Islamic Political Thought in Revolutionary Priangan and Kartosoewirjo’s Haluan Politik Islam of 1946

Abstract

Haluan Politik Islam offers a point of entry into the regional history of political Islam during the Indonesian Revolution. Composed by S. M. Kartosoewirjo in 1946 and associated with a Masyumi gathering in Garut, the tract connected the defence of Indonesian independence with a programme of Islamic social reconstruction. This article situates its arguments within Priangan’s networks of religious leadership, party organisation, and revolutionary mobilisation, while tracing their antecedents in Sarekat Islam and the politics of hijrah. Using the historical method and contextual interpretation of the text, it argues that Priangan was an active setting in which national sovereignty, popular participation, religious obligation, and administrative competence were brought into a common political vocabulary. Kartosoewirjo distinguished national liberation from subsequent ideological competition, linked diplomacy to armed resistance, and envisaged change through both state institutions and village society. These positions complicate readings that retrospectively treat every element of his thought as preparation for the Darul Islam rebellion. The relationship between the 1946 programme and the proclamation of the Islamic State of Indonesia in 1949 involved conceptual continuity alongside changes in regional political and military circumstances. The article contributes a regional intellectual history of revolutionary Priangan by recovering the tract’s political pedagogy and its movement between local, national, and religious horizons.