Poetry as Moral Tribunal: Islamic Verse in Madjalah Sunda during Indonesia’s 1966-1967 Political Transition

Abstract

This article examines Islamic poetry published in the Bandung-based Sundanese periodical Madjalah Sunda during Indonesia’s political transition of 1966-1967. Existing scholarship has established the importance of print in the formation of modern Sundanese literature and Islam-Sunda identity, but it has paid little attention to Islamic verse in a short-lived general-interest magazine whose editorial identity was also political and anti-communist. Using the historical method of heuristics, external and internal source criticism, interpretation, and historiography, the study reconstructs a core corpus of seven poems from issues 43, 47, 49, 65, and 66. It distinguishes composition dates from publication dates and limits chronological claims to poems whose authorship, issue, page, or reproduced image can be verified. The findings show that Islamic expression did not occupy a single devotional register. It ranged from Qur’anic transcreation and contemplations of time and death to moral economy, criticism of political promises, an ethic of productive labor, and eschatological condemnation of named political actors. These poems did not develop in a simple sequence from private devotion to public protest. They formed a layered repertoire through which writers converted economic deprivation, distrust of authority, and disputed memories of 1965 into Sundanese moral language. The article argues that Madjalah Sunda made poetry a vernacular moral tribunal. Its pages relocated judgments that appeared unresolved in political life into the ethical and eschatological authority of Islam, while modern free verse, old orthography, and local imagery kept those judgments culturally legible to Sundanese readers.