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Fauzan Saleh. Modern Trends in Islamic Theological Discourse in Twentieth Century Indonesia: A Critical Survey. Leiden: Brill, 2001. xvi, 343 pp.
It is only recently that Indonesia has begun to be recognized among Muslimmajority societies as a place to look for important and innovative thinking about Islam. Although Islam was hardly neglected by the Western scholars writing about this "new nation" in the decades after independence, it was studied mainly as part of an Indonesian story about integration and nation-building. The questions asked were about "Islam in . . . ": the legal system, politics, Javanese culture, Acehnese society. Rarely was the work of Islamic scholars in Indonesia studied in relation to their counterparts in, say, Egypt or Iran.
This focus shifted in the 1990s, as a few European and North American students, but especially their Indonesian colleagues, began studying Indonesian Islam as part of an Islamic story about religion and society. Although the first North American writings along this line were in anthropology, and thus mainly focused on local religious practices, Indonesian (and Dutch) scholars began writing about the history of contacts between Indonesia and the rest of the Islamic world. It was the Indonesians, often working with colleagues in Leiden, who had received training in Arabic as well as in Western languages along with their disciplinary training in history or Islamic studies; this training allowed them to undertake the new scholarship.
In the early 2000s, the number of scholars throughout the world studying Islamic thought in Indonesia is steadily rising. Two features of this new scholarship are of particular interest. The first is that the center of scholarship is in Indonesia, perhaps best identified with the publication Studia Islamika, edited at the State Islamic University in Jakarta by Azyumardi Azra, himself one of the pioneers in the new history of Indonesian Islam. The second is that whereas once Western interest in Indonesian Islam was limited to Indonesianists, now it is more widespread, and that, in the United States,...