Grassroots Muslim Majoritarianism: An Analysis of Salafi Islamic Expansion in Makassar & Its Socio-political Significance

Wednesday Forum – 19 October 2022

Over the past 30 years, Indonesia has witnessed the growing prominence of a number of transnational Islamic revivalist movements. These have had a considerable impact on political culture, as the popularity of these movements has gone hand-in-hand with increasingly sectarian views across segments of Indonesian society. Yet how do such movements successfully transmit their ideas at the grassroots level and present them in ways that influence national political opinion? Conversely, how does such grassroots activism alter the message and social aims of such activists? I aim to address these questions by focusing on the city of Makassar, South Sulawesi, and the activism of Indonesia’s largest Salafi-influenced organisation, Wahdah Islamiyah. Illuminating how Wahdah Islamiyah have grown their local network of mosques and schools, and the subtle practices they deploy to frame their Islamic message in ways that both relate to the anxieties of their audience, I explain how they promote a Muslim majoritarian vision of society. More broadly, I conclude by assessing the extent to which such activism can form an understandings pertaining to the socio-political mobilisation of religious social movements, and what it may tell us about the health of democratic debate and pluralism in 21^st century Indonesia.

In Search of Allah: Queer Spiritual Space in Bissu Community, South Sulawesi

Wednesday Forum – 12 October 2022

The proliferation of conservative Islam has affected non-normative gender and sexuality groups’ experience and construction of identity, as it has impacted the Bissu community in South Sulawesi. Bissu can be categorized as pan-Indigenous, including gender, sexual, and/or spiritual identity. Within Indigenous communities with androgynous concepts in their cosmology, Bissu have culturally-specific ceremonial and social roles in Bugis culture. In this ongoing research, I seek to understand how Bissu have encountered confrontation and acceptance within their queer indigenous body and spiritual space and how it has impacted their ability to partake and learn their religion and culture.

The Everyday Practices of Women’s Fatwa-making in Java, Indonesia

Wednesday Forum – 05 October 2022

My study deals with the legitimacy of Muslim women as ulama and the right ascribed to them by society to interpret religious texts and issue fatwas in response both to the everyday concerns of their followers (jamaah) and to urgent social problems. This study is therefore primarily concerned with the concept of religious authority and how it is modulated through gender. Taking a combined anthropological and gender lens, my study examines women issuing fatwas in different places and spheres of interaction between the fatwa-giver and fatwa asker as occurring at the institution, grassroots, women’s movement, and women’s magazines; spaces that are often considered as being of marginal importance in fatwa-making especially when it is done by women.

From Srandib, via Lanka, to Ceylon: Exile and Memory in the Colonial Age

Wednesday Forum – 27 April 2022

The small, Indian Ocean island known as Sarandib, Lanka, and Ceylon was a site of banishment throughout the 18th century for members of royal families, convicts, servants and others sent there from across the Indonesian archipelago. Descendants of these exiles who remained on the island continued to speak and write in Malay, the archipelago’s lingua franca, and to adhere to a collective Muslim identity for several centuries and into the present. The talk considers if and how earlier religious and literary traditions of banishment tied to the island – those of Adam’s fall from paradise to Sarandib and Sinta’s abduction to Lanka – played a role in the lives of the early exiles and their descendants.

Wednesday Forum, 20 April 2022, Speaker: A'an Suryana (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore)

Wednesday Forum, 13 April 2022, Speaker: Diane Butler (Universitas Udayana)