In Sufi orders, one of the first things a student learns is the silsila of his teacher. Most of the scholars based in the Dutch East Indies returned to the Netherlands, and some of them found positions at Leiden or another university, or in other government services. The scholars continued to publish, and in fact some of the best publications on Indonesian Islam were published after the colonial ties with Indonesia were severed.
1 On the Bureau for Indigenous Affairs, the most important advisers who worked there and the various roles of the Bureau, see H. It is widely regarded as one of the most important works of Dutch literature and is still read today.
First Years as an Anthropologist: the Middle East
He had written sympathetically about the Indonesian independence movement and the Chinese revolution, both of which he saw as uprisings by the oppressed masses against their exploiters. Shaykh Osman of Durū in Hawraman was perhaps the most prominent of the Kurdish Naqshbandi sheikhs. There I also met some Western converts from Seyyed Hossein Nasr's circle, who were deeply interested in metaphysical Sufism.
Postdoctoral Researcher at KITLV
This was Alfani Daud from Banjarmasin, who submitted his dissertation to the IAIN Syarif Hidayatullah in 1991.18 Alfani was thus in a sense my 'brother' in anthropology; but I only met him in 1992 or 1993 when I visited him in Kalimantan and he took me on a tour of the holy places around Banjarmasin. He had lived for a few years in Bogor, where he corrected an earlier Sundanese translation of the Old Testament, but was soon repatriated and has since worked at KITLV, concentrating on language and literature.21 Like many others in Leiden, he looked mainly to Indonesian societies. He had been stationed as a missionary in Jakarta for most of the 1950s – I was surprised by the large number of scholars with missionary connections I met in Leiden – and had written a book on Islam and politics in Indonesia since independence, not only very informative but also surprisingly sympathetic to Muslims, especially Masyumi.22 He had personally met many of the Muslim leaders featured in his book, and I found it interesting to talk to him.
He was quite skeptical of the worship of Snouck Hurgronje that still prevailed in Leiden, and enjoyed pointing out the great man's errors in judgment. Kees van Dijk then worked in the Documentation Section on Contemporary Indonesia and regularly wrote reviews of recent events in Indonesia for the journal RIMA (Review of Indonesian and Malay Affairs). He had just completed his dissertation on the Darul Islam movement.24 Kees was one of the few in Leiden interested in contemporary developments in Indonesia.
Several of my later friends pointed out errors in the book that were due to the bias of the sources, but they too were otherwise very positive about the book. Sam Van Dijk, who succeeded Boland as professor of Indonesian Islam in 1986, meanwhile continued to work in the same way, carefully reading the Indonesian press and other written materials. For his dissertation on Islamic education in Indonesia25, Steenbrink not only read Indonesian source materials and interviewed people, but actually lived in a pesantren, as one of the santris, and later somehow ended up as the only Western lecturer at the most prestigious Indonesian Institute of Islamic Education.
Not long after my employment at KITLV, I received a letter from Steenbrink, who welcomed me as a new colleague in the field and warmly invited me to his home when I would visit Indonesia.
Preparing Fieldwork in Indonesia
At LIPI: Focus on Ulama, Muslim Intellectuals, Kitab Kuning and Religious Study Groups
There would be two scholars for each province, one from LIPI and the other from a local university, who were supposed to make an inventory of Muslim associations, movements and institutions and identify a number of representative scholars for further investigation. Without the help of the scholars in this project and without the ulama who were its objects, I would never have been able to write my summaries of kitab kuning and Naqshbandiyyah. 31. 226–69; Martin van Bruinessen, "The Origin and Development of the Naqshbandi Order in Indonesia", Der Islam, vol.
During the course of the project, we got to know each other well and became friends. As the experienced head of the research desk of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, he was an inexhaustible source of information on various Islamic movements and Sufi orders. The discussions, introduced by a well-prepared introduction by one of the members, dealt with topics such as ijmā‘ tafsīr, sunna.
Through my friendship with Poncke, I was able to enter different social worlds and meet victims of the New Order's human rights abuses, including radical Muslim activists fiercely opposed to the Soeharto regime. In her youth, she wrote a thesis on the Kurds, and this was probably one of the reasons why we got along so well when we first met. A summary of my conclusions from the ulama research project appeared in the English version of Prisma magazine, published by Indonesia's first major New Order NGO, LP3ES, which was also the first to explore the potential of pesantren for mass development.
