The Gift of Future Time: Islamic Welfare and Entrepreneurship in 21st century Indonesia

The attainment of religiously informed and socially responsible wealth is a desire widespread in the metropolises of Java, Indonesia, especially amongst the pious middle classes. This article aims at an understanding of the emergence and effects of an early 21st century desire for pious entrepreneurial success, by focusing on the practices people consistently and regularly undertake in order to actualise this. It claims that the religiously informed desire for entrepreneurial success is permeated by a mode of temporality that privileges the future at the expense of the past and the present. This temporal orientation has important consequences for subject-making, as it forces the subjectivities created to take a distinctively asymptotic form, resulting in the production of self-differing subjects; that is, subjects in which past, present and future actualisations lack coincidence and complete convergence