November 28th, 2008
Pesantren progressives defend constitutional religious freedoms
It is a sweaty April afternoon, and the community hall in Cangkol, a fishing community on the outskirts of Cirebon on Java’s north coast, is packed to the gills. People have come to see former first lady, Ibu Sinta Nuriyah Wahid. Ibu Sinta, the wife of former president Abdurrahman Wahid, is touring halls like this around the country ahead of next year’s election, listening to ordinary people talk about the problems they face in their everyday lives.
Today, however, there are some technical difficulties in hearing those voices. The sound system is playing up, and while technicians fiddle, the MC, a popular and charismatic young kyai, KH Maman Imanulhaq Fakieh, keeps the crowd entertained. The captive audience presents a perfect opportunity for him to push his favourite issue of the moment: freedom of religion, a hot topic in Indonesia thanks to recent attacks on Ahmadiyah mosques and calls to outlaw the sect.
‘Is Islam a religion of violence?’ he cries, raising his fist in the air. ‘No!’ The crowd, largely comprised of jilbab-wearing housewives, responds with enthusiasm. ‘Does Islam permit violence by anyone?’ ‘No!’ ‘Towards anyone?’ ‘No!’ ‘On any grounds?’ ‘No!’ ‘Do we want the government to uphold the rights guaranteed in the constitution?’ ‘Yes!’ Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Pesantren, Pluralism
Posted in Spiritualism | No Comments »
November 28th, 2008
Piety and consumption in popular Islam
By February 2008, the novel Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love) had been republished 30 times since its launch in December 2004. It has sold more than 400,000 legitimate copies and an unknown number of pirated ones. In 2005, The Muslim women’s weekly Muslimah chose it as Indonesia’s ‘Favourite Book’ of the year, defeating the latest Harry Potter volume by four votes. The movie bearing the same name hit the cinemas in March 2008. It beat many Hollywood movies at the box office, gaining an audience of more than 4 million people. A special viewing was organised for President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono and his family, who invited his cabinet ministers and members of the diplomatic community in Jakarta.
Politicians from Islamic parties and Muslim leaders of all leanings, members of various Islamic prayer groups, students belonging to various Islamic organisations and ordinary Muslim teenagers in urban areas have not escaped the Ayat-Ayat Cinta fever either. They have declared the film and the novel a must-see and must-read for Indonesian Muslims. It seems that if you haven’t read it, and if you didn’t cry when you saw the movie, then there must be something wrong with you as a Muslim. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Indonesian Literature, Islamic Fiction, Popular Literature
Posted in Indonesian Literature | No Comments »
October 28th, 2008
Indonesia is currently experiencing a movie phenomenon not seen since the theatre-filled days of Titanic, with locally-written and produced “Ayat-Ayat Cinta” set to eclipse the box office any day now, and in under a month.
Presenter: Adam Connors
Speakers: Dr Ariel Heryanto, Indonesia program convenor of the University of Melbourne; Amrih Widodo, Southeast Asia Centre of Australia National University; Professor Barbara Hatley, foundation professor of Indonesian at University of Tasmania. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Ayat-Ayat Cinta, Novel
Posted in Novel | No Comments »
October 24th, 2008
Louis Althusser 1970
“Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays
First published: in La Pensée, 1970;
Translated: from the French by Ben Brewster;
Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production[1]
I must now expose more fully something which was briefly glimpsed in my analysis when I spoke of the necessity to renew the means of production if production is to be possible. That was a passing hint. Now I shall consider it for itself.
As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year.[2] The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production. This may be ‘simple’ (reproducing exactly the previous conditions of production) or ‘on an extended scale’ (expanding them). Let us ignore this last distinction for the moment. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Ideology, Louis Althusser
Posted in European Author | No Comments »
October 24th, 2008
Penjaga malam itu datang tatkala rembulan
jatuh di pundak tembok temugelang.Aku pun bergegas masuk ke dalam mata
cincin di di jari manismu, nimas. Orang-orang pun ribut “Maling sakti,
maling sakti, di mana engkau sembunyi.”
Keraguan muncul menyelimuti kalbumu.”Lepas dan berikan buat
tumbal-pageblug negeri. Pipi ini lebih nikmat dielus telanjang jari.”
Aku pun bergegas sembunyi di ikat sanggul rambutmu.
Engkau pun berbisik, “Maling hati, maling hati, kepadamu selamanya aku
bakalan mengabdi.” Lalu sepi
Penjaga malam itu pergi tatkala rembulan jatuh
di pundak tembok temugelang. Aku pun bergegas
keluar dari persembunyian. “Surtikanti, Surtikanti,
lelaki sejati tak pernah cidra ing janji.” Lalu sepi
Pakembinagun, l989
About the author:
Suminto Ahmad Sayuti, the dean of faculty of culture and pedagogy, Yogyakarta State University.
