(Re) Writing the History of Political Islam in Indonesia

SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 30, No. 1 (2015), pp. 105–40 DOI: 10.1355/sj30-1d © 2015 ISEAS ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic (Re) Writing the History of Political Islam in Indonesia Chiara Formichi The impact of Reformasi on Indonesia has extended beyond the realms of politics and economics, also leading to changing understandings of history. For example, the institutional and popular approaches to the Darul Islam movement (1947–65) and its leader Kartosuwiryo have shifted in Indonesian publications released between the 1940s and the 2010s. These approaches place varying degrees of emphasis on their rebellious or Islamic character. A trajectory from condemnation to glorification illustrates that, whilst formal political transitions are useful to gauge historiographical shifts, in the case at hand there is more continuity than change across regimes, and much nuanced variation within each politically defined era. Revisionism has also appeared in Indonesian military historiography. Keywords: Indonesia, Islam, Kartosuwiryo, Darul Islam, historiography, revisionism, official history. Kartosuwiryo (1905–62) was a prominent leader in the religiousnationalist wing of the Indonesian anti-colonial movement throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the founder of the Darul Islam (DI, “Abode of Islam”) movement in the late 1940s. Emerging as a structured organization at the apex of the independence struggle, DI opposed the post-war Dutch reoccupation of the archipelago. But, as it fought on a religious-political platform, it soon entered into conflict with the new Indonesian republic. Scholars (Formichi 2012; Solahudin 2011; Temby 2010)1 and observers (ICG 2005) alike have recently argued for Kartosuwiryo’s centrality to political Islam in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indonesia; it is thus on these 04...