Michael Laffan - Indonesian Islam: The Modern, Global Shapings of a National Tradition?

Published 2011-03-31
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Global Islam: Past, Present and Future is presented by UBC Continuing Studies, the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Laurier Institution. It is part of UBC Continuing Studies' Lifelong Learning Series. Laffan is a Professor of History at Princeton University where he studies the history of Southeast Asia, focusing at present on Islam, nationalism, Dutch colonialism and orientalism. He earned his B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). He came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (2003), he argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite. His forthcoming book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam, looks at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy. The next project, will use Sri Lanka as a lens to discuss a history of Indian Ocean mobilities and religious exchange.

All Comments (11)
  • @yucode7356
    Very enlightening talk to an otherwise nebulous explanation of the cause of the Padri war and the work of Hurgronje.
  • @Faisal-tc4ih
    Arab traders helped bring the spices of Indonesia, such as nutmeg, to Europe as early as the 8th century.
  • @fadlichong
    thank you so much that observing Indonesia.
  • because leveraging black magic is forbidden in islam, plus, eating crawl fish too, but there is a majority of moderate indonesians utilizing black magic services and eating crawl fish who are muslim, adding to that, the majority of non peacefull muslims have arabic influences and the ulama sees the rise in imams that are educated in the arab world in direct corellation. it was traders who brought islam to indonesia, because soon thereafter, islamic kingdoms would form due to the flow in money and trade in some of those communities...
  • @BodohYono
    Wtf? Hindu is no treat for the dutch, just read about Acer war and snouck hurgronje