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Decolonisation in South and Southeast Asia after 1945 was a period of intense negotiations over the role of religion in postcolonial society. For many witnesses in the religious field, religion had to be defended against primarily three threats: the changing power structures of imperial decline; communism; and secular nationalism. In this chapter I examine in how far the (Christian) concept of apologetics is suitable for world-historical research. My argument is that apologetics can indeed broaden our conceptual and empirical understanding of the twentieth century and deepen our understanding of religion and decolonisation. To do so, I propose to distinguish between three different forms of apologetics in word and deed: transnational forms of apologetics (illustrated by the theologies and institutional practices of the Church Missionary Society), national-majoritarian apologetics (discussed with the example of the Hindu-nationalist RSS in post-Partition India), and national-adaptive apologetics (as practices by Muhammadiyah in early-postcolonial Indonesia).

When Suharto began losing support in the military, he tried to shore up popularity by making the Indonesian hajj the largest in the world and dragging his whole family to Mecca to deflect outrage over their business scandals. His gesture put the pilgrimage in play as a legitimate subject for political debate and manipulation. After Suharto’s downfall, the hajj quickly became one of the most attractive battlegrounds for Muslim politicians competing for votes in Indonesia’s new democracy. All the major Muslim leaders have made the hajj–some of them several times–and all have written about their experiences in ways that are calculated to market their political personas. Indonesia’s current debates over the hajj and its meanings are a microcosm of power struggles in the world’s largest Islamic movements, particularly the Muhammadiyah and the Nahdlatul Ulama.

This Chapter republishes a review of Amelia Fauzia’s book Faith and the State: Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia, originally published in the Asian Journal of Social Science in 2014. Most research published in English since 2000 on Islamic philanthropy and humanitarianism has concentrated on the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Europe and the USA. Fauzia’s impressive monograph on Indonesia bears comparison with any of this research. She explores how zakat (the Islamic tithe) and sadaqa (optional charity) have been implemented in various ways in Indonesia. Her guiding theme is the tension between the private or personal imperatives of the Islamic revelation and public conduct where persuasion or coercion can be effective, including that exerted by the modern state. She gives special attention to the “modernist” Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912. The Chapter proposes an angle for historical research: to what extent did Christian institutions introduced by colonial powers affect the development of Islamic charities in Indonesia and elsewhere?

This chapter confronts issues of debate on music with regard to two of Indonesia's most prominent performing arts: the Javanese gamelan and wayang kulit shadow play. It critiques the histories of Islam and music, traces the gradual development of Islam within Javanese performing arts, and analyzes the evolving 20th-century positions on the arts of the two largest Islamic organizations: Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama. The chapter reveals the strategies for negotiating aesthetics and philosophies of Hinduism and Sufism, and for establishing boundaries and sometimes rationalizing Indonesian expressive arts in postcolonial times.

It deals with the way that Muslims who were influenced by Muslim reformism in Mecca and Cairo constructed Islam as a progressive religion and built faith communities in order to pursue progress in society. It highlights connections and disconnections, similarities and differences between Indonesian and Malay reforms. Indonesians sought to reform society through organization, whereas Malays primarily used publications.

This chapter addresses the crucial question of how democratic attitudes emerged within the major Muslim civil society groups in Indonesia, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and the Muhammadiyah. Key religious actors and organizations put Islam and democracy on the public agenda and in the process contributed both to the erosion of the authoritarian regime and to the building of democracy by their actions and, as hypothesized, actually had a positive effect on eroding the authoritarian regime and supporting a democratic transition. These thinkers had remained in constant dialogue with other public debate infrastructures, creating a wide network of publication and information dissemination that spread from the grassroots level toward the nation's diverse populace. Additionally, the ideas frequently dispensed were the products of both traditional Islamic education and modernist studies of philosophy and theology, ensuring that Islamic dialogue would be clearly expressed and applicable to facets of daily life.

This chapter argues that proponents of progressive Islamic discourses straddle the dichotomy or binary between traditionalist and modernist interpretations of the Islam. Their ability to work in the interstices of different strands creates a kind of liminality and even marginality requiring a degree of cultural hybridity. It includes a survey of clusters of academics constituting schools of thought gravitating around institutions of Islamic higher education; activists involved in NGOs such as the Liberal Islam Network; as well as new generations of religious scholars or ulama and cadres associated with the traditional Islamic mass organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) who have formulated the new discourse of Islamic Post-Traditionalism, and their modernist counterparts in the modernist Muhammadiyah. The reactionary detractors of these progressive intellectuals are associated with Islamist organizations such as the Dewan Dakwah Islamiya Indonesia (DDII) and the Tarbiyah student movement which dominates ‘Campus Islam’ at secular universities.