Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Portions of Chapters 1 and 6 are reprinted from an essay titled Marketing Morality: The Rise, Fall and Rebranding of AA Gym, which appeared in Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia, edited by Greg Fealy and Sally White, 2008, © 2008 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg. Reprinted by permission.

Portions of Chapters 1 and 6 previously appeared in an essay titled Aa Gym: The Rise, Fall, and Re-branding of a Celebrity Preacher, published in Inside Indonesia, no. 90 (2007). Reprinted by permission.

Portions of Chapter 4 previously appeared in an essay titled Prophetic Cosmopolitanism: Islam, Pop Psychology, and Civic Virtue in Indonesia, published in City & Society, no. 24 (2012). Reprinted by permission.

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoesterey, James Bourk, 1975–author.

Rebranding Islam : piety, prosperity, and a self-help guru / James Bourk Hoesterey.

pages cm—(Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9511-1 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8047-9637-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Gymnastiar, Abdullah, 1962-.   2. Muslim religious leaders—Indonesia—Biography.   3. Celebrities—Indonesia—Biography.   4. Self-help techniques—Religious aspects.   5. Muslims—Religious life—Indonesia.   6. Indonesia—Religious life and customs.   7. Islam—Psychology.   I. Title.   II. Series: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

BP80.G93H64 2015

297.4092—dc23

[B]

2015007275

ISBN 978-0-8047-9638-5 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14 Adobe Garamond

Rebranding Islam

PIETY, PROSPERITY, AND A SELF-HELP GURU

James Bourk Hoesterey

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

THE WALTER H. SHORENSTEIN

ASIA-PACIFIC RESEARCH CENTER

Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

Andrew G. Walder, General Editor

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University sponsors interdisciplinary research on the politics, economies, and societies of contemporary Asia. This monograph series features academic and policy-oriented research by Stanford faculty and other scholars associated with the Center.

ALSO PUBLISHED IN THE SHORENSTEIN ASIA-PACIFIC RESEARCH CENTER SERIES

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Gi-Wook Shin and Joon Nak Choi (2015)

Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan: Breakdown of a Hybrid Regime

Harukata Takenaka (2014)

New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan

Edited by Larry Diamond and Gi-Wook Shin (2014)

Spending Without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan

Gene Park (2011)

The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia

Erik Martinez Kuhonta (2011)

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Gi-Wook Shin (2010)

Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail

Yongshun Cai (2010)

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Edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder (2006)

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Edited by Rafiq Dossani and Henry S. Rowen (2005)

For my parents

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Authority, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Politics of Public Piety

SECTION ONE: RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

Chapter 1—Rebranding Islam: Autobiography, Authenticity, and Religious Authority

Chapter 2—Enchanting Science: Popular Psychology as Religious Wisdom

SECTION TWO: MUSLIM SUBJECTIVITY

Chapter 3—Ethical Entrepreneurs: Islamic Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism

Chapter 4—Prophetic Cosmopolitanism: The Prophet Muhammad as Psycho-Civic Exemplar

SECTION THREE: POLITICS OF PUBLIC PIETY

Chapter 5—Shaming the State: Pornography and the Moral Psychology of Statecraft

Chapter 6—Sincerity and Scandal: The Moral and Market Logics of Religious Authority

