This review argues that Adam Bobbette’s The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java, published by Duke University Press in 2023, makes an important contribution not only to the history of science but also to the study of Islam in Southeast Asia. Rather than treating Islam merely as the cultural background of Javanese society, Bobbette demonstrates that Islamic cosmology, Muslim saints (wali), and religious understandings of volcanic landscapes actively participated in the production of modern geological knowledge during the colonial period. Through the concept of political geology, the book challenges diffusionist narratives that portray modern earth sciences as products of Europe alone and instead reveals the co-production of geological knowledge through encounters among Dutch colonial scientists, Javanese Muslim traditions, Hindu-Buddhist cosmologies, and local intellectual practices. This review argues that the book deserves attention from scholars of Southeast Asian Islam because it expands how we understand the relationship between Islam, science, colonialism, and environmental knowledge.
Why do some local communities succeed in developing environmental conservation initiatives while others do not? A recent study by a team at the Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM), Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta (2024), addresses this question by examining local Muslim communities that have developed innovative environmental conservation practices. More specifically, this study seeks to explain why some local Muslim communities develop grassroots environmental innovations while others do not. How do religious institutions—namely religious narratives, figures, and organizations—shape grassroots innovation initiatives among local Muslim communities in Indonesia? The analysis focuses on the interaction among social capital (understood as citizen participation), religious institutions, and agency (understood as the role of local initiators), in shaping the development and variation of Green Islam grassroots environmental innovations.
This article explores the journey of Zayn al-Dīn al-Malībārī’s (d. 1522) Hidāyat al-adhkiyā’ from Malabar to Indonesia as a “traveling text". Combining historical-philological approaches with digital exploration, it maps three media regimes (manuscript, print, and online platforms) and their effects on authority and pedagogy in pesantren. In its early Indonesian reception, scholars reauthorized this Sufi text through commentaries (sharḥ), poetic interpretation, and interlinear translation (ngalogat/ngapsahi), anchoring meaning to local needs. Print capitalism and pesantren publishers then expanded circulation beyond traditional kiai-santri networks. In the era of live streaming, serialized religious lectures delivered in Indonesia’s linguistic varieties transform textual consumption, shifting from closed, ijāzah-based study to monetized, scheduled content, while reconfiguring figures of authority, audiences, and the knowledge economy. The findings reveal an ongoing vernacularization that crosses linguistic, institutional, and technological boundaries, renegotiating relations among Sufism, markets, and the contemporary Muslim.
This article examines the 1913 labour conflict at the Young & Gill machine factory in Surabaya to reconsider the role of Islam insubaltern politics in the colonial city. The conflict did not originate from ideological mobilisation or organisational command but from a moral judgment formed at the intersection of everyday religious practice and colonial industrial time discipline. A modest request to observe the Maulid Nabi—articulated without economic or political demands—was interpreted as a challenge to labour authority, leading to the dismissal of a trusted intermediary and a prolonged strike that neither Sarekat Islam nor colonial institutions could contain. Through a subaltern reading of colonial newspapers, administrative correspondence, and legal records, the article argues that Islam functioned as a living moral language through which workers evaluated justice, legitimacy, and the limits of authority in everyday life. This perspective challenges organisation-centred and ideology driven historiographies and highlights the importance of lived religious practice in the formation of popular politics in colonial urban settings.
This study analyzes Muhammadiyah and the organization of the orphan care in the Dutch East Indies in colonial Indonesia. This study, using various primary sources in Indonesian and Dutch, suggests that the number of native orphans increased during the colonial period and Muhammadiyah responded to it by establishing orphanages. Muhammadiyah believes that taking care of orphans is God’s command and that it is a social responsibility of fellow Muslims and Indonesians. It managed the orphanages professionally by creating effective organizational management, building proper facilities, and providing orphans with shelter, foods, clothes, psychological support, education, and life skills. This care resulted in the orphans becoming financially independent and being able to contribute to the wider community when they left their orphanage. This study discusses Muhammadiyah’s endeavors in saving Indonesian orphans amidst Dutch colonialism and the rise of Islamic modernism in Indonesia.
