Madjid, Nurcholish - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Kersten, Carool
Leiden
Brill
(1,070 words)
Nurcholish Madjid (1939-2005) was a leading Indonesian Muslim intellectual, who began his career as a prominent student leader in the 1960s and became one of the most influential Islamic thinkers and activists in late twentieth-century Indonesia. He was born in Jombang, the heartland of traditionalist Javanese Islam, to parents that subscribed to reformist-modernist Islamic ideas, leading to his family being socially ostracised. This experience was formative for the young man and shaped his lifelong independence as an intellectual who joined neither the traditionalist mass organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (