Religious Intellectuals in Southeast Asia: Post-coloniality, Faith, and State

Type

Single Panel

Schedule

Session 1
Tue 09:30-11:00 REC A2.14

Conveners

Ariff Hafizi Bin Mohd Radzi Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Esra Tiryaki Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Discussant

Claudia Derichs Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

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Papers

From Hassan al-Banna, Rachid al-Ghannouchi to Anwar Ibrahim and Nurcholis Majid: Negotiating Islam and Modernity and the Importation of the Notion of ‘Dawla Madaniyya’ in Post-colonial Southeast Asia Ariff Hafizi Bin Mohd Radzi Humbold-Universität zu Berlin
The catchphrase dawla madaniyya (civil state) gained significant traction during the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in the Arab World and saw renewed attention in Malaysia with Anwar Ibrahim’s ascension to Prime Minister in 2022. Anwar, with a background in Islamic activism in the 1970s inspired by the ideals of the Ikhwanul Muslimin in Egypt, brought attention to this concept. The concept of dawla madaniyya or civil state is not novel, originating from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s after the 1952 revolution in Egypt, which aimed to counter military rule and advocate for the civil aspect of the Islamic state. However, its interpretation varied among religious intellectuals, both in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. This paper traces the term’s importation to Southeast Asia from the Middle East in the 1990s by figures like Nurcholis Madjid and Anwar Ibrahim, arguing that dawla madaniyya represents a partial convergence between Islamists and their liberal and secular counterparts, as well as a negotiation between Islam and modernity. To this end, the concept serves as a tool in the ongoing discourse over the role of Islam in the socio-political sphere of diverse societies in Southeast Asia. The paper then proceeds to explore the recent application of dawla madaniyya in Malaysia by Anwar Ibrahim, arguing that while the concept harmonizes Islamic principles with the liberal ideals of civil society and state, it also harbours nuanced elements of socialism.
Syed Hussein Alatas’s Approach to Islam: Articulating an Egalitarian Discourse in the Climate of Islamic Developmentalism in Postcolonial Malaysia, 1970s-1990s Esra Tiryaki Humboldt-Universtiät zu Berlin
Syed Hussein Alatas, a prominent scholar of the Malay world, is highly regarded by the global scholarly community for his contributions to decolonial thought and the critique of intellectual imperialism. Concerned with the role of intellectuals in the Global South, his sociological thinking is imbued with crucial historical themes and contemporary issues drawn from his local landscape. His scholarly production in this line corresponds to a period when postcolonial Malaysia was undergoing secular developmentalism, which subsequently absorbed elements of Islamisation. These developmental policies also led to the nationalisation of higher education, thereby reconfiguring the Malaysian academic milieu and channelling academic production in that direction. Against this backdrop, I position Alatas in this paper as a Muslim scholar who articulates an intellectual discourse that unusually deconstructs and challenges the state policies and its official religious discourse, even though he is widely perceived as a secular thinker. His reading of Islam is strongly egalitarian at a time when chauvinistic inclinations and long-standing feudalistic tendencies coloured sociopolitical debates in Malaysia. With a particular focus on Alatas’s three books, namely Intellectuals in Developing Societies (1977), Kita dengan Islam (1979), and Islam and Socialism (1976), my analysis oscillates between his conceptualisation of intellectuals in developing societies for reflexive scholarly perspectives and his position as a scholar critically engaging with religious issues and concepts for Malay(sian) Muslim audiences. I argue that Alatas’s religious thinking is an eminent example of how Islam is discursively reproduced from non-religious disciplines and institutions, such as the university, through eclectic interpretations that blur the classical boundaries of secular and religious in the Malay world, similar to other postcolonial Muslim contexts.
Religious Intellectuals in Post-Colonial Vietnam: Buddhist Nationalists, Progressive Catholics, and their Advocacy for Peace and National Reconciliation, 1963-1975 Thao Nghiem University of Groningen
Abstract: Contrary to Euro-centric secularist presumptions, the post-colonial trajectory of religion in Vietnam witnessed a prominent role of faith leaders in shaping the country’s socio-political landscapes. This paper delves into the intricate influences of religious elites during the second half of the Republic of Vietnam (1963-1975), investigating two distinctive religious groups, namely the Buddhist nationalists and the progressive Catholics, and explores how their aims and visions both converge and clash as to how they sketched out diverse visions of what it meant to be religious in the (post-colonial) national community. Through analysis of selected writings and activities of some key figures from each faction, such as the Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh, Ven. Thich Tri Quang, and Fr. Chan Tin, this study investigates how these religious elites navigated their religious identity, constructed their theological narratives of nationalism, and negotiated with state power and the religious other against the backdrop of social injustices and political turbulences haunting their country. The presentation therefore demonstrates the paradoxes of their leadership: despite shared goals of alleviating suffering and promoting peace, differing approaches to engaging with communism created an irreconcilable division that eventually disrupted their joint national activism. Notwithstanding their divergent political strategies, taken together, these intellectuals actively defied the post-Enlightenment assumption that religious minds should be excluded from the landscape of legitimate politics. In so doing, the project complicates and rebuffs conventional boundaries of the strict religious/secular demarcation, and contributes to a more exquisite understanding of the entangled histories of the political and the religious. I would argue that, albeit their humble number, these religious intellectuals were imperative in the formation of a modus vivendi of religion-state relationships after the country’s reunification in 1975, and have continued to shape the theo-political imagination of the Vietnamese public into the present-day.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

