Georg Stauth

Politics and Cultures of Islamization in Southeast Asia

Indonesia and Malaysia in the Nineteen-nineties

2002, 302 S., kart., 30,80 €
ISBN 978-3-933127-81-5
Reihe Globaler lokaler Islam

Bestellen

This book is about cultural and political figures, institutions and ideas in a period of transition in two Muslim countries in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia. It also addresses some of the permutations of civilizing processes in Singapore and the city-state's image, moving across its borders into the region and representing a miracle of modernity beyond »ideas«. The central theme is the way in which Islam was re-constructed as an intellectual and socio-political tradition in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties. Scholars who approach Islam both as a textual and local tradition, students who take the heartlands of Islam as imaginative landscapes for cultural transformation and politicians and institutions which have been concerned with transmitting the idea of »Islamization« are the subjects of this inquiry into different patterns of modernity in a tropical region still bearing the signature of a colonial past.

Georg Stauth's research monograph Politics and Cultures of Islamization in Southeast Asia. Indonesia and Malaysia in the Nineteen-nineties took its beginning in the well-equipped Islam sections of the libraries of ISEAS and NUS. The author was inspirated by the association of Islam and the Asian Renaissance. In Malaysia and Singapore, the Asian renaissance has given new impetus to a non-western, non-European take-off to a successful modernity. One of the tensions concerns the legitimation of Islam in an increasingly stratified and unequal society. Islam and the ulema stand for a just and good society, in which the Malay majority follows the precepts of Islam.

Stauth criticizes the idea of one-way distribution of ideas from the center to the periphery. Far from absorbing the Islamic concepts from the heartland, the peripheries of Islam are engaged in a process which uses and even instrumentalizes Islamic ideas for secular modernization. He notes that it is time to reconsider the universalistic cultural projects of Islamic fundamentalism or mysticism in relation to the diversity of local applications.

Stauth then sets out to formulate a political sociology of Islam in Minangkabau, Java, Malaysia and Singapore in a comparative perspective. The author has found a fruitful solution to a Herculean task in focusing on the making of Islamic localities in light of the ideas and agency of Muslim intellectuals who- according to Stauth- have mistakenly been termed 'Fundamentalists'. His long interviews with the main Islamic actors are especially illuminating. The life-histories and oeuvres of selected intellectuals show that Muslim intellectuals in Southeast Asia have found their own style and tradition.

Islam in Southeast Asia always has the complex of the 'late-comer'. Yet, Islam has been deeply felt in Malaysia and Indonesia at least since the 16(th) century and there has been a steady transfer of ideas and networks between the Islamic heartland in the Middle East and the Malay Archipelago. There is a tension between adat and text-based, Shari 'a orientated Islam. However, Stauth argues that scholars of Islam as Geertz and Hurgronye have ignored the deep influences of heartland Islam on local adat and thus contributed to the dichotomization of adat and pure, authentic Islam. Instead, Islam has been appropriated and transformed in the local context.

The institutionalization of Islam in the nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia has given rise to cultural projects of Islamic reconstruction by the ulema. This tension and the accompanying cultural competition has been escalated in the nineteen-nineties. Those readers who are looking for a comparative survey of local reconstruction of Islam will find the book a rich resource. However, Stauth does not go in ethnographic detail and while the interest in Islam seems to be at its height, we still need empirical studies of Islamic border-crossing grassroots networks and movements. Maybe, other scholars can help to fill the void.

Alexander Horstmann, ILCAA, Tokyo, 22.08.2002

Weiterempfehlen