Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic

by Lin Hongxuan

From 1965 to 1966, at least 500,000 Indonesians were killed in military-directed violence that targeted suspected Communists. Muslim politicians justified the killings, arguing that Marxism posed an existential threat to all religions. Since then, the demonization of Marxism, as well as the presumed irreconcilability of Islam and Marxism, has permeated Indonesian society. Today, the Indonesian military and Islamic political parties regularly invoke the spectre of Marxism as an enduring threat that would destroy the republic if left unchecked.

In Ummah Yet Proletariat , Lin Hongxuan explores the relationship between Islam and Marxism in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and Indonesia from the publication of the first Communist periodical in 1915 to the beginning of the 1965-66 massacres. Lin demonstrates how, in contrast to state-driven narratives, Muslim identity and Marxist analytical frameworks coexisted in Indonesian minds, as well as how individuals' Islamic faith shaped their openness to Marxist ideas. Examining Indonesian-language print culture, including newspapers, books, pamphlets, memoirs, letters, novels, plays, and poetry, Lin shows how deeply embedded confluences of Islam and Marxism were in the Indonesian nationalist project. He argues that these confluences were the result of Indonesian participation in networks of intellectual exchange across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, of Indonesians "translating" the world to Indonesia in an ambitious project of creative adaptation.

368 pages, Hardcover

Published August 18, 2023

Reviews

[Imam Sihombing · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am an Indonesian senior high school history teacher, and even as a non-native English speaker, I can understand this book easily. This is a very comprehensive book about the Indonesian left, especially for national movement period and post- independent history in Indonesia topics. I like how the author uses historical methods and social science approaches in a clear and well-structured narrative.


Thank you, Lin!

[Jonah Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his 2023 monograph, Lin Hongxuan builds upon his 2020 PhD thesis by the same name to consider the convergence of Islam and Marxism in Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and Indonesian politics from 1915 to 1965. He does so through examining vernacular print sources, where one can locate genuine, locally-formulated convergence invisible in the Bolshevik-paranoia of Dutch colonial archives – which tended to view Marxist groups as under Moscow’s sway (20). Lin identifies the convergence a product as the confluence of two forces: The attempt to translate the global phenomena of Marxism into Indonesia through the vocabulary of Islam; and the attempt to build a viable Islamic political vision capable of challenging Euro-colonial society using Marxist intellectual frameworks (2-3). With the former heading from Marxism to Islam and the latter heading from Islam to Marxism, he argues the two processes ultimately produced an anticolonial popular politics where various Islamic and Marxist intellectual communities were highly interested in solidarity; actively borrowed and mixed concepts; and were present across different areas and social strata of Indonesia – all the way till the events of 30 September 1965.

Ultimately, I find that Lin successfully argues his case. His source-base, acquired from an enormous range of places, dates, and demographics, successfully proves that Marxist-Muslim intercourse was real and resilient across the popular politics of a vast swathe of NEI/Indonesia from 1915 till 1957 – roughly the period of his initial PhD study. However, his methodological lack of coverage of one particularly important constituent somewhat weakens his account of the 1960-1965 twilight of this convergence. Furthermore, while Lin certainly places a great deal of effort into justifying his deployment of literary sources, I do not see the margin of contribution to his work as sufficiently justifying their very difficult and space-consuming deployment.