Muhammadiyah Berkemajuan - English Synopsis

Muhammadiyah Berkemajuan: A Shift from Puritanism to Cosmopolitanism

Reading Muhammadiyah Berkemajuan is exciting and rewarding. Exciting, because Ahmad NajibBurhani, being an insider, presents data an outsider never would have access to. The author sketches contemporary developments within Indonesian Islam with a sharp pen and in an eloquent style. Rewarding, because the reader of the book gains profound insight into Muhammadiyah’s struggle for a ‘pure, pristine and progressive’ Islam in an age of globalization.

Herman L. Beck

Professor in Islamic Studies, Tilburg University, the Netherlands

In this book, the author presents Indonesia’s largest Modernist Islamic mass organization as an internally diversified phenomenon, capable of accommodating a wide variety of Muslim voices, which is now clearly on a trajectory from inward-looking renewal efforts to a more assertive outward orientation. Burhani demonstrates, how, through critical self-reflection the Muhammadiyah seeks to transform itself from a religious organization into a social movement capable of tackling important worldly issues that are of crucial importance for the further development of Indonesia as the world’s largest Muslim nation state.

Carool Kersten

Professor in the Study of Islam & the Muslim World, King’s College London

The scope of this book is wide, encompassing diverse aspects of Muhammadiyah movement. We can see ideologies, social activism, tasawuf as well as internationalization, international scholarship and even the song of Sang Surya, all of which say something about Muhammadiyah. This diversity allows us to view Muhammadiyah from holistic, integrative and dynamic angles. The strength of this book also stems from the fact that it is written by a scholar who has been one of the most serious, enthusiastic, and attentive researchers on Indonesian Islam. Thus, we can find out insightful views on Muhammadiyah in the contexts of Indonesian Islam.

Kim Hyung-Jun

Professor in Anthropology, Kangwon National University, South Korea

Synopsis

Formally, Muhammadiyah defines itself as “an Islamic movement that focuses its works on inviting people to do al ʿamr bi-l maʿrūf wa-n nahy ʿan al munkar -  enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong”. However, this organization has been associated with many epithets: Modernist Islam, Reformist Islam, Purist Islam, Puritan Islam, Moderate Islam, Progressive Islam, Cosmopolitan Islam, and even Wahhabi Islam. This book analyzes those epithets or identities and, specifically, elaborates the genealogy of the identity currently promoted by Muhammadiyah, namely “Islam Berkemajuan” or “Cosmopolitan Islam”.

Different from the previous identity as a Modernist Islam, which is based on the spirit of Surah al-Ma’un, the theological basis of “Islam Berkemajuan” is the teaching of Ahmad Dahlan on Surah al-‘Ashr. The ethos of al-‘Ashr is not only the obligation to help the needy, but also the ability to manage and control time and the necessity to develop a great civilization. The issue of time is the main topic of al-‘Ashr and it is a warning for human beings to be attentive to this issue, particularly when everything becomes so relative due to the acceleration of communication and transportation technologies.

Besides the issue of multiple identities, this book also discusses some sensitive and controversial topics within Muhammadiyah since the Aceh Congress in 1995 until the Makassar Congress in 2015. Among them are the anthem of organization (Sang Surya), indigenization of Islam, Wahhabism, fundamentalism, high politics, and the effort to internationalize Muhammadiyah. How did this organization deal with those issues under the leadership of Amien Rais, Syafii Maarif, and Din Syamsuddin? The answer can be found in this book. This book, therefore, will trigger productive debates on Muhammadiyah and contribute to the understanding on the developments of Indonesian Islam.  

Author’s Bionote

Ahmad Najib Burhani is a senior researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California-Santa Barbara, USA. During the last year of his study, he won the Professor Charles Wendell Memorial Award from UCSB for the academic achievement in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.

Not long after returning to Indonesia, Najib Burhani was selected as a member of the elite group Indonesian Young Scientists of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (AIPI). He was also asked to serve as a member of the study team of the Advisory Council of Indonesian President (Wantimpres) since 2015. As part of his social engagement, he was appointed as the vice chairman in the Department of Publication and Information of the National Leadership of Muhammadiyah, the largest modernist organization in Indonesia, for the term of 2015-2019.

Since his doctorate, Najib Burhani has been active in publishing articles in top academic journals such as Asian Journal of Social Science (NUS/Brill), Indonesia and the Malay World (SOAS/Roudledge), Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations (Birmingham/Roudledge), Sojourn (NUS/ISEAS), Contemporary Islam (Springer), and Asian Politics & Policy (Wiley-Blackwell). He also contributed articles for edited volumes published by Palgrave Macmillan Press, Amsterdam University Press, and so on. His monograph includes Sufisme Kota (2001), Islam Dinamis (2001), Tarekat Tanpa Tarekat (2002), Muhammadiyah Jawa (2010), and Muhammadiyah Berkemajuan (2016).

Najib Burhani was a fellow at Drew University, New Jersey, USA; IIIT (International Institute of Islamic Thought) Virginia, USA; ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World) Leiden, the Netherlands; and The Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) Kyoto University, Japan.