Varieties of Religious Authority: Changes and Challenges in 20th Century Indonesian Islam

2. UNDERSTANDING AL-IMAM’S CRITIQUE OF TARIQA SUFISM, by Michael Laffan

17 2 UNDERSTANDING AL-IMAM’S CRITIQUE OF TARIQA SUFISM Michael Laffan The dissemination of Islam in Indonesia in the twentieth century has been a process inextricably bound up with the active engagement of Southeast Asians with their emerging national communities. As Benedict Anderson has argued, such communities were increasingly “imagined” from the nineteenth century through the crucial engine of “print capitalism”, both regionally and in the world at large, and in ways that superseded older faith-based identities (Anderson 1991). For the Indonesian case though, I have argued that this process of imagining was more complicated, and that it drew upon, and was reinforced by, the communal experiences of Muslim pilgrims as they crossed the well-worn paths of their home isles or were carried by steamers across the sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean (Laffan 2003). Over time, many such sojourners would return to their home ports or hinterland communities with thoughts about their faith, their place in the world, and how the practice of the former might impact on the rank of the latter. Certainly the debates that were set in motion — most often concerning modernity, independence and reform — suffused the growing public sphere. Indeed they had their after-effects well into the end of the twentieth century, although the present state of doctrinal alignments — between “modernists”, “traditionalists” and (more recently) “Salafists”, tends to obscure the instabilities and shifting nature of the positions taken by their forerunners. 18 Michael Laffan In this chapter I therefore wish to revisit an early stage in the process of “modern” religious change in Southeast Asia by a close textual analysis of passages in the seminal Malay journal al-Imam (The Leader). I shall do so mainly in order to ascertain the extent to which its programme aligned with that imputed to the Cairo-based Muslim reformers Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935). More specifically, I will examine the arguments that were voiced in respect of the acceptable role of Sufism in the modern world. Here I shall argue that just as Muslim national imaginings in Southeast Asia had to draw on earlier, religiously-based, modalities of exchange, the editors of al-Imam should be seen as transitional figures emerging from an internal learned critique rather than presenting an absolute break with the past. It is also my contention that by opting more clearly, and indeed condescendingly, for this abrasive in mid-1908, the editors of this journal may well have sowed the seeds for its failure by alienating what may well have been a large part of their readership. In any case, they sowed the seeds for both the exacerbation of arguments between so-called Kaum Muda (“young pople”) and Kaum Tua (“old people”) in the region, and perhaps even between Arabs and Malays. In regard to this last point, I suggest that, well before the political alliance of the Cairene Salafiyya movement and the Wahhabiyya crystallized in the 1920s, a key group of Sayyids, so-called by virtue of their genealogical claims to descent from the Prophet, would find it increasingly hard to remain at the helm of al-Imam and sustain their self-proclaimed position as leaders of the Islamic community. This was because as they were reaching out to other Muslims above the winds, the style of reformism that they were drawing on, while valorising the early, Arab, days of Islam, was nonetheless denying their own claims to authority.1 As I will suggest, it was the very instability and, ultimately, the perceived incompatibility of Sayyid and Malay objectives that saw each pursue their own, increasingly nationalized, paths to the Islamic modern (either with or without the tariqas or mystical “orders”). BUILDING A BRIDGE TO MECCA AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Lately, Martin van Bruinessen has reprised some of his earlier work on the Naqshbandiyya tariqa and its impact in Southeast Asia from the latter part of the nineteenth century (Van Bruinessen, 2008). Drawing on both collective memory in Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s and the work of Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) a century before that, he has traced the trajectories of the competing lines of the Khalidiyya branch, whose centre was located on Understanding Al-Imam’s Critique of Tariqa Sufism 19 the hill of Abu Qubays in Mecca.2 In so doing, Van Bruinessen casts much light on the subsequent developments (and indeed discontinuities) of the Khalidiyya in Sumatra and Java...