How Indonesia Became a World Leader in Islamic Education: A Historical Sociology of a Great Transformation
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Abstract
Over the past twenty years, educators around the world have worked to devise curricula to educate students about how to live together as citizens in diverse societies. In Muslim educational circles, this task has been made additionally challenging by jurisprudential legacies from classical times that make strict and hierarchical distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims. This essay presents a historical sociology of educational reform in Islamic schools in Indonesia with regards to education about citizenship and nation. This study shows that the late-nineteenth century ascendance of madrasa-like institutions across the Indonesian archipelago meant that the widespread adoption of a more-or-less standardized fiqh-focused curriculum (like that long common in Middle Eastern and South Asian madrasas) coincided with two other developments: the rise of Indonesian nationalism, with an emphasis on multi-religious citizenship, and the spread of modernist-style “Islamic schools” (sekolah Islam) with a broad-based academic curriculum. The coincidence of these three currents ensured that here in Indonesia Islamic schooling adopted a general curriculum emphasizing the sciences of the world in addition to Islamic sciences more readily than in many other Muslim lands. In a manner that anticipated a shift recently seen in other Muslim-majority countries, Islamic educators did so while also prioritizing Islamic ideals of the public good (maslahat) and purpose-driven (maqasid) ethics over legal formalism, and rallying to the ideal of Indonesian traditions of multi-religious citizenship. In all these regards, Islamic higher education contributed greatly to contemporary Indonesia’s cultural and democratic reform.
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References
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Saliba, George. (2007). Islamic science and the making of the European renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Vredenbregt, Jacob. (1962). The Haddj: Some of Its Features and Functions in Indonesia. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. 118(1),91-154.
Ahmed, Shahab. (2016). What is Islam? The importance of eing Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Azra, Azyumardi. 1992. The Transmission of Islamic Reformism to Indonesia: Networks of Middle Eastern and Malay Indonesian Ulama in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: PhD Dissertation, Department of History, Columbia University.
Azra, Azyumardi, Dina Afrianty, & Robert W. Hefner. (2007). Pesantren and madrasa: Muslim schools and national ideals in Indonesia. In Robert W. Hefner, & Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Eds.), Schooling Islam: The culture and politics of modern Muslim education (pp. 172-198). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Berg, L.W.C. van den. (1886). Het Mohammedaansche godsdienstonderwijs op Java en Madoera en de darbij gebruikete Arabische Boeken. TBG 31, 519-55.
Berkey, Jonathan. (1992). The transmission of knowledge in medieval Cairo: A social history of Islamic Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Berkey, Jonathan. (2003). The formation of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, & Jean-Claude Passeron. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage.
Bruinessen, Martin van. (1990). Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic script used in the pesantren milieu. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 146(2-3), 226-269.
Bruinessen, Martin van. (1995). Shari`a court, tarekat and pesantren: Religious institutions in the Banten Sultanate. Archipel 50, 165-200.
Burhanudin, Jajat. (2006). Kerajaan-oriented Islam: The experience of pre-Colonial Indonesia. Studia Islamika 13(1), 33-66.
Chamberlain, Michael. (1994). Knowledge and social practice in medieval Damascus, 1190-1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dhofier, Zamakhsyari. (1999). The pesantren tradition: The role of the Kyai in the maintenance of traditional Islam in Java. Tempe: Monograph Series, Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University.
Dijk, C. van. (1981). Rebellion under the banner of Islam: The Darul Islam in Indonesia. Verhandelingen van Het KITLV No. 94. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Djamil, Fathurrahman. (1995). The Muhammadiyah and the theory of Maqasid al-Shari"˜ah. Studia Islamika 2(1) 53-67.
Feener, R. Michael. (2007). Muslim legal thought in modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Formichi, Chiara. (2012). Islam and the making of the nation: Kartosuwiryo and political Islam in twentieth-century Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Grandin, Nicole, & Gaborieau, Marc. (Eds.) (1997). Madrasa: La transmission du savoir dans le monde Musulman. Paris: Éditions Arguments.
Gutas, Dmitri. (1998). Greek thought, Arabic culture: The Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad and early "˜Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries). London: Routledge 1998.
Hallaq, Wael B. (2011). MaqÄsid and the challenges of modernity. Al-Jami"˜ah 49(1) 1-31.
