Religion and Global Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 9780197657386.
In his 1843 manuscript Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), Karl Marx likened organized religion to opium for its practical utility to those in society who may turn to it to medicate injury or sadness. As he averred: “Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes.” (Religious suffering is, in one sense, the expression of real suffering and, in another, the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people). As intellectual historians of progressive movements know well, though, this characterization by the “Father of Communism” is at odds with Marxist and Communist movements that emerged after Marx’s death. Religion and the very “ism” that bears Marx’s name coexist, have coexisted, and thrived in unison. In Asia, radical intellectuals often synthesized iterations of Marxism with elements of Catholicism, Theravada Buddhism, and Sunni Islam, to name a few rich cases.
Nowhere is the complex, yet vibrant interplay of religion and Marxism more evident than in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, where intellectuals engaged dialogically with exogenous intellectual products of the non-Islamic world in pursuance of a politically and socially engaged “progressive Islam” (31). In Ummah Yet Proletariat, Lin Hongxuan examines the processes whereby Islam and Marxism “coexisted” across a half century of Indonesian history. His book provides an overdue corrective to studies that appraise the histories of Indonesian Islam and Marxism as “conceptually distinct subjects” (16), and builds upon the relatively scant extant scholarship that treats intersections of Indonesian Islam and Marxism seriously. Lin’s exegetical analysis of vernacular print culture in Bahasa Indonesia, and not solely productions of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) thereof, reveals that Marxism was indeed “pervasive” and not exclusive to the PKI’s intellectual thrust. Nor did the PKI draw Muslim support disingenuously through insincere statements that the party’s Communism was in service to Islam. As Lin contends, importantly, Indonesian Marxists “theorized conciliation in a variety of ways, and these conciliations evolved over time” (7, 10).
The book consists of four sprawling but thorough chapters between an insightful introduction and epilogue, commencing with the emergence of The Free Word (Het Vrije Woord), the Netherlands East Indies’ (NEI) first “unambiguously Marxist” newspaper, in 1915, and ending with the anti-Communist killings precipitated by G30S in 1965. In the book’s opening pages, Lin identifies two salient processes that “animated” pre-Suharto Indonesian politics: 1) intellectual adaptations of ideas from outside Indonesia—whether Euro-American or from the ummah (Muslim identity and global community) in Eurasian Islamic spaces—with a view toward developing novel praxes that held currency for the Indonesian historical situation; and 2) Muslim intellectual translations of Islam via Islamic sources into an “intellectual scaffolding for viable political alternatives to European empires, capitalist liberal democracies, or purported socialist utopias” (2–3). The first chapter explores the origins and nature of Islamic Communism in Indonesia and its development into concrete praxis in the 1926–1927 anticolonial uprisings. Here, Lin places the lens of analysis squarely on two newspapers, Djago! Djago! and Pemandangan Islam, that “shared a distinct openness to the conciliation of Islam and Communism” (44). Next, in “New Modes of Movement,” Lin works from periphery to core in identifying further instances of confluence between Marxism and Islam in “peripheral” West Sumatra and Minangkabau diasporic spaces through the repressive 1930s. The emphasis is on pergerakan print culture, namely Muslim modernist newspapers like Soera Islam and Soeara PSII, and movements as exemplified by the Union of Indonesian Muslims (Persatuan Muslim Indonesia), pergerakan activist writings, and finally, in the Javanese “core” represented by Soekarno’s “Islam Progresif.”
A third important process of adaptive broad-front coalition parties and government appears in the book’s next three chapters. In “The Revolutionary Consensus,” Lin shifts focus to Revolusi (1945–1949) and the intellectual foment as Indies intellectuals fought to end Dutch colonial rule. Revolusi, he contends, represented a “moment of remarkable ideological efflorescence”—a subtle nod to Indonesia historian Rex Mortimer’s description of the PKI’s pemuda intellectual leadership—during which the Islamic Communism of yesteryear “yielded in favor of more Indonesia-centric engagements with Marxist ideas” (161–62). Religious socialists, the reconstituted PKI under DN Aidit, and Islamic modernists in Masjumi now perceived themselves as, at once, “part of the ummah and part of a global revolutionary subaltern movement to end European imperium” (234). Now independent from Dutch colonial rule, “A Critical Ummah, a Conscious Proletariat” explores Indonesia during the years before Soekarno’s 5 July 1959 initiation of Guided Democracy (Demokrasi Terpimpin). However, as Lin shows, the tumultuous Liberal Democracy period actually marked a time during which Muslim republicans such as the country’s first vice president and third prime minister, Mohammed Hatta, fifth prime minister, Mohammed Natsir, and the eventual head of the oppositional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia, Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, engaged with Marxism seriously. The process of “Indonesianization,” or adapting ideas creatively to interpret Indonesia’s historical situation and address Indonesians’ needs as they perceived and construed them, was an essential part of this generation of political intellectuals’ transition into becoming “heirs of world culture” (245). The book’s epilogue draws on political transcripts and plays to link earlier conciliations between Islam and Marxism to Soekarno’s ideological triad NASAKOM (NAsionalisme, Agama, KOMmunisme) during the era of Demokrasi Terpimpin before the concept ran aground.
Ummah Yet Proletariat is undoubtedly an achievement in NEI/Indonesian intellectual history that succeeds in bringing previously disparate scholarship into direct conversation while also building upon them in novel and sophisticated ways. Lin’s command of a half-century’s worth of Indonesian print culture and rich archival materials from the Netherlands and the United States merits unequivocal praise. The book’s lengthy chapters and massive cast of characters notwithstanding, one never loses sight of the long trajectories of intellectual conciliations between Marxism and Islam across this five-decade span. Ummah Yet Proletariat thus succeeds brilliantly in placing primacy on Indies/Indonesian actors’ agency in their dialectical engagements with extant and global thought streams and situates them on a truly global stage where they have always belonged.
Matthew Galway
Australian National University, Canberra