The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (review)

The past six years or so have seen a welcome surge in publications on the Islamization of the Indonesian archipelago. Ronit Ricci’s study of the dissemination and translation of the Book of One Thousand Questions (which was originally composed in Arabic in the tenth century) has provided us with a richly detailed portrait of an Islamic literary cosmopolis spanning South and Southeast Asia.¹ Thomas Gibson’s research on regional integration and identity transformation among the Makassar of South Sulawesi has enhanced our understanding of the cultures, politics, and subjectivities of Islamization in a once understudied area of the archipelago.² M. C. Ricklefs’s two books on Islamization in Java from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries have allowed us to rethink basic assumptions about the place of Islam in Javanese culture, and have offered general insights into the ways in which ethnic and religious identities interweave in the process of conversion.³ These and other recent studies have taken us well beyond earlier portraits of the Islamization of Indonesia as superficial, a cultural sleight of hand wrought by cloaking animist and “Hindu-Buddhist” practices in the casual garb of “Sufism.”

Michael Laffan’s new book on the makings of Indonesian Islam fits squarely within this welcome revisionist historiography. A professor of history at Princeton University, Laffan is the author of the earlier Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds.⁴ That book was applauded for the way in which it demonstrated that Islamic political ideals played a greater role than often assumed in the formation of early twentieth-century Indonesian nationalism. The new book has a reflexive ambition similar to that of the earlier book. The book’s “major theme” centers on the question, “What are the supposed ingredients of Indonesian Islam?” (p. xi). The book’s first sections are dedicated to combing through primary texts and historical archives to identify the ingredients through which Jawi (the Arabic term for Muslims from Southeast Asia) imagined and reimagined their faith as a result of their involvement with study circles in Mecca and Cairo. Laffan does not limit his account of Islam and Islamization, however, to the native point of view. He also explores “how Islam was interpreted and fashioned by the region’s diverse actors; Dutch Christians included” (p. xii). In addition to the Jawi writings and networks, then, Laffan explores the archives and activities of the Europeans who sailed to the archipelago, and highlights their often self-serving efforts to make sense of the region’s “Mohammedans.” In the nineteenth century, a handful of colonial scholars went on to pioneer the field of Dutch Orientalism. Foremost among the latter was Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. Snouck is the subject of three of the book’s chapters, and, in the author’s words, “the pivot on which this book turns” (p. 123). Laffan adds: “far beyond a mere fact of background hegemony, the direct engagement of Orientalist advisors like Snouck … is a major strand complicating this story” (p. xi). It is a complication that the author develops through a narratively sprawling, occasionally dizzying, but ultimately fascinating book.

Laffan divides his book into four sections of three chapters each. The first section is the most straightforwardly historical, and readers interested in a state-of-the-field overview of the early phases of the archipelago’s Islamization will find this section deeply rewarding. Chapter 1 examines the ways in which, early on, a handful of royal courts in the western archipelago became promoters of the new religion. Laffan also reviews the role played by other key actors in the early phases of Islamization, including mystical fraternities (tariqas), Chinese traders, and Java’s “Nine Saints” (Wali Sanga). The author takes exception to several long-established views of the role played by these actors in Islam’s dissemination. Although the Nine Saints and other heroes of early Islam...