Description: Ummah Yet Proletariat explores how Islam and Marxism were both integral to Indonesian politics from the earliest days of the anticolonial movement to the imposition of the autocratic Soeharto regime in 1966. Lin Hongxuan demonstrates that many Indonesian Muslims adapted Marxist ideas, while many Indonesian Marxists found ways to square their Islamic identity with their political commitments. In doing so, he upends the conventional, state-driven narrative that Islam and Marxism are mutually exclusive and argues that these confluences were the product of Indonesian participation in broader networks of intellectual exchange across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Review Quotes: "This is one of the most important studies of Islam and Marxist thought published in the past few years--not just in Indonesia, but in scholarship on the entire Muslim-majority world. The book will achieve, I believe, a significant readership in Indonesian and Southeast Asian studies...[and also] among the much larger community of students and scholars interested in the turgid but fascinating history of Islam and Marxism in the modern Muslim world, an interest that is today growing. This book addresses timely issues-and does so with a wealth of documentation and a clarity of argument. In sum--this is an outstanding book." -- Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology, Boston University
"This book retrieves a history that is unimaginable in today's Indonesia--a history of Muslims seeing themselves as Marxists, of Marxists seeing themselves as Muslims, and all manner of Indonesian nationalists combining Islam and Communism in new and unexpected ways. Lin, with a comprehensive grasp of the print culture of the decades from the 1910s to the 1960s, vividly recreates a lost world whose sense of creativity still holds the promise of inspiring a different future for Indonesia." -- John Roosa, author of Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia"Ummah Yet Proletariat is a richly illuminating study of Indonesian societies in which Muslims reconciled Islam and Marxism theoretically and in their material lives. Lin Hongxuan meticulously analyses Indonesian-Malay materials and recounts much-needed histories of left-wing Islamic reform as well as Islamic and Marxist labour movements, print culture and parliamentary politics. Accessibly written, this book is a remarkable addition to the study of modern Indonesia and Islam, reminding us that Indonesia should be central to conversations regarding Asian Marxism and Islamic Third Worldism." -- Teren Sevea, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Harvard Divinity School"Ummah Yet Proletariat is undoubtedly an achievement in NEI/Indonesian intellectual history that succeeds in bringing previously disparate scholarship into direct conversation while also building upon them in novel and sophisticated ways. Lin's command of a half-century's worth of Indonesian print culture and rich archival materials from the Netherlands and the United States merits unequivocal praise. Ummah Yet Proletariat thus succeeds brilliantly in placing primacy on Indies/Indonesian actors' agency in their dialectical engagements with extant and global thought streams and situates them on a truly global stage where they have always belonged." -- Matthew Galway, Pacific Affairs