Conclusion: Figuring Islam: Popular Culture and the Cutting Edge of Public Piety

Notes

References

Index

Preface

I first came to this project through my own befuddlement with the phrase Manajemen Qolbu (Heart Management). I was preparing a guest lecture about Islam in Indonesia for Charles Hirschkind’s course Anthropology of Religion at the University of Wisconsin. A year after 9/11 and just weeks after the deadly bomb blasts in Bali in 2002, I wanted to provide a portrait of Islam beyond bombs and veils. That very week the New York Times published A TV Preacher to Satisfy the Taste for Islam Lite, an article in which Jane Perlez describes a young, hip preacher—Aa Gym—and his Islamic self-help program of Manajemen Qolbu. I was curious about this peculiar linguistic hybrid that conjured both English and Arabic roots. Despite a year of intensive Indonesian language training and several stints living in Indonesia, at that time I had never even heard of the word qolbu. A bit embarrassed, I consulted the most respected Indonesian dictionary. Qolbu was not to be found. I then proceeded to a dictionary devoted to Indonesian Islam (Federspiel 1995). Still no qolbu. Next, I e-mailed an esteemed anthropologist of emotion with decades of experience in Indonesia. Never heard of it. With a couple of notable exceptions (Stange 1984), scholars writing about emotion in Indonesia had not really noticed qolbu.¹ This was due, in part, to a generation of emotion studies in Indonesia that approached the study of emotion largely in localized terms of ethnicity and ethno-psychology, neglecting how Islam might offer cultural constructs and moral models of affect. Beginning perhaps with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali during the 1930s, and carried on by Clifford Geertz during the 1960s and a generation of scholars in the 1980s, anthropologists of Indonesia have been interested in the cultural, not religious, construction of emotion. Geertz wrote about both religion and emotion, but seldom in terms of religious models of emotion. And for Geertz, Islam itself was a thin veneer overlying Hindu-Buddhist mystical practices and courtly restraint (1960b; Woodward 1989).

But the story is more complex. Even if scholars of Indonesia had been attuned to religious idioms of affect, they still would not have written about qolbu. The word has only recently entered the everyday national lexicon in Indonesia. Aa Gym brought the word qolbu—largely confined to the walls of Islamic schools—into the national public sphere and the religious marketplace of Islamic self-help. This relatively recent transformation in the national discourse about emotion marks an interesting shift in terms from the hati (the seat of the emotions, the liver) and the Javanese "logic of the rasa" (Stange 1984) toward a decidedly Islamic understanding of the heart.

However, by 2005 the word qolbu was ubiquitous in the national and religious imaginary. In spoken speech, Indonesians still use the word hati, but qolbu had acquired a cultural, religious, and market cachet in the public sphere and national imaginary. For example, popular television preacher Jefri al-Buchori occasionally hosted the morning television show The Qolbu Touch (Sentuhan Qolbu); then-head of Indonesia’s People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), Hidayat Nur Wahid, wrote the book The Qolbu Touch in the Qur’an; and, of course, Aa Gym even trademarked Manajemen Qolbu as MQ. His devotees listened to his radio show MQ Pagi, watched televised sermons produced by MQTV, and joined his piety and prosperity training seminars, MQ Training. Beyond the world of popular preachers, Islamist politicians, and Islamic training seminars, in the early 1990s academic psychologists in Indonesia formed the Association for Islamic Psychology, launched the academic publication Journal of Islamic Psychology (Jurnal Psikologi Islami) in 2004, and led divisive campaigns in universities to separate those academics who subscribed to Western secular models of the mind from those who promoted Islamic understandings of the mind, self, and soul. The popularity of Aa Gym and Manajemen Qolbu is thus part of a widespread convergence of Islam and psychology across diverse organizational and institutional settings. My task was to try to make some sense of these encounters—who, where, how, why, and to what social, economic, and political effect?

Like ethnographies, field sites are made, not found (Heider 1988). In terms of methodological strategies, I followed George Marcus’s advice (1998, 90–91) for conducting multisited ethnography: follow the people (in this case, Aa Gym) and follow the thing (Manajemen Qolbu). Over the course of two years of fieldwork (September 2005–July 2007) and several subsequent visits (August 2008, June 2009, July 2010, July 2012, and August 2014), I shadowed Aa Gym, collecting unique observations and insights about his role as public figure, the specific kind of religious authority he wielded, and how he navigated networks of religious, business, and political elite and then mobilized them for his personal, corporate, and political causes. Second, I also followed the thing, tracing the social life of Manajemen Qolbu (MQ) to understand its multiple discursive genealogies that connect with Islamic and Western psychological sciences and circulate within the market niche of Islamic self-help psychology.

