An important book that bridges the gap between the more specialist literature and the - often depressingly ill-informed - comments of journalists and ideologues. Merle Ricklefs Professor, Department of History, National University of Singapore --

There are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country, but most people outside the region know little about the nation, much less about the practice of Islam among its diverse peoples or the religion's influence on the politics of the republic. In this illuminating publication, Robert Pringle explains the advent of Islam in Indonesia, its development, and especially its contemporary circumstances. The author's incisive writing provides the necessary background and demystifies the spectrum of politically active Muslim groups in Indonesia today.

Across the Muslim world, religion plays an increasingly prominent role in both the private and public lives of over a billion people. Observers of these changes struggle to understand the consequences of an Islamic resurgence in a democratizing world. Will democratic political participation by an increasingly religious population lead to victories by Islamists at the ballot box? Will more conspicuously pious Muslims participate in politics and markets in a fundamentally different way than they had previously? Will a renewed attention to Islam lead Muslim democracies to reevaluate their place in the global community of states, turning away from alignments with the West or the Global South and towards an Islamic civilizational identity? The answers to all of these questions depend, at least in part, on what ordinary Muslims think and do. In order to provide these answers, the authors of this book look to Indonesia--the world's largest Muslim country and one of the world's only consolidated Muslim democracies. They draw on original public opinion data to explore how religiosity and religious belief translate into political and economic behavior at the individual level. Across various issue areas--support for democracy or Islamic law, partisan politics, Islamic finance, views about foreign engagement--they find no evidence that the religious orientations of Indonesian Muslims have any systematic relationships with their political preferences or economic behavior. The broad conclusion is that scholars of Islam, in Indonesia and elsewhere, must understand religious life and individual piety as part of a larger and more complex set of social transformations. These transformations include modernization, economic development, and globalization, each of which has occurred in parallel with Islamic revivalism throughout the world. Against the common assumption that piety would naturally inhibit any tendencies towards modernity, democracy, or cosmopolitanism, Piety and Public Opinion reveals the complex and subtle links between religion and political beliefs in a critically important Muslim democracy.

Indonesian Islam is an important and timely book based on approximately 2,000 fatwâ (pl. fatâwâ)--an opinion on a point of law or dogma given by a person with recognized authority (ijâza)--demonstrating that classical Islamic reasoning is an alternative to state-defined Islam and is capable of dealing with contemporary challenges in ethics and morality in a consistent and rational way. The book provides a comprehensive survey of how modern Indonesian Islamic thinking has responded to changes in social practices since the 1920s, and how authorities have ruled on diverse subjects ranging from football pools to land sales and milk banks. The author examines in detail the development and nuances of Islamic thinking, both by reference to local tradition and comparatively, by reference to the classical Arabian texts, therefore providing an important contribution to deepening popular understanding of Islam in Indonesia. The author's detailed analysis of fatwâ is unprecedented in the study of Indonesian Islam. To date there is no comparable analysis of modern fatwâ available in book form anywhere in the world, making this volume an invaluable resource for anyone who studies Indonesia. Professor Hooker describes the fatwâ as method and doctrine, religious duty, the status and obligation of women, Islam and medical science, offences against religion, and issues specific to Indonesian Islam. Responses to fatwâ cover such contemporary issues as abortion, organ transplants, insurance, and the status of women. For sale in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand by NUS Press (Singapore)

Indonesian Islam is often portrayed as being intrinsically moderate by virtue of the role that mystical Sufism played in shaping its traditions. According to Western observers--from Dutch colonial administrators and orientalist scholars to modern anthropologists such as the late Clifford Geertz--Indonesia's peaceful interpretation of Islam has been perpetually under threat from outside by more violent, intolerant Islamic traditions that were originally imposed by conquering Arab armies. The Makings of Indonesian Islam challenges this widely accepted narrative, offering a more balanced assessment of the intellectual and cultural history of the most populous Muslim nation on Earth. Michael Laffan traces how the popular image of Indonesian Islam was shaped by encounters between colonial Dutch scholars and reformist Islamic thinkers. He shows how Dutch religious preoccupations sometimes echoed Muslim concerns about the relationship between faith and the state, and how Dutch-Islamic discourse throughout the long centuries of European colonialism helped give rise to Indonesia's distinctive national and religious culture. The Makings of Indonesian Islam presents Islamic and colonial history as an integrated whole, revealing the ways our understanding of Indonesian Islam, both past and present, came to be.

"Once celebrated in the Western media as a shining example of a 'liberal' and 'tolerant' Islam, Indonesia since the end of the Soeharto regime (May 1998) has witnessed a variety of developments that bespeak a conservative turn in the country's Muslim politics. In this timely collection of original essays, Martin van Bruinessen, our most distinguished senior Western scholar of Indonesian Islam, and four leading Indonesian Muslim scholars explore and explain these developments. Each chapter examines recent trends from a strategic institutional perch: the Council of Indonesian Muslim scholars, the reformist Muhammadiyah, South Sulawesi's Committee for the Implementation of Islamic Shari'a, and radical Islamism in Solo. With van Bruinessen's brilliantly synthetic introduction and conclusion, these essays shed a bright light on what Indonesian Muslim politics was and where it seems to be going. The analysis is complex and by no means uniformly dire. For readers interested in Indonesian Muslim politics, and for analysts interested in the dialectical interplay of progressive and conservative Islam, this book is fascinating and essential reading." -Robert Hefner, Director Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs, Boston University

Civil Islam tells the story of Islam and democratization in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation. Challenging stereotypes of Islam as antagonistic to democracy, this study of courage and reformation in the face of state terror suggests possibilities for democracy in the Muslim world and beyond. Democratic in the early 1950s and with rich precedents for tolerance and civility, Indonesia succumbed to violence. In 1965, Muslim parties were drawn into the slaughter of half a million communists. In the aftermath of this bloodshed, a "New Order" regime came to power, suppressing democratic forces and instituting dictatorial controls that held for decades. Yet from this maelstrom of violence, repressed by the state and denounced by conservative Muslims, an Islamic democracy movement emerged, strengthened, and played a central role in the 1998 overthrow of the Soeharto regime. In 1999, Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid was elected President of a reformist, civilian government. In explaining how this achievement was possible, Robert Hefner emphasizes the importance of civil institutions and public civility, but argues that neither democracy nor civil society is possible without a civilized state. Against portrayals of Islam as inherently antipluralist and undemocratic, he shows that Indonesia's Islamic reform movement repudiated the goal of an Islamic state, mobilized religiously ecumenical support, promoted women's rights, and championed democratic ideals. This broadly interdisciplinary and timely work heightens our awareness of democracy's necessary pluralism, and places Indonesia at the center of our efforts to understand what makes democracy work.