Trevor Herbert's "The Brass Band Story"

Trevor Herbert is a former foundation scholar of the Royal College of Music. He was a trombone player (modern and period instruments) with various orchestras and ensembles, particularly the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, the Taverner Players and the Wallace Collection. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University where he developed a global reputation as an expert on the history and performance practices of brass instruments.

Herbert applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Brass Band Story, and shared the following:

‘Nothing separates the brass band more clearly from the rest of the musical world than the resilient centrality of contesting in its culture.’ These are the opening words of the new chapter that begins on page 99 of my book. I explain the Victorian origins of contesting and how it has been adopted in every country where the British model of the brass band is used. Contests occupy a marginal place in other forms of music making, so their pre-eminence in the world of the amateur brass band has prompted ridicule: to Charles Dickens they were ‘a musical prize fight’. The problem is easily understood. Listening to twenty or more bands, each playing the same piece in succession, is not an inviting prospect for everyone, and the idea that musical expression can be measured and scored to select ‘a winner’ is heavy with aesthetic contradictions. But that’s only how it’s seen from the outside.

An argument can be easily made to show that contests and brass bands were made for each other. They were introduced in the nineteenth century as mass entertainment for the working class. A standard instrumental format was introduced to encourage equivalence; this led to a bespoke repertoire and a unique musical idiom. Contests were and remain congregations of like-minds, and while local rivalries once drew vast audiences, a more subtle set of factors are at play in the modern era. They have become sites of pleasure that produce performances rich in musical nuance.

In my book I plot a much wider narrative about bands, their players and the lives they have led in music, how they weathered industrialisation and deindustrialisation, survived, modernised, internationalised and thrived over almost two centuries. This very British musical phenomenon has a fascinating and multi-faceted history. At every stage its momentum has been nourished by the heady excitement of the contest. Without it this very distinctive form of music making might prevail only as a memory: of a brief, temporary phase in Britain’s music history. For the full story read from page 99: remarkably it hits the exact spot – the epicentre.

Learn more about The Brass Band Story at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David B. Williams's "In the Range of Fire and Ice"

David B. Williams is an author, naturalist, and tour guide. He is the author 12 books, including the award-winning Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound plus Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature, Cairns: Messengers in Stone; Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology; and Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Ship Canal and Locks, the latter two of which were finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Williams is a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum and writes a free weekly Substack newsletter, the Street Smart Naturalist. He lives in Seattle.

Williams applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In the Range of Fire and Ice: A Human and Natural History of Washington’s Cascade, and reported the following:

Ninety-nine pages into in my new book about Washington’s Cascade mountains, In the Range of Fire and Ice, and I am still making connections between people and geology. The page comes in the middle of my chapter focusing on mining and quarrying, a story that stretches back more than 10,000 years to the earliest visitors to the Cascades. Those people who first found high quality rock in the mountains quarried material that they used to make exquisite tools, many of which have been unearthed in archaeological sites. The early visitors also traded the rock they quarried and those tools reveal the extensive trade networks across the region.

For mining, I focus on the one important mining town in the Cascades, Monte Cristo, where a lone miner first came across gold ore in 1889. His discovery led to John D. Rockefeller spending more than $2.5 million (about $850 million today) on developing the mines. This included building almost 60 miles of railroads, a massive ore concentrator, and a smelter. Because of the harsh weather, which restricted most activity to late summer and early fall, workers took six years to fully ramp up mining. Two years later, an epic rainstorm hit and wiped out much of the infrastructure. Monte Cristo never recovered and the population dropped from a peak of perhaps 2,000 to almost none.

Is page 99 a good illustration of the book? Yes. As illustrated in this section, each chapter, which focus on subjects such as glaciers, wolverines, mountain goats, fire, fish, and Mount St. Helens, weaves history, information from experts, and thoughts on how the mountains influence human history. Page 99 though lacks my time in the field and some of my personal perspective, which I hope draws people more into the stories of place. Ultimately, I hope this mix of science, history, and field time encourages people to head out into the mountains and find their own stories of this magical range of fire and ice.

Visit David B. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: Stories in Stone.

