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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Theologies of Remembering reveals how Indonesia's two largest Muslim groups, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah—self-identifying as respectively traditionalist and modernist—actively engage memory as a framework for theological thought and practice. By reimagining their pasts to respond to new contexts, they articulate what it means to be a traditionalist or a modernist in the present and imagine possibilities for the future. Verena Meyer draws on interviews with group members, Islamic intellectual and narrative traditions, and critical theory to show that processes of remembering facilitate manifestations of the divine that destabilize binaries between the historical and transhistorical as well as linear understandings of temporality. Observing how constructions of the past are called into the service of sometimes conflicting demands, she argues against the pervasive idea that Islamic modernities have lost their tolerance for ambiguity and paradox. Tensions among incommensurable memories are generative for articulating elusive theological insights and complex positionalities among both traditionalists and modernists, prompting us to rethink these familiar distinctions in modern identity politics.
“Through close analysis of two of the most energetic Islamic organizations of the 20th century, Theologies of Remembering movingly and brilliantly expands the scholarship on modernity beyond questions of secularism. Verena Meyer demonstrates how theological care for one’s ancestors, the nation, and the divine are fundamentally modes of caring for the past and the future.”—Carla Jones, Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
“An innovative contribution to Islamic studies that rethinks memory, history, and identity in modern Islam. Centering Indonesia, the book offers a fresh perspective on ambiguity, moderation, and transcendence, with implications far beyond its regional focus.”—Muhamad Ali, Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside
“An inspired study of how histories are produced and experienced by subjects associated with the two major ‘moderate’ Islamic organizations in today’s Indonesia—one ‘modernist,’ the other ‘traditional’—exploring how those subjects differently and actively remember their pasts in order to shape divergent presents and futures. Examining the contemporary politics of memory practiced by Javanese Muslim institutions and individuals in the Javanese heartland city of Yogyakarta at a time when the twin forces of global modernity and illiberal Islam seem ascendant, Meyer is particularly attentive to the ways in which ambiguity and paradox (and sometimes the miraculous) provide openings to alternative possibilities in the lived and inscribed histories of these Javanese Muslims.”—Nancy Florida, Professor Emerita, University of Michigan