Making modern Muslims : the politics of Islamic education in Southeast Asia

258 Pages·2009·28.807 MB·English

by  Robert W Hefner

ISLAM / ANTHROPOLOGY / ASIAN STUDIES
MAKING MODERN MUSLIMS
When students from a Muslim boarding school were convicted for the 2002 M
terrorist bombings in Bali, Islamic schools in Southeast Asia became the focus of A
intense international scrutiny. Some analysts have warned that these schools are K
THE POLITICS OF
being turned into platforms for violent jihadism. Making Modern Muslims is the first I
N
book to look comparatively at Islamic education and politics in Southeast Asia. ISLAMIC EDUCATION
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Based on a two-year research project by leading scholars of Southeast Asian Islam,
the book examines Islamic schooling in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, M IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
and the southern Philippines. The studies demonstrate that the great majority of
O
schools have nothing to do with violence but are undergoing changes that have far-
D
reaching implications for democracy, gender relations, pluralism, and citizenship.
E
Making Modern Muslims offers an important reassessment of Muslim culture R
and politics in Southeast Asia and provides insights into the changing nature of N
state-society relations from the late colonial period to the present. It allows us
M
to better appreciate the astonishing dynamism of Islamization in Southeast Asia
and the struggle for Muslim hearts and minds taking place today. Timely and U
readable, this volume will be of great interest to teachers and specialists of Islam S
L
and Southeast Asia as well as the general reader seeking to understand the great
I
transformations at work in the Muslim world. M
S
“This is a timely, well-conceived, and extremely well-crafted volume
that addresses topics of the utmost importance in today’s increasingly
globalized—and dangerously fraught—world. It will appeal to a
wide range of scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and to
general readers with vastly different levels of knowledge about the
peoples and cultures of modern Asia and the culture and politics of
contemporary Islam.”
—Michael G. Peletz, EMORY UNIVERSITY
“This is an up to the moment overview of Islamic schools in Southeast
Asia, with special attention to the roles played by states in shaping
schooling. It is timely, informative, well organized, and bears on
important and policy-relevant issues.”
H
—John Bowen, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS
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ROBERT W. HEFNER is professor of anthropology and director of the Program on
Islam and Civil Society at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at
Boston University.
COVER PHOTO: Qur’anic recitation (pengajian),
Ponorogo, East Java (Robert W. Hefner)
COVER DESIGN: Julie Matsuo-Chun
UNIVERSITY of
HAWAI‘I PRESS
Edited by ROBERT W. HEFNER
HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I 96822-1888
HefnerMODERNcover.indd 1 7/16/09 1:44:59 PM
MAKING MODERN MUSLIMS

M A K I N G

M O D E R N
M U S L I M S
THE POLITICS OF
ISLAMIC EDUCATION
IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Edited by Robert W. Hefner
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS
Honolulu
©2009 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
14 13 12 11 10 09 6 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Making modern Muslims : the politics of Islamic education
in Southeast Asia / edited by Robert W. Hefner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8248-3280-3 (hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8248-3316-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Islamic education—Political aspects—Southeast Asia. 2.
Muslims—Education—Southeast Asia. 3. Southeast Asia—
Politics and government—1945– I. Hefner, Robert W.
LC910.A785M35 2009
370.0770959—dc22
2008021704
Interior photos. ii: Mid-day pesantren class meeting, West Java,
Indonesia; x: youth pengajian (Qur’anic study), Ponorogo, East
Java. (Robert W. Hefner)
University of Hawai‘i books are printed on acid-free paper
and meet the guidelines for permanance and durability of
the Council on Library Resources.
Designed by Julie Matsuo-Chun
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
A Note on Spelling and Transliteration
ix
1 Introduction: The Politics and Cultures 1
of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia

ROBERT W. HEFNER
2 Islamic Schools, Social Movements, 55
and Democracy in Indonesia