The Page 99 Test: Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Sorkin's "The Emancipationists"

David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Jewish History at Yale University. Sorkin has received multiple honors, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Whitney Humanities Center fellowships, as well as a National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews' Campaign for Citizenship, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test does in fact work. Page 99 describes two editors of the French Jewish newspaper, the Archives Israélites (1840), Samuel and Isidore Cahen, who were father and son. Samuel founded the newspaper as an organ of French Jewish politics. He was an advocate of the economic and moral "regeneration," as well as religious reform, central to the emancipationists' effort to gain equal rights. He understood this agenda to be a form of “self-emancipation.” Isidore, editor from 1860, continued the campaign for self-emancipation but was more politically radical than his father, promoting general as well as specifically Jewish political issues e.g., "democratic liberties."

The father-son editors exemplified the transition in leadership across the nineteenth century. Samuel studied at a Yeshiva but in secular subjects was a self-educated "maskil" or Jewish enlightener. Isidore attended a prestigious lycée and then one of the most élite universities, the École Normale Supérieure.

The newspaper they created played multiple roles in promoting and defending the Jews’ rights: providing news and information that shaped an informed Jewish public as well as suggesting new activities and institutions to further their cause. For example, Isidore used the paper’s pages to suggest the establishment of a self-defense organization and was then one of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860).

Learn more about The Emancipationists at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jewish Emancipation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carly Thomsen's "Reproductive Justice, Queerly"

Carly Thomsen is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She is author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader. She is also the proud creator of the world’s first reproductive justice mini golf course.

Thomsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Reproductive Justice, Queerly plops readers squarely into my queer theoretical critique of Marxist feminism’s most well-known concept: social reproduction theory, or the labor of life-making, typically imagined as being done by women in their own homes. On page 99, I draw from the insights I developed in my first book Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming to articulate the limits of Marxist feminists’ desires to make labor “visible.” Making domestic labor and work visible, I argue, will not on its own do anything to change how this labor is compensated, valued, or redistributed. Visibility is, in short, not ambitious enough.

But Reproductive Justice, Queerly is not only, or even primarily, about care labor. In fact, the broader topic of chapter three, where page 99 lands, is on paid parental leave and how so much of the conversation around parental leave that claims to be feminist or queer relies on and reproduces heteronormative ideas. One wouldn’t get a sense of my broader critiques of paid parental leave from reading page 99, where I’m deep in the weeds of social reproduction theory.

Page 99, then, not a good representation of chapter three.

It is also not a good representation of the book more broadly. Reproductive Justice, Queerly is, in many ways, about the shift away from discussing reproductive justice issues as women’s or feminist concerns and the centrality of discourses of “queerness” to that shift. As I trace this move across topics—from abortion to surrogacy to parental leave to parenting—I noticed three patterns in these conversations:

1.) They end up centering men, sometimes gay and sometimes trans, but still men
2.) They call up LGBTQ people as a way to index progressive politics
3.) They focus on discursive inclusion, rather than material change

Reproductive Justice, Queerly argues that we can do better. Often, when reproductive justice supporters invoke LGBTQ+ness, what they are advocating for is actually quite conservative. A slight variation on the status quo. In the case of parental leave, which I discuss in chapter 3, where page 99 lands, advocating for a shift in language use from maternity leave to parental leave and rooting that advocacy in the claim that maternity leave doesn’t capture the needs of gay men couples is not radical. This shift continues to assume that people who have children are necessarily partnered and that the only care labor we should be concerned about is in relation to children and the household. What would be far more radical: Advocating for social reproduction leaves through which anyone who is doing care labor for their community could get a paid leave from work to either invest in their community work or to recover from investing in that work. Reproductive Justice, Queerly demonstrates that there are queerer ways to do reproductive justice.

Visit Carly Thomsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shelly Lundberg's "How Economics Discovered Women"

Shelly Lundberg is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Lundberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test gets only a partial pass. This book is a history and critique of how the growth of gender economics since the 1970s has been hampered by the persistence of simple conceptual models in the face of an explosion of empirical research that contradicts them. A reader of page 99 would be dropped into the middle of a discussion about preferences that is more formal than most of the book, but that illustrates the most important theme—that it’s time to revisit some of the foundational assumptions of economics.

