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."
