Lecture | Reconstructions of Fiqh Among Indonesian Traditionalist Muslims

The 2nd lecture in the "Shari'a and the State, a Comparative Perspective" conference series will be by Martin van Bruinessen.

In 1992, a gathering of Nahdlatul Ulama’s leading fiqh scholars formally accepted the legitimacy of the principle of ‘collective ijtihad,' thereby acknowledging a practice that had gradually emerged. Public discussions of religious issues, which routinely take place at local, regional and national levels, had gradually shifted from exercises in reducing new problems to known ones, to be found in the authoritative fiqh texts, to discussions of moral and political problems in which ulama listened to technical experts (lawyers, sociologists, medical doctors) before formulating opinions and counsels in the language of fiqh. Young scholars of traditionalist background went further and explored fiqh-style arguments for gender equality and religious pluralism. These efforts found their most outspoken expression in the first years after the fall of the Suharto regime.

Unsurprisingly, they provoked a conservative backlash; around 2005 major institutions and organisations strongly condemned such ‘liberal’ and ‘pluralist’ thought and marginalised its representatives. The effort to reconstruct religious discourse and to engage the ‘conservatives’ has continued, however. In this talk, the current state of debates will be surveyed.

van Bruinessen is Professor of Comparative Studies of Contemporary Muslim Societies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and was one of the founders of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM). He is an anthropologist with a strong interest in history and politics, with fieldwork experience in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia. He carried out his first fieldwork among the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria in the mid-1970s and has frequently revisited that region. Between 1982 and 1994 he spent altogether nine years in Indonesia, as a researcher, a consultant for research methods at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and as a lecturer at the State Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN) in Yogyakarta. His research in Indonesia concerned various aspects of Islam: Sufi orders, traditional Islamic education, the religious association Nahdlatul Ulama, and Islamic radicalism.