Economic analysis focuses on how behavior responds to changes in constraints such as prices and regulations with the preferences of these actors simply taken as given and unchanging. To economists, people want what they want and getting what they want increases their wellbeing. This assumption makes our theories very simple and is foundational to our evaluations of social programs, but runs counter to extensive evidence that, in fact, preferences are molded by social forces and evolve in response to economic and political events.

This assumption has been debated in economics in the past, but without generating any substantive change. Page 99 occurs in the middle of a discussion of one past attempt to shift the discussion—Amartya Sen’s rejection of a traditional approach to assessing the wellbeing of women in societies in which their ambitions and independence have been stifled for generations—he argues that, since gender norms are adaptive and respond to cultural pressures, the fact that women acquiesce to these constraints do not imply that freeing them would not improve their wellbeing.

Page 99 begins with philosopher Martha Nussbaum placing Sen’s critique in the context of an older questioning of economics’ non-judgmental approach to preferences. What if preferences are based on misinformation? Are clearly irrational? What if someone’s preferences are downright wicked? This discussion needs to be revisited, since,

…many models of domestic violence in economics attribute this phenomenon to, at least in part, the preferences for violence of the perpetrator. If we treat all preferences “on a par” for purposes of welfare analysis, then we are forced into the uncomfortable position of concluding that efficiency requires a positive quantity of violence between some intimate partners. (p. 99)

This is abhorrent, and recent work on domestic violence has been relentlessly atheoretical in response, but we can’t tiptoe around the problem forever—the contradictions between facts on the ground about the role of gender in economic behavior and our models need to be faced.

Visit Shelly Lundberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chandra Shekhar's "The Logic of Corruption"

Chandra Shekhar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma. Before going to OU in August 2024, he completed his PhD in Public Policy and Environmental Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2022, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Shekhar applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Logic of Corruption: Why it Persists and Why Reforms Fail, with the following results:

From page 99:

The survey specifically assessed whether the observed district-level patterns—corruption in intra-district transfers, petty corruption in the marketplace, and the linkages between them—are features of the district-level bureaucracy as a whole.

According to the survey, 79.2 percent (95 percent CI: 68.3 to 90.1 percent) of the street-level bureaucrats affirmed that grand corruption remains widely prevalent in intra-district transfers and agreed that it would be difficult to obtain an important assignment without resorting to such corruption. “Important” assignments referred to certain police stations that differed in their geographic locations and earning potentials, or distinct police categories within a district (for example, the civil police, who are the primary enforcers of the law in the district, versus the reserved police of the district, who are called upon only in situations of emergency). Further, 70.5 percent (95 percent CI: 59.1 to 81.9 percent) admitted having used either bribery or political influence or both at least once in their careers to secure their preferred assignment choice. The choice in this response referred to a district, a specialized unit, or a place within a district, hinting at the ubiquity of corruption in assignment allocations of street-level bureaucrats. A large percentage of officials (82.1 percent) (95 percent CI: 71.4 to 92.8 percent) reported that petty corruption like street-level bureaucrats taking bribes from street vendors in the marketplaces is not a district-specific phenomenon; similar practices occur in other districts as well, indicating the bureaucracy- wide presence of these petty corruption markets.

A total of 80.2 percent (95 percent CI: 69.4 to 91.0 percent) of the officials in the survey also believed that the market for corruption in transfers at all levels in the hierarchy remains the principal locus around which corruption is organized. This view reinforced the findings of the internal survey conducted by the Indian government (Figure 2.3), which showed that senior civil servants believed that a majority of their colleagues resorted to unethical means to obtain preferred assignments. It also echoed the views expressed by street-level bureaucrats during the first phase of the interviews, particularly regarding (a) the corrupt and unfair practices in the appointment of senior officials and not just street-level positions, and (b) an artificial sense of legitimacy based on the purchasing of office among street officials to extract rent in implementation. Finally, 77.3 percent (CI: 66.2 to 88.3 percent) agreed that the occurrence of grand corruption in the transfer of street-level bureaucrats is independent of who holds political power…

