Preaching in Word, Pen, and Deed: The Da’wah of Pemudi Persatuan Islam in Bandung Regency, West Java, 2007–2011

Abstract

Scholarship on Persatuan Islam (Persis) has privileged its male ulama, its polemics, and its central leadership, while the regional history of its young women’s wing has remained largely unwritten. This article reconstructs the da’wah of the Regional Board (Pimpinan Daerah) of Pemudi Persatuan Islam in Bandung Regency during the 2007–2011 term, a period framed by the partition that created West Bandung Regency. Using the historical method of heuristics, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography, it draws on the board’s accountability report, minute book, and congress decree, photographic records, organisational publications, and six oral testimonies from former office-holders, read critically against one another. The findings show that the board lost its western branches to a new regional body yet ended the term with nineteen recorded branches, five of them founded between 2008 and 2009, and 1,573 registered members. Its da’wah was organised as a division of labour across functional fields: preaching and study circles (bil lisan), the bulletin Kilau Nurani (bil kalam), and social service, disaster relief, and charitable mobilisation (bil hal). Read through Talcott Parsons’s structural functionalism, but against its equilibrium bias, the case shows how young women converted an externally imposed territorial loss into organisational expansion, while the life-course pressures of marriage, study, and relocation set the limits of that expansion.