This book is an English version of the author's 2009 text Islam dalam bingkai keindonesiaan dan kemanusiaan: Sebuah refleksi sejarah, by the well-established translator George A. Fowler. In addition to the translated Indonesian book, this edition comes with a short foreword by Jan Michiel Otto, professor emeritus at Leiden University, and ‘An introduction to Ahmad Syafii Maarif: The man and this book’, by Herman L. Beck of Tilburg University. Before this publication in Singapore, the translation was originally released as part of a Dutch book series on Islam and society.

Anyone who has followed Indonesian politics or religious life for the last 25 years will be familiar with the figure of Ahmad Syafii Maarif, the grandfatherly former head of the country's second-largest Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah and a prominent voice of moderation in politics, society, and religious practice. This book was written after he stepped down as Muhammadiyah's chairman in 2005 (and in that way it occasionally shows its age, e.g., with repeated references to George W. Bush, pp. 139–40 and 205–12).

After an Introduction that lays out the general approach to the questions of humanity and Indonesian identity and an outline of the book's contents, chapter 1 is a long narration of Indonesian history. In this (as in many other parts of the book), Maarif leans heavily on the existing secondary literature, and his thinking is deep but not always systematic — bouncing, for example, from the choice of Indonesian as a unifying language to statistics on the maritime territory of the country (pp. 48–9) without particular reason and without connection to Islam. Chapter 2, on Islam and democracy, is the part of the book where Maarif pulls most from the work of other leading thinkers, such as Fatima Mernissi on social justice and K.H. Husein Muhammad on equality of the sexes. Chapter 3, although titled ‘Indonesian Islam’ (the translation has left off the more explanatory subtitle of the Indonesian version: ‘The question of quality’), is mostly about education and how to build a ‘meaningful’ Muslim. This feels somewhat more original than the previous two chapters, and pulls extensively on Maarif's insider knowledge of Muhammadiyah. Chapter 4 probes questions of adherence to the Islamic scriptures, sincerity, the method of integrating Islam into politics, and the global environment of the twenty-first century; each of these sections was pulled from a different mass media publication by the author. The short chapter 5 restates the author's call for an Indonesian Muslim community that is tolerant, broad-minded, and forward-looking.

The translation is occasionally clunky (e.g., ‘national construction’, p. 159, for what should clearly be ‘national development’, pembangunan bangsa), but it captures the eclecticism of the original well. Mistakes in the original have been preserved (e.g., ‘Nico Schulte Nordholdt’, p. 231 n. 32, fusing the names of two different well-known Dutch scholars), and occasionally new mistakes have been introduced, as when the translator apparently did not know that Rasuna Said, the famous female firebrand of the nationalist movement in the 1930s–1950s, was a woman, and thus consistently rendered with male pronouns (p. 87). The real frustration for scholars using this book is that the interventions of the translator and the thinking behind them are not clear. There is no translator's note to explain the general approach. In the footnotes, interventions by the translator are only inconsistently labelled (see, e.g., p. 237 n. 85 versus n. 91). Needless to say, for experts in the field this can be frustrating.

While it is clear why Syafii Maarif published this book in Indonesian in 2009, it is a little less clear why this book needed an English translation in 2018. Much of the book's content is echoing secondary literature already in English. Other sections of the book quote from and integrate other prominent Muslim thinkers (e.g., Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman) or Indonesian thinkers (e.g., Mohammad Hatta, Hamka), but without necessarily building on them. At least twice in the book, the author calls for us to pay attention to the next generation of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals (pp. 125 and 216); hopefully the names he lists can be the focus of future translation projects. Even the frontmatter provided by European experts speaks of Maarif as an activist more than a thinker, and highlights his deeds and leadership more than his innovative ideas.

On the whole, though, it is good to have this book in English and thus accessible for students and readers more familiar with other parts of the Muslim world. The pockets of original thinking (I might assign students ‘Islam and the challenges of religious and cultural diversity’, pp. 120–28; ‘Symbolism: Salt and lipstick’, pp. 200–205; and chapter 5) are worth bringing to a wider audience, and the book as a whole is representative of the moderate line of Indonesia's leading Islamic organisations. Although Syafii Maarif's intervention is undoubtedly targeted exclusively at Indonesia, it remains an uplifting example of how a Muslim intellectual can call his country to its best self while recognising reality on the ground.