It would be difficult to overstate Aa Gym’s celebrity status at the time I began fieldwork in 2005. In a country where even the most famous movie stars can walk freely in Jakarta’s supermalls without being mobbed, Aa Gym had no hope of making it through a crowd without his bodyguards. Even then, it typically involved countless handshakes, group photos, and selfies. He even claims to have set a national record for being the most photographed Indonesian ever. With thousands of visitors getting their pictures taken with Aa Gym every weekend, I am not inclined to dispute that claim. I am grateful to Aa Gym for welcoming me into his Islamic school and permitting me to chronicle his life, from the proud moments of national celebrity to the dark and difficult days of public humiliation. I gathered ethnographic information and leveraged that data for my own professional, and ultimately financial, ends.

Yet ethnography is more than simple extraction. It is also embedded in exchange. When I present this research for academic audiences, I am often asked, What (if anything) did Aa Gym get out of having me around? Why even allow me to travel with him and chronicle his life (especially his fall from grace)? For the most part, Aa Gym described my presence as an opportunity to show an American the beauty of Islam. I arrived in 2005 amid an ongoing war on terror, and he joked that he wished I were a CIA agent so I could tell President Bush that Islam is not a violent faith. Beyond the geopolitics of America’s war on terror, when he was young, Aa Gym had a very positive experience with American missionaries, and I suspect that also played a role in his warm welcome.

I traveled with Aa Gym throughout Indonesia as he preached to tens of thousands of admiring followers, observed the production of television programs, and accompanied Aa Gym as he met with politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople. I usually traveled with his advance team, two or three assistants who arrived a few days prior to liaise with the inviting committees, double-check travel routes, and verify the stage and sound setup. I observed long conversations, and occasional arguments, about who would get to sit next to Aa Gym, dine at his table, or sit at adjacent tables. During informal interviews with local committee members, I got a sense of how local cultural brokers pulled together private and government funds to sponsor Aa Gym’s visits, which could cost thousands of dollars for logistics, police, crowd control, advertising, and the preacher’s honorarium. I often rode with Aa Gym during these visits, especially when his motorcade would circle the town square after his sermon, and Aa Gym would rise out of the sunroof and wave to his adoring fans, who shouted warm greetings as he passed by. News spread quickly when he visited local restaurants, and soon dozens of onlookers, mostly his female admirers, gathered outside in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Aa Gym.

Gender played an important role in Aa Gym’s widespread popularity. As I will discuss, Aa Gym presented himself as the ideal of modern Muslim masculinity—the gentle, romantic, self-made family man—and his audiences were overwhelmingly women. Whereas much of the literature has divided the intellectual labor into studies of Muslim femininity or masculinity, I bring these categories together in a single analytical frame in order to better understand how feminine fantasy is informed by understandings about ideal Muslim masculinity (at least in this particular hetero-normative articulation). Of course, ideas about gendered propriety influenced the social spaces in which I could speak with women as well as the sorts of questions I could ask. My gendered positionality as a male certainly influenced my fieldwork, data, and analysis. My status as a man, however, did not prevent me from eliciting meaningful accounts about women’s emotional and economic connection with Aa Gym. Indeed, I spent much of my weekends speaking with women’s pilgrimage groups as they waited in line to get their picture taken with Aa Gym. I also attended public events tailored for women, such as the launching of Betty Y. Sundari’s book, A Muslim Woman Becomes CEO: Come On, Become a Momtrepreneur. I also served as a guest speaker for an MQTV training seminar, The Spiritual Power of Women. Although I cannot claim any privileged insider perspective, the seminar offered yet another opportunity to understand the cultural ideals of gender, emotion, and family espoused by popular icons of feminine piety, such as celebrity actress Astri Ivo. And when Aa Gym fell from public grace, women had no problem expressing their anger and sense of betrayal.

