She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia, and shared the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Theologies of Remembering at the University of California Press website.[Without denying the historical] factuality of Dahlan’s long dwelling on Sūrat al-Māʿūn, Pak Syukrianto cited other historical data to contextualize Dahlan’s agenda and to put his focus on Sūrat al-Māʿūn into perspective.Someone cracking open page 99 and reading it top to bottom may not immediately grasp the primary argument of the book. Nonetheless, page 99 is surprisingly illuminating in specific ways.
It is significant that neither of the two men criticizing the contemporary status of Fikih al-Maun questioned the significance of Dahlan’s historical actions for the organization’s current norms. Neither is the normativity of Dahlan’s example ever called into question. On the contrary, according to Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, the problem was precisely that Muhammadiyah members did not know their history well enough. As Pak Munir criticized very explicitly, what other activists were doing was to project the present into the past. His critique articulates an insight familiar from social or collective memory studies as formulated by Maurice Halbwachs and his successors, that because memory is constituted by the frameworks and needs of present society, it has little to do with what actually happened. Pak Munir feared that Muhammadiyah members were doing a superficial exegesis of Dahlan’s life, simply accepting hearsay without inquiring into its reliability. Doing so leads to a collapse of the alterity of the past, leaving one with an unimaginative present and a subtly self-serving agenda. His insistence on proper historicity—utopian as this ideal may be—emphasizes that, for him, the organization’s focus on present and future does not erase the responsibility the living have to the past. This responsibility is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.
Just like the authority of the Qur’an is not called into question among Islamic reformists (or really, most Muslims) on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the same is true for Muhammadiyah’s understanding of the normative content of Dahlan’s life. At the same time, as is the case with the Qur’an, understandings of the message’s normative essence, separated from the historically contingent and applied to contemporary times, often widely diverge from one interpreter to the next. For some prominent voices in the organization, the historiographic and hermeneutic process needs to be improved, because a faulty understanding of Ahmad Dahlan’s life ultimately leads to decay and corruption. People like Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto seek to provide corrections through debates that take the form of seminars, publications, or, in Pak Syukrianto’s case, films. The point of these debates is not so much to reach an authoritative conclusion, but—as [detailed in the previous chapter—to keep the conversation open, to challenge and dispute dominant views, and to revise insights based on increases in knowledge and changing times.]
The page begins with an ethnographic example, the voices of Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, two long-time activists in Muhammadiyah, one of the two Indonesian Islamic mass organizations the book focuses on. While an ethnographic example is necessarily specific and only contributes a small piece to the broader puzzle the book discusses, it highlights a principal methodological commitment of the book: Centering local voices as experts on theological and historiographical questions.
But while small, the piece put in place by the two men’s theologizing is indispensable for the book’s broader argument. Both bemoan the fact that an uncritical and mythologized reading of the biography of Muhammadiyah’s founder Ahmad Dahlan has become widespread in their organization. Their concerns remind us of the problem that remembering the past, while compelling for its potential as a source of motivation and belonging, is also fraught within the forward-looking ideology adopted by Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously modernist organization. And this ambiguity about the relevance of the past in modernist Muhammadiyah is a central puzzle in the book.
Crucially, the book argues that this ambiguity is not an impasse or a symptom of the contradictions inherent in modernist movements. It is a theologically generative tension that we are more familiar with in traditionalist Islamic movements, where it often expresses the fundamental transcendence of and knowledge about God. Here, this tension organizes the theological meaning of the past: It gives rise to a kind of memory that allows the past to be normative, precisely because remembering itself, the process of retrieving the past, has to be accountable to the modern insights, including — in the case of Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto — the epistemic norms of modern historiography. This kind of accountability to progress was already mandated by Ahmad Dahlan, who bequeathed to his successors the responsibility to constantly renew the movement. This responsibility, as we read on page 99, “is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.”
--Marshal Zeringue