Umat as Rakyat: Performing Islam through Veils of Nationalism

Abstract

In Malaysia, during the early 1980s, proponents of an Islamic theatre, such as playwright Noordin Hassan, constituted an influential faction of its national theatre community. This is unsurprising to Malaysian theatre scholar, Krishen Jit, who connects the emergence of an identity-based theatre alternative to secular nationalism with the fragmentation of a decolonial discourse; that is, with a progression from universalist postcolonial nationalism to a decentered critique of state neo-colonialism. However, lest such ‘progression’ seem teleological, he calls attention to a very different situation amongst Malaysia’s close ethnic and cultural kin to the south: ‘Although plays revealing Islamic themes have sprouted in contemporary Indonesia, they have been eschewed by the major and influential figures. And no signs of a similar movement are to be seen in Indonesia’ (Jit, 2003: 73–5). In Malaysia, Muslim artists challenged the nationalist presumption that Malaysians were the people (rakyat) before being members of the global Islamic community (the umat). Despite the existence of a vast Muslim majority, despite the rise of political Islam from the late Suharto era onward, and despite the fact that most Indonesian theatre artists self-identify as Muslims, there has never been a similar attempt to acculturate postcolonial Indonesian theatre to Islam.