Islamic Law and Society
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
127
Muslim Legal ought in Modern Indonesia. By R. Michael Feener. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 290. ISBN: 978-0-521-53747-6. £60;
$120.99.
Michael Feener’s close examination of the intellectual development of Islamic law in
Indonesia is an important work that adds to a growing body of literature covering
various aspects of Indonesian Islam. ese include works on Muslim organizations
and movements,1 Islamic education and Muslim students,2 Qurʾānic exegesis,3 Islamic
theology,4 and on Muslim Sufism.5
By offering insights into areas not taken into account by earlier works on Islamic
law in modern Indonesia,6 Feener fills in some important gaps. As he states in his
preface, the seven chapters of this book examine “the ways in which Indonesian Muslim
scholars and activists have formulated new conceptions and interpretations of Islamic
law through creative readings and syntheses of diverse materials, including Islamic
scriptural sources, classical Muslim jurisprudential texts, and modern Middle Eastern
and ‘Western’ academic writings read in light of rapidly evolving social, economic and
political contexts” (p. xx).
Drawing on Roff,7 Feener points out that three key phenomena have influenced
Muslim legal thought in modern Indonesia: voluntary associations, print culture and
1)
Taufik Abdullah, Schools and Politics: e Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra,
1927-1933 (Ithaca, 1971); Deliar Noer, e Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia,
1900-1942 (Kuala Lumpur, 1973); B. J. Boland, e Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia
(e Hague, 1982); Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia
(Princeton, 2000); Bahtiar Effendi, Islam and the State in Indonesia (Singapore, 2003).
2)
Mona Abaza, Indonesian Students in Cairo (Paris, 1994); Yon Mahmudi, Islamising
Indonesia: e Rise of Jemaah Tarbiyah and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) (Canberra,
2008); Robert Hefner, Making Modern Muslims: the Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast
Asia (Honolulu, 2009).
3)
Anthony H. Johns, “Islam in the Malay World, an Explanatory Survey with Some
References to Qurʾānic Exegesis,” in Islam in Asia: Southeast and East Asia, vol. 2, ed.
R. Israeli and A. H. Johns (Jerusalem, 1984), 115-61; Howard M. Federspiel, Popular
Indonesian Literature of the Qurʾān (Ithaca, 1994); Peter G. Riddell, Islam and the MalayIndonesian World: Transmission and Responses (Honolulu, 2001).
4)
Fauzan Saleh, Modern Trends in Islamic eological Discourse in 20th Century Indonesia:
A Critical Study (Leiden, 2001).
5)
Julia Day Howell, “Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic Revival,” Journal of Asian Studies,
60:3 (2001), 701-29.
6)
E.g., Daniel S. Lev, Islamic Courts in Indonesia: A Study in the Political Bases of Legal
Institutions (Berkeley, 1972); Atho Mudzhar, Fatwa-fatwa Majelis Ulama Indonesia: Sebuah
Studi Tentang Pemikiran Hukum Islam di Indonesia, 1975-1988 (Jakarta, 1993); and Barry
Hooker, Indonesian Islam: Social Change through Contemporary Fatawa (Honolulu, 2003).
7)
William Roff, e Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven, 1967).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011
DOI: 10.1163/156851910X538413
128
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
educational reform. Feener considers these as three legs of a triangle, each intersecting
with and supporting the other two and, taken together, contributing to wide-scale
transformations of the religious, intellectual and legal cultures of the Muslim communities of the Indonesian archipelago. With a more systematic approach and a deeper
focus, this volume is a comprehensive and sophisticated update of previous works,
such as those by Federspiel and Bowen, on Muslim intellectuals in modern Indonesia.8
It has never been an easy task for a scholar studying Indonesian Islam to present a
comprehensive view of the historical development of Islamic legal thought in modern
Indonesia. Feener tackles this task skillfully. Expanding upon his dissertation (Boston
University, 1999), he discusses a number of independent Muslim thinkers from
various Muslim organizations across different decades of the 20th century, including
government officials, such as Munawir Sjadzali, political leaders, such as M. Natsir,
Anwar Harjono and Abdurrahman Wahid, academics, such as Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy,
Hazairin, Nurcholish Madjid and Jalaluddin Rakhmat, as well as both modernist
and traditionalist scholars. Among the modernists, he includes Ahmad Hassan and
Moenawar Chalil, and among the traditionalists, Said Aqil Siradj, Ali Yafie, Ibrahim
Hosen, Sahal Mahfudh and Masdar Farid Mas’udi. Feener has divided this approximately one-hundred year period of development into three phases, which he describes
in Chapters 2 through 6.
