HONGXUAN LIN

Dr Lin is an Assistant Professor with the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies. His research interests lie in the intersection between Islam and Marxism in Indonesia. More broadly, he is also interested in the articulation of progressive Islamic ideas across the Muslim world. His first monograph, Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism and the Making of the Indonesian Republic will be published by Oxford University Press in August 2023.

His current research project tentatively titled “Progressive Islamic Discourses Circulating Across a Maritime Muslim World.” This project will trace the circulation of progressive Islamic discourses across the Indian Ocean, which can be conceived of as connective tissue linking the components of what might be called the Islamic maritime world. These are regions in which Islam has played an important role in shaping societies, regions that are linked to each other by longstanding networks of trade, pilgrimage, and intellectual contacts. Geographically, this project is sited in those parts of the ummah connected by the Indian Ocean: Egypt, Arabia, Iran, South Asia, and the Malay Archipelago. Temporally, it is concerned with the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, an era in which self-consciously progressive discourses were articulated by Muslim intellectuals. Thematically, it focuses on identifiably progressive ideas such as remedying socio-economic inequity, promoting women’s rights, defending intercommunal tolerance, normalizing the separation of religion from government, and perhaps most important of all, developing novel approaches to the science of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).

Selected publications:

• Lin, Hongxuan. “‘One Eye in the Chain of the Asian Movement:’ Muslims Adapting Marx in the Dutch East Indies, 1927–1942.” In Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia, edited by Marc Opper and Matthew Galway. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2022, 33–67.
• Lin, Hongxuan, and Galway, Matthew. “‘Heirs to What Had Been Accomplished’: D. N. Aidit, the PKI, and Maoism, 1950–1965.” Modern Intellectual History, 2022, 1–29.
• Zawawi Ibrahim and Lin, Hongxuan. “Penan Storytelling as Indigenous Counter-Narrations of Malaysian Nation-State Developmentalism.” Positions 21, no. 1 (2021)
• Lin, Hongxuan. “Sickle as Crescent: Islam and Communism in the Netherlands East Indies, 1915–1927.” Studia Islamika 25, no. 2 (2018): 447–484.
• Lin, Hongxuan. “English as an Islamic Cosmopolitan Vernacular: English-language Sufi Devotional Literature in Singapore.” Southeast Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (2017): 309–350."