Abstract
This chapter explores the role of oratory in Indonesian Islam through an examination of two books: the 1964 book of Muhammad Isa Anshary entitled The Da’wah Struggler (Mudjahid Da’wah), and the 1967 work of Toha Jahja Omar, The Science of Da’wah (Ilmu Da’wah). These two accounts concern preaching by Muslims for Muslims, and were created by Indonesian intellectuals working from contrasting positions in Indonesia’s variegated Islamic and political landscape, and project differing conceptions of diversity and tolerance in that landscape. Normative writing about oratory provides insight into contestations over pluralism and difference within Indonesia’s Islamic community, and offers insight into the border conflicts in contemporary Indonesia in which the single public and counter-public positions are instrumental.
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Notes
- 1.
A highly readable and concise summary of the literature on the arrival of Islam into Indonesia is that of Ricklefs (2008, pp. 3–16).
- 2.
General discussions of Indonesia’s Islamic diversity are found in Bowen (2003) and Hefner (2000).
- 3.
In Indonesian languages, the Arabic-derived term dakwah literally means invitation, call, or challenge, and is used by Muslims to refer to Islamic predication of all kinds. In the context of the late-twentieth century Islamic revival, the term also describes private- and state-sponsored projects for increasing the role of Islam in public and private life. For these meanings, see Gade (2004) and Mahmood (2005). The term is spelt variously in Indonesian. In the book titles under discussion here, the spelling da?wah is used. In this chapter I have preferred the spelling dakwah, which is more commonly used in contemporary Indonesian.
- 4.
I have found very little biographical information concerning Omar. The details reproduced here are found in the introductory comments by Bustami A. Gani in Omar (1964, pp. XII– XIII). My naming of 1973 as the year of his death is based on the statement of Ahmad Syadali about the appointment of Harun Nasution as rector of IAIN Jakarta on 4 June, 1973. According to Syadali, Nasution replaced “Prof. Thoha Yahya Umar, who had only just returned to the Mercy of Allah.” (Syadali 1989, p. 274).
- 5.
At that time, the State Islamic Universities (IAINs) did not have dakwah faculties, so dakwah was included among the disciplines taught in the usul ul-din (foundations of the religion) faculty. 6. The largest share of the vote was captured by Sukarno’s Indonesian Nationalist Party (22.3%), followed by Masyumi with 20.9%, and Nahdlatul Ulama with 18.4 (Feith 1962, pp. 434–435).
- 6.
There is a political background to Isa Anshary’s aversion to sufi sm. As noted above, the group representing Indonesia’s traditional Islamic constituency, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), was the fi rst major group to withdraw from the Masyumi political coalition of which Anshary was a leader (Noer 1987 ). NU’s elites have traditionally included the heads of the country’s largest sufi orders (tarekat).
- 7.
Anshary is recalling a common scheme for representing the journey of the sufi from the way of instruction (tarekat) to the law (shariah), to gnosis of the Divine (ma‘rifat), and fi nally, to comprehension of essence (hakekat).
- 8.
In the pages referred to here, Omar expressed the pluralist nature of the Medina community through a narrative of its formation. More commonly, arguments for the inclusiveness of this community are made via the written “constitution” of the same community (Watt 1961, pp. 19–21, 146–148). It is possible that Omar avoided discussion of the constitution because it was so often mobilized rhetorically in support of the conception of an Islamic state, something inimical to Omar’s arguments in The Science of Dakwah.
- 9.
Omar died in or before 1973, so he himself was (once again?) not involved in the republication, although the publisher has rather cynically implied that he was: the “new” introduction by Omar, dated 12 March, 2004, is a word-for-word replication of the original introduction of 1967.
- 10.
The organization most active in proselytizing against the Ahmadiyah has been Persatuan Islam (Islamic Unity), of which Isa Anshary was general chairman between 1948 and 1961. See generally Federspiel (2001).
- 11.
The recent history of the Ahmadiyah sect’s problems in Indonesia is set out in Crouch (2009). 13. Omar must certainly have been instrumental in the early development of a social sciencesoriented, Islamic discourse on Indonesian pluralism. He was rector of the Jakarta State Islamic University in the period before the rectorship of Harun Nasution, identifi ed by Barton (1997) as the starting point of the trend towards western social sciences.
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Millie, J. (2012). Preaching over Borders: Constructing Publics for Islamic Oratory in Indonesia. In: Manderson, L., Smith, W., Tomlinson, M. (eds) Flows of Faith. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2932-2_6
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