The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree: A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town, c. 1910s–2010 by Mitsuo Nakamura (review)

In his “Foreword to the First Edition” of Mitsuo Nakamura’s The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree, the late Mukti Ali begins by drawing attention to Nakamura’s dual “historical and ethnological” approach (xxxiii). Indeed, Nakamura himself describes his work in similar terms early in his own preface to that same original edition (xxxix). For readers of this expanded version of Nakamura’s monograph, such characterizations may seem even more appropriate than they did for the original work.

The “second enlarged edition” was achieved by pairing Nakamura’s original monograph, a revision of his 1976 dissertation about the early history of Muhammadiyah in the Yogyakarta town of Kotagede, with new work based on research Nakamura has carried out in the years since. Simply adding seven chapters, covering the three decades since the publication of the original book, has transformed the enlarged edition into a new kind of historical anthropology. Nakamura’s 1983 monograph used ethnography, archival sources, and oral histories to chart transformations in Kotagede’s political economy and religious life since the 1910s. The enlarged edition adds ethnographic research carried out over more than a forty year period to create a longitudinal study covering one hundred years and four generations. Perhaps of even more significance is the way in which a reading of The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree affords the reader an opportunity to peer into Nakamura’s ongoing relationship with Kotagede, and the resultant ways of thinking about the links between Islamic reformism, economic transformation, and Indonesian political economy that Nakamura has developed.

It would be a mistake to read the two halves of The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree separately. These two halves show marked contrasts, but together they form an integral whole. Nakamura’s original monograph is an upbeat account of the growth of Muhammadiyah’s influence in Kotagede since its founding in the first decades of the twentieth century. He begins by using archival sources to illustrate how economic transformations and changes in the central Javanese political economy weakened the power of traditional Islamic elites, especially the jurukunci who oversaw and mediated rituals at the royal cemetery in Kotagede. This laid the groundwork for the rise of an Islamic religiosity no longer tied primarily to court culture. Nakamura then turns to ethnographic sources and activist publications to illustrate Muhammadiyah’s steadily increasing influence in Kotagede from the late-colonial period, ending with an account of reformist ritual and social sensibilities during his fieldwork in the early 1970s when Muhammadiyah’s political ascendance was unrivaled.

The new material in the second half of the enlarged edition is, by Nakamura’s own admission, much less focused, “a series of snapshots of major events and developments” (219). Nonetheless, and perhaps precisely for this reason, it complements the original monograph quite nicely. In it two major themes emerge. First, Nakamura focuses on what seems to be a decline of Muhammadiyah’s influence and importance in Kotagede since the 1970s, looking especially at intergenerational struggles over leadership and post-reformasi competition with groups such as Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, Prosperous Justice Party). Second, Nakamura draws attention to a diversification in religious sensibilities, both within Muhammadiyah and, more generally, that began to become apparent in Kotagede during the late New Order.

As a result of the pairing of the original monograph and this later work, an argument develops over the course of the enlarged edition that is at once consistent with the original work, yet of its own standing and significance. Nakamura contends that key changes in the character of the Muhammadiyah movement and its intellectuals, changes that seem to indicate a decline of the group’s influence and ideology since the final decade of the twentieth century, are actually a result of the institutional success of the movement...