I F Alatas
Biographic Data
| ID | 24810 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I F Alatas |
| GIVEN NAMES | I F |
| FAMILY NAME | Alatas |
| SIGNATURE | ALATAS I F |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9344-668X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Not Quite a Prophet Facing Backward: On History as Extension of Prophecy
This essay develops the concept of history‐as‐extension‐of‐prophecy , a mode of historiographical reasoning that unsettles the dominant modern opposition between tradition as temporal continuity and revolution as temporal rupture. Through a close reading of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh al‐Saqqāf's (1882–1950) Tārikh Sulṭanat Bāntan al‐Islamiyya , a mid‐twentieth‐century Arabic history of the Islamic Sultanate of Banten (West Java), I show how prophetic tem…
Islam, Ambiguity, and (In)Tolerance: Perspectives from Southeast Asia
This introductory article builds on recent historical and anthropological scholarship that highlights the centrality of ambiguity in Islam and how Muslims navigate their religious life. It brings together insights from the anthropology of Islam and Islamic Studies, as well as classic work on Southeast-Asian cosmologies and concepts of power, to develop new insights into Islam’s possible relations to ambiguity and tolerance. Extending this inquiry…
Familiar outsider: Arab encounters perspective in colonial Malay-Indonesian Archipelago
Voicing God's presence: Qurʾānic recitation, Sufi ontologies, and the theatro-graphic experience
This article examines Qurʾānic recitation as a modality of divine presence among Bā ʿAlawī Sufis in Tarīm (Yemen) and Jakarta (Indonesia). It engages with Sufi ontologies that have shaped Bā ʿAlawīs’ understanding of Qurʾānic recitation as capable of engendering a theatro-graphic experience of divine presence marked at once by scriptural distance and stability, and theatrical immediacy and instability. The article complicates some of the basic pr…
Continuity and Change in Islamic Religious Authority
This article aims to elaborate on the debate surrounding continuity and change in Islamic religious authority. The discussion begins by establishing a framework for understanding the analytical definition of authority before delving into the dimensions that experience continuity and change. Arendt defines authority as a relationship, signifying a connection to a specific discursive tradition, knowledge, and history. Additionally, it involves a re…
In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East, By Aaron Rock-Singer
Journal Article In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East, By Aaron Rock-Singer Get access In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East By Aaron Rock-Singer University of California Press, 2022. 278 pages. $95.00 (hardcover), $34.95 (paperback or e-book). Ismail Fajrie Alatas Ismail Fajrie Alatas New York University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford A…
Rethinking Diasporic Returns: Ḥaḍramī Trajectories in Indonesia’s Religio-political Field
This article calls for a rethinking of the concept of diasporic return in light of contemporary religious and political developments in Indonesia. It does so by exploring two modalities of diasporic returns, namely, re-embedding and re-encountering, neither of which necessarily involve transnational travel or any notion of an ancestral homeland, but both of which are nevertheless important to the process of diasporization. Based on ethnographic o…
What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia
Digital Theology: Saintly Marvels and God‐talk on Facebook
Among Indonesia's traditionalist Muslims, anecdotes of saintly marvels ( karāma ) relating occurrences that contradict reason or human understanding of nature are lodged in everyday conversations. While scholars have noted how recounting and listening to karāma anecdotes is believed by Muslims to transmit the blessing (baraka) of the saints and facilitate their intercession, this article explores such anecdotes' capacity to engender conversations…
What Is Religious Authority: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia
Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, this book traces the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia and looks at how they traversed complex cultural settings while opening new channels for the transmission of Islamic teachings. The book describes the rise to prominence of Indonesia's leading Sufi master, Habib Luthfi, and his rivalries with competing religious leaders, revealing why some Muslim voices become …
What Is Religious Authority: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia
An anthropologist's groundbreaking account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building on the island of JavaThis compelling book draws on Ismail Fajrie Alatas's unique insights as an anthropologist to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim commu…
On the State of the Shari'a
From ʿAlid Treatise to anti-Shiʿi Text: The Riṣāla fī ibṭāl bidaʿ munkarāt of ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar Bin Yaḥyā (d. 1265/1849) and its Afterlife in Indonesia
