Review

Reviewed Work(s): What is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in

Indonesia by Ismail Fajrie Alatas
Review by: Haryanto
Source: Contemporary Southeast Asia , August 2022, Vol. 44, No. 2, Special Issue: Southeast
Asia in Global IR: A Reflexive Stocktaking in Research and Teaching (August 2022), pp.
342-344
Published by: ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27206622

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 Contemporary Southeast Asia Vol. 44, No. 2 (2022), pp. 342–344 DOI: 10.1355/cs44-2k
© 2022 ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute ISSN 0129-797X print / ISSN 1793-284X electronic

What is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in

Indonesia. By Ismail Fajrie Alatas. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2021. Softcover: 268pp.

Throughout history, Islamic communities grew and developed along

diverse trajectories. While some prospered, others withered. Some
theorists hold that religious authority plays an important role in
the sustenance of Islamic societies. However, within these societies
there are varying levels of acceptance towards religious authorities,
and this can determine whether Islamic communities expand or
diminish. Ismail Fajrie Alatas’ book, What is Religious Authority?:
Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia, provides a fresh
perspective on how religious authority is created and maintained
in Islamic societies.
The book is based on the author’s research into the historical
and cultural practices of Islamic community leaders in Java, who
sought to align community interests with the teachings of the
Prophet Muhammad so that the former could serve as sites for the
transmission and social realization of the latter (p. 210). The main
focus is on a Sufi leader of Arab descent from Hadramawt (Yemen),
Habib Luthfi (b. 1947), who is still influential in Muslim communities
in Indonesia today. Following Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy,
Alatas explains that a hierarchical master-disciple relationship in
the Muslim community works to stabilize, centralize and expand
religious communities (p. 136).
The author believes that contemporary Islamic societies across
the world have experienced alienation from the prophet’s life (sunna)
in terms of role models as devout Muslims. Therefore, religious
community leaders had to work hard to connect, reconstruct, select
and represent the prophetic past as a model of action for their
communities. The work carried out by religious community leaders
has produced authoritative teachings and practices adapted to the
context of specific communities—translating sunna practices into
local practices. According to Alatas, lasting Islamic communities are
built on efforts to construct cultural and political institutions that
establish religious authority, or what he calls “articulatory labour”:
the labour of articulating the sunna and the community (p. 18).
Alatas emphasizes that articulatory labour must adapt to the culture
in which the community is located. To support this argument,
the book is divided into two parts: “authority in motion”, which
consists of three chapters, and “assembling authority” in the next

342

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 Book Reviews 343

four chapters. In these two parts, Alatas lays out chronologically how
religious authority emerged, spread, changed, competed, dwindled
and finally re-emerged under the process of articulatory labour in
Indonesian Muslim communities.
In “authority in motion”, the author outlines the history of
articulatory labour in Java and Hadramawt. Chapter One recounts
the Javanese kingdom era, and the historical accounts of how figures
of saints (Walisongo) and local leaders (Pangeran Diponegoro)
transmitted sunna to build Muslim communities in the perdikan
(free villages) and keraton (royal court). Elsewhere in Hadramawt,
Sufi scholars built Muslim communities through tar¯qa (path of
spiritual wayfaring) and hawt.a (sacred sanctuary). In both Java
and Hadramawt, religious authority had to be built in conjunction
with local culture and interests while establishing themselves as
links to the Prophet’s past. In Chapter Two, Alatas explains how
articulating texts originating from the Prophet, such as the creedal
texts—abridged legal manuals and litanies—served as a form of
authority infrastructure in these communities. Alatas’ focus on text
articulation explains the Haddādian mode of articulatory labour,
which is based on a Sufism paradigm pioneered by Abdallāh
b. Alaw al-H·addād (d. 1720) from Hadramawt, and how it spread to
Indonesia. The first part of the book then closes with a discussion
of the transformation of Muslim communities in Java as a result of
new modes of articulation such as reformist and modernist ideas
regarding Islam.
The second part of the book explains how Habib Luthfi cultivated
religious authority in Java. Chapter Four begins by recounting the
biography of Habib Luthfi and explains how an aspiring scholar
assumed a position of authority by tapping into different genealogies
and networks of Islamic transmission (p. 110). Chapter Five deals with
the social institutions that Habib Luthfi built to establish authority
and develop a durable community. Specifically, the hierarchical
master-disciple relationship in the tar¯qa community, where Habib
Luthfi served as a murshid (a spiritual mentor or Sufi master), made
religious authority easy to cultivate. The subsequent discussion in
Chapter Six describes Habib Luthfi’s relationship with various state
actors and institutions in Indonesia. Having close relationships with
various political actors, such as presidents, military generals and
district heads, Habib Luthfi enjoyed state protection, which helped
him fend off challenges to his authority and expand the community.
The central concept, articulatory labour, is again used in this chapter
to explain how the state can be used as a framework for religious

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 344 Book Reviews

authority (p. 164). The final chapter describes Habib Luthfi’s efforts
to strengthen his authority through the hagiographic composition
of saintly talk (like sermons), texts (like litanies) and tombs (as
sacred sanctuaries). Through this hagiographic composition, Habib
Luthfi was able to project himself as a new saint and local leader.
Overall, Alatas’ work provides rich insights for readers who wish
to gain a better understanding of comparative Islamic authority. The
author’s success in blending historical, anthropological and political
analyses together makes this book a worthwhile read and a useful
source of reference for scholars interested in Islam in Indonesia.
Through this book, we discover that there is not one global Islamic
community but that there have always been many communities,
each revolving around different articulations in various places and
at various times.

H aryanto is a lecturer at the Department of Political Science,

Hasanuddin University in Makassar, Indonesia. Postal address: Jalan
Perintis Kemerdekaan KM. 10, Kota Makassar, Sulawesi Selatan,
Indonesia 90245; email: harymusi@unhas.ac.id.

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