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Arguing for new consideration of calls for implementation of Islamic law as projects of future-oriented social transformation, this book presents a richly-textured critical overview of the day-to-day workings of one of the most complex experiments with the implementation of Islamic law in the contemporary world - that of post-tsunami Aceh.

Indonesia has been home to some of the most vibrant and complex developments in modern Islamic thought anywhere in the world. Nevertheless little is known or understood about these developments outside South East Asia. By considering the work of the leading Indonesian thinkers of the twentieth century, Michael Feener, an intellectual authority in the area, offers a cogent critique of this diverse and extensive literature and sheds light on the contemporary debates and the dynamics of Islamic reform. The book highlights the openness to, and creative manipulation of, diverse strands of international thought that have come to define Islamic intellectualism in modern Indonesia. This is an accessible and interpretive overview of the religious and social thought of the world's largest Muslim majority nation. As such it will be read by scholars of Islamic law and society, South East Asian studies and comparative law and jurisprudence

R. Michael Feener's review of America's Encounters with Southeast Asia, 1800–1900: Before the Pivot by Farish A. Noor.

Over the last few decades historians and other scholars have succeeded in identifying diverse patterns of connection linking religious communities across Asia and beyond. Yet despite the fruits of this specialist research, scholars in the subfields of Islamic and Buddhist studies have rarely engaged with each other to share investigative approaches and methods of interpretation. This volume was conceived to open up new spaces of creative interaction between scholars in both fields that will increase our understanding of the circulation and localization of religious texts, institutional models, ritual practices, and literary specialists. The book's approach is to scrutinize one major dimension of the history of religion in Southern Asia: religious orders. "Orders" (here referring to Sufi ṭarīqas and Buddhist monastic and other ritual lineages) established means by which far-flung local communities could come to be recognized and engaged as part of a broader world of co-religionists, while presenting their particular religious traditions and their human representatives as attractive and authoritative to potential new communities of devotees. Contributors to the volume direct their attention toward analogous developments mutually illuminating for both fields of study. Some explain how certain orders took shape in Southern Asia over the course of the nineteenth century, contextualizing these institutional developments in relation to local and transregional political formations, shifting literary and ritual preferences, and trade connections. Others show how the circulation of people, ideas, texts, objects, and practices across Southern Asia, a region in which both Buddhism and Islam have a long and substantial presence, brought diverse currents of internal reform and notions of ritual and lineage purity to the region. All chapters draw readers' attention to the fact that networked persons were not always strongly institutionalized and often moved through Southern Asia and developed local bases without the oversight ...

Tabut is the name given to the commemoration of Muharram as it is observed in Bengkulu, Indonesia. The basic traditions connected with its observance have their origins in Muslim India. However the Tabut has, over the course of its development in Bengkulu, absorbed and incorporated various local elements. Recently the "Tabut Festival" has come to be seen as a symbol of 'local Bengkulu culture', this reinterpretation facilitating the easy absorption of this potentially disruptive' happening into the fold of acceptable and even desirable 'local cultural heritage' as defined by the present lndonesian government.DOI:10.15408/sdi.v6i2.732

The social, economic, and political transformations of the past two centuries have been rapid and dramatic, resulting in complex reconfigurations of religious authority in many Muslim societies. These changes have involved not only the emergence of distinctly new profiles of leadership, but also the persistence and adaptation of the models established by the ulama of the classical period. The challenges of modernizing reform at the turn of the twentieth century struck at the very heart of traditions that had bolstered established religious authority for a thousand years. In the modern period, ulama find themselves in increasingly crowded and highly contested public spheres in which they can no longer hold any kind of monopoly. Contemporary debates in Muslim public spheres are characterized by the emergence of complex new discursive formulations on issues of religious belief and practice, individual rights and responsibilities, and proper standards of public morality. This essay provides an historical introduction to the emergence of diverse models of Muslim religious authority in modern Asia.

AbstractThis paper addresses issues relating to the adaptation of notions of hybridity from contemporary Diaspora Studies to the study of Hadhrami migration to Southeast Asia. It also presents a series of short biographies of prominent figures in the networks of Muslim scholarship that spanned the Indian Ocean from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries from perspectives that highlight intersections of religion, language, and ethnicity during that time. Integrating this historical data into the inter-disciplinary theoretical frameworks of contemporary Diaspora Studies approaches provides an opportunity for reflecting on changing conceptions of identity under processes of modernization.

Featuring new historical and ethnographic research on China and Southeast Asia, this book explores how power and violence have shaped the experiences of Sufis and state-builders, as well as refugees and rebels, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of Islamic cosmopolitanism.