Title: Urbanization, civil society and religious pluralism in Indonesia and Turkey
Abstract: This comparative study is part of a broader intellectual history of the Muslim
world involving the formulation of alternative Islamic discourses by contemporary Muslim intellectuals. I have identified Indonesia and Turkey as two new
cardinal points in the cartography of this innovative contemporary Muslim thinking, because both countries evince an important and perhaps crucial
transformation in the outlook of religious intellectuals. Here I will primarily
concentrate on the parallels between Indonesia and Turkey regarding new
engagements with religion in the public sphere as a part of articulations of civil
society in the Muslim world, which have begun to emerge at the close of the
second and the beginning of the third millennium.
The choice of the term ‘parallel’ is deliberate, because tracing parallels strikesme as less reductionist than a search for similarities or commonalities. It will
leave the most room for specific trajectories within culturally particular contexts
of the two countries that are accommodative of a plurality of manifestations of
religiosity and the simultaneous recognition of universal values, which characterizes the dispositions, attitudes, practices and modes of expression of these
contemporary Muslim intellectuals. In spite of their wide geographical separation, vast cultural differences, and variance in religious factors influencing the
establishment of the Turkish and Indonesian republics, I suggest that – between
the mid-1980s and 1990s – it has become increasingly manifest that the divergent
political-historical experiences of these two Muslim countries are converging
onto closer parallel tracks in terms of redefining and expressing the role of religion in public life.
In the wake of the 1997 ‘Post-Modern’ Coup in Turkey and in the course ofIndonesia’s Post-Suharto Reformasi era (begun in 1997-98), new Muslim or religious intellectuals in both countries have re-invented themselves yet again along
alternative discursive lines. In Indonesia these ideas are presented under the
rubrics of cultural, civil or cosmopolitan Islam predominantly by young cadres of
the traditionalist Islamic mass organization the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) or its
youth wing, Anak Muda NU. Their newly formulated discourse is referred to as
Post-Traditionalisme – or Postra, for short. The Turkish parallel is formed by a
‘Post-Islamist’ discursive formation articulated by religious intellectuals who
have left behind their political agendas of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
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Cited By Count: 1
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