This article examines a little-known treatise on the commemoration of ʿĀshūrāʾ (the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad) written by a scholar from the Ḥaḍramawt, ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar Bin Yaḥyā (d. 1265/1849). Entitled Risāla fī ibṭāl bidaʿ munkarāt (Treatise on Nullifying Reprehensible Innovations), the text was composed in response to the ʿĀshūrāʾ commemorative processions introduced by South Asian Muslims in early ninetee…
Dreaming saints: Exploratory authority and Islamic praxes of history in Central Java
This article examines dreaming as an Islamic practice of historical inquiry among traditionalist Muslims of Central Java, Indonesia. Combining insights from the anthropologies of Islam and history, it looks at alternative praxes of history, how they are interpreted through Islamic frameworks, and how they generate forms of religious authority. The article follows the work of a Sufi master, Habib Luthfi bin Yahya, in identifying old unmarked grave…
The Pangeran and the saints: The historical inflection of a mid 19th-century Ḥaḍramī mausoleum in East Java, Indonesia
This article charts the history of a mid 19th-century Ḥaḍramī mausoleum in Surabaya, East Java. Officially known as the mausoleum of the Ḥaḍramī saints Muḥammad b. ʿAydarūs al-Ḥabashī (d.1919) and Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Miḥḍār (d.1926), the site has been a popular destination of Indonesian Muslim pilgrims. A close inspection of the inscriptions on the other tombstones in the mausoleum, however, reveals that the edifice was actually built in honour …
The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Assembling Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt, Yemen
This article investigates the socio-discursive processes that have enabled the emergence and maintenance of pilgrimage practice by examining the rising popularity of the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Yemen as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims. Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt mainly revolves around visiting the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī (a group of Ḥaḍramīs who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muḥammad) Sufi saints and scholars scattered around…
Momok Ketimpangan: Waktu, Sejarah, Antropologi & Modernitas
This article critically observes the modern regime of time that led to the temporalizing of history. The employment of the master category of singular modernity encompasses its capacity for unifying all singularities, hence, betraying capitalism's and nation states' desire to transform plural histories into a single one. Anthropology too has been responsible for the production and maintenance of the temporal order of modernity. While capitalist a…
Land of the Sacred, Land of the Damned: Conceptualizing Homeland among the Upholders of the Thariqah ‘Alawiyyah in Indonesia
Tulisan ini mengkaji rihlah (catatan perjalanan) dalam tradisi Thariqah Alawiyyah dalam kaitannya dengan kisah migrasi kaum Hadrami di Indonesia. Bagian pertama tulisan ini mengenai ajaran-ajaran Thariqah tentang migrasi. Bagian kedua membahas pembentukan identitas dan konseptualisasi tentang "kampung halaman" di kalangan pengikut Thariqah pada masa kolonial. Bagian terakhir menyoroti rihlah sebagai sebuah sumber bagi penelusuran konseptualisasi …
Pilgrimage and Network Formation in Two Contemporary B Alaw Hawl in Central Java
This article examines the Bā ʿAlawī—a group of Ḥaḍramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of the Prophet—in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it looks at the ḥawl, an annual commemoration of, or collective pilgrimage to, the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī saints/scholars. Focusing on two contemporary ḥawls in Central Java—that of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1346/1927) in Pekalongan, and that of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ḥabashī (d. 1330/1912) in S…
Becoming Indonesians: The Bā 'Alawī in the Interstices of the Nation
This paper examines the Bā' Alawī-a group of Hadramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of Prophet Muhammad-in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it observes the Bā 'Alawī scholars' creative adaptation and manipulation of their Sufi path, tarīqa 'alawiyya, in their attempt to secure their place within the wider imagination of Indonesian nationhood while protecting their distinctive genealogical eminence. In the twentieth century the ta…
The Upsurge of Memory in the Case of Haul: A Problem of Islamic Historiography in Indonesia
This essay investigates the reasons behind the proliferation of haul celebrations in Indonesia. The study focuses on the construction of haul as a ritual forging collective memory among a particular group of people in the Muslim community. The writer adopts Pierre Nora’s theory of the upsurge of memory which is caused by the acceleration and democratization of history. These two factors bring about the construction of an object which forms the pa…
