Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution 

Kevin Fogg 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 270 pages. 

 

In the years following the end of the Second World War, Indonesia witnessed fierce 

confrontations between locals and the returning colonial powers. Close to a hundred thousand 

or more lives were wasted, millions of others were displaced, and daily life was wrought with 

shortages, suffering, and uncertainties. Dubbed the “Indonesian Revolution,” this watershed 

moment in Southeast Asian history lasted for four long years, culminating in the creation of a 

fragile nation on 27 December 1949 after centuries of Dutch rule. The coming into being of 

the world’s largest Muslim country left in its wake cycles of state violence, civil unrest, and 

insurgencies: between the reigning government against its detractors, between Islamic forces 

and secularists, and between those who had differing visions of what an Indonesian nation 

should look like. 

The book under review directs our attention to Islamic dimensions of the Indonesian 

Revolution. To some extent, this story of has been told by a good number of scholars. Chiara 

Formichi’s Islam and the Making of the Nation (2012) and Remy Madinier’s Islam and Politics 

in Indonesia (2015), among other recent monographs, have delved deeply into the dynamics of 

Muslim resistance against colonial and postcolonial regimes. Kevin Fogg’s Indonesia’s Islamic 

Revolution expands the frontiers of the extant literature by shifting the inordinate focus on 

notable leaders of the revolution (such as Sukarno, Hatta, Sjarir, Natsir, Sutomo, and Sudirman) 

onto the contributions of the masses, or, the people forgotten by most official narratives. His 

study moves away from the locally-oriented research on Islamic revolutionary movements 

operating in different islands of the Indonesian archipelago to make a compelling case for a 

national-level analysis. Above all, the book interweaves official archival sources with more 

than ten dozen interviews and conversations with participants and witnesses of the revolution. 

This final contribution is perhaps the most notable, and makes this study a model for future 

research on the topic.  

The book is divided into two parts and thirteen chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the massive 

transformations in the Indonesian Muslim population in the twentieth century under Dutch 

colonial rule through the eve of the second world war. The Dutch policy of sharpening divisions 

among nominal and pious Muslims and among the traditionalists and reformists paradoxically 

brought disparate groups closer. Together, they agitated for the independence of Indonesia. 

Fogg attributes the rise of revolutionary fervor among Muslims to their growing frustrations 

under the Dutch, which rose to dangerous levels in the Japanese interregnum. During the 

closing stages of the war, Japanese-sponsored Muslim militias took things into their own hands 

and this provided the impetus for revolution. Missing in this account was the fact that antipathy 

toward all things “unIslamic”, “secular”, and “foreign” among many religiously-inclined 

Muslims had developed for many decades even prior to the advent of the Japanese. These were 

the long-term causes of the revolution, so to speak, which needed precipitating or triggering 

events to spark a full-blown revolution. 

Chapters 2-5 are the best and most gripping segments of the book. The ulama, activists, 

and militias, according to Fogg, used fatwas, manifestoes, amulets, magic, and trances to 

mobilize and wage fierce battles against the Dutch. How these mediums of resistance were so 

quickly distributed, socially communicated, and rapidly disseminated across different parts of 

Indonesia and within such a confusing and tumultuous context could have been better 

explained. While reading the blow-by-blow description which Fogg assiduously provides, I am 

reminded of Theda Skocpol’s dated yet still influential study of the Iranian revolution (in 

Theory and Society 11:3) where she explained how activist networks in some revolutionary 

contexts fused and manipulated up-to-date communicative tools with traditional methods of 



oral communication to spread revolutionary ideas and to swell up support amidst constant 

reprisals. Skocpol’s theoretical insights could have been furthered or even questioned in light 

of the Indonesian experience. Indeed, Indonesian Islamic revolutionaries, much like their 

Iranian counterparts, were not always effective in the face of a technologically and strategically 

superior power. And yet, thanks to their tenacity, persistence, and sophistication in relaying 

information, Islamic revolutionaries—many of whom were women (66)—did much to inflict 

severe damage to the Dutch war machinery and the morale of colonial collaborators. The 

Islamic revolutionaries eradicated remnants of public fear toward the old feudal order and 

thereby supercharged the pursuit of merdeka (independence).   

Much of what Fogg covers in Chapter 6 is quite standard, barely departing from Chiara 

Formichi’s study on the Darul Islam (House of Islam) secessionist movement which traced its 

roots in West Java and found sympathies in other parts of Indonesia. This chapter is nonetheless 

significant in that it depicts Darul Islam not as a unique episode in Indonesian history but as 

part of a larger story of Islamic militant responses to colonialism and its perceived avatars. 

Chapters 7-12 (forming Part II) share the same limitations as Chapter 6: these chapters shed 

little new light on the already well-documented events of the Jakarta Charter, the creation and 

thorny career of Masjumi (Partai Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia, or Council of Indonesian 

Muslim Associations), the early years of the Ministry of Religion, and the bumpy fates of 

Islamic parties.  

In these chapters, Fogg could have given more space to considering meso-level or 

micro-level Islamic actors rather than re-enacting the rather familiar terrain of high-level 

politics covered in many histories of revolutionary Indonesia. Viewed in totality, however, the 

second part of the book demonstrates Fogg’s overarching point: the Islamic factor of the 

Indonesian revolution implicated all levels of the Muslim society, young and old, elites and 

laymen, men and women. Chapter 13 on “Islamic Diplomacy” compensates for the 

shortcomings of these earlier chapters. There Fogg elucidates the roles of Indonesian students, 

travellers, and workers based in the Middle East, Australia, United States, and the Czech 

Republic in rallying the support of foreign governments and institutions to advance their cause 

for self-determination. Diplomacy just as much as militancy was a potent part of the battles for 

independence. A book-length study of the roles of Indonesian Muslims overseas in the shaping 

of the new nation-state, during the heat of the revolution and the years immediately after, is 

now sorely needed. We are thankful to Fogg for opening our eyes to this historiographical gap. 

A valued resource and soon-to-be a staple for many courses on Islam in the modern 

world, scholars writing on anti-colonial revolutions and on revolutions in general may well 

find this book useful as a basis of comparison for investigating the use and abuse of religions 

in liberation movements.  

 

Khairudin Aljunied 

Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 

National University of Singapore, Singapore