Beyond resistance and compliance: Muslim intellectuals and Islamic education in 1970s Indonesia

Abstract

The 1970s Indonesia, marked by Suharto’s autocratic New Order Regime, entailed a critical moment in the reimagination of Islamic education by a generation of Neo-modernist Muslim intellectuals. The aim of this article is to examine how these individuals, working in a repressive political context and in a traditionalist religious milieu, applied notions of democracy, pluralism, and critical thinking in their educational thinking. We argue that political repression restricted their ability to develop critical understandings of democracy, pluralism, and critical inquiry. However, despite such constraints, they established their interpretations of those concepts independently of the prescriptions of the state. Rather than framing Islamic education as either resistance or cooperation with authoritarianism, or their conceptualisations of education as a de-politicised version of Western counterparts, this article shows how their work reflected a complex fusionism where tradition became a resource for pluralism and critical thought, offering an educational and theological and political rearticulation of freedom and responsibility.