In the article, I focused specifically on the political views of the ulama and Muslim intellectuals and tried to explain what I understood to be the dilemma faced by many ulama who disagreed with the policies of the Soeharto regime but did not have the courage to openly criticize them. 41.
Teaching at IAIN Sunan Kalijaga
Some of the books and articles I wrote in the following years were a direct product of my teaching, and my students often contributed material to those writings. Among my colleagues at IAIN, I was excited to meet Mukti Ali, who I knew had played an important role in stimulating Muslim intellectualism. I found it surprising that most of the students who visited me at home had an NU background – perhaps they saw me as someone close to NU because of my good relationship with Abdurrahman Wahid, whom I continued to see, or because I continued to write for traditional Islam and pesantren culture, or because I did not hide my skepticism about ICMI.
In 1994 LKiS published my book about NU, which made me a well-known person in NU circles.42 After my years in Yogya, I kept in touch with them; I particularly liked them because they combined an interest in progressive Islamic discourse – one of my interests – with social and political activities. One of the LKiS activists, Farid Wajidi, later joined me in the Netherlands, where he became a junior research fellow at ISIM and was actively involved in similar international NGO networks. Ciciek was, together with Farid Wajidi, active in interreligious dialogue and later increasingly in women's rights activism.
This was the time when the controversial idea of Muslim feminism or Islamic feminism began to be discussed in Indonesia, and I am proud that several of my friends played a pioneering role in it. Wardah Hafidz discovered an interesting text on "women's theology" by the Pakistani feminist theologian Riffat Hassan, which she translated and published. The proceedings of a workshop on women and religious scriptures that she organized was another pioneering publication (in which I also had a contribution).45 Lies would be involved in most of the Islamic women's NGOs of the following years. , and she is now no doubt the most experienced person in this field.
Ciciek was also for many years one of the most prominent Muslim women's activists, leading the NGO Rahima in Jakarta and training many young women.
Inserting Myself into the Scholarly Tradition(s)
His collected articles and his advice as an adviser to the government also remain very valuable as a source for the social history of Indonesia in the late colonial period.49 Although much of the information in his books was in fact collected for him by colleagues for whom he does not give sufficient credit, he was clearly himself an excellent field researcher. 48 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Mecca, Bd.II: Aus Dem Heutigen Leben (The Hague: . Nijhoff, 1889), translated into English as Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Mecca in the Last Part of the 19th Century (Leiden: Brill, 1931); Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, De Atjèhers, vol. Pijper was the last of the native advisers and professor of Arabic in Batavia and later in Amsterdam.
These were the men of the Leiden school, from whom I learned much, although I never met them. I liked his early article on the Islamization of Indonesia,62 and when I tried to rewrite the history of the pesantren, I wrote to him for advice. He was particularly interested in religion and knew Islam very well; I found that he knew large parts of the Koran by heart.
The group's central figures were Alexandre Popovic, Marc Gaborieau and the younger Thierry Zarcone. The article I wrote on the subject was first presented at one of the conferences where the two French networks met.68. 67 Martin van Bruinessen, "Shaykh 'Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī and the Qādiriyya in Indonesia", Journal of the History of Sufism, vol.
361-95 irratti kan argamu; Martin van Bruinessen, “Guyyoota Abu Qubays Booda: Jijjiirama Indooneezhiyaa Naqshbandiyya-Khâlidiyya,” Joornaalii Seenaa Suufiyyaa, jildii.
Back to the Netherlands: ISIM and Other International Networks
The End of the Leiden School?
Kaptein, Islam, Colonialism and the Modern Age in the Dutch East Indies: A Biography of Sayyid Uthman Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014). Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (New York: Princeton University Press, 2011). Benda, Harry J., The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under Japanese Occupation The Hague: W.
Shaykh 'Abd al-Qâdir al-Jîlânî og Qâdiriyya i Indonesien", Journal of the History of Sufism, vol. Bruinessen, Martin van og Julia Day Howell, Sufism and the "Modern" in Islam, London: I.B.Tauris, 2007. Nucleus of a Debate in Contemporary Indonesia", i Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse, red. .
Kaptein, Nico J.G., Islam, Colonialism and the Modern Age in the Dutch East Indies: A Biography of Sayyid Uthman Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014. Laffan, Michael F., The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past , New York: Princeton University Press, 2011. Noorhaidi, “Laskar Jihadi: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in Post-New Order Indonesia,” PhD Thesis, Utrecht: University of Utrecht, 2005.
Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