During the late colonial and post-colonial periods in Southeast Asia, a number of intellectuals emerged, transcending the classical boundaries of scholarship with their approaches to articulating religious discourse in a more progressive and eclectic manner (Kersten, 2011). Reason, rights, and faith were central to the discourse of these intellectuals, as opposed to ‘secular’ intellectuals who concentrated solely on man and ignored God, or to religious clerics who focused on God but ignored the human element (Bayat, 2007: 85). Southeast Asian intellectuals such as Syed Hussein Alatas, Nurcholis Madjid, Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh and U Nu paved the way for a more nuanced understanding of how religious discourse intersected with broader socioeconomic and political thought, shedding light on the complex dynamics that shaped the region’s postcolonial identity. Drawing on Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, this panel situates religious intellectualism in a critical perspective, i.e. contextualising it within the socio-political environment in which it emerged and investigating the impact of dominant ideas on societies (Mannheim, 1991). The panel begins with Esra Tiryaki’s paper, which focuses on Syed Hussein Alatas’s sociological reflections from the 1970s to the 1990s, a time when Malaysia’s developmentalism was intertwined with the Islamisation agenda. She highlights how Alatas’s thought offers alternative and autonomous perspectives that challenge established norms in postcolonial Malay-Muslim contexts under state-dominated discourses. The next paper by Ariff Hafizi Radzi takes up this particular moment in Southeast Asia and traces the importation of the notion of dawla madaniyya to Southeast Asia from the Middle East in the 1990s, arguing that dawla madaniyya represents a partial convergence between Islamists and their liberal and secular counterparts, as well as a negotiation between Islam and modernity. The third paper, by Thurein Naing examines the genesis of Political Buddhism in Myanmar through the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) in the 20th century and explores the continuity and the profound impact of the revival of Political Buddhism on Myanmar’s contemporary political landscape. Finally, building on the post-colonial trajectory of religion in Southeast Asia, the final paper by Thao Nghiem delves into the intricate dynamics of religious intellectualism during the second half of the Republic of Vietnam (1963-1975), investigating two distinctive religious groups, namely the Buddhist nationalists and the progressive Catholics, and explores how their aims and visions both converge and clash as to how they sketched out diverse visions of what it meant to be religious in the (post-colonial) national community.