Hamka's great story
Subtitle: a master writer's vision of Islam for modern Indonesia
By: James R. Rush
Series: New perspectives in Southeast Asian studies; New perspectives in Southeast Asian studies
Publisher: The University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Madison, Wisconsin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780299308407
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Muslim scholars; Biography; Islam
Description: Hamka’s Great Story presents Indonesia through the eyes of an impassioned, popular thinker who believed that Indonesians and Muslims everywhere should embrace the thrilling promises of modern life, and navigate its dangers, with Islam as their compass. Hamka (Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah) was born when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony and came of age as the nation itself was emerging through tumultuous periods of Japanese occupation, revolution, and early independence. He became a prominent author and controversial public figure. In his lifetime of prodigious writing, Hamka advanced Islam as a liberating, enlightened, and hopeful body of beliefs around which the new nation could form and prosper. He embraced science, human agency, social justice, and democracy, arguing that these modern concepts comported with Islam’s true teachings. Hamka unfolded this big idea—his Great Story—decade by decade in a vast outpouring of writing that included novels and poems and chatty newspaper columns, biographies, memoirs, and histories, and lengthy studies of theology including a thirty-volume commentary on the Holy Qur’an. In introducing this influential figure and his ideas to a wider audience, this sweeping biography also illustrates a profound global process: how public debates about religion are shaping national societies in the postcolonial world. (Publisher).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Society's compass; title: Father and son; title: Hamka-san and Bung Haji; title: Islam for Indonesia; title: Culture wars; title: The new order.