The emergence of violent Muslim vigilante groups in regions of Indonesia where there has been serious inter-religious conflict is one of the most conspicuous new phenomena in contemporary Indonesian Islam. During the brief presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid, such groups often gained control of the streets, and the army and police appeared unable, or unwilling, to contain them. Most observers of modern Indonesia agree that much of the violence is financed by military and civilian interest groups, and is provoked by struggles for power between rival élite factions. But at the same time it is clear that at least some of these groups are rooted in movements that existed long before the present crisis. This paper argues that the roots of most of the radical Muslim groups in contemporary Indonesia can be traced to two relatively ‘indigenous’ Muslim political movements which date back to the 1940s – the Darul Islam movement and the Masyumi party – and to a number of more recent transnational Islamic networks. It traces the transformations of Masyumi and Darul Islam from the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of ‘campus Islam’ in the 1980s, the empowerment of Islam in the final years of the Suharto regime, and the course of Islamic politics during Suharto's downfall and in the 1999 elections, before looking in detail at the recent involvement of radical Muslim groups in street politics.

A research project on the Indonesian ulama gave me the opportunity to visit pesantren in various parts of the Archipelago and put together a sizeable collection of books used in and around the pesantren, the so-called kitab kuning. Taken together, this collection offers a clear overview of the texts used in Indonesian pesantren and madrasah, a century after L.W.C. van den Berg's pioneering study of the Javanese (and Madurese) pesantren curriculum (1886). Van den Berg compiled, on the basis of interviews with kyais, a list of the major textbooks studied in the pesantren of his day. He mentioned fifty titles and gave on each some general information and short summaries of the more important ones. Most of these books are still being reprinted and used in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, but many other works have come into use beside them. The present collection contains around nine hundred different titles, most of which are used as textbooks. I shall first make some general observations on these books and on the composition of the collection. In the second part of this article I shall discuss a list of 'most popular kitab' that I compiled from other sources. All of the books listed there are, however, part of the collection.[2] Criteria and representativeness In order to judge how representative this collection is, a few words on my method of collecting are necessary. I visited the major publishers and toko kitab (bookshops specializing in this type of religious literature) in Jakarta,

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