Indonesian Islam - TEXT PAGES 15/7/03 3:14 PM Page 5
INTRODUCTION
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Islam but it also had some pretension to influencing the wider educated Muslim audience. A useful early summary in English for the years 1933–47 is that written by Dr W. Cantwell Smith.14 This concentrates on the first two founding editors of the Majallat, who are used as exemplars of ‘ulåmå’ response to the intellectual demands of the immediate pre- and postwar period. This is actually quite an interesting approach, because it tells us as much about the psychology of the author as about the two editors. The first is al-Khi∂r Husayn (1930–32), who is described as ‘. . . an idealist . . . the nobility of [whose] position is clear . . .’. The reference to ‘idealist’ appears to be a reference to two things. First, to a position in metaphysics. Second, to a position in ethics/morality where the ‘ulåmå’ responsibility is confined to instructions and example. The moral imperative, once known, will inevitably determine the nature of men and society. Revelation is thus primary. Thus ‘. . . man must strive to make real society approximate more closely to the ideal [of Islam]’.15 The only real function of any history of Islam is to provide moral examples. This reading of alKhi∂r Husayn has an attractive simplicity for us 40 years later, but it can hardly be totally accurate. The same is true of Professor Smith’s account of the Majallat’s second editor, Moh. Far•d Wajd• (1932/3–1952), whom he dismisses at the outset as ‘vacuous’. In its own way this is just as misleading as uncritical admiration. It appears to rest on the fact that Wajd• was not an ‘idealist’ but a man of compromise, for whom Islam was only ‘a heritage, a society, an historical reality’ which had to be defended. It is difficult for us today to understand why Dr Smith was so wholly condemnatory. After all, the excellence and superiority of Islam always remains the given proposition. On the other hand perhaps, it is not always clear in Wajd• whether the excellence is in Revelation or history or culture. Materialism (or, better now, secularism) was rightly seen by him to be the great enemy of Islam as of all religions. Perhaps Wajd• went too far in his direct engagement with Western thought on the terms of that thought, even though his motives for doing so were of the highest (see below for later examples). There is no justification for a Western author to be patronising about this, given the circumstances of the time. But the habit is hard to break and it is not helped by ill-informed comment from contemporary Muslim authors. For example, ‘science’ was and is often invoked to demonstrate the truth of Revelation (chapter 4). This is not only an acceptance of Western criteria: it amounts also to diminishing Revelation itself. For many Western observers such a response gives the impression that Islamic thought is confused, not to say incoherent. This is certainly the view of Dr Lazarus-Yafeh, whose analysis16 of material from the Majallat Al-Azhar spans the years 1963–68.These were years of fundamental change for Al-Azhar: in 1961, the law of that year subjected the university to state control (below) and it became, in effect, a state university with faculties of secular studies. The new law also