This week, my article about " Reinforcing Charisma in the Bureaucratisation of Indonesian Islamic Organisations" has been published in the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. Here's the abstract:

Many studies of Islam in Indonesia have focused on the mass Islamic organisations that form the backbone of civil society and Indonesian religious life. However, studies of these organisations have not appreciated the central place of charisma amid their bureaucratic features. This article looks at the case of Alkhairaat, a mass Islamic organisation headquartered in Central Sulawesi but spread throughout eastern Indonesia, as a bureaucracy built to reinforce and perpetuate the charisma of its founder, Sayyid Idrus bin Salim al-Jufri. The case of Alkhairaat demonstrates how mass Islamic organisations in Indonesia bureaucratise Islam but also, in doing this, defy the broader trend of legalisation. Instead, the on-going veneration of the founder’s charisma helps to make sense of the continuing attention to supernatural occurrences among traditionalist Indonesian Muslims and the power of organisational leaders over their followers.

You can read the full article free, from the open-access journal's website, at this link.

In today’s Jakarta Post, K.H. Yahya Cholil Staquf (a leader in Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama and its outreach Bayt ar-Rahmah in North Carolina) has written another piece in his consistent call for the separation of Islam and politics and moderation in religion generally, this one generically titled “Islamist Politics in ‘Reformasi’ Indonesia.”

The article is a fine statement of the NU leadership’s opposition to transnationally-oriented Islamism and commitment to the Indonesian state, but it also includes a highly revisionist (I would argue, unsustainably revisionist) interpretation of NU’s history vis-à-vis Islam and the state. In the passage that surprised me most as a historian of Indonesia, the kyai writes, “During the 1950s and ‘60s, [Abdul] Wahab [Hasbullah, then leader of NU] blocked Masyumi from restoring the Jakarta Charter and transforming Indonesia into an Islamic state, supported Sukarno and the Indonesian military in repressing the Darul Islam and PRRI/Permesta rebellions, and allied with Soeharto to prevent a communist seizure of power, such as that which had already occurred to such devastating effect in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, China, Korea and Tibet.”

It is worth breaking down these claims one by one:

1. Did Abdul Wahab Hasbullah and NU “block Masyumi from restoring the Jakarta Charter and transforming Indonesia into an Islamic state?” Unambiguously no. In the Constitutional Assembly (Konstituante) of Indonesia, which met from 1956-59 in Bandung, Wahab and the rest of the NU delegation supported the establishment of Islam as the foundation of the Indonesian constitution. Indeed, in the final votes of May and June 1959 before the Constitutional Assembly was unilaterally dissolved by President Sukarno, Wahab and most NU party members voted in favor of the Jakarta Charter—not against it!

2. Did NU “support Sukarno and the Indonesian military in repressing the Darul Islam and PRRI/Permesta rebellions?” Only sort of. As well-documented by Greg Fealy, NU did draw closer and closer to President Sukarno in the late 1950s, and thus grew closer to his allies in the armed forces, too. However, NU was not practically involved in the suppression of either rebellion. In fact, I have it on good authority from Prof. Mestika Zed (whose father-in-law was the head of NU in Central Sumatra in 1958) that it was the NU-faction in the provincial legislature that first put forward the motion of a ‘revolutionary’ rebel government, which led to PRRI. National NU leadership (including Wahab) does seem to have been opposed to both rebellions, though: Darul Islam for being too hardline about Islam (although this opposition was rarely foregrounded; cf. Remy Madinier’s discussion of Masjumi’s awkward position with regards to Darul Islam), and PRRI (less so Permesta) for being its former political rivals from Masjumi.

3. Did NU “ally with Soeharto to prevent a communist seizure of power?” Again, I think this is partly true and partly misleading. NU definitely had been opposed to PKI, vocally and publically, for many years from the 1940s, and this opposition became fever-pitched by the 1960s. NU definitely joined in the attacks and killings initiated by the army under Soeharto in 1965-67 in response to the supposed Communist-backed failed coup of 1 October 1965, and aspects of NU’s participation have been very deftly unpacked by Fealy and MacGregor in their 2010 article. However, this statement seems to be premised on the idea that the Communists were actively trying to seize control of the government through extra-legal means—an idea that many or most overseas historians of Indonesia would dispute.