Circumlocutory Imperialism: Watan in the Thoughts of Syed Shaykh bin Ahmad al-Hady
This article seeks to examine such transition. Specifically, it focuses on the concept of watan(Ar. Watan or homeland) in the view of an early 20th century Muslim modernist, Syed Shaikh bin Ahmad al-Hady. Watan - as proclaimed by al-Hady - had a modern and secular connotation, posing a challenge to the prevalent worldview of the Malays and kerajaan(kingdom). The conceptualization of watan was new for most Malays. Identity was constructed predomin…
Disrupting Spatiality and Temporality: Authority and Statecraft in Hikayat Mareskalek
While this essay shares Stoler's analytical approach of literature, it does not focus on the politics of a?ect. Rather, this essay examines an early nineteenth century literary production, the Hikayat Mareskalek, in an attempt to question various assumptions in contemporary works on the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. The first is the perceived geography of culture that is divided over what is considered 'Malay' and what 'Javanese.' The second is a…
Dreaming saints: Exploratory authority and Islamic praxes of history in Central Java
This article examines dreaming as an Islamic practice of historical inquiry among traditionalist Muslims of Central Java, Indonesia. Combining insights from the anthropologies of Islam and history, it looks at alternative praxes of history, how they are interpreted through Islamic frameworks, and how they generate forms of religious authority. The article follows the work of a Sufi master, Habib Luthfi bin Yahya, in identifying old unmarked grave…
Pilgrimage and Network Formation in Two Contemporary B Alaw Hawl in Central Java
This article examines the Bā ʿAlawī—a group of Ḥaḍramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of the Prophet—in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it looks at the ḥawl, an annual commemoration of, or collective pilgrimage to, the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī saints/scholars. Focusing on two contemporary ḥawls in Central Java—that of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1346/1927) in Pekalongan, and that of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ḥabashī (d. 1330/1912) in S…
Becoming Indonesians: The Bā 'Alawī in the Interstices of the Nation
This paper examines the Bā' Alawī-a group of Hadramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of Prophet Muhammad-in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it observes the Bā 'Alawī scholars' creative adaptation and manipulation of their Sufi path, tarīqa 'alawiyya, in their attempt to secure their place within the wider imagination of Indonesian nationhood while protecting their distinctive genealogical eminence. In the twentieth century the ta…
Rethinking Diasporic Returns: Ḥaḍramī Trajectories in Indonesia’s Religio-political Field
This article calls for a rethinking of the concept of diasporic return in light of contemporary religious and political developments in Indonesia. It does so by exploring two modalities of diasporic returns, namely, re-embedding and re-encountering, neither of which necessarily involve transnational travel or any notion of an ancestral homeland, but both of which are nevertheless important to the process of diasporization. Based on ethnographic o…
The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Assembling Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt, Yemen
This article investigates the socio-discursive processes that have enabled the emergence and maintenance of pilgrimage practice by examining the rising popularity of the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Yemen as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims. Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt mainly revolves around visiting the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī (a group of Ḥaḍramīs who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muḥammad) Sufi saints and scholars scattered around…
Circumlocutory Imperialism: Watan in the Thoughts of Syed Shaykh bin Ahmad al-Hady
This article seeks to examine such transition. Specifically, it focuses on the concept of watan(Ar. Watan or homeland) in the view of an early 20th century Muslim modernist, Syed Shaikh bin Ahmad al-Hady. Watan - as proclaimed by al-Hady - had a modern and secular connotation, posing a challenge to the prevalent worldview of the Malays and kerajaan(kingdom). The conceptualization of watan was new for most Malays. Identity was constructed predomin…
Disrupting Spatiality and Temporality: Authority and Statecraft in Hikayat Mareskalek
While this essay shares Stoler's analytical approach of literature, it does not focus on the politics of a?ect. Rather, this essay examines an early nineteenth century literary production, the Hikayat Mareskalek, in an attempt to question various assumptions in contemporary works on the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. The first is the perceived geography of culture that is divided over what is considered 'Malay' and what 'Javanese.' The second is a…
