Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern "Ulama" in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Part of the 'Asian Studies Association of Australia' series.
Internationally respected scholar Professor Azyumardi Azra examines the transmission of Islamic reformism from the Middle East to Indonesia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Islamic renewal and reformism is an ongoing process which is commonly thought to have started only in the twentieth century. Professor Azra's meticulous study, using sources from the Middle East itself, shows how scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were reconstructing the intellectual and socio-moral foundation of Muslim societies.
Drawing on Arabic biographic dictionaries which have never before been analysed or used as research materials, Professor Azra illuminates a previously inaccessible period of history to show the development of the Middle Eastern heritage in the Indonesian archipelago.
The reader can trace the formation and expression of Indonesian Islam and the adaptation of the Arabic intellectualism into recognisably Indonesian idioms. For the first time we have a description of the actual process of localisation, a process of interest to historians, anthropologists and sociologists, and also a subject of intense contemporary relevance.
