THE PEACOCK IN SUFI COSMOLOGY AND POPULAR RELIGION

In various cultural and religious contexts, from West Asia to Southeast Asia, we come across a number of quite similar creation myths in which a peacock, seated on a cosmic tree, plays a central part. For the Yezidis, a sect of Sufi origins that has moved away from Islam, the Peacock Angel, who is the most glorious of the angels, is the master of the created world. This belief may be related to early Muslim cosmologies involving the Muhammadan Light (Nur Muhammad), which in some narratives had the shape of a peacock and participated in creation. In a different set of myths, the peacock and the Tree of Certainty (shajarat al-yaqīn) play a role in Adam and Eve’s fall and expulsion from Paradise. The central myth of the South Indian Hindu cult of the god Murugan also involves a tree and a peacock. The myth is enacted in the annual ritual of Thaipusam, like the Nur Muhammad myth is still enacted annually in the Maulid festival of Cikoang in South Sulawesi. Images of the peacock, originating from South India, have moved across cultural and religious boundaries and have been adopted as representing the different communities’ peacock myths

‘I would be sitting in the village room where people gather.’ Interview with Martin van Bruinessen

I. Interview Interview conducted by Marie Le Ray, Utrecht, 23/12/06. EJTS: Could you introduce yourself and let us know more specifically how you got interested in the Kurdish question as a scholar? Martin Van Bruinessen: It is a story that I have told too many times and it has become perhaps too polished to be exactly what happened. The story that I have told seems to have shaped my memory. Anyway, I was a student of mathematics. I enjoyed travelling. I was going every summer holidays to the..

In the Tradition or Outside? Reflections on Teachers and Influences

In this autobiographical essay, Martin van Bruinessen looks back at the diverse intellectual influences that contributed to his formation as a scholar of Indonesian Islam. He was never trained as an Indonesianist or a scholar of Islam, and came to the subject through a series of unplanned changes in his life trajectory. His first acquaintance with Indonesia was through late colonial and post-colonial Dutch literature. It was followed in his student days by critical reporting on the massacres of 1965-66 and a re-reading of Indonesian history from an anti-imperialist viewpoint. His formal academic training was in entirely different disciplines, and his first experience with anthropological fieldwork took place in a different part of the world. A fortuitous post-doctoral appointment at KITLV, followed by four years at LIPI as a consultant for research methods, enabled him to acquaint himself directly with contemporary Muslim discourses and movements. He had the good fortune of working with leading Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, who became his major teachers. Only when he became a teacher and thesis supervisor himself, at the IAIN Sunan Kalijaga and later at Utrecht University, did he feel the need to reflect on how his own research relates to established academic traditions. The essay documents his growing appreciation of, and lasting critical distance from, the Leiden school of Oriental studies and his relationship with the French tradition of Islamic and Indonesian studies. It also attempts to be the story of the rise and decline of Leiden’s tradition of Indonesian Islamic studies, from the perspective of a critical reader who wishes to remain an outsider.[Dalam tulisan biografis ini, Martin van Buinessen melihat kembali beberapa pengaruh pembentukan dirinya sebagai sarjana tentang Islam Indonesia. Martin tidak belajar khusus tentang keindonesiaan atau keislaman, minat itu muncul dari perubahan-perubahan dalam hidupnya. Perkenalannya dengan Indonesia dimulai lewat tulisan-tulisan dari masa akhir dan pasca penjajahan. Pengalamannya berlanjut pada masa studinya saat menulis laporan kritis tentang kasus 1965-1966 dan dengan pembacaan ulangnya atas sejarah Indonesia dari sudut pandang anti imperalisme. Latar belakang pendidikan formalnya sama sekali berbeda, sementara pengalaman pertama riset antropologinya juga di tempat yang berbeda. Posisi post-doktoral di KITLV dan diikuti empat tahun di LIPI sebagai konsultan metodologi riset membuat Martin bersinggungan langsung dengan wacana muslim kontemporer dan gerakannya. Martin sangat beruntung bertemu dengan para cendikiawan muslim Indonesia yang kemudian menjadi guru-gurunya. Dari pengalamannya menjadi dosen dan supervisor disertasi di IAIN Sunan Kalijaga, sekarang UIN Sunan Kalijaga, dan selanjutnya di Universitas Utrecht juga, Martin merasa perlu untuk merefleksikan kembali penelitiannya dalam kaitannya dengan tradisi akademik yang mapan. Tulisan ini mendokumentasikan perkembangan apresiasinya, sekaligus kritiknya, terhadap studi ketimuran mazhab Leiden serta keterkaitannya dengan studi keislaman dan keindonesiaan dalam tradisi Perancis. Ini juga merupakan upaya untuk menulis sejarah naik-turunnya studi keislaman Indonesia mazhab Leiden dari perspektif seorang pembaca kritis yang berusaha tetap menjadi ‘orang luar’.

