Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia ed. by Kathryn Robinson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia ed. by Kathryn Robinson Thomas Gibson Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia. Edited by Kathryn Robinson. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. 2021. 277 pp. ISBN 978-981-325-120-5 [End Page 212] This volume contains a collection of essays by nine authors all of whom collaborated on a research project on 'Being Muslim in Eastern Indonesia'. The project was based at the Australian National University in Canberra and the Universitas Hasanuddin in Makassar, South Sulawesi. Each author focusses on the role played by the local imam in their area of research. This was an inspired methodological decision. Local communities have a wide range of latitude in the way they select their imams, who are often among the most respected members of their communities. Local imams must navigate an increasingly complex field of competing opinions about what constitutes correct doctrine and practice, as well as changing social and economic conditions. In most cases, their goal is to ensure that all members of their congregations can continue to worship together in peace while continuing to preside over the life cycle rituals that reproduce the local social and cosmic order. The essays explore a wide range of ways local imams go about these tasks, providing a window into the way global currents of religious opinion, national economic development, and increasing levels of higher education are assimilated at the local level throughout Eastern Indonesia. Rather than trying to synthesize the material in the volume, I will summarize the most notable features of each paper. A bit of background is in order. In many parts of Eastern Indonesia, the local population is divided between those who follow the practices endorsed by the 'traditionalist' Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) organization and the 'modernist' Muhammadiyah organization. For the past hundred years, the Muhammadiyah has been denouncing many Indonesian local customs, adat, as contrary to Islam, claiming that they amount to the worship of beings other than Allah (syirk), or that they constitute illegitimate innovations in scripturally mandated religious practices (bid'ah). Many of these so-called 'local customs' were not local at all, but were practiced throughout the Islamic world in the precolonial period. They were based in the oral transmission of scriptural knowledge and in the mystical traditions of the Sufi brotherhoods. These practices were called into question only when modern schooling created a class of educated lay persons and when vernacular translations of Islamic texts allowed them to bypass the interpretations of the ulama who had been trained in the traditional oral way. Educated modernists saw excessive mysticism as one of the reasons why the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe and subjected it to severe criticism. Traditionalists were at first put on the defensive, but soon began to justify their practices in new ways. In Indonesia, tensions between the followers of the NU and Muhammadiyah seem to have moderated over the past generation as imams have altered certain practices in response to modernist criticism, and as modernists have adopted a more tolerant attitude toward some of the practices they continue to view as ill-founded. A prime example of this is the recitation of the Maulid an-Nabi by Jaffar al-Barzanji (1716–1764), a poetic account of the life of the Prophet, during life cycle rituals throughout Indonesia and elsewhere in the Islamic world. Modernists regard this practice as showing the Prophet undue veneration on a par with Allah, and so as a species of syirk, traditionalists are fiercely devoted to it. This disagreement has the potential to disrupt a great many life cycle rituals, and imams must be able to finesse the issue. [End Page 213] More recently, a new generation of students has come under the influence of the views of the Salafi movement emanating from Egypt and Saudi Arabia that is far less willing to accommodate local cultural practices anywhere and that seeks to impose a uniform interpretation of Islam on the global community. It is this latter current of opinion that local imams must now seek to accommodate to maintain some level of social harmony. Muhamad Adlin Sila discusses the way members of the royal family of...