Foreword

Summary

Yudi Latif' Indonesian Muslim Intelligentsia and Power is a study of great scope and importance. There is no comparable study of its kind in the extensive literature on Indonesia. Given its considerable scope and its critical historical argument, it is a book that should be essential reading for an understanding of Indonesian society and its current political development.

As a fundamental sociological inquiry, this book defines and discovers its subject. Its focus is on Indonesia' Muslim “intelligentsia” and its argument is that this “stratum” of society — barely recognized as such by other writers — has provided the critical Islamic discourse within the public sphere that enabled Muslims to define themselves and give direction to the Indonesian nation. This offers a new perception of Indonesia' history and it gives credit both to the centrality of ideas and to the role of those key historical figures in Indonesia who fostered this on-going intellectual discourse.

As a work of intellectual history, this book begins in the nineteenth century, setting out the colonial context within which individual Muslim intellectuals sought to obtain an education and create a place for themselves in colonial society. It then carries on into and through the twentieth century with the emergence of an “intelligentsia” and its varied struggle to gain recognition and political authority. As such, the book charts a succession of generations whose popular designations, in each period, give a sense of the historical embeddedness of their intellectual horizons. From kaum moeda, bangsawan pikiran, and pemoeda peladjar to sarjana and cendiakawan, successive generations of Indonesian Muslims have struggled both to take their place in a national setting and to engage with issues of significance for the Muslim world as a whole.

It is particularly pertinent to recognize that this book is itself an engagement with the discourse that it examines. Like those he studies, Dr Latif is an engaged intellectual. The critical analytic concepts that inform this book are drawn from a variety of intellectual sources. Thus, for example, Dr Latif draws upon the ideas of Mannheim, Gramsci, Foucault, and Habermas — to name a few of his sources of inspiration. He refashions and refocuses these ideas for his own analytic purposes and presents a coherent perception of the nation' past that complements classic studies of Indonesia by such writers as Benda, Feith, Legge or McVey.