It will not be inaccurate to term page 99 as the most important page in the whole book. Surprisingly, someone opening the book to page 99 will see what probably is its most important empirical result, including getting a good sense of what the whole project is all about. Of course, the core puzzle of the book is not stated verbatim on page 99, but it becomes quite clear to the reader through the description of the survey and its main results that the project is about the grand corruption of political and bureaucratic elites and petty corruption of street-level bureaucrats, and their linkages. By reading page 99 alone, the reader will learn that the book identifies corruption not as a uniform phenomenon, but categorizes the corruption of elites as grand corruption and the corruption of street-level bureaucrats as petty corruption. The reader also learns from this page that petty corruption at the grassroots and grand corruption, especially in the transfers and postings of both street- and senior-level bureaucrats, are widely prevalent, a key result that has been tested across India’s state police, environmental, and infrastructure bureaucracies.

The book examines why corruption exists and persists in government bureaucracies using an extensive seven-year-long fieldwork with three of India’s major state bureaucracies: the police, environmental, and infrastructure. The core puzzle derives from three realities. First, both grand and petty forms of corruption exist in India’s state bureaucracies. Second, grand and petty corruption are organized around the market for public office, especially the transfers and postings of street-level bureaucrats by political and bureaucratic elites. Finally, grand corruption causes petty corruption to exceed it beyond the level explained by standard principal-agent relationships inherent in large, complex bureaucracies. Street-level bureaucrats have strong preferences over assignments, which they categorize into choicest and punishment postings. Political and bureaucratic elites allocate choicest street-level offices in exchange for bribery and political influence, a mechanism I conceptualize as “the market for public office.” (This term was coined by Robert Wade in 1980s.) After participating in the market for public office, street-level bureaucrats view it as legitimate to extract rent and accommodate elites’ informal expectations in the implementation, explaining the existence of high levels of petty corruption. To maintain their choicest assignments, street-level bureaucrats also regularly share a portion of the rent with their superiors, which accounts for the persistence of high levels of this corruption.

Learn more about The Logic of Corruption at the Cambridge University Press website. Visit Chandra Shekhar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William I. Hitchcock's "A Shadow Over the World"

William I. Hitchcock is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning teacher who has published numerous books relating to World War II and the Cold War, including The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association. He is also the author of The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. He received his BA degree from Kenyon College and his PhD from Yale University. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a fellow of the Nobel Institute in Oslo, the holder of the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress, and a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is now the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Hitchcock applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America's World War II, and shared the following:

On page 99 of A Shadow Over the World, readers find columnist Walter Lippmann describing Franklin Roosevelt as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications, would very much like to be president.” In was January 1932; FDR had just announced his intention to run for president; and the critics were ready to pounce.

The reason this works so well in setting up the book’s central story is that Lippmann reminds us that there was nothing inevitable about FDR becoming president. Even Democrats doubted his abilities, and many wanted Governor Al Smith, a seasoned party elder, to get the party’s nomination for president instead. FDR was rather unknown outside New York. He had been governor for four years and worked in Washington in the Navy Department under Woodrow Wilson. Beyond that, his resumé was thin, and he certainly knew very little about foreign affairs or the crisis of democracy then unfolding around the world.

So we sense, upon reading Lippmann’s dismissive remark, how much Roosevelt will have to change and grow before he emerges as the defender of democracy in the coming global struggle with fascism. And that’s the story the book tells: how he and the country gradually concluded that America’s fate was indeed tied up with the world’s. If democracy was to survive in the United States, it must be defended everywhere it faced attack from fascists, Nazis, militarists, and authoritarians. By 1940, FDR came to believe that the United States could not exist as “a lone island in a world dominated by a philosophy of force.” To secure America, democracy itself must be made secure in the world. That idea would carry the country into the war and into the postwar world.

Learn more about A Shadow Over the World at the Simon & Schuster website.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Eisenhower.

