Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (book launch)

Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (University of California Press, 2026) reveals how Indonesia's two largest Muslim groups, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah—self-identifying as respectively traditionalist and modernist—actively engage memory as a framework for theological thought and practice.

By reimagining their pasts to respond to new contexts, they articulate what it means to be a traditionalist or a modernist in the present and imagine possibilities for the future. Verena Meyer draws on interviews with group members, Islamic intellectual and narrative traditions, and critical theory to show that processes of remembering facilitate manifestations of the divine that destabilize binaries between the historical and transhistorical as well as linear understandings of temporality.

Observing how constructions of the past are called into the service of sometimes conflicting demands, she argues against the pervasive idea that Islamic modernities have lost their tolerance for ambiguity and paradox. Tensions among incommensurable memories are generative for articulating elusive theological insights and complex positionalities among both traditionalists and modernists, prompting us to rethink these familiar distinctions in modern identity politics.

Speaker & chair biographies

Dr. Verena Meyer is an Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent) of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. In her work, she draws on ethnographic field research and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Her book is titled Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (University of California Press, 2026). Her second project, funded by the Dutch Research Council, investigates the digitization of Islamic manuscripts in Indonesia, asking how digitization transforms understandings of the meaning and use of writing and textuality.

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by Alim on Unsplash

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