At both the pinnacle of popularity and during his downfall, Aa Gym graciously provided access to different contexts, moments, discussions, and decisions. When I first asked Aa Gym for copyright permission for MQ Photo’s portrait of Aa Gym standing boldly in front of a fighter jet, and disclosed that the image would be used for an article about his downfall, he simply replied, Please feel free to use any documentation you have, as long as you first consult your conscience. This was a testament to his cooperation with my project, and I have taken his request to heart. Along the way, Aa Gym offered commentary on his understanding of his role as a public figure as well as his diverse relationships with Muslim clerics, national politicians, and wealthy investors.

Just weeks into my research, Aa Gym invited me to join an eight-car caravan for family vacation at the end of Ramadan 2005. Professing one’s friendship and sympathetic connection with interlocutors has long been a trope in anthropological research and writing. I do not wish to extol or exaggerate my close connection with Aa Gym. Nonetheless my access to Aa Gym, and my relationships with his family and inner circle, did afford a unique glimpse into the phenomenon of Muslim televangelism, Islamic psychology, and popular culture. Aa Gym often invited me to join him onstage, especially during his stock sermon on the beauty of differences. He introduced me as his American anthropologist friend, Aa Jim (our running joke was that he was Aa Gym, pronounced with a hard G, and I was his sidekick Aa Jim). "Hey Mr. Aa Jim. Did you place an order with Allah, asking to be born with white skin? And in what eventually turned into a scripted performance, I would reply, No, Aa [elder brother]. Then he would continue, And did you put in a request to be born in America, that land of Mr. George W. Bush?" After a little more banter, Aa Gym quoted from the Qur’an to remind the audience that Allah, if so inclined, could have made all ethnic groups and nationalities the same. But Allah chose not to and decreed that religions and nations are to compete with each other in good deeds. I had become part of the road show—a small price to pay for the opportunity to travel with Aa Gym around the country. Much like his devotees, and perhaps like many other ethnographic encounters, my relationship with Aa Gym was marked by economic and emotional exchange.

To follow the thing, I traced how Manajemen Qolbu Training integrated Western psychology and then stripped it of its secular garb, adorning it instead with teachings from the Qur’an and stories of the Prophet Muhammad. At Daarut Tauhiid—Aa Gym’s Islamic school, television studios, and training complex—I worked closely with several trainers whose job was to design, market, and conduct MQ Training. I participated in meetings and observed firsthand how these trainers drew from a broad range of Islamic and Western sources. I looked on as they refined MQ Training and pitched training seminars to human resources managers of privately owned companies and state-owned enterprises. MQ Training at Daarut Tauhiid generated the bulk of the non-MQTV-related revenues—to the tune of five hundred dollars per person for week-long training groups of approximately fifty employees.² Daarut Tauhiid had the capacity and resources to host about eight groups a week. I joined dozens of corporate MQ Training cohorts and spiritual tourist groups during their visits to Daarut Tauhiid. Weekends could begin as early as 3:00 a.m. with prayers and dzikir (mindfulness of God) recitation inside the mosque in the mornings, continuing with seminar classes and group meals during the day, culminating each evening in coffee and conversation in the open-air lobby of the MQ Guest House. As I got further into my research, I also surveyed other popular Islamic training programs to get a better sense of the range of both Islamic training and Muslim trainers in Indonesia.³

