Kyrchanoff Maksym

Historical Memorial Politics of the Liberal Segment of the Indonesian Ummah

ЮГО-ВОСТОЧНАЯ АЗИЯ: АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ РАЗВИТИЯ, 2023, №1(58), 99-111

 
Annotation: The article analyses the features of development and the main vectors of transformation of the historical Indonesian memory within the liberal segment of the Muslim Ummah. It is shown that liberal Muslim intellectuals are active in the formation of their own versions of the collective historical memory, leading to the formation of a memorial culture of the Ummah, developing various perceptions of the past. The last ones develop and coexist simultaneously and parallelly. It is presumed historical memory function in different directions presented by secular civil Indonesian nationalism and Muslim alternatives. The author analyses the perception of the Ummah's collective memory by moderate liberal Muslim intellectuals. It is assumed that memorial activities develop in two directions. On the one hand, intellectuals of the Ummah, engaged in memorial politics, reproduce grand narratives of secular history in their attempts to write the history of Islam in Indonesia in general. On the other hand, the culture of memory of the Ummah actualises the political and ideological contradictions in the national modern history, which contributes to the actualisation of collective historical traumas within the framework of memorial spaces. Particular attention is paid to the actual ideological contradictions that form different and parallel developing modes of the historical memories of the Ummah in modern Indonesia. It is shown that the model of the collective memory of the Ummah stimulates the development of the policy of memory in the religiously-centric coordinates system of moderate Islam. The article shows how and why the dividing lines of the fragmentated collective memory of Indonesia are formed and developed, stimulating the development of parallel memorial cultures of secular nationalists, moderate liberal Muslims and supporters of radical political Islam.

Keywords: Islam, Indonesia, collective memory, politics of memory, memorial culture, memorial confrontation, wars of memory, ummah as a bearer of memory