Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta · Makin, Al. Bisakah Menjadi Ilmuwan di Indonesia? Keilmuan, Birokrasi dan Globalisasi. Pidato Pengukuhan Guru Besar dalam Ilmu Filsafat, disampaikan di hadapan Rapat Senat Terbuka UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, 8 November 2018. Yogyakarta: Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga, 2018. · 2018
Abstract
This inaugural professorial lecture in philosophy was delivered by Al Makin before the open Senate session of UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta on 8 November 2018. Drawing on his intellectual journey from pesantren education to McGill and Heidelberg, Al Makin asks whether Indonesia can produce world-class scholars. He argues that Indonesians' intellectual capacity is not inferior, but that bureaucratic and administrative burdens consume lecturers' research time. He defends the internationalisation of publishing and proposes simpler administration, a tenure-track system and greater academic autonomy.
Identifier
KBA-BKU-2018-0008
Type
Buku
Publisher
Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta
Date Issued
2018
Bibliographic Citation
Makin, Al. Bisakah Menjadi Ilmuwan di Indonesia? Keilmuan, Birokrasi dan Globalisasi. Pidato Pengukuhan Guru Besar dalam Ilmu Filsafat, disampaikan di hadapan Rapat Senat Terbuka UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, 8 November 2018. Yogyakarta: Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga, 2018.
Bisakah Menjadi Ilmuwan di Indonesia? Keilmuan, Birokrasi dan Globalisasi (Can One Become a Scientist in Indonesia? Scholarship, Bureaucracy and Globalisation) is the text of the inaugural professorial lecture in philosophy delivered by Prof. Dr. phil. Al Makin, S.Ag., M.A., a lecturer in the Faculty of Ushuluddin and Islamic Thought, before the open Senate session of the State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta on 8 November 2018. It was published by UIN Sunan Kalijaga in the same year, and a digital version is available in the university's digilib repository. The title page carries no ISBN, and the table of contents shows the author's short biography beginning on page 61, so the booklet probably runs to a little over sixty pages, although the exact count could not be confirmed.
Al Makin was born in the village of Sidorejo, Kedungadem, Bojonegoro, East Java. In the lecture he recounts his education: a madrasah in Bojonegoro, pesantren in Kendal and Jember, then an undergraduate degree in Qur'anic exegesis and hadith at the Ushuluddin faculty of IAIN Sunan Kalijaga, with a thesis on the orientalist Richard Bell. He went on to an MA at McGill University in Canada, with a thesis on Sayyid Qutb supervised by Issa J. Boullata, and a doctorate at Heidelberg University in Germany, with a dissertation on Musaylima supervised by Susanne Enderwitz. The dissertation was published as Representing the Enemy: Musaylima in Muslim Literature. His fieldwork on self-proclaimed prophets in Indonesia appeared as Challenging Islamic Orthodoxy with Springer in 2016 and was translated into Indonesian as Nabi-Nabi Nusantara. He also wrote Keragaman dan Perbedaan (Diversity and Difference) in 2016. A few years after this lecture, Al Makin was appointed Rector of UIN Sunan Kalijaga.
The lecture is organised in several sections. After the opening address and thanks to his teachers and the university leadership, including Yudian Wahyudi and M. Amin Abdullah, the author poses a set of provocative questions about the state of scholarship in Indonesia. There follow an account of his personal journey, a sketch of the intellectual trajectory of Sapen, the Yogyakarta campus, a summary of his research and contributions from the study of prophethood to the study of diversity, a discussion of whether Indonesia can produce scientists, a section on publication productivity and internationalisation, a reply to criticisms he considers irrelevant, reflections on simplicity and dedication, his hopes, a bibliography and the author's short biography.
The central question grows out of his observation that Indonesians often suffer from an inferiority complex about science and scholarship. Al Makin uses a football analogy: many Indonesians enthusiastically follow foreign leagues but do little to develop home-grown talent. Likewise in scholarship, the work of foreign scholars is admired while the potential of Indonesian scholars is neglected. From his own journey he draws the lesson that his thinking was shaped by combining turath, the classical Islamic heritage, with tajdid, renewal drawn from Western methodology. He also argues that Islamic civilisation under the Umayyads and Abbasids flourished because of its openness to other traditions, whereas the later homogenisation of orthodoxy narrowed intellectual life.