I developed my ideas on marketing and Aa Gym’s personal brand during ongoing conversations with leading figures in the marketing and business seminar circuit. One of these, Hermawan Kartajaya, was Indonesia’s self-proclaimed marketing guru. President of one of Indonesia’s most successful marketing firms, Kartajaya popularized his theory of a historical marketing trajectory that began with appeals to the rational, then to the emotional, and now to the spiritual values of customers—or spiritual marketing. Even though he was not Muslim, Kartajaya was a keen observer of religious marketing and coauthored the best-selling book Syariah Marketing. He also coauthored books with Aa Gym and frequently appeared on the seminar circuit with other popular Muslim trainers and business leaders. After initially meeting Kartajaya at a seminar on Spiritual Capital, we met several times to discuss Aa Gym as a spiritual marketer and the booming culture of corporate seminars in Indonesia. Eventually Kartajaya asked me to become a trainer for his marketing firm. I was hired to develop and deliver marketing seminars on Ethnographic Marketing. These were the sorts of serendipity that shaped my fieldwork.

Without wishing to romanticize street corner ethnography (Whyte 1943), I was fortunate to be able to conduct the vast majority of my fieldwork within one hundred meters of a single street corner at Aa Gym’s Islamic school. To give a sense of the spatial layout of Aa Gym’s Islamic school, a sprawling complex tucked away in a crowded suburb on the slopes of northern Bandung, this ethnographic crossroads was directly across from the mosque, which was in front of Aa Gym’s mini-mart, next to the training classrooms, diagonally across from the MQ Fashion store, which was next to Aa Gym’s Islamic bank office, which was near the souvenir shop, up the alley from Aa Gym’s home, which was across the courtyard from MQTV, just down another side street from the MQ Publishing company, across from the sound production company, and near the MQ Guest House, diagonal from the souvenir shop, which, to come full circle, gets us back to the mosque.

Aa Gym seldom missed a piece of the economic action. An admirer of vertical integration business models, he owned the guest houses where the corporate trainees stayed, the cleaning business that washed the sheets, the restaurants that catered the food, the mini-mart that sold snacks and toiletries, the nearby pharmacy, and even funded profit-sharing initiatives for dozens of small-scale food, clothing, and souvenir vendors inside the complex. He frequently sold Daarut Tauhiid display space for various promotional and marketing ventures of both private corporations (such as Honda) and state-owned enterprises (such as PERTAMINA Oil).

Part of Aa Gym’s business success was due to an adept ability to cultivate personal relationships with Indonesia’s financial and political brokers. A parade of politicians, Muslim leaders, foreign dignitaries, and academics came to visit Aa Gym on a regular basis. Each weekend, thousands of spiritual tourists and corporate trainees toured the complex, prayed in the mosque, and purchased Aa Gym souvenirs to take home to family and friends. I enjoyed countless conversations, coffees, and lunches with a diverse range of Indonesians (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) who made the pilgrimage to Daarut Tauhiid, and I even met with some of them in their homes when I traveled with Aa Gym.

Aa Gym left Bandung every Monday afternoon and typically returned by Thursday evening to deliver his national radio sermon. Each Monday morning, I would join the approximately seven hundred other employees for a weekly sermon and motivation session before Aa Gym left town. As an honorary member of Daarut Tauhiid, I was expected to arrive promptly for these weekly sessions and to conform to the male dress code of dark pants and long-sleeved formal white shirt. Occasionally some of my friends and interlocutors would ask jokingly when I was going to fully comply with the dress code: "Hey, Aa Jim, why do you always seem to remember everything except for the white peci hat?" Donning this hat would mean that I had converted to Islam. Their playful kidding aside, Aa Gym made it clear that compulsion was not allowed in Islam. Whether I became Muslim, he assured me, was an issue between God and me.

It would be impossible to provide an in-depth analysis of the twenty-plus corporate divisions within Daarut Tauhiid and MQ Corporation. I conducted a preliminary visit to every subsidiary but later focused my efforts on those most relevant to my ethnographic questions and theoretical interests. I did not have a rigid schedule that dictated certain months for researching each division at Daarut Tauhiid. Instead I structured my calendar in a way that would allow me to research what departments defined as their most important activities and propagation (dakwah; Arabic, da‘wah). I worked with MQTV during the times when they were most intensively designing, programming, and producing Aa Gym’s television shows (usually the couple of months before Ramadan). I sat in production meetings while marketing directors discussed how to best promote Aa Gym. I listened as producers decided which psychologist to invite for an episode of Aa Gym’s prime-time program Voice of the Heart (Suara Hati). I also interviewed several popular preachers, public icons, and industry executives involved with Islamic media and self-help psychology.

