Islam Borjuis dan Islam Proletar: Konstruksi Baru Masyarakat Islam Indonesia [Bourgeois Islam and Proletarian Islam: A New Construction of Indonesian Muslim Society]

Abstract

A book by Nur Kholik Ridwan, a young Nahdlatul Ulama intellectual from Yogyakarta, with a foreword by Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, founder of the Liberal Islam Network (Jaringan Islam Liberal). Using class analysis as his tool, the author distinguishes "bourgeois Islam", namely the style of Islamic religiosity of the urban upper-middle class that is close to power, capital, and symbols of formal piety, from "proletarian Islam", namely the religiosity of ordinary people, peasants, labourers, and village santri who are economically and politically marginalised. He criticises how Islamic discourse in Indonesia, whether modernist or Islamist, is often monopolised by the interests of the bourgeois class, and then offers a new construction of Muslim society that sides with the mustadh'afin (the oppressed) through a liberationist interpretation, social justice, and the defence of oppressed groups. Published amid the euphoria of reformasi, the book forms part of the wave of progressive Islamic thought and "left Islam" among young NU circles in the early 2000s.