Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia is partly the outcome of a trend in thescholarship on Southeast Asian Islam that has gained momentum from themid-1980s onwards: namely, a corrective of the tendency to regard Islam asa “thin veneer” (as the Dutch historian van Leur had described it) over mucholder and supposedly more profound cultural deposits from the Indian subcontinent.The tremendous influence of the late Clifford Geertz’s characterizationsin his The Religion of Java (University of Chicago Press: 1976 [newed.]) only seemed to confirm this. However, a younger generation of American anthropologists, among them John Bowen, Robert Hefner, and MarkWoodward, explicitly challenged that view when they began publishingtheir findings in the 1980s. These writings showed that there was a vibrantand truly “Islamic” cultural legacy in Indonesia and elsewhere.The present volume also demonstrates the significance of the Australianacademe’s role in furthering our understanding of Islam in Southeast Asia.Both editors are associated with the Australian National University(ANU), one of “Downunder’s” epicentres of Southeast Asian studies. GregFealy is a recognized authority on the Nahdlatul Ulama, the mass organizationuniting more than 20 million of Indonesia’s traditionalist Muslims,while Virginia Hooker is a leading scholar in the field of Malay-Muslim literatureand history. In fact, the pioneering research of two former ANU academics,Anthony Johns and his student Peter Riddell, provided importantevidence of the close, long-standing, and sustained contacts of Muslimscholars from the “Lands below the Winds” with centers of Islamic learningin the Middle East ...