e first phase covers the early 20th century to 1945, the year in which Indonesia
was declared free from colonial rule. During this time, fierce polemics emerged on the
question of whether or not the gate of ijtihad was closed. Additionally, legal debates
between Muslim groups were frequent, especially regarding differences in worship and
ritual. e modernist groups (e.g., Persatuan Islam and Muhammadiyah) advocated
the deployment of ijtihad and educational reforms, while the traditionalist groups
(e.g., Nahdlatul Ulama) maintained that in order to acknowledge the importance
of Islamic tradition, adherence to one of the four madhhabs and the foundational
authority of their respective leaders was necessary.
e second phase covers the 1950s, when the Yogyakarta-based leading religious
scholar Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy and the Jakarta-based prominent professor of law Hazairin, both expressed the need for a new national Indonesian madhhab. For both men,
Islam could remain a vital force in the lives of believers only if Indonesian fiqh within
the framework of a national madhhab was in line with the local cultures of Indonesia
and at the same time was based on the Qurʾān and the Prophetic tradition. In their
view, an Indonesian madhhab was a necessary response to the plurality of laws developing in post-independent Indonesia, which incorporated the Dutch colonial code,
local customary law and Shāfiʿī jurisprudence.
In addition to this desire for a national Indonesian madhhab, a number of Islamic
parties, as well as prominent Muslim individuals, demanded that the Sharīʿa be the
8)
Howard M. Federspiel, Muslim Intellectuals and National Development in Indonesia
(New York, 1992); John R. Bowen, Islam, Law and Equality in Modern Indonesia: An
Anthropology of Public Reasoning (New York, 2003).
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
129
basis of constitutional law. Initially, leaders of the Masjumy Islamic party (who then
founded the Islamic Propagation Board of Indonesia [DDII]) were not able to accept
the idea that a country in which the majority of the population was Muslim should
have anything other than Islamic law as the law of the land. According to Feener, for
these leaders the issue was not “the interpretation of Islamic law in relation to contemporary Indonesian society, but rather … Islam as the formal identity for the law
of the Indonesian state” (p. 114). However, their struggle at the Constituent Assembly
(1957-59) ended in failure.
e third phase covers the New Order regime era (1966-1998), which, since its
early period, banned any initiative to introduce Islamic law based on the draft of the
Jakarta Charter (the rejected draft of the Indonesian constitutional preamble that
contained the controversial words ‘with the obligation of carrying out Islamic Sharīʿa
for its adherents’). Following this ban, some individual Muslim intellectuals looked
for other means to bring their religious ideals into engagement with the rapid social
transformations of the period and the new course of national development.
Driven by different backgrounds and external influences, these Muslim intellectuals
proposed programs of Islamic (legal) reform that purportedly went hand-in-hand with
the regime’s developmentalist agenda of economic growth, political stability and equal
access to welfare. In Chapter 5, Feener discusses three scholars ( Jalaluddin Rakhmat,
Nurcholish Madjid and Munawir Sjadzali) who proposed different ideas and concepts to overcome the narrow and inflexible fiqh interpretations associated with those
Indonesian Muslim groups which, in their view, often held up national development.
