Indonesia’s New Muslim Intellectuals

Religion Compass

Volume 3, Issue 6, pages 971–985, December 2009

Carool Kersten

Article first published online: 25 NOV 2009

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing appreciation among scholars with an interest in contemporary Muslim thought for the contributions by Indonesia’s new Muslim intellectuals. The realisation that Indonesians are in the vanguard of a significant rethinking of the place of religion in the present-day Islamic world is helped by the progress in the research on Southeast Asian Islam and resultant corrections of the received knowledge of its place in the context of the wider Muslim world. While in the existing literature this new Indonesian Muslim intellectualism is closely associated with ‘neomodernists’ belonging to the first generation coming of age in the postcolonial era, I propose to regard it rather as part of a discursive development traversing three generational shifts embedded in an increasingly articulate understanding of Indonesia as an integral part of the Muslim world and Islam as a constitutive element in Indonesian culture. These new Muslim intellectuals, who pair an intimate familiarity with the Islamic tradition to an equally solid knowledge of advances in the Western human sciences, are exponents of an emergent cosmopolitan Islam in which the dichotomy between ‘Islam’ and ‘Other’ or the binary opposition ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’ collapse. Most recently it has culminated in a generation of articulate young Muslims exploring the possibilities of hybrid forms of ‘liberal Islam’ and ‘post-traditionalist Islam’.