ROBERT W. HEFNER
3 Reforming Islamic Education in 106
Malaysia: Doctrine or Dialogue?
RICHARD G. KRAINCE
4 Islamic Education in Southern 141
Thailand: Negotiating Islam, Identity,

and Modernity

JOSEPH CHINYONG LIOW
5 Muslim Metamorphosis: Islamic 172
Education and Pol i tic s in
Contemporary Cambodia
BJØRN ATLE BLENGSLI
6 Islamic Education in the Philippines: 205
Political Separatism and Religious
Pragmatism
THOMAS M. MCKENNA & ESMAEL A. ABDULA
List of Contributors 237
Index 239

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book grew out of a research project that
began in December 2004 and ended in January 2007, funded by the
National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) in Seattle, Washington.
The NBR is a nongovernmental and nonpartisan institute that
sponsors academic research on policy-relevant issues in the broader
Asian region. Although the contributors eventually took their research
and writing into scholarly as well as policy terrains, the research would
not have been possible without NBR support. I want to thank Richard
J. Ellings, Michael Wills, and Mercy Kuo for their generous support
of this and other research on Southeast Asia, and Aishah Malaya
Valencia Pang and Teresa Reimers for their skill in organizing our
research meetings.
Although all of the authors had their own in-country research
teams, the entire project owes a special thanks to Dr. Azyumardi
Azra, former rector, and Dr. Makruf Jamhari, director of the Center
for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM), both at the Syarif
Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The NBR research grew directly out of an earlier (2002–2004) project
on Islamic Education in Indonesia, sponsored by the Pew Charitable
Trusts and based on collaboration between the PPIM and the Program
on Islam and Civil Society at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and
World Affairs at Boston University. The questions and methods of this
research project show the great influence of Dr. Azra and Dr. Jamhari,
who taught me most of what I know about modern Islamic schooling in
Indonesia. First-rate researchers in their own right, Jajang Jahroni and
Din Wahid also helped guide me to Islamic schools across Indonesia
in December 2005 and December 2006. Terima kasih banyak Pak
Azyu, Pak Jam, Pak Jajang, dan Pak Din!
For the time required for additional library research and the
editing of the manuscripts, I also wish to thank Patricia L. Rosenfield
at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Under a Carnegie Scholars
grant, the corporation provided me with sabbatical funding to carry
out additional library research, edit this book, and begin the writing of
another book on Islamic education.
My appreciation goes to Michael Peletz of Emory University,
who read the manuscript in its entirety and made enormously helpful
suggestions for its improvement. I also wish to thank my editor at the
University of Hawai‘i Press, Pamela Kelley, who, as always, made the
task of publishing with Hawai‘i a special pleasure.
Finally, as the chapters in this volume make clear, gender issues
were a critical part of the research team’s investigations, yet our
research team itself was gender imbalanced. This was not our original
intent. At the project’s outset, I recruited two women scholars to write
chapters. However, as a result of unexpected demands on their time,
both had to withdraw from the project. The remaining members of the
research team rose to the challenge of incorporating gender questions
into their own studies, and I am grateful to them for this and all their
fine work.
ROBERT W. HEFNER
Institute on Culture, Religion, and
World Affairs, Boston University
viii Acknowledgments
A NOTE ON SPELLING AND
TRANSLITERATION
The essays in this volume deal with Muslim
Southeast Asians who speak an array of languages and who spell
and transliterate Arabic words in varied ways. Even in the case of
a single language like Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), a word like
madrasa can be spelled in different ways (madrasa, madrasah). Most
Southeast Asian Muslims today write their native languages in Roman
scripts. When they transliterate Arabic words in their own alphabet,
Southeast Asians (with the notable exception of those writing for
specialized academic journals) tend to keep diacritic marks to a
minimum, dispensing with most entirely. Many also tend to use the
singular form of a noun as the base for the plural, thus madrasas rather
than madaris, fatwas, rather than fatawa. There are country-specific
exceptions to these rules. However, for the sake of both clarity and
consistency across the chapters, we have kept transliteration simple,
even dispensing with the Arabic ‘ayn (as found in shari‘a) and hamza
(as in Qur’an) except in those few instances where these have become
common in a regional language.
Finally, words that occur frequently throughout the volume
(madrasa, ulama) are not italicized after their first use.