So, by my tally, this paragraph from the kyai’s article has one strike and two balls (to use the baseball analogy, go Flying Squirrels)—no hits.

Perhaps more important that the historical fudges or flagrant revisionism themselves is the question of why an NU leader today would want to engage in such revisionism. This is partly a manifestation of NU’s continuing opposition to conservative, perhaps transnationally-inspired challenges from the right, which have been seen as eating away at NU’s dominant position in Indonesian Islam over the last two decades. By asserting that NU so strongly defends Indonesia, the leaders can imply that groups further to the right do not defend Indonesia and thus should not merit popular (or political) support. This revisionism also makes NU more appealing as a mass-base for political campaigns both this year and next, something very much in the interest of NU leaders hoping for various kinds of patronage and positions.

Although I can understand the revisionism and the reasons behind it, my position as a historian places me strongly opposed to this kind of tweaking (or denying) the facts to match the desired narrative. I think NU will grow stronger, not weaker, as a democratic force in Indonesia and the Muslim world more broadly if it honestly faces its history.

Some readers may recall several years ago when I debated a colleague in Oxford, with our prompts being ‘Global History’ (for him) and ‘Area Studies’ (for me). (Read my remarks from that night on an earlier blog post.) It was a fun night, and a useful exercise in thinking about historiography and academic disciplines for the post-graduates who hosted the event.

My opponent in that debate, Dr Jan-Georg Deutsch, passed away in 2016, leaving a big hole in the Faculty. This year, in his memory, I proposed to the same student-run seminar a debate on a similar historiographical question. My colleague, Prof Alexander Morrison, was game to participate, and put up the proposition, as follows: ‘Global History Is An Excuse for Anglophones to Study the History of the World Without Having to Learn any of its Languages.’

It was a provocative topic, leading to lots of enjoyable discussion. I argued against the proposition, but neither of us (of course) was really arguing our honest feeling on the matter; we argued opposing positions as a useful exercise. As I did last time, I wanted to share here my comments, in case they might spark further debate.

Many thanks to everyone for joining us tonight, and especially to my esteemed colleague for putting forward the proposition and debating me on it. The last time I defended one side of a debate in the Transnational and Global History Seminar, Jan-Georg Deutsch mopped the floor with me, and I hope I have learned a thing or two in order to improve my performance this time.

I reject the proposition on three levels: It is wrong as a specific idea, as a general idea, and as a principle.

1. The proposition is wrong as a specific idea.

All of us can name specific global historians who definitely speak more than just English. Without even resorting to many names from our own Faculty (indeed, many names of those within the room), I could point to Engseng Ho (for his beautifully nuanced studies of Hadrami Arabs spread around the Indian Ocean world) or Cemil Aydin (for his deep inquiries into alternative global ideas: pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism, and now the concept of the Muslim world).

Lest these names sound insufficiently Anglophone, though, let me through out a forefather in the study of Indonesia who is far more British than I am: Benedict R. O’G. Anderson. What global history has been more influential in the last four decades than his global history of the idea of nationalism? To drive the point home, though, let me remind us all that Benedict Anderson was anything but a monoglot. He spoke some Chinese from having been born in Kunming, learned Indonesian (and, I’m told, passable Javanese) for his doctorate, and after he was prohibited from entering Indonesia after 1965 he casually took up the study of Thai, then later Spanish and Tagalog to write on the Philippines. His pioneering lens on global history was not born out of an inability to access the local histories of specific places, but precisely by observing many places (several of them in their own languages) and finding striking similarities and the modular spread of ideas.

So, as a specific idea about the way global history is practiced in this day and age, I find the proposition wrong on its face.

