Urban Heirs of Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Defence of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Indonesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.v18i2.197Abstract
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.References
Affifi, Abul Ela 1974 (1939) The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid Din-Ibnul ’Arabi. AMS Press, New York.
Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naguib 1970 The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri. University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur.
Arberry, A.J. 1950 Sufism. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Azra, Azyumardi 2004 The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia. Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ‘Ulama’ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Feener, R. Michael 1998 A Re-examination of the Place of al-Hallaj in the Development of Southeast Asian Islam. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 154.4: 571-92.
Geertz, Clifford 1960 The Religion of Java. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL.
Gellner, Ernest 1984 Muslim Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Howell, Julia Day 2001 Sufism in the Indonesian Islamic Revival. Journal of Asian Studies 60.3: 701-29.
Ricklefs, Merle 1993 A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2nd edn.
Seen and Unseen Worlds of Java, 1726–1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II. New South Wales, St Leonards.
Riddell, Peter G. 2001 Islam and the Malay–Indonesian World: Transmission and Responses. Hurst & Co, London.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.