Harry J. Benda

Harry Jindrich Benda (October 28, 1919 – October 26, 1971) was a Czechoslovakian-born American full professor at Yale University, who specialised in Indonesian politics.

Quotes

• The political significance of Indonesian Islam, including Javanese Islam, stems in no small measure from the fact that in Islam the borderline between religion and politics is, at best very thin. Islam is a way of life as much as a religion…. Islam does not recognize the existence of independent, secular realms of life…. Separation of religion and politics, in other words, was, at best a temporary phenomenon of Islam in decline. In an era of Islamic awakening, it could not survive for long, either in independent Muslim lands or in Islamic areas ruled by non-Muslims….
  • Harry J. Benda, 1958. Benda. The Crescent and the Rising Sun, pp. 13, 29, 57. in Bostom, A. G. (2015). Sharia versus freedom: The legacy of Islamic totalitarianism.

• Like other Muslims, Indonesian Islamic leaders—reformists, hardly less than orthodox—were thus by Western standards not only lacking in political experience, but were, by the nature of their orientation and training, ill-equipped to formulate political goals as such. The santri {Javanese practitioners of a more orthodox Islam} civilization, in other words, is not a political ideal so much as the idealization of a religious community—the ummah—which would subsume within its all-embracing confines all walks of life, subordinating the state to the dictates of the Islamic ethic…. If given political expression in Darul Islam—the so-called “Islamic State”—the political program of Islam is limited to postulating a state which, irrespective of its constitutional form, economic organization, and social composition, is to be ruled by Muslims in accordance with Islamic Law.
  • Harry J. Benda, 1958. Benda. The Crescent and the Rising Sun, pp. 13, 29, 57. in Bostom, A. G. (2015). Sharia versus freedom: The legacy of Islamic totalitarianism.