Henry Corbin, Charles Taylor, and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: Metaphysics and the Making of Islam Nusantara in Indonesia

What does it mean to think Islam beyond doctrine, ritual, and politics-and instead from the depth of metaphysical imagination?

Henry Corbin, Charles Taylor, and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: Metaphysics and the Making of Islam Nusantara offers a profound and accessible exploration of Islam Nusantara as an intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical project. Rather than treating Islam Nusantara as a cultural label or regional variation of Islam, this book presents it as a metaphysical mode of thinking-one that emerges from deep engagements with imagination, meaning, tradition, and the sacred.

Bringing together three major thinkers from distinct intellectual worlds-Henry Corbin, Charles Taylor, and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas-this book traces how their ideas converge in shaping a uniquely Nusantara articulation of Islam. Corbin’s concept of the imaginal world and spiritual hermeneutics, Taylor’s reflections on modernity, moral frameworks, and social imaginaries, and al-Attas’s Islamic metaphysics and critique of secular knowledge are not merely compared, but woven into a coherent philosophical narrative.

At the heart of the book lies a central question:
How can Islam Nusantara be understood as a living metaphysical tradition-one that mediates between global modernity and local wisdom, between rational discourse and spiritual depth?

Through a carefully structured analysis, the book explores:

• the metaphysical foundations of Islam Nusantara,

• the role of imagination, symbolism, and meaning-making in Islamic thought,

• the interaction between modern philosophy and Islamic intellectual traditions,

• and the ways in which Nusantara Islam articulates ethics, belief, and knowledge beyond rigid binaries of tradition versus modernity.

Written in a clear and engaging style, this book speaks to scholars and general readers alike who are interested in Islamic philosophy, metaphysics, religion and modernity, Islam Nusantara, Sufism, social imagination, and Southeast Asian Islamic thought. It positions Indonesia not as the periphery of Islamic intellectual history, but as a critical site for rethinking Islam in the contemporary world.

This work is not merely an academic contribution-it is an invitation to rethink how Islam can be lived, understood, and imagined today.