Suchergebnisse

Indonesia's category of 'national hero' or pahlawan nasional has evolved since it first emerged with Indonesian independence. This title went from a popular term for veterans, to a designated national category, to a centrepiece of New Order civil religion. This article chronicles further changes in the post-Suharto era both by a quantitative analysis of the entire pantheon of 179 pahlawan and by the case study of the first national hero for West Nusa Tenggara Province: TGKH M. Zainuddin Abdul Madjid, also known as Tuan Guru Pancor, from the island of Lombok. The category of pahlawan nasional has become both more diverse and more political in the last two decades.

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) was at his core an Arabist, rather than a scholar of Southeast Asia or even Islam in the Dutch East Indies. An Arab lens is evident in his early work on the Hijaz and in his later scholarship for the Dutch colonial government. Snouck Hurgronje's work The Acehnese, in particular, evidenced a thoroughly comparative approach, verging at times on a focus outside of Southeast Asia, and throughout a preference for Arab orthodoxy. He found Indonesians to be inferior Muslims, and he saw their indigenous cultural practices as non-Islamic. It is important to remember Snouck Hurgronje's Arab lens when considering his work and his legacy.

Although most policy studies argue there has been no influence of Islam on Indonesia's foreign policy, the foreign relations of the Republic of Indonesia during the revolution for independence provide a counter-example. Because of the greater role for society in conducting, rather than just influencing, foreign relations, Islam was used as a key element in Indonesia's diplomatic efforts in the Arab world between 1945 and 1949. This led to several key, early successes for Indonesia on the world stage, but changing circumstances meant that relations with the Arab world and thus the place of Islam in foreign policy were no longer prominent from 1948.

Islamic socialism was a major intellectual and political movement in Indonesia in the twentieth century, with ongoing influences until today. However, this movement did not follow the most common narratives of Indonesian intellectual history, which trace religious influences to the Middle East and political movements to anti-colonial reaction in terms framed by the Dutch. Rather, the first major Indonesian proponent of Islamic socialism, H. O. S. Tjokroaminoto, took his thinking on Islamic socialism directly from the English-language work of a South Asian itinerant scholar, Mushir Hosein Kidwai, in a process that most likely had the minority Ahmadiyyah community as intermediaries. Future Islamic socialist thought, much of it influenced by Tjokroaminoto, continued to echo through Indonesian secular nationalism, political Islam, and even Islamism. Studying the intellectual origins of Islamic socialism in Indonesia, then, shows not only the roots of an important strand of Southeast Asian politics in the last century, but also the importance of alternative currents of thought (South Asian, outside the mainstream, Anglophone) in Southeast Asian Islam.