Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Muslim Thought and Practice in Contemporary Indonesia 1 9 3o b s e rvances, these ships also carried Southeast Asian Muslims who stayedlonger in the Middle East (Snouck 1931). In this period, more Muslim studentsfrom the archipelago could follow the footsteps of Shaykh Yusuf andAbd al-Samad to Arabia than were ever before conceivable.These same developments also fostered a massive increase in the numbersof new immigrants to the archipelago, including a considerable number ofArabs from the Hadhramawt region along the coast of Yemen. Given thatthese rapid increases in the numbers of Indonesian h a j j is and new Arab immigrantsto the archipelago were made possible by technology introduced fromEurope and by the policies of colonial population movements, it is ironic thatthey were ultimately the source of considerable concern and conflict for colonialpowers in the region. For example, religious leaders from Yemen whoclaimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad himself were believedto have been important influences in the Aceh Wa r. This conflict preventedDutch power from achieving the subjugation of Sumatra for decades in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this movement, not only didthe local u l a m a (religious leaders) mobilize their p e s a n t re n and t a re k a t n e t w o r k sfor struggle, but they also succeeded in presenting their cause as a distinctly Islamicone. Muslim leaders accomplished this both locally, such as by popularizingpoems and songs on the virtues of j i h a d , and globally, by tapping intoanticolonial discourses in the broader Muslim world.The reconstructed image of a global Islamic opposition to European colonialrule was a powerful symbol that was meaningful for more than just thoseinvolved in the regional Muslim resistance movements in Indonesia. The ideawas increasingly significant to the Dutch as well. The development of a Dutch“Orientalist” image of Islam, which came along with what Europe imagined Isla m ’s role to be in the so-called Netherlands East Indies, also proceeded rapidlyin the later nineteenth century. At that time, colonial officials in the archipelago,along with diplomatic staff at the new Dutch consulate in Jeddah,turned a new eye toward the activities of Islamic networks—especially those ofSufi t a re k a t like the Naqshbandiyya—that connected Muslim movements inSoutheast Asia to broader, pan-Islamic ideologies (Laffan 2003).The rapid expansion of such Sufi orders during the latter half of the nineteenthcentury followed and further enhanced preexisting Islamic networks inthe archipelago. During this time, the p e s a n t re n experienced phenomenalgrowth and development. Although there had long been a tradition of Islamiceducation in the region, its appeal seemed to strengthen proportionately to intensifyingDutch colonial control. This may have been in part due to the factthat these institutions were thought to be free from European influence andalso independent of the “official Islam” of the local ruling aristocracies, whichwere believed to have been co-opted by the European colonials. Such local politicalfactors combined with patterns of a broader, global Islamic revival to