In the last chapter of What is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia, Ismail Fajrie Alatas recounts the story of how, sometime in 2015, the sultan of Yogyakarta Hamengku Buwono X issued a decree to eliminate the title of caliph from the list of his royal determinants and then proceeded to nominate his daughter as his heir apparent. The move was heavily criticized by Muslim scholars and organizations and brought to an end, among other things, one chain of interactions described by Alatas in a previous chapter—that is, the attempt by the great Sufi master Habib Luthfi Bin Yahya “to realign the royal and the saintly” through a renewed alliance with the kraton (“the palace,” a word intended to indicate political power). Alatas takes the sultan’s story as paradigmatic of the fact that “any form of articulatory labor can fail” (210) and that maintaining social and cultural structures is an inherently local and demanding task. Widening the scope of his observations, the author summarizes the main claim of his fine book as follows: “As a sociological reality, Islam is an outcome of a historically and culturally situated articulatory practice that seeks to align a cultivated community to the normative teachings of the Prophet Muhammad so that the former can serve as the site for the transmission and social realization of the latter” (210).
While other reviewers have underlined Alatas’ engagement with Hannah Arendt’s work on authority, I see the book as profoundly Latourian—up to the point that it could just as well be titled Islam in Action. Bruno Latour elaborated on the actor-network theory (ANT) paradigm to observe socio-historical phenomena in the making—focusing on how they are combined, assembled, and put together via the labor of different networked actors in ever-changing situational contexs. One key tenet of ANT is that the social is “flat” and should be considered and described as a network of nodes of varying entity, dimension, expertise, power, and ability to understand and act upon the environment. According to Latour, a crucial step of any sociological analysis consists in locating the mediators who (and that) assemble and translate existing elements—some of which originated in far-off times and places—to forge previously unseen social connections and, at the same time, remake the elements themselves.
What Alatas presents in this work is precisely a set of historical (part 1) and ethnographic (part 2) studies in association and translation. The book is built on a simple but effective claim: There exists nothing like a pristine “universalized and acultural Islam” (9) that was then diffused, implanted, changed, or hybridized in specific locales. This volume, Alatas writes, “demonstrates how Islam does not simply radiate from the ‘central lands,’ but instead is perpetually formed in between heterogeneous cultures” (6) as particular sets of answers given to a general problem-space, that of connecting contemporary life with its prophetic past (19). In this regard, one of the best features of What is Religious Authority? is its agnosticism regarding what counts as an analytic element: (sacred) texts are just one of the components of the assemblages described by Alatas, and seldom the most important.
To reconstruct how communities are created by religious leaders around the sunna (traditions and practices), the umma (community), a Sufi master, a tariqa (Sufi religious order), or any other component of the Islamic religion, is to suspend judgment as to which elements and which configurations count as “sunna” (or “umma” or “tariqa” etc.) in different times and places. Since everything is local, it is impossible to disentangle or distill any authentic version of a phenomenon (in this case, “Islam”) and then look at the different ways in which it gets “modified,” “enriched” or “distorted” in local situations. This is why speaking of syncretism remains too connected to a view of religious (and cultural) traditions as more or less “authentic”—one in which tradition X is deemed to be a mixture of tradition Y and tradition Z, which are first conceptualized or modelized as pure products (11). Abandoning this vocabulary allows scholars to approach their objects as contingent, temporary, never to be taken for granted. In both sections of the book, Alatas shows the busily mediated weldings between different locales, some of which are thousands of kilometers and centuries away from where the action is, and the alternative ways of claiming authority—blood genealogies, adoptive relationships, organizational forms or Sufi orders, to name a few—emerging from these assemblages.
While he does not theorize it, Alatas’ theoretical and methodological stance is highly consistent with Latour’s dictum that any language of “levels” or “layers” should be abandoned in favor of “flattening the social.” For example, chapters 6 and 7, focus respectively on Habib Luthfi’s articulation labor with political actors and his work to construct convincing, practically operative genealogies to legitimate himself and his various religious and mundane enterprises. In both cases, the elements Alatas assembles are heterogeneous and irreducible: texts, books, norms, mausoleums, interpretations, plots of land, political relations, acts of grace, envelopes full of money, property rights, state officials, construction permits, and so on. What counts is the “perpetual reproduction of the combinations through various articulatory models” (23), where no individual or collective actor possesses either a panoramic view of the situation or a permanent primacy.
Alatas’ general insight might be extended to any societal and cultural configuration. This makes his monograph relevant well beyond the boundaries of the study of Javanese or Indonesian Islam, and, in fact, beyond the study of Islam or religion in general. And still, the theoretically oriented reader would have enjoyed more examples of contingency, more examples of failed alignments, more examples of situational emergence of unexpected outcomes, more examples of the sheer fragility of once-solid assemblages, and a bit more of micro-historical comparison and explanation. But saying this is not to detract from this layered, important book, which might be read from many different points of view across disciplines and research interests, and whose usage on the part of other scholars depends only on the latter’s creativity and ability to forge new assemblages.
Matteo Bortolini is an associate professor in sociology at the University of Padova, Italy.
Matteo Bortolini
Date Of Review:
October 12, 2024