2. The proposition is wrong as a general idea.

One can have some sympathy with the sweeping, pro-global South claim that there are too many individuals out of touch with the global South who are now empowered by circuitous academic thinking to make authoritative statements about the world. We have also just heard the argument that global history might be nothing more than the old imperial history masquerading under a new name. However, the idea that studying the largest geographic scale as a historian is a tradition with roots in Anglophone historians only pulling on Anglophone sources is seriously misguided. That assumption overlooks the facts and engages in exactly the kind of patronizing Orientalism that it claims to combat.

We have always had world histories that were neither Anglophone nor Eurocentric. Look at Sima Qian with his Shiji or Taishigongshu (1st century BCE Han China), or Rashid al-Din with his Jami’ al-tawarikh (13th century CE Ilkhanate Persia), or even the anonymous Babad Jaka Tingkir (19th century CE Java). All of these aspired to be world histories, and we can find in them an alternative genealogy for global history. Thus, it would be an error to say that only Anglophones have been interested in global history or writing the whole world in one scheme.

Even when turning to the establishment of modern, Western historiography, many of the white men who gave birth to the ‘global’ approach of historiography were indeed able to speak foreign languages. Perhaps my favourite among them was Marshall G.S. Hodgson (another thoroughly Anglicized name, to keep the rabble happy). Although we now think of him as a pioneer of world and global history, those writings were all published posthumously. The historical work he published in his lifetime was about the Assassins, grounded in Arabic sources.

If you prefer something a bit more up-to-date, what about Kenneth Pomeranz? He broadly revised our thinking about the comparative history of China and Europe entering the modern world. Here is a man who made his name researching China, thoroughly skilled in Chinese, and whose first book used records made by the Japanese imperial state. This is no linguistic weakling.

Thus, I would argue, great global historians who speak the languages of the world are not the exception, but are the backbone on which the sub-discipline was built. Furthermore, they come in a long line of non-Anglophone, non-Western writing on the history of humankind.

2a. As a side note, is there something wrong with global history written using only one language?

Harping only on linguistic qualifications of historians to write on certain topics overlooks many of the other types of sources and other types of knowledge that might be just as important. When we read a book on maritime history (the theme of this seminar in this term), do we question the sailing bona-fides of the author? Understanding how ships and boats work on water and amid wind is just as important, one could argue, as reading the language of the captain and crew. When we read early modern histories, what assurances do we get that the author is qualified to deal with non-written sources from archaeology and material culture? Surely those are also a source base just as important as sources in a foreign language.

When we look at language as just one tool of many in a historian’s toolkit, perhaps we can see that the proposition is a bit problematic. But I would go even further than that:

3. Dismissing global history as exclusively Anglophones using English sources is wrong as a principle.

The proposition would silo those historians who work on other parts of the world and speak other languages into a limited, area studies framework. We become the afterthought of history as a discipline, rather than the cutting edge of building new historical knowledge and ideas. As much as I (being an expert on Indonesia who put in the time to learn five non-English languages along the way) do not want to lose the specificity and distinctiveness of Indonesian history, I am equally concerned about not being dismissed as irrelevant to history broadly.

Rather than making the case for myself, let me frame it as defending one of my respected colleagues. Lien-Hang Nguyen speaks and reads Vietnamese, English, and some Chinese and French. Dismissing her fantastic book, Hanoi’s War, as being less than a global history of the Vietnam War is to undercut the importance of her work. To demote her from being a global historian of the Cold War to just being a regional historian of Vietnam flirts dangerously with the position of arguing that the history of peoples speaking languages other than English are minor histories. Especially tonight as we commemorate the great historian Georg Deutsch, let this be a trap that we never fall into!

Sunday night, 10 September 2017, I attended the UK premiere of director Garin Nugroho's silent film Setan Jawa, accompanied by a live gamelan orchestra. The event was sponsored by the Indonesian Embassy in London as part of the International Gamelan Festival.

