Urban Heirs of Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Defence of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Indonesia

Authors

  • Julia Day Howell Griffith University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.v18i2.197

Abstract

This paper calls attention to the appreciative interest Indonesia’s cosmopolitan Muslim urbanites are now showing in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Unity of Being metaphysics and in Sufi spiritual practices associated with it. Introducing two recently formed groups, Padepokan Thoha and Pusaka Hati, that facilitate study and practice in this tradition, the paper accounts for the apparently paradoxical appeal of Wujudiyya Sufism, reviled by twentieth-century Muslim Modernists, to religiously committed Muslims at the leading edge of the nation’s modernisation. Padepokan Thoha and Pusaka Hati’s this-worldly, non-authoritarian and inclusivist renderings of Wujudiyya Sufism model an alternative to the exclusivism now aggressively promoted by better-known Islamist groups.

Author Biography

  • Julia Day Howell, Griffith University
    Julia Day Howell is an anthropologist who works on religions in Indonesia and New Religious Movements in both Asian and Western societies. She is a researcher in the Griffith Asia Institute and Senior Lecturer in the department of International Business and Asian Studies at Griffith University.

References

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Published

2005-02-05

How to Cite

Howell, J. D. (2005). Urban Heirs of Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Defence of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Indonesia. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 18(2), 197-209. https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.v18i2.197