IN DEFENSE OF GUIDED REASON Aljunied, Syed Muhd Khairudin
History of religions,
11/2017, Letnik:
57, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Aljunied explores the ideas of Haji Abdullah Malik Abdul Karim Amrullah (1908-81), commonly known as "Hamka," who was one of the leading figures of the Islamic reformist movements in Southeast Asia ...in the twentieth century. Other than being the most influential Muslim scholar and preacher in Indonesia, Hamka was the first of few Southeast Asian scholars to receive an honorary doctorate from the prestigious Al-Azhar University. He was the author of more than a hundred popular and scholarly books covering a wide range of topics, including history, theology, philosophy, Islamic jurisprudence, and spirituality. All written in the Malay language, Hanika's books are still widely read by Muslims across Southeast Asia today and are used as sources of references in tertiary institutions in the region and beyond. Among the issues that concerned Hamka throughout his prodigious scholarly career was the marginalization of reason and rationality in Southeast Asian Muslim thought.
This article examines the historical evolution of the madrassah in Singapore as against its ideal Islamic past. We argue that a few broad processes have brought the estrangement of the present day ...madrassah from its ideal concept and practice in the medieval times. First was the nature of Islam that was propagated in the Malay Archipelago. This has to a large extent left certain tendencies in thought, which had stunted reformist movements at a later period. Next was the growing threat of Christian missionary movements which were reinforced by the role of British colonialists in marginalizing and delimiting the development and growth of the madrassah into an integrated educational institution. Last but not least are the secular-based expectations and policies that were implemented by the post-colonial state of Singapore which further relegated the madrassah institution within the mainstream national objectives.
Said Zahari was a journalist and leftist political activist who was detained without trial for seventeen years in Singapore during the premiership of Lee Kuan Yew. This essay examines his memoir, ...Dark Clouds at Dawn, and argues Said Zahari's principled political position was informed by his religious beliefs and his status as a Malay man of letters. His memoirs challenge dominant national narratives portraying Malay identity during the 1950s and 1960s as ethnically insular or chauvinistic, as Said Zahari always held a cosmopolitan and coalitional outlook. His memoirs remind us that ethnic and racial identities, both historically and in the present, cannot be essentialized and require analysis in relation to social and political struggles.
This article argues for the need to view imprisonment as a transformational experience for anti‐colonialists in British Malaya and beyond. Colonial prisons were fertile grounds that led to the ...shaping and restructuring of anti‐colonial sentiments. They were also spaces where new forms of collective action, compromises and adaptations emerged. As will be shown, anti‐colonialists' subjectivities and positions shifted from initial feelings of fear and submissiveness upon incarceration to the articulation of collective resistance and the manifestation of attempts to subvert and destabilize the colonial structures that bore down upon them. Such circumstances led to the alteration of the everyday practices not only of the colonized, but also of those in positions of authority.
The Koran in English: A Biography Aljunied, Khairudin
American journal of Islam & society (Online),
07/2018, Letnik:
35, Številka:
3
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The Koran in English: A Biography, by Bruce B. Lawrence is reviewed.
While much has been written about identity formation and the politics of ethnicity among minority communities in various parts of modern-day Southeast Asia, the same cannot be said regarding the ...Malay community of Singapore. This article seeks to address this scholarly neglect by bringing into sharp focus the dynamics, processes, and circumstances that shaped Malay identity in postcolonial Singapore during the 1980s. By interweaving historical data with theoretical insights derived from the works of Andrew Willford, Manuel Castells, and Richard Jenkins, among others, this article provides an analytical reading of the global, regional, and local developments that brought about an ethnic resurgence within one of the largest minority groups in this island city-state. Such developments prompted the Singapore government to devise new laws and employ multi-faceted strategies to regain its legitimacy in the eyes of a certain segment of the population, and to enhance its ruling capacity. The problematics embedded within the state's interpretation of Malay identity and the effects of citizen resistance against state policies are considered in detail in the final sections of this article.
This article provides a narrative analysis of a widely publicized murder case in Singapore in 1929 and, in so doing, develops the argument for the need to recover uncharted aspects of the social ...history of working-class Sikhs in Malaya through the methodology of micro-history and the employment of previously neglected sources, such as legal records and coroners' records. The circumstances which led to the brutal murder of Jewa Singh, as will be shown, reflect the extent of personal animosities, everyday rivalry and occasional acts of violence among the Sikhs in Singapore and Malaya at that time. Additionally, by unravelling the occupational pursuits, the state and position of women, the domestic environment, modes of communication as well as networks of social acquaintances of multiple actors that were implicated in the murder, and by framing the homicide case against larger historical processes in colonial Malaya, I will demonstrate the ways in which such a fateful episode provides us with a prism for understanding the social worlds and daily life of a segment of the minority population, and the tribulations they faced as migrants in a multicultural setting.
Although diverse and extensive, scholarship on ethnic riots in South East Asia has given inordinate attention to the genesis, evolution and eventual suppression of such episodes of violence, while ...many of the available studies have been local in scope and have centred mainly on incidents in modern-day Indonesia and the Philippines. This paper takes as its point of departure some lacunae in the literature on ethnic riots in South East Asia. It seeks to initiate a shift from the study of the causes, processes and conditions that led to the outbreak of ethnic riots to a critical analysis of regional and global responses by both colonial and anticolonial actors in the aftermath. By focusing on the case of the deadly ethnic riots – commonly known as the Maria Hertogh riots – which broke out in Singapore in December 1950, and by drawing connections between local events and wider developments overseas, the paper demonstrates how the study of collective violence in South East Asia and elsewhere can be further enhanced through an analysis of the various strategies that were enacted by colonial states and by the forms of resistance and collaboration of the colonized and other non-state agencies.
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