Ibrahim Hosen

From World History

(1917–2001), Indonesian religious figure. Ibrahim, a son of Hosen bin Abdul Syukur, emerged as a colorful religious figure in Indonesia, with bold and unorthodox opinions. He was born in the South Sumatran town of Bengkulu to a Bugis father and a South Sumatran mother. During Ibrahim's early years, his father took the family first to Jakarta and Singapore, where he was in the retail business, and then to Lampung in South Sumatra, where he ran a religious school. Ibrahim's four-year stay in Singapore as a child and pupil at the As-Sagaf School left a strong imprint on his worldview, which tended to be tolerant, open-minded, modern, and pluralist. In 1934 he went to Java for further study of the Qur'an, Islamic law, Arabic literature, and rhetoric. According to his biographers, Ibrahim met and studied under a number of religious scholars and Hadrami (Yemeni Arab) teachers in Java.
After one year of study and travel in Java, Ibrahim returned to South Sumatra. In 1939, for the first time, he successfully represented an established school of Islamic law in a debate, defending its stance on many social and religious issues. During the rapid political disruption in the 1940s, precipitated by the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Pacific War and the return of the Dutch, Ibrahim, as a religious scholar-cum-official, energetically took part in socioreligious and political activities in the region of Bengkulu, his native town. He married twice, in 1946 and again in 1948 following the death of his first wife, and had eight surviving children.

In 1955 Ibrahim went to Cairo to study at al-Azhar University. Returning to Indonesia with a degree in Islamic law in 1960, he joined the Department of Religious Affairs in Jakarta. In 1964 he was appointed rector of the newly opened State Institute of Islamic Studies in Palembang.

Following the major political changes in Indonesia in the mid-1960s in the wake of the purge of the Indonesian Communist Party and the rise to power of Suharto, Ibrahim began a major career as a national figure. In 1966 he moved to Jakarta, assuming the post of bureau chief in the Department of Religious Affairs. He continued to occupy an important post in the department until his retirement in 1982. At the same time, capitalizing on his credibility as a religious figure and official, Ibrahim won financial support from many wealthy sponsors to institute and lead two centers of higher learning for Qur'anic studies in South Jakarta, one for men, in 1971, and another for women, in 1977.

Ibrahim was appointed to the chairmanship of the Indonesian Council of Religious Scholars in 1980. Here he found an official platform from which to launch his religious views, considered by many Indonesians to be innovative but also controversial, on account of his toleration of beer drinking, bank interest, the lottery, and contraceptive devices. Although Ibrahim did not write major works detailing his jurisprudential principles, religious philosophy, or reformist ideas, he responded to the religious controversies that occupied the minds of many Indonesian Muslims.

Ibrahim's religious interpretations arose in the context of the nature of Islam in Indonesia, with its often-declared openness, moderation, tolerance, and pluralism. He responded positively to the tolerance and open-mindedness of his countrypeople, and at the same time he saw the religious justification for many practices under scrutiny, such as those mentioned. This religious predilection, not surprisingly, annoyed or even angered many religious leaders who strictly adhered to scripture. At some point, he was even branded a religious scholar who could be hired to issue legal opinions or a religious scholar who always supported government policy.

Ibrahim himself claimed that his approach to any issue was based on the Islamic legal principle of permissibility; that is, that all matters are inherently permissible. Only when there are specific and unequivocal prohibitions in Islam does such permission end. Considering his religious and educational background, Ibrahim can be seen to belong to a scholarly tradition that tackles religious issues on the basis of Islamic jurisprudence, or a legalistic approach. All his references and quotations may be traced to earlier opinions of Muslim jurists or their equivalents. Not surprisingly, he claimed that his legal opinions were not novel, let alone un-Islamic, since his rulings were based on earlier, established scholarly opinion.

Further Reading

Federspiel, Howard M. (1992) Muslim Intellectuals and National Development in Indonesia. New York: Nova Science.

Gibson, Thomas. (2000) "Islam and the Spirit Cults in New Order Indonesia: Global Flows vs. Local Knowledge." Indonesia 69 (April): 41–70.

Ratno, Lukito. (1999) "Law and Politics in Post-Independence Indonesia: A Case Study of Religious and Adat Courts." Studia Islamika 6, 2: 63–86.

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