The situated listener as problem: ‘Modern’ and ‘traditional’ subjects in Muslim Indonesia

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which evaluations of media forms, and specifically religious oratory, reveal a differentiated Muslim community. Indonesia’s Muslims attend oratorical events (preaching) in great numbers, and frequently do so within routines following the Islamic calendar and other schedules. But, despite their popularity, conventions of Islamic oratory are interpreted by the country’s Muslim progressives as inefficacious and anachronistic. This article explores the models of individual subjectivity that underpin critiques of oratory, noting how the ‘Muslim listener’ is caricatured as lacking in autonomy, incapable of deliberation and passive. It argues that a rival subjectivity, one that constructs listening as a legitimate form of engagement with Islam, emerges from the ideology and preferred communication forms of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars, or NU). This legitimisation provides an alternative to the idealised narrative of modernity against which oratory is judged as a form of mediation belonging to Indonesian pasts.