I met with writers and editors at Aa Gym’s publishing company (MQS), worked alongside employees as they prepared their booth for the Islamic Book Fair in Jakarta, and followed the successes and failures of various MQS self-improvement books. I learned even more about the Islamic publishing industry during several long conversations and interviews with Haidar Bagir, the president-director of Mizan Press. These experiences do not figure heavily in this book, yet they were important to my broader understandings of the Islamic self-help industry.

I also devoted a lot of time working with the executive board and staff of Aa Gym’s moral movement, Gema Nusa. I participated in the Training of Trainers retreat, where representatives from over thirty provincial offices convened in Jakarta to learn Gema Nusa’s civic volunteer and organizational management curriculum. During my trips with Aa Gym, I attended the formal declarations of the provincial offices in North Sumatra, West Sumatra, and South Kalimantan. I gained insights into some of the local politics of becoming a Gema Nusa leader, and I got a sense of how Gema Nusa also spread through some of the organizational structures and economic players involved in Aa Gym’s multilevel marketing and consumer goods company, MQ Barokah (MQ Blessings).

These ethnographic encounters reflect my main methodological strategies and the ethnographic contexts in which they unfolded. I collected hundreds of qualitative surveys and conducted a range of formal interviews. I gained important perspectives through conversations with Indonesian scholars and greatly appreciate their invitations to present my research at several universities and academic forums in Indonesia. The insights of these colleagues and interlocutors were especially valuable during the immediate aftermath of Aa Gym’s downfall, when I had to rethink my prior assumptions, working theories, and future research agenda. This book examines the phenomenon of Muslim televangelism from different ethnographic contexts and theoretical perspectives. It is about the rise and fall of a celebrity preacher, yet it is about much more than the biography of a single preacher. It is about how a popular-culture niche of Sufis and self-help gurus has managed to recalibrate religious authority, Muslim subjectivity, and religious politics in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Popular culture is a fickle thing, though. Styles go in and out of vogue, and pop icons rise and fall. This book is a reluctant truce in my thinking and writing.

Acknowledgments

Hutang emas dapat dibayar

Hutang budi dibawa mati

Debts of gold can be repaid

Debts of kindness we take to the grave

—Indonesian couplet

I have had the great fortune to accumulate many debts of kindness along the meandering path that led to the research and writing of this book. As this book project nears its end, I get the privilege and pleasure to reflect on the people and places that have shaped both research and researcher. I am indebted to so many for their time, generous engagement, intellectual insights, incisive critiques, and kind encouragement along the way. Formal acknowledgments cannot adequately express my gratitude to the several institutions, departments, and colleagues that have helped to shape this book.

I first became interested in the academic study of emotion as a high school intern at Southern Methodist University, where Buck Hampson introduced me to observational research in the field of clinical psychology. Two decades later, Buck continues to be a wonderful mentor and friend. When I was an undergraduate psychology major at Marquette University, Marvin Berkowitz, James Grych, and Tony Kuchan continued to guide my interest in emotion. When my interests gradually shifted toward the cultural dimensions of emotion, my anthropology professor Alice Kehoe encouraged me to consider graduate training in anthropology.

