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by Vladislav Khodasevich (Author)
Hamka s Great Story presents Indonesia through the eyes of an impassioned, popular thinker who believed that Indonesians and Muslims everywhere should embrace the thrilling promises of modern life, and navigate its dangers, with Islam as their compass.
Hamka (Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah) was born when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony and came of age as the nation itself was emerging through tumultuous periods of Japanese occupation, revolution, and early independence. He became a prominent author and controversial public figure. In his lifetime of prodigious writing, Hamka advanced Islam as a liberating, enlightened, and hopeful body of beliefs around which the new nation could form and prosper. He embraced science, human agency, social justice, and democracy, arguing that these modern concepts comported with Islam s true teachings. Hamka unfolded this big idea his Great Story decade by decade in a vast outpouring of writing that included novels and poems and chatty newspaper columns, biographies, memoirs, and histories, and lengthy studies of theology including a thirty-volume commentary on the Holy Qur an. In introducing this influential figure and his ideas to a wider audience, this sweeping biography also illustrates a profound global process: how public debates about religion are shaping national societies in the postcolonial world."
Author Biography
Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), called by Vladimir Nabokov (in 1939) "the greatest Russian poet that the twentieth century has yet produced," was also an outstanding memoirist and biographer. Angela Brintlinger is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture 1917-1937 and coeditor of Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture.