In Chapters 6 and 7, Feener discusses a dynamic reform that arose among members
of the new generation of the largest Muslim traditionalist organization, Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU), especially its endeavor to escape the label of “madhhab fanaticism” often
attached to it by earlier Muslim reformers. One example of this trend was an attempt
to rethink the organization’s fundamental ideology: Ahl al-Sunna wa al-jamaʿa (the
people of the Prophetic tradition and the community). Usually abbreviated as Aswaja,
this core ideology was reinterpreted as the way of moderation (tawassut), characterized
by the virtue of balance (tawazun) and tolerance (tasamuh). is reinterpretation
resulted in NU’s effort to formulate a religious law in which neither the literal statements of authoritative texts nor the use of human reason are completely excluded
or exclusively decisive. Additionally, NU’s reformulation of Aswaja suits the objectives of the state’s development agendas, as well as the increasingly popular values of
democracy, pluralism and human rights.
Regrettably, Feener includes only a few Muslim women intellectuals. is is not
because he disregards them, but rather because significant works on Islamic legal
thought by Indonesian Muslim women scholars are rarely to be found. Be that as it
may, two female scholars should be noted: Andi Rasdiyanah, who wrote her dissertation on the integration of Buginese customary law into Islamic Sharīʿa and who has
held positions at both academic and religious institutions within the country, and
Huzaimah Tahido, who received a doctorate from al-Azhar and is currently Professor
of Comparative Islamic Law at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta.
130
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
It is unfair to expect a single volume to address all issues and include every subject;
this gap, however, should inspire future researchers to investigate the extent to which
Indonesian Muslim women scholars and activists have been part of Islamic legal discourse.
is book is an excellent contribution to the existing scholarly literature on modern
Indonesian Islam. It stands apart in its extensive use of Indonesian sources to construct
the first map of Islamic legal discourse in Indonesia, which will be of use both to
scholars specializing in Indonesian studies, as well as to historians, anthropologists
and Islamicists who have only limited knowledge of Indonesian Islam.
Arskal Salim
Aga Khan University
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations
127
Muslim Legal ought in Modern Indonesia. By R. Michael Feener. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 290. ISBN: 978-0-521-53747-6. £60;
$120.99.
Michael Feener’s close examination of the intellectual development of Islamic law in
Indonesia is an important work that adds to a growing body of literature covering
various aspects of Indonesian Islam. ese include works on Muslim organizations
and movements,1 Islamic education and Muslim students,2 Qurʾānic exegesis,3 Islamic
theology,4 and on Muslim Sufism.5
By offering insights into areas not taken into account by earlier works on Islamic
law in modern Indonesia,6 Feener fills in some important gaps. As he states in his
preface, the seven chapters of this book examine “the ways in which Indonesian Muslim
scholars and activists have formulated new conceptions and interpretations of Islamic
law through creative readings and syntheses of diverse materials, including Islamic
scriptural sources, classical Muslim jurisprudential texts, and modern Middle Eastern
and ‘Western’ academic writings read in light of rapidly evolving social, economic and
political contexts” (p. xx).
Drawing on Roff,7 Feener points out that three key phenomena have influenced
Muslim legal thought in modern Indonesia: voluntary associations, print culture and
1)
Taufik Abdullah, Schools and Politics: e Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra,
1927-1933 (Ithaca, 1971); Deliar Noer, e Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia,
1900-1942 (Kuala Lumpur, 1973); B. J. Boland, e Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia
(e Hague, 1982); Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia
(Princeton, 2000); Bahtiar Effendi, Islam and the State in Indonesia (Singapore, 2003).
2)
Mona Abaza, Indonesian Students in Cairo (Paris, 1994); Yon Mahmudi, Islamising
Indonesia: e Rise of Jemaah Tarbiyah and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) (Canberra,
2008); Robert Hefner, Making Modern Muslims: the Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast
Asia (Honolulu, 2009).
