Piety and Politics: Nurcholish Madjid and His Interpretation of Islam in modern Indonesia (review)

This is an important and unfortunately timely book. Kull chronicles the life and thought of one of Indonesia's most influential and creative Muslim thinkers; Nurcholish Madjid, or Cak Nur as he was affectionately known, who, as Indonesians often put it "returned to the mercy of God" in August of 2005.

Madjid was an influential and controversial theologian who advocated the both the modernization and Islamicization of Indonesian society, but rejected the notions of Islamic political parties and the Islamic state. He was a vocal and articulate advocate of democratic reform and played a central role in the "reformasi" (reformation) movement that led to the collapse of the "New Order" regime of Indonesia's second president Suharto. He was, however, a reluctant politician. When I last spoke with him, ironically over breakfast at the Embassy Row Hilton in Washington D.C., a tired and clearly unwell Cak Nur sighed and said: "Mark, I wish I could quit being a politician and go back to writing books." I first met Cak Nur in the late 1970s when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and I, one hundred fifty miles to the south at the University of Illinois. I met with him many times in subsequent years, most frequently during the "Reformasi" period when conferences on Islam and Indonesian politics were nearly as common as traffic jams in Washington and Jakarta.

On the basis of this long experience I can state with confidence that Kull's portrayal of Nurcholish's intellectual and political careers are accurate in almost every detail. The volume is meticulously researched, drawing on virtually all of the secondary sources as well as many of Nurcholish's own writings and interviews with Cak Nur himself and many of his Indonesian associates. The book is divided into three primary sections. The first is biographical, the second, consisting of two chapters concerns his religious and political thought and the strategies he employed to diffuse and popularize them and the third positive and negative responses to them.

In her biographical account Kull stresses the importance of Nurcholish's father, Abdul Madjid, in the development of his thought and character. Abdul Madjid was affiliated with the conservative Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). Unlike most NU members he remained loyal to the Islamic political party Masyumi when NU established itself as a party in 1952. If anything Kull understates the importance of this rupture in Nurcholish's life. He often spoke of his father agonizing over the decision and remembering seeing him standing weeping in the rice fields agonizing over its consequences. Among the most significant of these was that the young Nurcholish came to have one foot in the staunchly conservative, Sufi oriented world of NU and the other in the scripturalist/modernist world of Masyumi. Prior to his father's rupture with NU, Nurcholish studied at a traditional pesantren (Islamic boarding school). These schools combine the study traditional Shafite legal texts with Sufi devotionalism. When his father stuck with Masyumi, Nurcholish was subject to serious harassment and subsequently transferred to the modernist pesantren in Gontor. Here the curriculum emphasized the study of only the foundational texts of Islam (Qur'an and Hadith) and secular subjects. Sufi devotionalism is prohibited. The tension between these very different theological orientations was to prove to be a source of both religious inspiration and social tension for the remainder of his life.

His experience at Gontor led Nurcholish to continue his studies at the IAIN (State Insitute of Islamic Studies) in Gontor. Kull notes that during this period Nurcholish came under the influence of three of the days most important Indonesian Muslim scholars: Muhammad Natsir, Hamka, and Harun Nasution. Natsir was an avid proponent of democracy and of the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam taught by the modernist organization Persatuan Islam. Hamka was known as a prolific author, a gifted orator, and for...