Abstract
Taking a critical view of the dominance of postcolonial studies by South Asian and Latin American scholars and intellectuals, this article presents a newly emerging discourse among young Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, known as ‘Islamic Post-Traditionalism’. The specific question addressed in the present investigation is to establish to what extent this strand of Muslim thought can be considered a contribution to the engagement with postcoloniality and an application of deconstructionist discourse critique developed by postmodern philosophers within the context of rethinking religion, and Islam in particular, in Indonesia. Identifying a vivid interest among Indonesian Muslim intellectuals in the work of pioneering and controversial contemporary Arab-Islamic thinkers such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri, and Mohammed Arkoun, this article will interrogate the influences exercised by these Arabophone and Francophone Muslim intellectuals on the formation of Indonesia's Islamic Post-Traditionalism and how this is reflected in this discourse. An illustration will be provided by a précis of the writings of a key exponent of the Islamic Post-Traditionalist discourse and an examination of a number of other contributors.
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Notes
The term was introduced by Roland Robertson in the eponymous chapter in which he discusses the interplay of worldwide historical processes and trends with local cultural specificities (Robertson 1995).
Called Naqd al-‘Aql al-‘Arabi in Arabic. It consists of The Formation of Arab Reason (Takwin al-‘Aql al-‘Arabi) first published in 1984; The Structure of Arab Reason (Bunya al-‘Aql al-‘Arabi) from 1986; and Arab Political Reason (Al-‘Aql al-Siyasi al-‘Arabi) released in 1990 (Jabiri 2009a, 2009b, 2009c).
Cf. also Jabiri 2009b: 11–53.
An explanation of this process in English can be found in Jabiri (1999).
In this contecxt, bayani stands for discursive theology grounded in Islamic scriptures (Qur’an and Traditions of the Prophet) and exemplified by the writing of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111); irfani refers to the mystical, intuitivist and illuminationist traditions of the Persian world; while burhani represents demonstrative reason which reached its heyday in the work of Ibn Rushd and his interpretation of Aristotelian or Peripatetic philosophy. Al-Jabiri elaborates this in great detail in The Structure of Arab Reason (Jabiri, Muhammad Abid al- 2009b).
This last point has been taken up by Yudian Wahyudi, a professor in the Faculty of Syariah at UIN Sunan Kalijaga in Yogyakarta, former visiting scholar at Harvard and Tufts University, and now a senior official in the Indonesian ministry of religious affairs. Admittedly, his hermeneutics of fiqh and study of maqāsid al-sharī‛a draw predominantly on Hanafi’s rereading of usūl al-fiqh as a philosophical methodology, but his approach is also grounded in the comparative study of Hasan Hanafi, Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri, and Nurcholish Madjid which he wrote for his PhD at McGill (Wahyudi 2003, 2007a, b).
Baso 2000: liii.
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Kersten, C. Islamic Post-Traditionalism: Postcolonial and Postmodern Religious Discourse in Indonesia. SOPHIA 54, 473–489 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0434-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0434-0