3)
Anthony H. Johns, “Islam in the Malay World, an Explanatory Survey with Some
References to Qurʾānic Exegesis,” in Islam in Asia: Southeast and East Asia, vol. 2, ed.
R. Israeli and A. H. Johns (Jerusalem, 1984), 115-61; Howard M. Federspiel, Popular
Indonesian Literature of the Qurʾān (Ithaca, 1994); Peter G. Riddell, Islam and the MalayIndonesian World: Transmission and Responses (Honolulu, 2001).
4)
Fauzan Saleh, Modern Trends in Islamic eological Discourse in 20th Century Indonesia:
A Critical Study (Leiden, 2001).
5)
Julia Day Howell, “Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic Revival,” Journal of Asian Studies,
60:3 (2001), 701-29.
6)
E.g., Daniel S. Lev, Islamic Courts in Indonesia: A Study in the Political Bases of Legal
Institutions (Berkeley, 1972); Atho Mudzhar, Fatwa-fatwa Majelis Ulama Indonesia: Sebuah
Studi Tentang Pemikiran Hukum Islam di Indonesia, 1975-1988 (Jakarta, 1993); and Barry
Hooker, Indonesian Islam: Social Change through Contemporary Fatawa (Honolulu, 2003).
7)
William Roff, e Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven, 1967).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011
DOI: 10.1163/156851910X538413
128
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
educational reform. Feener considers these as three legs of a triangle, each intersecting
with and supporting the other two and, taken together, contributing to wide-scale
transformations of the religious, intellectual and legal cultures of the Muslim communities of the Indonesian archipelago. With a more systematic approach and a deeper
focus, this volume is a comprehensive and sophisticated update of previous works,
such as those by Federspiel and Bowen, on Muslim intellectuals in modern Indonesia.8
It has never been an easy task for a scholar studying Indonesian Islam to present a
comprehensive view of the historical development of Islamic legal thought in modern
Indonesia. Feener tackles this task skillfully. Expanding upon his dissertation (Boston
University, 1999), he discusses a number of independent Muslim thinkers from
various Muslim organizations across different decades of the 20th century, including
government officials, such as Munawir Sjadzali, political leaders, such as M. Natsir,
Anwar Harjono and Abdurrahman Wahid, academics, such as Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy,
Hazairin, Nurcholish Madjid and Jalaluddin Rakhmat, as well as both modernist
and traditionalist scholars. Among the modernists, he includes Ahmad Hassan and
Moenawar Chalil, and among the traditionalists, Said Aqil Siradj, Ali Yafie, Ibrahim
Hosen, Sahal Mahfudh and Masdar Farid Mas’udi. Feener has divided this approximately one-hundred year period of development into three phases, which he describes
in Chapters 2 through 6.
e first phase covers the early 20th century to 1945, the year in which Indonesia
was declared free from colonial rule. During this time, fierce polemics emerged on the
question of whether or not the gate of ijtihad was closed. Additionally, legal debates
between Muslim groups were frequent, especially regarding differences in worship and
ritual. e modernist groups (e.g., Persatuan Islam and Muhammadiyah) advocated
the deployment of ijtihad and educational reforms, while the traditionalist groups
(e.g., Nahdlatul Ulama) maintained that in order to acknowledge the importance
of Islamic tradition, adherence to one of the four madhhabs and the foundational
authority of their respective leaders was necessary.
e second phase covers the 1950s, when the Yogyakarta-based leading religious
scholar Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy and the Jakarta-based prominent professor of law Hazairin, both expressed the need for a new national Indonesian madhhab. For both men,
Islam could remain a vital force in the lives of believers only if Indonesian fiqh within
the framework of a national madhhab was in line with the local cultures of Indonesia
and at the same time was based on the Qurʾān and the Prophetic tradition. In their
view, an Indonesian madhhab was a necessary response to the plurality of laws developing in post-independent Indonesia, which incorporated the Dutch colonial code,
local customary law and Shāfiʿī jurisprudence.