--Marshal Zeringue

Duncan Pritchard's "Tempting Fate"

Duncan Pritchard is distinguished professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Epistemic Luck; Epistemological Disjunctivism; Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing; and Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Pritchard applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life, and reported the following:

If you opened page 99 of Tempting Fate, then you would be jumping into the heart of my discussion of the nature of achievements. I’m arguing that achievements require more than merely the conjunction of skill and success. I illustrate this point by describing an archer skillfully firing at a target but the arrow being intercepted mid-flight by a friendly dog who catches it and places it in its intended destination. That the skillful archer’s arrow ends up in the target would not count as his achievement. This is because for an achievement one’s success must be primarily attributable to one’s own skill rather than to other factors, like something else intervening. The dog may have achieved something, but the archer did not.

This discussion gives you a sense of one of the issues we explore in the book, which is how luck of a certain kind can undermine achievements, but it wouldn’t be particularly representative of its main themes. The overarching goal of Tempting Fate is to convince the reader that we need a completely new theory of risk. This is not just because the existing ways of thinking about risk are wrong, but because having the right theory of risk is crucial to making sense of how taking risks can confer value and meaning in our lives. Think about Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan. The risk he took was monumental, but rather than diminishing his achievement it enhances it. We need the right theory of risk in order to explain how this is possible.

Thinking about Honnold’s climb helps to explain the connection between what’s on page 99 and the book as a whole. The risk-taking that leads to a flourishing life is aimed at significant achievements, which is why it’s so important to the book that we understand not only what achievements are but also how they relate to luck and risk. Honnold’s ascent of El Capitan is a great example of this. It’s a peerless achievement, but it also essentially involves a lot of risk and a fair amount of luck too. But as the book makes clear, the value of risky achievements isn’t just relevant to extreme endeavors like free-solo climbing. This is because all of us will at some point need to make fundamental life- decisions if we are to lead authentic, and thus flourishing, lives. Getting married, switching career, starting a family, moving to another part of the world—these are all decisions that are inherently risky. No matter how skillfully one makes them, there’s always the possibility of things going awry. That’s why we all must tempt fate, and thus embrace risk, at some point if we are to flourish.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Casey's "The Sceptic Isle"

Steven Casey is Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of eleven multi-awarding-winning books, including Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and Nazi Germany, 1941-45 (2001); Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and the Press in the United States, 1950-1953 (2008); The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War against Nazi Germany (2017); and The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War against Japan (2021). His articles appear in such outlets as Foreign Affairs, History Today, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Spectator.

Casey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War, with the following results:

In Britain, World War II is remembered as the “People’s War.” Crucial to this image is the notion of the so-called “Blitz spirit,” when people in all parts of the country kept calm and carried on, despite the relentless nature of the nightly German bombing raids. Yet this was only one aspect of what had happened. As the propagandists knew only too well, beneath this surface unity there remained plenty of unrest, much of it directed at them whenever they sought to massage the war news.

While The Sceptic Isle covers Britain’s entire World War II experience, page 99 specifically addresses a key element of the argument as it relates to the Blitz.

By November 1940, the British public had come to dislike and distrust the complex blend of censorship and public relations on the nightly air attacks. On the one hand, the government had prohibited the press from publishing not just casualty figures, but also the names of towns outside London and Liverpool, as well as specific locations that had been hit. On the other, it had sought to “play up” the destruction of “places to which special sentiment attaches” or that enjoyed “outstanding ‘news value,’” such as schools, churches, and hospitals.

The first two months of the Blitz had already seen a rise in corrosive gossip, including the belief that London “casualties are really ten times bigger than what we are told.” Then came the disastrous German raid on Coventry on November 14. Here, the survivors, dazed after the first attack and scared of a repeat, engaged in a particularly vigorous bout of speculation, resulting in “strongly exaggerated rumours about casualties and damage which quickly spread to the surrounding countryside.” Yet still the government tried to clamp down hard, placing a cordon of soldiers ten miles around the city to stop anyone, including reporters, from entering the stricken city.

Small wonder that the British public were often sceptical about what they were told. Page 99 offers a perfect illustration of government censorship and propaganda and its most brazen.

Learn more about The Sceptic Isle at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

Verena Hanna Meyer's "Theologies of Remembering"

Verena Hanna Meyer is Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University.

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:

[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.

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.]

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.

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.”

Learn more about Theologies of Remembering at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue