Revolutionary Islam and the Nation-State, 1900–1965

Abstract

Between 1952 and 1961, many of my acquaintances in the village of Ara were involved in the Darul Islam movement, a movement that wanted the Republic of Indonesia to be founded on Islamic principles. The origins of the form of Islamic knowledge advocated by this movement can be traced to a decision taken by the colonial government in the early twentieth century to educate a cadre of Indonesians to staff the lower ranks of the expanding state bureaucracy. The introduction of modern schools and of mass media such as printed books, journals, and newspapers introduced the newly educated Indonesians to the modernist ideas that had been developed in the late nineteenth century by Muslim intellectuals in colonial India and Egypt. The government found it harder to confine the reformist impulse of this generation to purely religious matters than the generation born during the late nineteenth century. The educated Indonesians who were drawn to Islamic modernism played a key role in the birth of Indonesian nationalism during the 1910s and 1920s. As we saw in chapter 6, the government responded to Islamic nationalism by adopting the explicitly reactionary policy of trying to revive the traditional authority of the royal houses they had just spent a century trying to undermine.