Since the late nineteenth century, Muslim movements for religious and social reform have underscored the value of making scripture accessible to a broad public. Scholars and activists alike have urged ordinary Muslim men and women to study and follow the Qur'ān and the hadīth (the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), and to do so they have rendered these scriptural writings and commentaries on them into the vernaculars of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They have also framed a wide range of appeals—to study the sciences, to modernize society, to stage a revolution—in the language and format of scriptural commentary. Vernacular writings (and, more recently, audio and videocassettes) based on scripture provide the foundations of popular religious education (Shahrani 1991), figure prominently in political movements (Fischer 1980; Kepel 1985), and serve as guides for living for Muslims traveling outside their homelands (Kepel 1987). The modern period has seen an explosion in the range of languages, genres, and contexts in which Muslims have authoritatively deployed scripture.

In social and political discourse in contemporary Indonesia, the use of hadīth texts serves social and political as well as more narrowly religious ends. Among the purposes of the translation and exegesis of Arabic texts are the definition of an ideal Islamic society and indications of the ways Indonesia falls short of this ideal. In a narrow sense, contemporary translations are examples of what Bernard Lewis (1988:92) calls the “authoritarian and quietist” mode of Muslim political thought because they refrain from calling for an Islamic state. But in the context of Indonesian political culture they approach what he terms the “radical activist” mode, and seek to reshape society, if not the state, in the image of the Qur’ān and hadīth.

The north indian movement of spiritual renewal widely known as the Tablīghī Jama'āt dates from the 1920s and exists today throughout the world. The movement's fundamental goal has been tablīgh: “conveying,” specifically conveying sharī'ā-based guidance. To this end, it has consistently used vernacular works based on translations of the Qur'ān and, especially, hadīth in its quietistic work of inculcating correct and devoted religious practice among Muslims. In this use of the vernacular, primarily Urdu, the movement has been heir to over a century of translation and subsequent publication of religious works. These publications, often in inexpensive format, have been produced by the lithographic presses that became especially common in the late nineteenth century. As in the Indonesian cases considered in this symposium, the 1930s and early 1940s were a key period for translating and printing influential texts based largely on translation of hadith. In this period, the reformists' printed texts not only reached a larger number of people but were used in new settings as Tabligh institutions evolved. Texts were never meant to stand alone and have always been secondary to practice.

Gulbuddin hekmatyar made the above statement in a speech to Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the early 1980s. As the leader (amīr) of Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan (the Islamic Party of Afghanistan), one of the principal Islamic parties then fighting to overthrow the Marxist regime in Afghanistan, Hekmatyar was primarily concerned in this speech with condemning the leftist leadership in Kabul and its Soviet sponsors. However, the head of the most radical of the Afghan resistance parties also took time to inform his audience about the origins of his party as a student group at Kabul University in the late 1960s. This reminiscence of student days was not a digression or flight of fancy. To the contrary, Hekmatyar's historical reflections have major significance in the context of Afghan national politics, for it is through history that Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan has staked its claim to rule Afghanistan.

Muslim movements in the twentieth century have sought to develop new reading and listening publics attuned to the messages of reform and renewal. Across Asia and the Middle East, scholars, poets, and activists have created distinctive vernacular genres intended to make the words of scripture widely available. Newspaper columns, quickly printed tracts, and popular poetry have been shaped to the task of tafsīr, the interpretation of scripture. International networks of printers, booksellers, and, more recently, television producers have extended the reformist's reach far beyond older networks of scholarship and communication (Metcalf 1990; Eickelman 1992). Often modernist writers have signaled their break with past scholarly traditions by writing in vernaculars, sometimes developing new vernaculars. They wrote in Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, or Indonesian, rather than the traditional religious and literary languages of Arabic, Persian, and Javanese (Anderson 1990; Freitag 1988; Mardin 1989).

The tenacity of family-farming households in agrarian economies experiencing capitalist penetration has long figured in a debate about the ultimate consequences of such penetration for agrarian social structure. On the one hand are those who argue that, while various forces may work to speed or delay the process, the most likely long-term outcome of the capitalization of agriculture is that envisioned by Lenin: polarization of the countryside into two opposing classes, capitalist farmers and landless laborers, linked by wage relations (Bartra 1974; de Janvry 1981). On the other hand are those who claim that, at least under some conditions, capitalist farming can stimulate small-scale entrepreneurship and socioeconomic differentiation, with the attendant persistence of small family farms (Goodman and Redclift 1982:109–12; Maclachlan 1987:16–23).