By Alexander Arifianto
Submitted to Session P3052 (Faith-Based Conservative Activism in Turkey: Fethullah Gulen as a Social Movement, 2012 MESA Annual Meeting
| Pol Science | |
| All Middle East; Indonesia; Southeast Asia; Turkey; | |
| Islamic Studies; Middle East/Near East Studies; Southeast Asian Studies; | |
| LCD Projector without Audio; | |
| Much
of the current scholarships on globalization and Islam in
Muslim-majority countries focus on the political discourses of
conservative/fundamentalist Islamic groups such as Al Qaeda and Hamas.
Fewer scholarships have examined the role of globalization of ideas in
influencing the political discourse of progressive/liberal leaning
Islamic groups such as the Gulen Movement (GM) from Turkey and the
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) from Indonesia. Virtually none of the scholarships
on these two movements have examined them from a comparative historical
perspective. Utilizing constructivist international relations theory,
this study attempts to make a theoretically informed cross-regional
comparison between these two groups. It analyzes similar and different
strategies utilize by these groups to promote and institutionalize
progressive Islamic ideas - defined in this study as theological support
toward democracy, state-religion separation, and religious
tolerance/pluralism -- within their respective societies. By conducting comparative historical, cross-regional study of these two Islamic movements, I hope that my project can serve as a theory development exercise of the role of moral authority leadership and its role in disseminating new theological ideas beyond the artificial regional boundaries that has historically made scholarship on political Islam and Islamic social movements in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to exist largely separately, with little dialogue and collaboration with one another. I hope this study will bring together existing knowledge about Islamic social movements from these two regions in order to develop a new theory on the role of theological change within Islamic social movements that is generalizable across the Islamic world. The data of this research consist of historical documents, secondary studies, and in-depth interviews with officials and activists from these movements. My study argues that that the success of these Islamic organizations to promote progressive Islamic ideas within their respective societies can be explained by the role of charismatic moral authority leaders within these movements: Fethullah Gulen from the GM and the late Abdurrahman Wahid from the NU who personified and institutionalized these ideas within their respective communities. In addition to moral authority leadership, reform’s success within these Islamic groups also depend on the internal culture of the organizations that either tolerates or discourages new and unorthodox theological ideas, and the historical relationship between these organizations and the state. |
