Beyond Colonial Archives: Decolonizing Indonesian Islamic Historiography Through Epistemic Pluralism
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and orientalism in the historiography of Indonesian Islam and the impact they continue to have on contemporary Islamic Studies. Although colonialism and capitalism have been heavily criticized in the past for their bearing on contemporary knowledge production, they have been neglected in knowledge-based research on Indonesian Islamic intellectual traditions, which are regarded as legitimate sources of knowledge. In this research, we applied a qualitative approach that takes into account critical archival analysis of two important British colonial texts, The History of Java (1817) and The History of Sumatra (1783), and the semi-structured interviews conducted with scholars at SOAS University of London, University of Oxford, and University of Birmingham. We found that colonial epistemic hierarchies still exist in academic institutions, and that the systems of archival authority, publishing practices, citation politics, and the production and validation of theory each have their own mechanisms. Rather than examining colonialism, capitalism, and orientalism as separate historical processes, we thought of them as jointly constitutive structural actors that influence the production and circulation of knowledge in Islam. As a result, Indonesian Islamic intellectual traditions, including pesantren epistemologies, oral transmission, and local knowledge of intellectual practices, are valuable tools for epistemic pluralism and the decolonization of Islamic historiography. The article argues that decolonizing Islamic historiography, beyond postcolonial critique, is about epistemic reconstruction, in which Indonesian Islamic intellectual practices are seen not only as empirical objects of study but also as legitimate sources of conceptual and theoretical innovation. The study contributes to contemporary Islamic studies by bringing together colonialism, capitalism, and orientalism as interrelated frameworks and by positioning Indonesian Islamic historiography as a plural and generative site of knowledge creation.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21043/qijis.v14i1.34563
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