Millî Görüş in Western Europe

ISIM, in co-operation with Gerdien Jonker (Marburg University), held a workshop on 9 January 2004 to take stock of previous research on the Turkish religious movement Millî Görüs (“The National Vision”) in Western Europe. The workshop brought together scholars from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, whose research was at least in part concerned with this movement

The Production of Islamic Knowledge in Western Europe

The ISIM is setting up a research programme on 'The Production of Islamic Knowledge in Western Europe', coordinated by Professor Martin van Bruinessen in cooperation with Dr Nico Landman of Utrecht University. The ISIM has organized a series of lectures (summer 2001 and forthcoming in autumn 2001) on the state of the art in this research area - to be published either in the ISIM Newsletter or separately as ISIM Papers. An annotated bibliography prepared through the concerted efforts of the ISIM, CNRSStrasbourg, the University of Louvain-la-Neuve and other institutions, will soon be made available online

ISIM Workshop: Muslim Intellectuals and Modern Challenges

From 26-28 April 2000, twelve prominent Muslim thinkers from a wide range of regional backgrounds (Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa and the European diaspora) met at an ISIM workshop to discuss some of the major intellectual and political challenges facing the Muslim world at present. Each of them presented a paper on an important aspect of the encounter with modernity, to which he or she had been devoting much thought recently. Several of the papers explicitly addressed the question of compatibility between Islam and modernity (or rather, as several participants emphasized, interpretations of Islam and conceptions of modernity). Some engaged in such sensitive issues as minority rights, women's rights and pluralism and called for the development of a contemporary religious discourse based on rights to balance the traditional emphasis on obligations or contributed to a theory of civil society. Others focused on (reformist revisions of) the relationship between the sacred texts, context and contemporary discourse

The Governance of Islam in Two Secular Polities: Turkey’s Diyanet and Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs

Turkey’s particular form of secularism, laiklik, does not entail the separation of state and religion but the disestablishment of all independent religious authority and subjection of the religious sphere to state control. The chief instrument through which the state exerts its control, Diyanet, has grown into a vast bureaucracy, especially in the wake of the 1980 military coup. The only other Muslim-majority country that has a similar large bureaucratic apparatus for the administration of Islam is Indonesia, also a secular republic though of a different kind. In both countries, secular elites attempted to enlighten and modernise the ‘backward’ pious segments of their populations through policies of social engineering of religion. In doing so, they presided, wittingly or unwittingly, over the consolidation of Sunni orthodoxy and the imposition of conservative religious attitudes, at the expense of popular, radical, or progressive forms of Islamic religiosity. In both countries too, parts of the groups that were the chief targets of these social engineering policies have succeeded in wresting control of these bureaucratic apparatuses. The modalities of the process were different, however, and a comparison of these two cases may bring out the specifics of each more clearly

Transformations of Heterodoxy

On 21 November 2000, Martin van Bruinessen, ISIM Chair at Utrecht University, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled 'Muslims, Minorities and Modernity: The Restructuring of Heterodoxy in the Middle East and Southeast Asia'. The lecture compared Alevism in Turkey with kebatinan in Indonesia, where adherents of heterodox folk belief and practice - rather than gradually shifting towards scripturalist, sharica oriented Islam - were transformed into distinct religious minorities deliberately distancing themselves from orthodox Islam. The following is composed of excerpts from the lecture