UMMAH YET PROLETARIAT : Islam + Marxism in Indonesia, with author Lin Hongxuan !

Historian Lin Hongxuan, author of Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic (2023, Oxford University Press), will join us to discuss his work!

We've touched upon topics like Christian anarchism, The Catholic Worker movement, and intersections of Islam and Socialism, but we haven't even scratched the surface... Socialist thought and action has so often flowed directly from — and reinforced — religious identities.

This comes as a surprise to many, thanks to successful campaigns having taught us that socialists are out to destroy religion. "Opiate of the masses", etc.

In Indonesia, religious identities were indeed invoked to fuel the mass killing, imprisonment, or exiling of millions of suspected Leftists in the 60s. Even now, communism and atheism are still widely taught to be synonymous 'latent dangers'. For most, it is difficult to imagine the existence of anyone with a foot planted firmly in both camps: Socialism and Islam.

But, on the contrary, such a large-scale reaction occurred precisely because Socialist ideas were once extremely popular among millions of Indonesian Muslims. President Sukarno himself even promoted "NASAKOM" (Nationalism-Religion-Communism) as a unifying political concept for the new Republic. So how were these identities harmonized?

LIN HONGXUAN has recently written a (THE?!) book on this, and will help us to take the plunge into this complicated and underappreciated history. Submarines ahoy!

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PRE-EVENT READING ( 100% OPTIONAL ) :

• INTRODUCTION to Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic by Lin Hongxuan (2023) [Note: We're encouraged to skip/skim the 'Contributions to existing scholarship' section]