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and Islamic traditionalism respectively. Guided by different

ideologies, they were often at odds with each other on a wide

range of religious and social issues, but both were awakened by

the Islamic student movement of the decade which helped to

transform them into parts of the Islamic resurgence network in

Indonesia and the rest of the Malay-speaking world.

The two

organizations appeared to find a common position on several

religious and social issues, and from the 1980s the leaderships of

both demonstrated a greater openness to interreligious dialogue.

The Arab world

In the Arab world of the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood

(Ikhwan al-Muslimin)

, the oldest and perhaps the only then

existing mass Islamic movement, benefited from the world-

wide Islamic resurgence, particularly the religious awakening

among Arab students and youth. It was energized by recruits

from among Arab students studying in Western universi-

ties and also their seniors, who upon graduation decided

to stay in the West. Intellectually and organizationally,

however, the Muslim Brotherhood changed little over the

decades leading to the twenty-first century. Unlike in South-

East Asia, Arab-Islamic resurgence did not produce any new

Islamic civil society movement worthy of the name inde-

pendently of the longer established organization that could

serve as a viable alternative to them. In particular, it hardly

produced a single internationally renowned Muslim voice

of interreligious dialogue. Only the Muslim Brotherhood of

Sudan, under the leadership of Hassan al-Turabi, emerged

as more open in intellectual outlook and more flexible in its

organizational operation.

The Indian subcontinent

Decades before the 1970s two mass Islamic movements

had existed in pre-partitioned India. The older one, Jamaat

al-tabligh, founded in 1921 by Muhammad Ilyas al-Kand-

hlawi, was a spiritual and

da’wah

movement aimed at the

spiritual reformation of individuals. The other, Jama’at

al-Islami, established 20 years later by Abul A’la al-Maududi,

was a religious-political movement.

The global Islamic resurgence that began in the 1970s

helped both organizations to grow into well-known interna-

tional movements, and they in turn played a significant role in

influencing the course of the resurgence in the subcontinent

and beyond. However, Jama’at al-tabligh proved to be a far

more popular movement, now boasting more than 20 million

members worldwide.

As a whole, Islamic resurgence in the subcontinent mani-

fested itself in the expansion of each movement’s ideological

influence beyond the region to Malaysia and other places

where there were large numbers of Pakistani and Indian

migrants, while preserving its identity. Whatever new Islamic

student, youth or other organizations were created in the

1970s, such as Jamaat al-Islami of Afghanistan, no other

Islamic organizations emerged to complement the civil

An entrepreneurial class at Universiti Brunei Darussalam: intercultural mixing is common in Brunei’s private and state-funded educational institutions

Image: SOASCIS

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