The Upsurge of Memory in the Case of Haul: A Problem of Islamic Historiography in Indonesia
This essay investigates the reasons behind the proliferation of haul celebrations in Indonesia. The study focuses on the construction of haul as a ritual forging collective memory among a particular group of people in the Muslim community. The writer adopts Pierre Nora’s theory of the upsurge of memory which is caused by the acceleration and democratization of history. These two factors bring about the construction of an object which forms the pa…
Becoming Indonesians: The Bā 'Alawī in the Interstices of the Nation
This paper examines the Bā' Alawī-a group of Hadramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of Prophet Muhammad-in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it observes the Bā 'Alawī scholars' creative adaptation and manipulation of their Sufi path, tarīqa 'alawiyya, in their attempt to secure their place within the wider imagination of Indonesian nationhood while protecting their distinctive genealogical eminence. In the twentieth century the ta…
Momok Ketimpangan: Waktu, Sejarah, Antropologi & Modernitas
This article critically observes the modern regime of time that led to the temporalizing of history. The employment of the master category of singular modernity encompasses its capacity for unifying all singularities, hence, betraying capitalism's and nation states' desire to transform plural histories into a single one. Anthropology too has been responsible for the production and maintenance of the temporal order of modernity. While capitalist a…
Land of the Sacred, Land of the Damned: Conceptualizing Homeland among the Upholders of the Thariqah ‘Alawiyyah in Indonesia
Tulisan ini mengkaji rihlah (catatan perjalanan) dalam tradisi Thariqah Alawiyyah dalam kaitannya dengan kisah migrasi kaum Hadrami di Indonesia. Bagian pertama tulisan ini mengenai ajaran-ajaran Thariqah tentang migrasi. Bagian kedua membahas pembentukan identitas dan konseptualisasi tentang "kampung halaman" di kalangan pengikut Thariqah pada masa kolonial. Bagian terakhir menyoroti rihlah sebagai sebuah sumber bagi penelusuran konseptualisasi …
Pilgrimage and Network Formation in Two Contemporary B Alaw Hawl in Central Java
This article examines the Bā ʿAlawī—a group of Ḥaḍramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of the Prophet—in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it looks at the ḥawl, an annual commemoration of, or collective pilgrimage to, the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī saints/scholars. Focusing on two contemporary ḥawls in Central Java—that of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1346/1927) in Pekalongan, and that of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ḥabashī (d. 1330/1912) in S…
The Pangeran and the saints: The historical inflection of a mid 19th-century Ḥaḍramī mausoleum in East Java, Indonesia
This article charts the history of a mid 19th-century Ḥaḍramī mausoleum in Surabaya, East Java. Officially known as the mausoleum of the Ḥaḍramī saints Muḥammad b. ʿAydarūs al-Ḥabashī (d.1919) and Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Miḥḍār (d.1926), the site has been a popular destination of Indonesian Muslim pilgrims. A close inspection of the inscriptions on the other tombstones in the mausoleum, however, reveals that the edifice was actually built in honour …
The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Assembling Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt, Yemen
This article investigates the socio-discursive processes that have enabled the emergence and maintenance of pilgrimage practice by examining the rising popularity of the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Yemen as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims. Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt mainly revolves around visiting the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī (a group of Ḥaḍramīs who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muḥammad) Sufi saints and scholars scattered around…
From ʿAlid Treatise to anti-Shiʿi Text: The Riṣāla fī ibṭāl bidaʿ munkarāt of ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar Bin Yaḥyā (d. 1265/1849) and its Afterlife in Indonesia
This article examines a little-known treatise on the commemoration of ʿĀshūrāʾ (the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad) written by a scholar from the Ḥaḍramawt, ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar Bin Yaḥyā (d. 1265/1849). Entitled Risāla fī ibṭāl bidaʿ munkarāt (Treatise on Nullifying Reprehensible Innovations), the text was composed in response to the ʿĀshūrāʾ commemorative processions introduced by South Asian Muslims in early ninetee…
Dreaming saints: Exploratory authority and Islamic praxes of history in Central Java
