Urban Heirs of Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Defence of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Indonesia

Abstract

This paper calls attention to the appreciative interest Indonesia’s cosmopolitan Muslim urbanites are now showing in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Unity of Being metaphysics and in Sufi spiritual practices associated with it. Introducing two recently formed groups, Padepokan Thoha and Pusaka Hati, that facilitate study and practice in this tradition, the paper accounts for the apparently paradoxical appeal of Wujudiyya Sufism, reviled by twentieth-century Muslim Modernists, to religiously committed Muslims at the leading edge of the nation’s modernisation. Padepokan Thoha and Pusaka Hati’s this-worldly, non-authoritarian and inclusivist renderings of Wujudiyya Sufism model an alternative to the exclusivism now aggressively promoted by better-known Islamist groups.