Over the last couple of decades, the study of Islam in Southeast Asia has taken several remarkable turns. Ethnohistorical approaches broadened the geographic and temporal scope to include wider religious networks across Indian Ocean communities over the centuries, and more conventional Islamic studies accounts of (male, elite) jurisprudence and textual authority have been complemented (and complicated) by richly textured ethnographic accounts of lived religion. Building creatively on both trends, Ismail Fajrie Alatas's provocative book What Is Religious Authority? examines the “polyphonic reality” of Islam through “a story of how different and discordant Islamic communities came to be formed and interacted with one another in transgenerational and transregional settings” (212). This is a serious book with bold ambitions and will undoubtedly become required reading on syllabi in history, anthropology, Islamic studies, religious studies, and multidisciplinary approaches to Indian Ocean worlds.
At the center of this story is Indonesia's most popular Sufi...
