In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 5 Modern Intentions RESHAPING SUBJECTIVITIES IN AN INDONESIAN MUSLIM SOCIETY John R. Bowen In the aftermath of the cold war, some in North America have found their next enemy in Islam, an Islam construed to be monolithic and antimodern. Replacing the clash of economies is a clash of civilizations: the secularized West versus overreligious Islam. This dichotomy rests on a particular construction of what it is to be modern, a construction that arose from the European Enlightenment and that celebrates the ideal of a secular public sphere of deliberative discourse. A modern society, in this view, must draw a sharp boundary between the religious values of the individual and the political values of the public.1 From this perspective, social movements that urge people to become more steadfastly religious in order to become more modern are internally contradictory, if not outright threatening to modernity itself. Secularizing states throughout the world have taken this view seriously, arrogating to themselves the right to define the modes and manners of public behavior, and to view religious-based public norms (of dress, legal standing, or education ) as anathema. Here, post-Enlightenment political theory converges conveniently with the interests of those in power. Ironically, these state actions have made all religious movements “modern ” by dictating the terms by which they must operate. In shaping their activities, religious movements must take account of modern state structures , ideologies, and forces, as well as international economic exchanges and transnational communication flows.2 Culturally, as well, religious movements have redefined their own ideas in engagement with European modernity and in particular with ideas of agency, individual responsibility, and subjectivity. As Charles Taylor has argued (1989), European modernity has historically entailed a radical detachment of subjectivity from the outer 158 | John R. Bowen world, including the social world, and a consequent refocusing inward. This process of fashioning a cultural model of individualized subjectivity has been religious as well as political in the Euro-American world. Taylor’s analysis leads us to ask what kinds of cultural subjectivities modernity-making may have engendered elsewhere in the world. Such an inquiry builds on the long-standing concern of cultural anthropologists with local ideas of self and subjectivity but asks what challenges to these ideas are posed in the name of a “modernity” that is also religious. I examine here one such confrontation between older and newer religious practices where notions of subjectivity became central. The broader context for the case is the set of movements for religious reform that animated many Muslims throughout the Dutch and British East Indies (and elsewhere), beginning early in the twentieth century. I consider what has been at stake in Gayo society in the highlands of Sumatra, where, beginning in the 1930s, heated disputes arose over whether a worshiper should recite a statement of intent before worship. The debates implicated ideas about subjectivity, persons, and actions, and contained a strong critique of local thinking about religion. The dispute was carried out along many channels; I examine here the religious poetry created to disseminate the reformers’ views. Finally, I consider what other courses the reform movement might have taken, drawing on materials from neighboring societies to do so. I use this case to suggest strategies for proceeding beyond the single ethnographic study to a comparative study of Muslim modernist projects. Through this case study I wish to underline the importance of strategy, beliefs, and rhetorics to religious phenomena, religious in the narrowest sense of matters of worship and liturgy.3 These strategies, beliefs, and rhetorics are highly responsive to social and cultural features and processes. Religious actors select from a variety of ideas and emphasize those that offer the best chances of success in a particular social environment, or so I argue. Such a claim is commonplace in studies of the social and political aspects of Islamic movements.4 But debates about worship or liturgy have generally been left to the text-based Islamicist, whose training leads him or her to focus on the origins of particular ideas in normative texts. This unfortunate division of labor has at times led scholars of religion to respond to field studies of religious ideas with some hostility.5 My own assumption, one shared by most anthropologists, is that we do wish to understand how people have interpreted and debated particular religious issues, and why they have emphasized some matters over others. This kind of knowledge allows us to understand why transnational movements (such as Islamic reformist movements) catch on at...

Share