THE ORIGINS OF ISLAMIC REFORMISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA pdf

The Origins Of Islamic Reformism In Southeast Asia Networks Of Malay Indonesian And Middle Eastern

THE ORIGINS OF ISLAMIC REFORMISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The transmission of Islamic renewal and reformism is a neglected area of Islamic studies.

In contrast to the abundance of studies of the transmission of learning and ideas, for instance, from the Greeks to the Arabs and further to the Western world, there has not yet been any comprehensive study devoted to examining the transmission of religious ideas from centers of Islamic learning to other parts of the Muslim world.

There are, of course, several studies on the transmission of hadiths (Prophetic tradition) from one generation of early Muslims to another by way of unbroken isnads (chains of transmission). 2

 The study of the transmission of Islamic renewal and reformism, particularly on the eve of European expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is important for several reasons.

The Islamic socio¬ intellectual history of this period has been little studied; most attention has been given to Islamic political history. Given the decline of Muslim polities, this period has often been considered a dark age in Islamic history.

In contrast to this widely held belief, it will be shown that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constituted one of the most dynamic periods in the socio-intellectual history of Islam. 3

The origins of Islamic dynamic impulses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were networks of Muslim scholars (‘ learned ’), centered in Mecca and Medina.

The central position of these two Holy Cities in Islam, especially in conjunction with the annual hajj pilgrimage, attracted a large number of scholars and students who produced a unique scholarly discourse there.

These scholarly networks consisted of a significant number of leading ‘ulama’ who came from different parts of the Muslim world; they thus brought together various traditions of Islamic learning to Mecca and Medina.

There was conscious, if not concerted, efforts among these scholars to reform and revitalize the prevailing teachings of Islam; their central theme was the intellectual and socio-moral reconstruction of