Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130 127

Muslim Legal ought in Modern . By R. Michael Feener. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 290. ISBN: 978-0-521-53747-6. £60; $120.99.

Michael Feener’s close examination of the intellectual development of Islamic law in Indonesia is an important work that adds to a growing body of literature covering various aspects of Indonesian . ese include works on Muslim organizations and movements,1 Islamic education and Muslim students,2 Qurʾānic exegesis,3 Islamic theology,4 and on Muslim Sufism.5 By offering insights into areas not taken into account by earlier works on Islamic law in modern Indonesia,6 Feener fills in some important gaps. As he states in his preface, the seven chapters of this book examine “the ways in which Indonesian Muslim scholars and activists have formulated new conceptions and interpretations of Islamic law through creative readings and syntheses of diverse materials, including Islamic scriptural sources, classical Muslim jurisprudential texts, and modern Middle Eastern and ‘Western’ academic writings read in light of rapidly evolving social, economic and political contexts” (p. xx). Drawing on Roff,7 Feener points out that three key phenomena have influenced Muslim legal thought in modern Indonesia: voluntary associations, print culture and

1) Taufik Abdullah, Schools and Politics: e Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra, 1927-1933 (Ithaca, 1971); Deliar Noer, e Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1942 (Kuala Lumpur, 1973); B. J. Boland, e Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia (e Hague, 1982); Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, 2000); Bahtiar Effendi, Islam and the State in Indonesia (Singapore, 2003). 2) Mona Abaza, Indonesian Students in Cairo (Paris, 1994); Yon Mahmudi, Islamising Indonesia: e Rise of and the (PKS) (Canberra, 2008); Robert Hefner, Making Modern Muslims: the Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 2009). 3) Anthony H. Johns, “Islam in the Malay World, an Explanatory Survey with Some References to Qurʾānic Exegesis,” in Islam in Asia: Southeast and East Asia, vol. 2, ed. R. Israeli and A. H. Johns (Jerusalem, 1984), 115-61; Howard M. Federspiel, Popular Indonesian Literature of the Qurʾān (Ithaca, 1994); Peter G. Riddell, Islam and the Malay- Indonesian World: Transmission and Responses (Honolulu, 2001). 4) Fauzan Saleh, Modern Trends in Islamic eological Discourse in 20th Century Indonesia: A Critical Study (Leiden, 2001). 5) Julia Day Howell, “Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic Revival,” Journal of Asian Studies, 60:3 (2001), 701-29. 6) E.g., Daniel S. Lev, Islamic Courts in Indonesia: A Study in the Political Bases of Legal Institutions (Berkeley, 1972); Atho Mudzhar, Fatwa-fatwa Majelis Ulama Indonesia: Sebuah Studi Tentang Pemikiran Hukum Islam di Indonesia, 1975-1988 (, 1993); and Barry Hooker, Indonesian Islam: Social Change through Contemporary Fatawa (Honolulu, 2003). 7) William Roff, e Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven, 1967).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156851910X538413 128 Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 116-130 educational reform. Feener considers these as three legs of a triangle, each intersecting with and supporting the other two and, taken together, contributing to wide-scale transformations of the religious, intellectual and legal cultures of the Muslim com- munities of the Indonesian archipelago. With a more systematic approach and a deeper focus, this volume is a comprehensive and sophisticated update of previous works, such as those by Federspiel and Bowen, on Muslim intellectuals in modern Indonesia.8 It has never been an easy task for a scholar studying Indonesian Islam to present a comprehensive view of the historical development of Islamic legal thought in modern Indonesia. Feener tackles this task skillfully. Expanding upon his dissertation (Boston University, 1999), he discusses a number of independent Muslim thinkers from various Muslim organizations across different decades of the 20th century, including govern ment officials, such as Munawir Sjadzali, political leaders, such as M. Natsir, Anwar Harjono and , academics, such as Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy, Hazairin, and , as well as both modernist and traditionalist scholars. Among the modernists, he includes Ahmad Hassan and Moenawar Chalil, and among the traditionalists, , Ali Yafie, Ibrahim Hosen, and Masdar Farid Mas’udi. Feener has divided this approxi- mately one-hundred year period of development into three phases, which he describes in Chapters 2 through 6. e first phase covers the early 20th century to 1945, the year in which Indonesia was declared free from colonial rule. During this time, fierce polemics emerged on the question of whether or not the gate of ijtihad was closed. Additionally, legal debates between Muslim groups were frequent, especially regarding differences in worship and ritual. e modernist groups (e.g., Persatuan Islam and ) advocated the deployment of ijtihad and educational reforms, while the traditionalist groups (e.g., ) maintained that in order to acknowledge the importance of Islamic tradition, adherence to one of the four madhhabs and the foundational authority of their respective leaders was necessary. e second phase covers the 1950s, when the Yogyakarta-based leading religious scholar Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy and the Jakarta-based prominent professor of law Hazai- rin, both expressed the need for a new national Indonesian madhhab. For both men, Islam could remain a vital force in the lives of believers only if Indonesian fiqh within the framework of a national madhhab was in line with the local cultures of Indonesia and at the same time was based on the Qurʾān and the Prophetic tradition. In their view, an Indonesian madhhab was a necessary response to the plurality of laws devel- oping in post-independent Indonesia, which incorporated the Dutch colonial code, local customary law and Shāfiʿī jurisprudence. In addition to this desire for a national Indonesian madhhab, a number of Islamic parties, as well as prominent Muslim individuals, demanded that the Sharīʿa be the

8) Howard M. Federspiel, Muslim Intellectuals and National Development in Indonesia (New York, 1992); John R. Bowen, Islam, Law and Equality in Modern Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (New York, 2003).