Muslim intellectuals in the twentieth century Indonesia: A socio-political and educational context

Abstract

Various criteria have been formulated to determine whether or not someone should be classified as an intellectual. These criteria range from patterns of recruitment to responses to various cultural or political movements. This paper is devoted, however, to examining the rise of Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia in the last three decades of the twentieth century. It highlights, as a subject of analysis, the significance of socio-political (and even religious) context as well as the educational background upon which the formation of those Indonesian Muslim intellectuals is based. An important finding shows that the rise of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals in such a time frame resulted mainly from three vectors, movements in Islamic thought, socio-political relations between the government and the Muslim community, and developments in education. The educational background of Muslim intellecttuals, as another finding encapsulates, is not monolithic since some of them pursued their studies in Islamic educational institutions, and some others in more general, public ones.