The section on the intellectual trajectory of Sapen maps the development of Islamic scholarship in Yogyakarta across three periods: foundation from 1960 to 1980, development from 1980 to 2000, and the generation of the UIN and of science and technology since 2000. Al Makin compares the Sapen tradition with the Ciputat tradition in Jakarta, judging Yogyakarta scholars to be individually productive but less collectively organised than the Jakarta groups. He reviews Mukti Ali's scientific-cum-doctrinaire approach, Amin Abdullah's integration-interconnection paradigm, and Kuntowijoyo's idea of Islam as an epistemology.
In the section on his research, Al Makin explains how his interest moved from Musaylima to fieldwork on new religious movements in the archipelago. He defines prophethood by three criteria: a claim to revelation, a community of followers, and a social movement that provokes reactions from society and the authorities. Diversity, in his view, must be understood at once as a reality, as an attitude of openness and as state policy. He surveys legal progress in the recognition of religious diversity, including the 2006 Population Administration Law and the 2017 Constitutional Court ruling on the religion column for adherents of indigenous faiths, while criticising the spread of sharia-inspired regional regulations since Reformasi. He also proposes a future research agenda on ecology, theology and Southeast Asian regional connections.
The core argument comes in the section asking whether Indonesia can produce scientists. Al Makin insists that Indonesians' intellectual capacity is not inferior, but that excessive bureaucracy and administration obstruct research. Drawing on Masdar Hilmy and Azyumardi Azra, he shows how lecturers' time is consumed by attendance requirements, workload reporting, promotion procedures and other paperwork. He presents a table comparing administrative obligations with the goals they are meant to serve, exposing the mismatch between them. Even permits for research travel abroad, he notes, weigh more heavily than the research output itself. His proposals are to simplify administration, introduce a tenure-track system and grant academics greater autonomy.
In the section on publishing he uses Scimago data placing Indonesia 52nd in mid-2018, behind Malaysia and Singapore. He acknowledges Indonesia's recent gains thanks to government programmes but notes Malaysia's head start and its advantage in English. He also records that UIN Sunan Kalijaga's journal Al-Jami'ah was the first journal from Islamic higher education to be indexed in Scopus in the social sciences and humanities. To critics who portray Scopus and international indexing as a spectre or a capitalist imposition, he replies that international metrics are one legitimate measure among others, and that campus policy should be guided by scholarly rather than political considerations. He closes this part by reflecting on his parents' devotion as village teachers and asking why so few lecturers commit themselves to research despite substantial research funding for Islamic higher education.
For readers of an Islamic-studies and Aceh-studies library, the lecture is an important document on the state of Islamic higher education in Indonesia at the end of the 2010s. The problems it raises, such as lecturers' administrative burdens, the demand for reputable publications and the tension between bureaucracy and academic freedom, are equally familiar in Islamic universities in Aceh, including UIN Ar-Raniry. Al Makin's criticism of sharia-inspired regional regulations is also relevant as one perspective in the debate on the regional application of sharia, including in Aceh, although the lecture does not discuss Aceh specifically. The text also illustrates the inaugural lecture as a distinct academic genre in Indonesia, in which a new professor summarises his scholarly journey and sets out ideas for policy.
This record describes the copy held in the private collection of KBA13 Academy and was catalogued from its cover. The summary of contents is based on the digital version of the text available in the UIN Sunan Kalijaga repository.
Al Makin, “Bisakah Menjadi Ilmuwan di Indonesia?: Keilmuan, Birokrasi dan Globalisasi [English translation]”, Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta, Makin, Al. Bisakah Menjadi Ilmuwan di Indonesia? Keilmuan, Birokrasi dan Globalisasi. Pidato Pengukuhan Guru Besar dalam Ilmu Filsafat, disampaikan di hadapan Rapat Senat Terbuka UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, 8 November 2018. Yogyakarta: Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga, 2018., 2018. KBA13 Academy Archive and Library, KBA-BKU-2018-0008.
![Bisakah Menjadi Ilmuwan di Indonesia?: Keilmuan, Birokrasi dan Globalisasi [English translation]](https://pustaka.kba13academy.com/files/original/04c325dc6030e6747a2d7f27c0686fb03534a57b.jpg)
