Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia

Edited by Andrew Weintraub

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About the Book

Home to approximately one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population, Indonesia and Malaysia are often overlooked or misrepresented in media discourses about Islam. Islam is a religion but there is also a popular culture, or popular cultures of Islam that are mass mediated, commercialized, pleasure-filled, humorous, and representative of large segments of society. This book focuses on these forms and the accompanying practices of production, circulation, marketing, and consumption of Islam. It dispels the notion that Islam is monolithic, militaristic, and primarily Middle Eastern and emphasizes upon its dynamic, contested, and performative nature in contemporary Indonesia and Malaysia. It addresses important questions such as – Under what historical and social conditions have popular culture and Islam become mutually constitutive as sites for defining Islam in the Malay world? What forms does Islam take in popular culture? What meanings about Islam do audiences derive from popular culture? What is the relationship between Islam and Malay identity, viz a viz long-standing debates about language, culture, race, and ethnicity in the Malay world?

Table of Contents

Introduction: Islam, Popular Culture & Southeast Asian Studies Andrew N. Weintraub 1. Upgraded Piety and Pleasure: The New Middle Class and Islam in Indonesian Popular Culture Ariel Heryanto 2. Negotiating Mass Media Interests and Heterogeneous Muslim Audiences in Indonesian Television Ishadi SK 3. Music, Islam, and the Commercial Media in Contemporary Indonesia R. Anderson Sutton 4. The Liberal Islam Network in Cyberspace Muhamad Ali 5. Sexing Islam: Religion and Contemporary Malaysian Cinema Noritah Omar 6. Taking Liberties: Independent Filmmakers Representing the Tudung in Malaysia Gaik Cheng Khoo 7. Multiple Islams, Multiple Modernities: Art Cinema in between Nationhood and Everyday Islam in Bangladesh and Malaysia Zakir Hossain Raju 8. Holy Matrimony? The Print Politics of Polygamy in Indonesia Suzanne Brenner 9. Sex Sells, or Does it? Discourses of Sex and Sexuality in Popular Women's Magazines in Contemporary Indonesia Sarah Krier 10. Preaching, Pop and Politics: Nasyid Boy Band Music in Muslim Southeast Asia Bart Barendregt 11. Musical Modernity and Arab Aesthetics in Arab-Indonesian Orkes Gambus Birgit Berg 12. Music as a Medium for Communication, Unity, Education, and Da'wah Rhoma Irama

About the Author(s)

Andrew N. Weintraub is Assistant Professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the music of Indonesia, particularly Sundanese music, dance, and theater of West Java. His articles have appeared in edited books and journals including Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, Asian Theatre Journal, Perfect Beat, and Balungan.