A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Muslim Java [Paperback]

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book examines how the Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, is actively negotiating both modernity and tradition in the contexts of nation-building, globalisation, and a supposed clash of civilizations. The pesantren community, so-called because it is centered around an educational institution called the pesantren, uses education as a central arena for dealing with globalization and the construction and maintenance of an Indonesian Islamic identity. However, the community's efforts to wrestle with these issues extend beyond education into the public sphere in general and specifically in the area of leadership and politics. The case material is used to understand Muslim strategies and responses to civilizational contact and conflict. Scholars, educated readers, and advanced undergraduates interested in Islam, religious education, the construction of religious identity in the context of national politics and globalization will find this work useful.Negotiating Tradition, Modernity, and Identity The 'House' That Change Built 'Politics' By Other Means: Using Education to Negotiate Change Beyond Education You Are Who You Follow: Negotiating Leadership and Community Identity A Peaceful Jihad in a Globalizing World References Cited

This is a thorough study of an important institution in a very interesting part of the Islamic world. On the basis of his careful anthropological investigation of three different pesantran (Islamic schools) in Java, focusing on their physical design, their curricula, and their leadership structures, Dr Lukens-Bull tells us a great deal about the education and 'formation' (in the traditional religious sense) of young Indonesian Muslims as they seek to construct their identity and negotiate their relationship with modernity. Issues such as consumerism and democracy are carefully discussed as illustrations of this process, and the Indonesian discussion is helpfully located within the wider Isll³*