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Papers by carool kersten

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2018

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at ... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of publication.

Indonesia's Muslims are still pondering the role of religion in public life. Although the rel... more Indonesia's Muslims are still pondering the role of religion in public life. Although the religious violence marring the transition towards democratic reform has ebbed, the Muslim community has polarised into reactionary and progressive camps with increasingly antagonistic views on the place of Islam in society. Debates over the underlying principles of democratisation have further heated up after a fatwa issued by conservative religious scholars condemned secularism, pluralism and liberalism as un-Islamic. With a hesitant government dominated by Indonesia's eternal political elites failing to take a clear stance, supporters of the decision are pursuing their Islamisation agendas with renewed vigour, displaying growing intolerance towards other religions and what they consider deviant Muslim minorities. Extremist and radical exponents of this Islamist bloc receive more international media coverage and scholarly attention than their progressive opponents who are defiantly challenging this reactionary trend. Calling for a true transformation of Indonesian society based on democratic principles and respect for human rights, they insist that this depends on secularisation, religious toleration and freethinking. Conceived as a contemporary history of ideas, this book aims to tell the story of these open-minded intellectuals and activists in the world's largest Muslim country.

The term 'critical Islam' can mean a host of things and therefore needs to be qualified. Here it ... more The term 'critical Islam' can mean a host of things and therefore needs to be qualified. Here it will be used to describe a strand of contemporary Muslim thinking arising and developing both in parallel with-and in contrast to-what scholars of Islam from different academic disciplines refer to as the 'Islamic Resurgence' beginning in 1970s. 1 The exponents of this other current are called turāthiyyūn, or 'heritage thinkers', because they do not take Islam as a narrowly defined 1 There are earlier instances in the twentieth century where the reverse is also true. This belies Armando Salvatore's suggestion of a temporal asymmetry between the Islamists' conflation of din wa dawla and its challenge by their opponents, claiming that there had been an effective absence of the former during the latter's dominance over the political domain in the Muslim world between the 1920s and 1970s, cf. Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, Reading, Ithaca Press, 1997. Salvatore's contention can be challenged by pointing at the dissonant emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1920s and the rise of Sayyid Qutb in the 1940s and 1950s. Meanwhile, during the supposed heyday of 'deconflationist' (secular) thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, Calvert and Shepard have also noted a shift towards Islamic themes in the writings of intellectual icons such as Taha Husayn and 'Abbas Mahmud al-'Aqqad: cf.

Poligrafi, 2020

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualt... more In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstractions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy an...

Ideologies in World Politics, 2020

This chapter offers a broad perspective on the ideological use of Islam in a global context. It b... more This chapter offers a broad perspective on the ideological use of Islam in a global context. It begins by challenging the perception of the political use of religion in the Muslim world as an Islamic resurgence, because this obscures the continued and continuing political relevance of religion to Muslims throughout history. The chapter surveys the political significance of Islam's universality claim, both institutionally and symbolically; the conflation and deconflation of religion and statehood; and the post-Cold War role of Islamism on the global stage. To capture the wide variety in which Islam features in public life and international relations, the chapter introduces an alternative taxonomy for categorizing different ways of engaging politically with religion, distinguishing between traditional, reactionary and progressive approaches. It also examines how Sunni-Shi'a polarization features in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control of the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East. The chapter's scope extends beyond the Middle East to include the most populous Muslim country in the world: Indonesia and the unique dynamics of Islam in this second largest democracy in Asia. It also addresses counter-narratives, such as Post-Islamism and Moderatism.

A History of Islam in Indonesia, 2017

Indonesia is home to the largest Muslim mass organizations in the world, which not only predate, ... more Indonesia is home to the largest Muslim mass organizations in the world, which not only predate, but whose tens of millions of adherents also put more well-known movements such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistans Jamaat-e Islami in the shadow. Opting for less confrontational modes of emancipation of Indonesia’s Muslim population, the Islamic modernist Muhammadiyah (1912), the puritan reformist Persatuan Islam (1923), and traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama (NU, 1926) all focused on Islamic education. Only the Sarekat Islam (1911) had a political agenda from the beginning, When opportunity arose during the Japanese occupation, al switched to political activism, playing a key role in the independence struggle of the 1940s.

<p>Within the context of Indonesia's encounters with liberalism in late colonial and po... more <p>Within the context of Indonesia's encounters with liberalism in late colonial and postcolonial times, this chapter examines Muslim discourses that are critical of both Western liberal ideology and its Islamist detractors. After problematizing the existing categories of Islamic neo-modernism, Liberal Islam, and Islamic liberalism, the chapter focuses on alternative discourses formulated by Muslim intellectuals from both traditionalist and modernist-reformist Islamic backgrounds during the Reformasi era when Indonesia transitioned from a military autocracy to a democratic system of governance. Islamic Post-Traditionalists draws on poststructuralism and postcolonial theory to offer an emancipatory trajectory for Indonesian Muslims in the twenty-first century, while modernist-reformist intellectuals have drawn on the social sciences to develop a new paradigm referred to as Transformative Islam. Instead of presenting sweeping ideas, this younger generation is more concerned with translating new regimes of knowledge into applied thinking about concrete issues, such as democratization, development, justice and battling corruption.</p>

Middle Eastern Studies, 2017

Ilahiyat Studies, 2015

This hefty tome of more than five hundred pages is the third and longest volume in Merle Ricklefs... more This hefty tome of more than five hundred pages is the third and longest volume in Merle Ricklefs's trilogy on the history of the Islamization of Java-the most populous island of the world's largest Muslim nation state: Indonesia. It completes a narrative which started with Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamisation from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (2006), followed by Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830-1930) (2007). It also continues an argument for understanding the Islamization of Java as an open-ended and ongoing process of religious transformation.

Like anywhere else, the present-day Islamic world too is grappling with modernity and postmoderni... more Like anywhere else, the present-day Islamic world too is grappling with modernity and postmodernity, secularisation and globalisation. Muslims are raising questions about religious representations ...

Sophia, 2010

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Religion Compass, 2009

In recent years, there has been a growing appreciation among scholars with an interest in contemp... more 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'.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2011

This article examines Mohammed Arkoun as one of the pioneers of a new Muslim intellectualism seek... more This article examines Mohammed Arkoun as one of the pioneers of a new Muslim intellectualism seeking new ways of engaging with Islam by combining intimate familiarity with the Islamic civilizational heritage (turath) and solid knowledge of recent achievements by the Western academe in the humanities and social sciences. It will show how his groundbreaking and agendasetting work in Islamic studies reflects a convergence of the spatiotemporal concerns of an intellectual historian inspired by the Annales School with an epistemological critique drawing on structuralist and poststructuralist ideas. Influenced by Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Arkoun evolved from a specialist in the intellectual history of medieval Islam into a generic critic of epistemologies, advocating a concept of so-called 'emerging reason' which transcends existing forms of religious reason, Enlightenment rationalism and the tele-techno-scientific rea...

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006

This article surveys the reign of Cambodian King Reameathipadei I (1642–58) on the basis of Khmer... more This article surveys the reign of Cambodian King Reameathipadei I (1642–58) on the basis of Khmer and Dutch sources, with a particular focus on the monarch's conversion to Islam in the early 1640s. This episode provides an illustration of the pluralism of Southeast Asian societies during the Age of Commerce.

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2009

Husni and Newman here make a valuable contribution to the field of women and gender studies in Is... more Husni and Newman here make a valuable contribution to the field of women and gender studies in Islam, or, more accurately, to Muslim feminist studies. This contribution is in the form of a highly accessible and clear translation of an early twentieth century feminist work ...