When I began my MA in anthropology under the guidance of Karl Heider at the University of South Carolina, I could barely place Indonesia on a map and had never heard of Clifford Geertz. In his seminars, Karl introduced me to the anthropological study of Indonesia, emotion, ethnographic film, and cinema studies. Through his everyday example, he taught me the importance of humility and collegiality. Laura Ahearn, Ann Kingsolver, and Tom Leatherman introduced me to anthropological theory and continue to offer encouragement when our paths cross. During a year of intensive Indonesian language study at Cornell University, Betty Chandra, Krishna Darma, and John Wolff were brilliant (and patient) teachers, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies provided a warm welcome. Richard Baxstrom added welcome levity to our language study, and over the years I have learned much from his innovative approach to cinema in Southeast Asia.

This project took shape within, and between, two vibrant intellectual communities at University of Wisconsin–Madison: the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS). It would be difficult to overstate the time, generosity, and unfailing support of Ken George. In what came to be known as idea badminton, Ken guided me as I tried, in fits of starts and stops, to articulate what this project might become, always encouraging me to follow my curiosity. In the years since, Ken has continued to offer warm counsel and sharp insights. Kirin Narayan contributed her wonderful energy, wit, and wisdom, and her seminar on ethnographic writing compelled me to consider issues of voice, narrative, and characterization. Historian of science and medicine Warwick Anderson encouraged me to investigate the historical legacies, transnational flows, and social life of Islamic psychology. Katherine Bowie, Charles Hirschkind, Maria Lepowsky, Paul Nadasdy, Larry Nesper, Frank Solomon, and the late Neil Whitehead generously offered their time and expertise along the way. The CSEAS was a wonderful community of interdisciplinary inquiry, and I am especially grateful to Mike Cullinane, Anne Hansen, Ellen Rafferty, Andy Sutton, and Mary Jo Wilson. Conversations with fellow graduate students Sarah Besky, Yosef Djakababa, Eric Haanstad, Jennifer Munger, Alex Nading, Natalie Porter, Fadjar Thufail, and Kent Wisniewski pushed me to articulate the relevance of my work beyond Indonesia, and I remain grateful for their continued advice and friendship.

Several scholars beyond UW-Madison also helped to shape this project during the initial stages of research and writing. Robert Hefner commented on an early grant proposal, visited Daarut Tauhiid during my fieldwork, and has continued to provide abiding mentorship and encouragement. Anna Gade generously offered her encyclopedic knowledge about Islam and emotion when she was a scholar-in-residence in Madison during the summer of 2004, and she continues to offer wisdom and guidance in the study of Islam. And Peter Mandaville, ever since his visit to Daarut Tauhiid in 2007, has been an invaluable interlocutor about Islam, media, and politics. Other scholars who shared their own insights during visits to Daarut Tauhiid include Art Buehler, miriam cooke, M. B. Hooker, Julia Day Howell, Bruce Lawrence, Tim Lindsey, Hans Pols, Julia Suryakusuma, and Nelly van Doorn-Harder. Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good were wonderful interlocutors when I presented my research at the Islamic University of Indonesia (UII). They, along with Michael Fischer and Mary Steedly, offered helpful insight, questions, and encouragement when I presented my research at Harvard University’s School of Social Medicine.

I am also grateful to other interlocutors along the way who posed provocative questions during presentations at Boston University (CURA, The Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs); Indonesian Institute for Sciences (LIPI); New College of Florida (Department of Anthropology); Islamic University of Bandung (Department of Psychology); National Islamic University-Syarif Hidayatullah (UIN, Center for the Study of Islam and Society); Stanford University (Asia Pacific Research Center); University of Michigan (Stephen M. Ross School of Business); World Affairs Council (San Francisco); and the Centers for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) at Cornell University, Northern Illinois University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison, UCLA, and University of California, Berkeley.

This book evolved over the course of fellowships, and I appreciate these institutions and colleagues for their warm collegiality and generous support of my research. During my time at the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University (2009–2010), my thinking benefited from Don Emmerson’s indefatigable curiosity and unfailing collegiality. I am also grateful to other scholars-in-residence during that time, Marshall Clark, Juliet Piet, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Sudarno Sumarto, and Christian von