Theology from Marginalized Experience: Humanistic Islam and Transgender Muslim Subjectivity in Indonesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35719/islamikainside.v12i1.360Keywords:
Humanistic Islam, religious subjectivity, religious legitimacy, transgender Muslim, Pesantren WariaAbstract
This article examines how Santri Waria represents the negotiation of religious subjectivity, dignity, and religious legitimacy among waria santri and what this negotiation reveals about humanistic Islam. Existing studies of Pesantren Waria al-Fatah have primarily approached the institution through social identity, religious space, education, embodiment, lived religion, and social precarity, while its implications for Islamic theological reflection have been examined less systematically. This study employs a qualitative critical-hermeneutic analysis of a published narrative-textual corpus, drawing primarily on Masthuriyah Sa’dan’s Santri Waria (2020). Religious subjectivity is used as the central analytical unit and examined through religious practice, identity, piety, moral reasoning, self-understanding, communal participation, and religious agency. These dimensions are interpreted in relation to religious space, mentorship, authority, legitimacy, and epistemic exclusion. Asghar Ali Engineer provides an ethical-emancipatory lens centered on dignity, justice, and liberation, while Mohammed Arkoun offers an epistemological lens to examine the boundaries of legitimate religious knowledge and the “unthought.” The analysis shows that the waria santri represented in the corpus negotiate Muslim belonging through religious practice, moral reasoning, communal participation, and claims to religious recognition rather than through institutional inclusion alone. The article argues that marginalized religious experience can function as a locus of theological questioning without replacing scripture, Islamic tradition, or established theological reasoning. It offers an empirically grounded account of transgender Muslim religious subjectivity and formulates Humanistic Islam as an ethical-epistemological analytical framework that connects dignity and agency through a critical examination of religious authority, legitimacy, and epistemic exclusion.
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