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PREFACE To THE SEConD EDITIon The book before the reader is a study on the development of the Muhammadiyah movement in Kotagede, a small town in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Republic of Indonesia, over a period of approximately one hundred years from the early twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Muhammadiyah, a modernist Islamic social and educational organization, was established in 1912 (1330 AH) by Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan (1868–1923), a preacher (khatib) of the Great Mosque of the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. The organization is celebrating its centennial anniversary in 2010 (1430 AH) according to the Islamic calendar. In 1890, Dahlan went to Mecca for pilgrimage and was deeply impressed by the ideas of such modernist Islamic thinkers as Jamaladdin Al Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida. He felt that the backwardness of the Javanese Muslims and their suffering under the Dutch colonial rule were rooted in the sorry state of Islam in Java, contaminated by syncretism and deviations (bid’ah). So, he began to advocate a return to the pristine teachings of the Qur’an and Hadith, and purification and reinvigoration of Islam through ijtihad (independent reasoning) over taqlid (blind obedience). He brought tajdid (reform) into a number of religious practices including the use of vernacular languages rather than Arabic in Friday sermons and religious propagation (pengajian) to make the teachings of Islam understandable to ordinary Muslims. He also introduced a modern school system for the education of Muslim children, for both boys and girls, in which religious and secular subjects were taught side-by-side. He urged the pious actions in Islamic philanthropy towards the poor and the needy of payment of religious taxes (zakat), contribution of sacrificial animals (qurban or korban), voluntary donations of money (infaq or infak and sadaqa or sadaka, sedakah), and institution building for educational and social welfare through permanent donation of property (waqaf or wakaf ). Over the past 100 years, the Muhammadiyah has grown nationally to be the second largest Islamic civil society organization in Indonesia, claiming some 30 million members and supporters. The largest is Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), a traditionalist organization, which claims around 40 million followers. The major sphere of Muhammadiyah’s activities is in institution building (amal usaha) for education and social welfare. According to its recent official xxv statistics, it runs more than 10,000 schools from kindergartens to universities; also, more than 900 social welfare institutions including hospitals, clinics, delivery houses, orphanages, elderly houses, rehabilitation centres, houses for the handicapped, cooperatives, and numerous microfinance unions. These institutions are spread throughout the country and managed by the branches of Muhammadiyah: those branches are found in 419, or 84.30 per cent, of all districts and municipalities (kabupaten and kota) totaling at 497 in the country.1 Part I of this volume, The Development of the Muhammadiyah in Kotagede, ca. 1910s–1972, is an almost exact reproduction of my earlier work, The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree: A Study of the Development of Muhammadiyah in a Central Javanese Town (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1983). The book traced the development of the movement in the town of Kotagede from its very beginning to the year 1972, employing both historical as well as ethnographic approaches.The study was based mainly upon data collected through fieldwork in Kotagede between October 1970 and May 1972, with some additional material from archival work in the Netherlands. It was originally submitted as a Ph.D. dissertation to Cornell University in 1976. The book presented a local case in which the Muhammadiyah movement had transformed the religious life of the townspeople from the one deeply imbued with kejawen (Javanese syncretic Islam mixed with pre-Islamic and local beliefs and practices: kejawén) to that of reformism — purified and adapted to modernity — over decades. The town is one of the oldest in Islamized Java with a history of at least 400 years going back to the late sixteenth century when it was built as the first capital of the Mataram Kingdom. So, the case of “re-Islamization” from kejawen to reformist one in this town had a particular significance in understanding contemporary religious transformation of traditional Javanese society. I then asserted on the basis of my observation in Kotagede as follows: “The reformist version of orthodox Islam [= Muhammadiyah] is a vigorously proselytizing religious ideology, and has, is, and will bring profound changes to the social, cultural, economic and political aspects of Javanese life in the town.” (p. 208 below...

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