New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. xix, 286 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$79.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-299-30840-7.
James Rush’s Hamka’s Great Story could not be more timely. A series of arrests against minorities in the name of protecting citizens’ morality is taking place in Indonesia today. The governor of Jakarta, a Chinese Christian, was just put in jail through an accusation of humiliating the Qu’ran; under Sharia law, a gay couple in Aceh was punished on stage in a public square with eighty-five strokes of the cane; meanwhile 141 men at a gay party in Jakarta were arrested for allegedly violating what is known as the Pornography Law. Such recent events, associated with the Islamic turn in Indonesia, are inseparable from the process of “democratic” transition, which (especially since the time of President Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono) has been marked by the withdrawal of the state from taking action on discrimination and violence against religious and sexual minorities. This development, along with the rise of Islamists and their aspiration to increase the influence of Islamic nationhood in the socio-political life of Indonesia, has worried not only Indonesia’s minorities but also the majority of moderate Muslims. While I was reading James Rush’s book, a masterful biography of Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah (Hamka) (1908–1981), a prominent Muslim Indonesian who lived through different regimes of power, I could not stop wondering what Hamka would have thought about the goings on in his Indonesia today.
Hamka’s story, in Rush’s words, is Islam’s story, which is also Indonesia’s story. It is a story about conflicts and conciliations between Islam and Pancasila (the five principles of the Indonesian state) as they were experienced by Hamka. Hamka lived during a time when the state was actively involved in making sure that society was shaped not by Islam but by the state. The era he last lived in was that of the New Order, which demanded that citizens be loyal to the state by not bringing religion into political life. As a member of that social order, Hamka always opposed theocracy and he cared about the national society above religion. However, and this is what makes Rush’s account of Hamka so interesting, Hamka also always wondered why Pancasila, and not Islam, was the basis of the nation; why in a country where Muslims were the majority, there was such reluctance to allow Muslims to apply Muslim law (159).
The main theme of Hamka’s Great Story is captured in a question that Hamka posed for himself: “What does it mean to be a Muslim, to be Indonesian?” (xiv). In Hamka, Rush presents us with a Muslim who took Islam as his living compass. He saw every happening, small or large, individual or historical, as an unfolding of the Greater Story of Islam, where “there is no God but God,” but such totality in turn moved him and his Indonesia forward from one era to the next without becoming an Islamic state. He was a “modernist” (associated with Muhammadiyah) who rejected the Javanized Hinduism of pre-Muslim civilization as part of Indonesian Islamic culture. Yet, he was occasionally invited to speak at the gathering of the “traditionalist” Nahdlatul Ulama, the rival organization of Muhamadiyah. Hamka seems to have transcended both the modernist and the traditionalist. This explains how he was appointed chair of the state’s Ulama Council, but the position never turned him into a state apparatus. Instead, he was perceived by his fellow Muslims all the way to the end of his life as an independent individual who, when stepping down from his post as the chairman of the Ulama Council, was “in a blaze of glory for standing up to the government” (176). In relation to the state, Hamka was celebrated as “a symbol of freedom and resistance,” as if Islamic value gained meaning not by occupying the state, but by forming a critical relationship with it.
I have focused on the book’s coverage of the theme of religion and the state, but there are many other interesting stories in Hamka’s Great Story. As a kid in Medan, I read Tenggelamnya kapal van de Wijck at school and we knew the author’s name, Hamka, by heart. We knew nothing however about the fact that the great novel was an adaptation of the work of an Egyptian writer. How Hamka defended himself was profoundly interesting and it was superbly documented and discussed as part of the larger cultural wars of the 1960s and the power struggles between the army, the Islamic group, the left literary circles, and the Indonesian Communist Party. It is this moving in and out of Hamka’s great story to address the larger historical dynamic within which Hamka is embedded that makes the book valuable. Rush presents absorbing accounts of Hamka’s own life, often through a detailed account of the everyday in order to breach the great historical themes of religion and nationhood.
Those who have read Rush’s earlier masterpiece on opium farming and the Chinese of Java will recognize the shift in Rush’s approach to Indonesian history. Opium to Java (published in 1990) portrayed the micro view of the colonial state, but Hamka’s Great Story sees Indonesian history from the inside through the perspective of an Islamic nationalist. Hamka died in 1981, and today, his fellow Muslim Indonesians are also posing questions about Islam and the state, issues with which Hamka himself wrestled. In the conclusion, Rush offers the opinion that Hamka’s Great Story cannot be seen as giving rise or contributing to the radical Islamism of today’s Indonesia. There are many more stories today about “Islam for Indonesia” but few are presented in ways that acknowledge the diversity of Islam and that any definition of “what is Islam” is spatially and temporally bounded. Hamka’s Great Story presents Islam and the state relations contextually so that new problems and challenges might be understood historically.
Abidin Kusno
York University, Toronto, Canada
pp. 196-197