Theologies of Remembering

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Theologies of Remembering 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.