Hefner, Robert W. 2009. The politics and cultures of Islamic education in Southeast Asia. In Robert W. Hefner (Ed.), Making modern Muslims: The politics of Islamic education in Southeast Asia, (pp. 1-54). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Hefner, Robert W. (Ed.) (2011). Shari"˜a politics: Islamic law and society in the modern world. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hefner, Robert W. (2016). Shari"˜a law and the quest for a modern Muslim ethics. In Robert W. Hefner, (Ed.), Shari"˜a law and modern Muslim ethics, (pp. 1-34). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hooker, M.B. (1983). Islamic law in South-East Asia. Singapore: Oxford University Press.
Ibrahim, Azhar. (2012). Denial, trivialization, and relegation of pluralism: The challenges of managing diversity in multi-religious Malaysia and Indonesia. Studia Islamika 193(3), 437-75.
Jabali, Fuad, & Jamhari. (Eds.) (2002). IAIN & modernisasi Islam di Indonesia [The State Islamic Institutes and the Modernization of Islam in Indonesia]. Jakarta: Logos Wacana Ilmu.
Johnston, David L. (2007). Maqâşid al-Sharî"˜a: Epistemology and hermeneutics of Muslim theologies of human rights. Die Welt des Islams, 47(2), 149-87.
Karamustafa, Ahmet T. (2007). Sufism: The formative period. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kersten, Carool. (2017). A history of Islam in Indonesia: Unity in diversity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lindsey, Tim. (2012). Islam, law and the state in Southeast Asia: Volume I: Indonesia. London and New York: Tauris.
Lohlker, Rudiger. (2021). Fiqh reconsidered: Indigenization and universalization of Islamic law in Indonesia. Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society. 7, 188-208.
Lukens-Bull, Ronald. (2005). A peaceful jihad: Negotiating identity and modernity in Muslim Java. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Lussier, Danielle N., & Fish, M. Steven. (2012). Indonesia: The benefits of civic engagement. Journal of Democracy 23(1) (January), 70-84.
Makdisi, George. (1981). The rise of colleges: Institutions of learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid. (2002). The scope of pluralism in Islamic moral traditions. In Sohail H. Hashmi, (Ed.), Islamic political ethics: Civil society, pluralism, and conflict, (pp. 135-47). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid. (2005). Shâtibî's philosophy of Islamic law. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust.
Moosa, Ibrahim. (2001). The poetics and politics of law after Empire: Reading women's rights in the contestation of law. UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law, 1, 1-46.
Moosa, Ibrahim. (2005). Muslim ethics? In William Wchweiker, (Ed)., The Blackwell companion to religious ethics (pp. 237-43). Malden, MA and Oxford UK.
Mulkhan, Abdul Munir. (2010). Kiai Ahmad Dahlan: Jejak pembaruan social dan kemanusiaan. Jakarta: Kompas Books.
Nakamura, Mitsuo. (2012). The crescent arises over the banyan tree: A study of the Muhammadiyah movement in a central Javanese town, c. 1910s-2010. (2nd Enlarged ed.). Singapore: ISEAS Press.
Nassery, Idris, Rumee Ahmed, & Muna Tatari. (2018). The objectives of Islamic law: The promises and challenges of the MaqÄá¹£id al-SharÄ«Ê¿a. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
Njoto-Feillard, Gwenaël. (2012). L'Islam et la réinvention du capitalisme en Indonésie. Paris: Karthala.
Opwis, Felicitas. (2007). Islamic law and legal change: The concept of Maslaha in classical and contemporary Islamic legal theory. In Abbas Amanat, & Frank Griffel (Eds.), Shari`a: Islamic law in the contemporary context (pp. 62-82). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ramadan, Tariq. (2009). Radical reform: Islamic ethics and liberation. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Ricci, Ronit. (2011). Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Saliba, George. (2007). Islamic science and the making of the European renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Schmid, Hansjorg, & Amir Sheikhzadegan. (Eds.). 2022. Exploring Islamic social work: Between community and common good. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
Ubaedillah, Achmad. (2018). Civic education for Muslim students in the era of democracy: Lessons learned from Indonesia. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 16(2), 50-61.
Vredenbregt, Jacob. (1962). The Haddj: Some of Its Features and Functions in Indonesia. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. 118(1),91-154.