Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture

“Mainline Islam: Islamic Associational Life in Indonesia”

Kevin W. Fogg
Associate Director
Carolina Asia Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Friday, March 10, 2023
12:00-1:30
206 Ingraham Hall

Indonesian Islam has a unique structure in its associational life, in the form of mass Islamic organizations. The most well-known of these, NU and Muhammadiyah, are frequently heralded by politicians and scholars as pillars of religious life and civil society in Indonesia, but there are many similar organizations that function on a provincial or regional level in a similar capacity. This project draws in a comparative study of three regional mass Islamic organizations—Jamiyatul Washliyah founded in Medan, Nahdlatul Ulama based on Lombok, and Alkhairaat headquartered in Palu—to draw broader conclusions about the nature of Islamic associational life in Indonesia, how Indonesian organizations differ from Islamic groups in other countries, and how Islamic organizations in Indonesia have changed over the last century. The project also uses a comparison with American Protestantism, the so-called “Mainline Protestant Denominations,” to articulate a category of organization that is normative in Indonesia but unknown elsewhere in the Islamic world: “mainline” Islamic organizations.

Dr. Kevin W. Fogg is the Associate Director of the Carolina Asia Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With degrees from Duke and Yale, he previously taught at Oxford University, and he has been a visiting researcher at State Islamic Universities across Indonesia. As a historian, his work focuses on Islamic communities in Indonesia after independence.