This poem was published in a book entitled Malam Taman Sari, Suminto A. Sayuti, Cetakan I, 2000, Yayasan Untuk Indonesia.
Tags: Malam Taman Sari, Suminto A Sayuti
Posted in Indonesian Author, Poetry | No Comments »
October 15th, 2008
To be or not to eat a peach
Who the heck is J. Alfred Prufrock? The answer is: nobody important.
Which is itself important.
After you finish reading J. Alfred Prufrock’s “love song”, you may realize that the name means very little. Eliot could have called his narrator Joe Schmo, or Alfred E. Neuman for that matter. “Prufrock” is just something Eliot made up to go in the title. It has an civilized, slightly fussy ring to it, which fits the modernist imagery of the poem, and you can make what you will of plays upon “proof” and “rock”. But otherwise the character is meant to stand for anyone or everyone in these confusing times. Eliot makes no effort to develop a specific character for him. He’s a vehicle through which the poet can muse on whatever the poet wants to muse on.
So is J. Alfred Prufrock really T.S. Eliot? Yes and no. It’s like asking who Jude is in the Beatles song “Hey Jude”; apart from being some dude with the movement he needs on his shoulder, whatever that means, Jude is just a name applied to whatever Paul McCartney wants to sing about. (Yeah, I know the song’s supposed to be directed to Julian Lennon—but you’re missing the point that this doesn’t matter.) Prufrock is the name attached to the poem’s point of view. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: T.S. Eliot
Posted in English Literature, European Author, Poetry | No Comments »
October 15th, 2008
Only in Canada, you say? Pity
Write what you know, they tell beginning writers. And even veteran, successful authors tend to stick to this advice. Which is why we get so many novels about people trying to write novels. And which is one of the reasons why so many people are turned off serious modern writing. Too self-indulgently intellectual and irrelevant to most people’s lives.
Granted there are some very good and popular novels featuring writers. Works by several great authors come to mind. The thing is though that, while these may feature writers, they are not about the writers trying to write. Rather, writing just happens to be the profession of the characters who are engaged in more important issues of life.
This is happily the case with The Diviners. The protagonist Morag Gunn is obviously based on Margaret Laurence herself, being raised in a small Manitoba town, working on a local newspaper, marrying a professional man, separating, becoming a novelist, living for stretches in Vancouver and Britain. Many differences too however. In the final analysis it’s a work of imagination, as Morag deals with her scarring childhood, the men in her life, a footloose daughter, and her quest to discover where she belongs. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
Posted in American Author, Book Review, Novel | No Comments »
October 15th, 2008
COLLEGE BOOK ART ASSOCIATION BIENNIAL CONFERENCE
JANUARY 8-10, 2009
Hosted by the University of Iowa Center for the Book
Talks, artist presentations, exhibits, demos, professional development, and tours
KEYNOTES
* Randall McLeod, University of Toronto
* Tate Shaw, Visual Studies Workshop and Preacher’s Biscuit Books
The art of the book has been at once visionary and documentary, imagining a future that has yet to exist while finding inspiration from the resources of the past. Read the rest of this entry »
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October 15th, 2008
From childhood to his present age of 70, Saini KM has remained a modest figure despite his accomplishments.
Born in small Gending hamlet, Kota Kulon village, in the West Java town of Sumedang, Saini has contributed significantly to the country’s literary world, especially in West Java.
His modest personality and appreciation for his juniors has won him the admiration and respect of many.
“We should have mutual respect, including respect for each other’s professions. And we should be serious in life with occasional humor,” Saini said with a smile.
The prolific writer of poems, essays, plays and non-fiction works for 50 years has acted as mentor for more than a dozen younger poets like Acep Zamzam Noor, Beni Setia, Juniarso Ridwan, Deden Abdul Azis, Nirwan Dewanto and many more. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Saini KM
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October 15th, 2008
Our previous studies of Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, commonly known as the Shaykh al-Ishraq, have put us in a position to appreciate the full importance of his work. In an imaginary topography, this work is situated at a crossroads. Al-Suhrawardi died just seven years before Averroes. At that moment, therefore, in western Islam, ‘Arab Peripateticism’ was finding its ultimate expression in the work of Averroes, so much so that western historians, mistakenly confusing Averroes’ Peripateticism with philosophy pure and simple, have overlong persisted in maintaining that philosophy in Islam culminated in Averroes. Yet at the same time in the East, and particularly in Iran, the work of al-Suhrawardi was opening up the road which so many thinkers and spiritual seekers were to follow down to our own days. It has already been suggested that the reasons for the failure and disappearance of ‘Latin Avicennism’ were in fact the same as those which lay behind the persistence of Avicennism in Iran; but from the background of this Avicennism the work of al-Suhrawardi, in one way or another, was never absent. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Suhrawardi
Posted in Philosopher | No Comments »