In addition to this desire for a national Indonesian madhhab, a number of Islamic
parties, as well as prominent Muslim individuals, demanded that the Sharīʿa be the
8)
Howard M. Federspiel, Muslim Intellectuals and National Development in Indonesia
(New York, 1992); John R. Bowen, Islam, Law and Equality in Modern Indonesia: An
Anthropology of Public Reasoning (New York, 2003).
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
129
basis of constitutional law. Initially, leaders of the Masjumy Islamic party (who then
founded the Islamic Propagation Board of Indonesia [DDII]) were not able to accept
the idea that a country in which the majority of the population was Muslim should
have anything other than Islamic law as the law of the land. According to Feener, for
these leaders the issue was not “the interpretation of Islamic law in relation to contemporary Indonesian society, but rather … Islam as the formal identity for the law
of the Indonesian state” (p. 114). However, their struggle at the Constituent Assembly
(1957-59) ended in failure.
e third phase covers the New Order regime era (1966-1998), which, since its
early period, banned any initiative to introduce Islamic law based on the draft of the
Jakarta Charter (the rejected draft of the Indonesian constitutional preamble that
contained the controversial words ‘with the obligation of carrying out Islamic Sharīʿa
for its adherents’). Following this ban, some individual Muslim intellectuals looked
for other means to bring their religious ideals into engagement with the rapid social
transformations of the period and the new course of national development.
Driven by different backgrounds and external influences, these Muslim intellectuals
proposed programs of Islamic (legal) reform that purportedly went hand-in-hand with
the regime’s developmentalist agenda of economic growth, political stability and equal
access to welfare. In Chapter 5, Feener discusses three scholars ( Jalaluddin Rakhmat,
Nurcholish Madjid and Munawir Sjadzali) who proposed different ideas and concepts to overcome the narrow and inflexible fiqh interpretations associated with those
Indonesian Muslim groups which, in their view, often held up national development.
In Chapters 6 and 7, Feener discusses a dynamic reform that arose among members
of the new generation of the largest Muslim traditionalist organization, Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU), especially its endeavor to escape the label of “madhhab fanaticism” often
attached to it by earlier Muslim reformers. One example of this trend was an attempt
to rethink the organization’s fundamental ideology: Ahl al-Sunna wa al-jamaʿa (the
people of the Prophetic tradition and the community). Usually abbreviated as Aswaja,
this core ideology was reinterpreted as the way of moderation (tawassut), characterized
by the virtue of balance (tawazun) and tolerance (tasamuh). is reinterpretation
resulted in NU’s effort to formulate a religious law in which neither the literal statements of authoritative texts nor the use of human reason are completely excluded
or exclusively decisive. Additionally, NU’s reformulation of Aswaja suits the objectives of the state’s development agendas, as well as the increasingly popular values of
democracy, pluralism and human rights.
Regrettably, Feener includes only a few Muslim women intellectuals. is is not
because he disregards them, but rather because significant works on Islamic legal
thought by Indonesian Muslim women scholars are rarely to be found. Be that as it
may, two female scholars should be noted: Andi Rasdiyanah, who wrote her dissertation on the integration of Buginese customary law into Islamic Sharīʿa and who has
held positions at both academic and religious institutions within the country, and
Huzaimah Tahido, who received a doctorate from al-Azhar and is currently Professor
of Comparative Islamic Law at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta.
130
Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130
It is unfair to expect a single volume to address all issues and include every subject;
this gap, however, should inspire future researchers to investigate the extent to which
Indonesian Muslim women scholars and activists have been part of Islamic legal discourse.
is book is an excellent contribution to the existing scholarly literature on modern
Indonesian Islam. It stands apart in its extensive use of Indonesian sources to construct
the first map of Islamic legal discourse in Indonesia, which will be of use both to
scholars specializing in Indonesian studies, as well as to historians, anthropologists
and Islamicists who have only limited knowledge of Indonesian Islam.
Arskal Salim
Aga Khan University
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations