Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia is partly the outcome of a trend in the scholarship on Southeast Asian Islam that has gained momentum from the mid-1980s onwards: namely, a corrective of the tendency to regard Islam as a “thin veneer” (as the Dutch historian van Leur had described it) over much older and supposedly more profound cultural deposits from the Indian subcontinent. The tremendous influence of the late Clifford Geertz’s characterizations in his The Religion of Java (University of Chicago Press: 1976 [new ed.]) only seemed to confirm this. However, a younger generation of American anthropologists, among them John Bowen, Robert Hefner, and Mark Woodward, explicitly challenged that view when they began publishing their findings in the 1980s. These writings showed that there was a vibrant and truly “Islamic” cultural legacy in Indonesia and elsewhere. The present volume also demonstrates the significance of the Australian academe’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. Greg Fealy is a recognized authority on the Nahdlatul Ulama, the mass organization uniting more than 20 million of Indonesia’s traditionalist Muslims, while Virginia Hooker is a leading scholar in the field of Malay-Muslim literature and history. In fact, the pioneering research of two former ANU academics, Anthony Johns and his student Peter Riddell, provided important evidence of the close, long-standing, and sustained contacts of Muslim scholars from the “Lands below the Winds” with centers of Islamic learning in the Middle East ...