Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Gustav Brown, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper discussed trends in shariah politics and Muslim ethical imaginaries in post-Soeharto (i.e. post May 1998) Indonesia. Several years ago, the distinguished scholar of Indonesian Islam, Martin van Bruinessen (2013), spoke of a “conservative turn” in Indonesian Islam, and singled out growing appeals to shariah ideals as an example of the trend. A more nuanced understanding of Muslim politics and ethics in Indonesia, however, suggests that we would do well to set aside the overused sobriquet of “liberal” vs. “conservative.” Public debates and politics over a proper Muslim normativity in Indonesia in fact show the deep imprint of two more specific organizational and political contingencies. These are the remarkable history of Muslim madrasa development in Indonesia, and, in the twentieth century, the pervasiveness of Islamic social welfare associations. Together, I will suggest, these two rather ordinary looking social contingencies have informed and transformed Indonesian Muslim understandings of the religious and ethical, creating the conditions whereby many believers have been drawn to a purposive or maslahah -based understanding of Islamic ethics and legal traditions. This legacy has not pre-empted challenge by Islamists promoting a positivized and etatist understanding of Islamic legal and ethical traditions. But it has provided shariah politics in Indonesia with a dynamic subtly different from some other Muslim-majority countries.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Global Affairs, and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at the Pardee School for Global Affairs at Boston University. He was the director of CURA from 2009-2017 and associate director from 1986 to 2009. Hefner has led CURA’s program on Islam and civil society since 1991. Hefner has published twenty books and authored seven major policy reports for government and private policy centers. His primary research interests have to do with the imbrications of Islam, Christianity, and secularism with the contemporary challenge of social citizenship and plural coextistence. Hefner has worked on questions of Islam, plurality, and citizenship in Indonesia for more than thirty years; more recently he has also been conducting research on Muslims and the challenge of pluralist citizenship in North America and Western Europe. In conjunction with the Center for Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia, he is currently conducting research on plurality and coexistence in Indonesia, and completing a book on Islamic public ethics and citizenship contests in post-Suharto Indonesia. During 2009-2010, Hefner served as the elected president of the Association for Asian Studies. During 2008-2009, he was invited by Stanford University and the National University of Singapore to be the first Lee Kong Chian Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies. He also serves on the executive board of the “Contending Modernities” project at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace, and taught as an invited Senior Professor in the Summer Graduate Program on Religion, Culture, and Society at the University Centre-St. Ignatius, University of Antwerp, Belgium (2007-2014).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.