This article examines dreaming as an Islamic practice of historical inquiry among traditionalist Muslims of Central Java, Indonesia. Combining insights from the anthropologies of Islam and history, it looks at alternative praxes of history, how they are interpreted through Islamic frameworks, and how they generate forms of religious authority. The article follows the work of a Sufi master, Habib Luthfi bin Yahya, in identifying old unmarked grave…
What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia
Digital Theology: Saintly Marvels and God‐talk on Facebook
Among Indonesia's traditionalist Muslims, anecdotes of saintly marvels ( karāma ) relating occurrences that contradict reason or human understanding of nature are lodged in everyday conversations. While scholars have noted how recounting and listening to karāma anecdotes is believed by Muslims to transmit the blessing (baraka) of the saints and facilitate their intercession, this article explores such anecdotes' capacity to engender conversations…
What Is Religious Authority: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia
Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, this book traces the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia and looks at how they traversed complex cultural settings while opening new channels for the transmission of Islamic teachings. The book describes the rise to prominence of Indonesia's leading Sufi master, Habib Luthfi, and his rivalries with competing religious leaders, revealing why some Muslim voices become …
What Is Religious Authority: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia
An anthropologist's groundbreaking account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building on the island of JavaThis compelling book draws on Ismail Fajrie Alatas's unique insights as an anthropologist to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim commu…
On the State of the Shari'a
Rethinking Diasporic Returns: Ḥaḍramī Trajectories in Indonesia’s Religio-political Field
This article calls for a rethinking of the concept of diasporic return in light of contemporary religious and political developments in Indonesia. It does so by exploring two modalities of diasporic returns, namely, re-embedding and re-encountering, neither of which necessarily involve transnational travel or any notion of an ancestral homeland, but both of which are nevertheless important to the process of diasporization. Based on ethnographic o…
Continuity and Change in Islamic Religious Authority
This article aims to elaborate on the debate surrounding continuity and change in Islamic religious authority. The discussion begins by establishing a framework for understanding the analytical definition of authority before delving into the dimensions that experience continuity and change. Arendt defines authority as a relationship, signifying a connection to a specific discursive tradition, knowledge, and history. Additionally, it involves a re…
In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East, By Aaron Rock-Singer
Journal Article In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East, By Aaron Rock-Singer Get access In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East By Aaron Rock-Singer University of California Press, 2022. 278 pages. $95.00 (hardcover), $34.95 (paperback or e-book). Ismail Fajrie Alatas Ismail Fajrie Alatas New York University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford A…
Voicing God's presence: Qurʾānic recitation, Sufi ontologies, and the theatro-graphic experience
This article examines Qurʾānic recitation as a modality of divine presence among Bā ʿAlawī Sufis in Tarīm (Yemen) and Jakarta (Indonesia). It engages with Sufi ontologies that have shaped Bā ʿAlawīs’ understanding of Qurʾānic recitation as capable of engendering a theatro-graphic experience of divine presence marked at once by scriptural distance and stability, and theatrical immediacy and instability. The article complicates some of the basic pr…
Familiar outsider: Arab encounters perspective in colonial Malay-Indonesian Archipelago
Not Quite a Prophet Facing Backward: On History as Extension of Prophecy
This essay develops the concept of history‐as‐extension‐of‐prophecy , a mode of historiographical reasoning that unsettles the dominant modern opposition between tradition as temporal continuity and revolution as temporal rupture. Through a close reading of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh al‐Saqqāf's (1882–1950) Tārikh Sulṭanat Bāntan al‐Islamiyya , a mid‐twentieth‐century Arabic history of the Islamic Sultanate of Banten (West Java), I show how prophetic tem…
Islam, Ambiguity, and (In)Tolerance: Perspectives from Southeast Asia
This introductory article builds on recent historical and anthropological scholarship that highlights the centrality of ambiguity in Islam and how Muslims navigate their religious life. It brings together insights from the anthropology of Islam and Islamic Studies, as well as classic work on Southeast-Asian cosmologies and concepts of power, to develop new insights into Islam’s possible relations to ambiguity and tolerance. Extending this inquiry…
Asian Studies and History (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Islam (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Theology (6 works)