The film was impressive not just for its tremendous artistic value (the film expert I was sitting with was in awe of the use of light in this black-and-white movie) but also for its historical echoes. I chaired a panel in the festival a day earlier in which Garin Nugroho spoke about his acute awareness of the early years of moving pictures in Indonesia. Where the first film actors were pulled from the Komedie Stambul stage tradition, Pak Garin also conscientiously wanted to bridge between stage acting and screen acting (this is even more apparent in his work Nyai / A Woman from Java). The black-and-white, silent film form was more than just a stylistic choice, it was also explicitly pushing the audience to think back to spiritual practices from a century ago, traditions now sidelined in Indonesia. The form effectively and pointedly furthered the director's goal of evoking the past into the present.

The incorporation of traditional arts was also beautiful. This was found, of course, in the live gamelan accompaniment, which was tremendous! I have been to lots of gamelan performances, shadow puppet plays, wayang wong, etc., but I don't think I had ever heard such a wonderful gamelan orchestra. On top of this, though, the actors in the film were also dancing in the classical Javanese tradition, and by the end of the movie (not to spoil it) the line between dance and non-dance-acting on screen was thoroughly blurred.

There is no doubt that this movie was aesthetically amazing. I would watch it again in a heartbeat. I am less convinced that it fulfilled the director's other mission, though, to challenge radicalism by showing other, more traditional spiritual forms on Java and demonstrate how conservative, Arabizing interpretations of Islam are new in the Javanese context. The story was thoroughly abstract, and (despite the director's own ideas as discussed in the previous day's panel) any connection with Islam was not just understated but unclear. I also was unable to grasp the connection of the "Prolog", which had a small boy punished by Dutch authorities, to the greater arc of the story.

Despite my own limitations when it comes to watching and understanding art films, I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and would recommend it to others for its mesmerizing aesthetic power, above and beyond its more conteporary messages.

One of the great privileges of teaching at Oxford is the opportunity to work with master’s students in the Europaeum programme, including one this year who wrote a dissertation on the international relations of the Indonesian struggle for recognition of its sovereignty in the 1940s (read Simon Boeke’s thesis here). Although his excellent project focused on Australia, it led us to discover together the tremendous resources available in the Frank Porter Graham papers for the study of Indonesian History in the 1940s.

Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972) was an academic, a US Senator (briefly), a United Nations official, and a president of the University of North Carolina (for which I can—barely—forgive him). Most accounts of his diplomatic career highlight his work in South Asia between India and Pakistan, but he also played an important role as the United States representative on the UN Committee of Good Offices assigned to mediate between the Dutch and the Indonesians during Indonesia’s war for independence. In this capacity, Dr Graham chaired discussions in the US, in Indonesia, and in Europe on the future of the archipelago, and he was crucial at forcing the Dutch to the negotiating table where they eventually acknowledged Indonesian sovereignty.

Dr Graham’s papers are held in the UNC library (again, despite being a Duke graduate, I can still see value in them). Many folders (#1980-#1984; #2089-#2098; #2156b-#2158b; #2196b; and #4955; among others) have materials related to Indonesia and/or collected during his time on the Committee of Good Offices, ranging from the very mundane (complaints among the different delegates about scheduling and accommodation) to the very serious (letters and reports from the Chinese community in Batavia about violence against them during the war). Many of the papers are reports that do not seem to be available elsewhere, either from US government officials or interested parties who submitted papers to Dr Graham, almost entirely in English. The collection also has ephemera from this period, such as Dr Graham’s passport, which can be so telling. On the visa pages, the stamp from the Indian representative in 1948 is already labelled as coming from the “Consulate General of India in Indonesia at Batavia”—a position that surprised me in its boldness to use “Indonesia” in formal diplomatic stamps when the country had not yet been officially recognized by India. A thorough examination of these papers would certainly find a lot of points of interest for Indonesian (and American!) diplomatic history in the 1940s, but probably also many points of historical interest about Indonesia in the 1940s more broadly.

Most of these files have now been digitized (indeed, my student and I arranged for the digitization of some of them) and are available for viewing on the UNC libraries website at the links above, so they are accessible to scholars in Europe, Indonesia and elsewhere who might find it difficult to travel to North Carolina. (This also makes them accessible to scholars like me who generally want to avoid being on the Chapel Hill campus.)