The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern `Ulama’ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries by Ayzumardi Azra (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. 254 pages.)

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Timothy P. Daniels

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Abstract

This book, an extension of Azra’s doctoral dissertation, explores the transmission
of Islamic knowledge from the Middle East to the Malay-Indonesian
(Jawi) world. Making use of Arabic biographical dictionaries and scholarly
texts, he produces a historical account arguing that the region’s Islamic
renewal and reformism originated in crisscrossing networks of Islamic scholars
based in the Haramayn (Makkah and Madinah) during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Azra’s detailed historical research substantiates an
earlier intellectual transmission than previously thought. He contends that
the main ideas transmitted comprised a “neo-Sufism” characterized by harmonizing
the Shari`ah and tasawwuf (Sufism) and promoting a return to
orthodoxy, purification, and activism. He makes these arguments in an introduction,
seven chapters, and a brief epilogue ...

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