Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia

8. MAKING MEDINAS IN THE EAST: Islamist Connections and Progressive Islam

149 8 MAKING MEDINAS IN THE EAST Islamist Connections and Progressive Islam Terenjit Sevea The interaction of these Malays and Pathans will create new sacred spaces… the meeting and subsequent interaction of Maulana Maududi and Natsir created Medina in Pakistan and Indonesia Mian Maqsood Ahmad Deputy Secretary General, Jama’at-i Islami Pakistan It was Mian Maqsood Ahmad who first drew my attention to a madrasa in the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, where Malay teachers “educated illiterate Pathans about true Islam”.1 Through a series of interviews with Islamists from bodies such as the Jama‘at-i Islami Pakistan (JIP) and the Deobandis at Dar Uloom, I have become increasingly aware of both the volume and dynamism of modern circulations of students, teachers, texts, and ideas between South and Southeast Asia. This chapter explores some of these connections through an examination of texts produced by South and Southeast Asian Islamists such as Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Ala Maududi, Hussein Alatas, and Mohammad Natsir. As diverse as these thinkers were, they were bound together across differences of culture and citizenship by shared sentiments for the establishment of a new and reinvigorated Islamic order for the modern world. Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) has been hailed as one of the greatest Urdu poets, and celebrated as Muffakir-i Pakistan (“Thinker of Pakistan”).2 150 Terenjit Sevea While he was not part of the class of professional politicians emerging from opportunities accorded by the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms in colonial India,3 Iqbal chastised intellectuals who stood aloof from politics and referred to his own work as nala-i jung (songs of war).4 As a post-colonial critic and activist,5 Hussein Alatas (1928–2007) held a number of academic positions in Singapore and Malaysia, and participated as an opposition leader in Malaysian politics. He also edited a short-lived but influential journal entitled Progressive Islam (1954–55) that “endeavored to conform to the true spirit of Islam”.6 Combining the reflections of scholars such as the aforementioned Islamists with prominent Indonesian politicians such as Mohammed Roem and Muhammad Hatta, and Pakistani critics such as J.W. Syed and Hamidullah Siddiqi, this journal reflected post-colonial concerns in Indonesia and Pakistan over the Islamic system and competing ideologies. The term “South-East Asia” appeared in Progressive Islam to emphasize the post-colonial revival of religious and ideational connections between South and Southeast Asia that had been impeded by European colonialism. Maududi (1903–79) and Natsir (1908–93) had emerged as the “most prominent voices of Islamist opposition” in Pakistan and Indonesia respectively.7 The former established an academic centre, Darul-Islam, in colonial Punjab,8 and established the Jama’at-i Islami in 1940, serving as its Amir (President) until 1972. Natsir presided over the Madjelis Sjoero Moslimin Indonesia (Masyumi) for most of the 1940s to 1950s, and served as the Indonesian prime minister for a brief period from 1950 to 1951. While Maududi regularly used print journalism as a vehicle for disseminating Islamism, Natsir’s later frustrations with party politics led to him to adopt an almost exclusive reliance on the press to advance his agenda of religious propagation through the Dewan Dakwah Indonesia Islamiyah (DDII) under the Suharto regime.9 The epistemic community of Islamists in which these writers participated was one that rejected the idea of the Middle East as the de facto “centre” of Islam in the modern world. In no sense did Iqbal, Maududi, Alatas, and Natsir demonstrate traits of a peripheral consciousness. Rather, they confronted the historical legacy of the larger nominal umma for lapsing into a state “perpetually blurred and sleepishly detached” from what they viewed as “true Islam”.10 In this chapter, I will discuss the ways in which these Islamists “returned to” or reconstructed classical texts and conceptions of Islam as ideals to be realized rather than inert historical legacies. This was evident in how some rhetorically created their own “Medinas” or “Ka‘abas”. In his poem Kinar-i Ravi, for example, Iqbal alleged to receive the “pleasure of the Ka‘aba” and “message of prostration” on the banks of the Punjabi river, Raavi.11 Elsewhere, he called for the “revival of Iran and Arabia”,12 claiming Making Medinas in the East 151 that his “eyes were aligned with Medina and Najaf”.13 Similar constructions of sacred space were evident in Maududi’s remarks, in the Tarjuman alQur ’an, on how there...