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Abstractc iso_1067 38..61 In contemporary Indonesia, a new generation of Muslim pop preachers and self-help gurus tap into, and trade on, the symbolic and economic capital of Islam, science, and media technologies. Through television sermons and elaborate Power Point presentations, these pop preachers and self-help gurus summon the Prophet Muhammad's life and teachings in ways that resonate with the civic concerns, consumerist desires, and aspirational piety of the Muslim middle classes. These sermons and seminars often portray the Prophet Muhammad as the ultimate measure of what it means to be cosmopolitan. In this article I explore "prophetic cosmopolitanism" as a vernacular Muslim cosmopolitanism, but one which is not isolated from, or necessarily prior to, Western liberal-secular ideas about civic virtue. I argue instead that prophetic cosmopolitanism is both informed by, and offered as an alternative to, global discourses about psychology and self, citizen and believer, nation and umma. [Cosmopolitanism, Islam, popular culture, public sphere, transnationalism].

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—for the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia's democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women's rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity.