From a comparative point of view, some among the early twentieth century’s reformists can be seen as Muslim counterparts to the 'creole intellectuals’ that, in an influential study, Benedict Anderson has identified as the primary propo nents of the secular nationalism that swept the colonial world in the early decades of the twentieth century.43 The creoles Anderson had in mind were individuals recruited from among the native elite, educated in European ways and then posted to the provinces to assist in colonial rule. Anderson observes that, because many of these 'bicultural’ individuals internalised Enlightenment values, they chafed under the colonial controls that so blatantly contradicted the progressive ideals propagated in European run schools.
Muslim reformists tended to be less bicultural than the nationalist intellec tuals Anderson has described. Although some were keen to promote the study of modern sciences, few among the Islamic reformists were convinced that the secular values of the Western Enlightenment could guarantee Muslim pro gress. Most also did not rally to the idea that the community at the heart of a modern polity should be a 'nation’ defined in terms of imagined ancestry and culture rather than religion. Notwithstanding these difierences, in one
41 See Azyumardi Azra, Dina Afrianty and Robert W. Hefner, 'Pesantren and madrasa: Muslim schools and national ideals in Indonesia’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds.), Schooling Islam: The culture and politics of modern Muslim education (Princeton, 2007), pp. 172 98.
42 Andree Feillard, Islam et armee dans I’Indonesie contemporaine (Paris, 1995); Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, 2000).
43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of national ism, rev. edn (London, 1991).
World History
