Two founders, one Yogyakarta neighbourhood, and a label that does not fit

Two boys were born in the same Yogyakarta neighbourhood, within two years of each other. One went on to found Muhammadiyah in 1912, the movement usually labelled modernist. The other founded Pesantren Krapyak, a cornerstone of the traditionalist world of Nahdlatul Ulama. Verena Meyer did her fieldwork in that same neighbourhood, a set of narrow alleys beside the Kraton where motorbikes are not allowed, listening to how members of each movement tell the story of their own founder. Her book, Theologies of Remembering, came out this year with University of California Press, and she talks through the research on the Talking Indonesia podcast, published by Indonesia at Melbourne.

The standard division runs like this: modernists broke with the past and prize clarity and progress, while traditionalists keep the chain of teachers and are at ease with paradox. Meyer says the stories she collected do not sort that neatly. Members of both movements told her layered, ambiguous accounts of their founders, and both put that ambiguity to use. She and host Tito Ambyo also discuss the Orientalism sitting inside the division itself, the old habit of sorting someone else's religion into a forward-looking kind and a backward-looking kind. Her sources are not only interviews. She reads the written tradition in Javanese, Malay and Arabic.

The labels travel much further than the research does. Modernist and traditionalist are the two boxes foreign writers reach for when they need one sentence about Indonesian Islam, and Indonesian commentators use them too, in election coverage and in arguments about who speaks for whom. Meyer's point is not that the two movements are the same. It is that their members think in more than one register at once, and the shorthand hides it.

Why it matters

If you read foreign coverage of Indonesian religion, this is a reason to slow down at the word traditionalist. Guesses about how tens of millions of people will vote or react often rest on this two-camp shorthand, and the people inside those camps do not tell their own story that way. It is also a rare case of outside scholarship making Indonesian religious life more complicated rather than simpler, which is usually the sign it has got closer to the thing itself.