ABSTRACT
Any history of Islamic publishing in Indonesia should devote special attention to the remarkable career of Abdillah Toha. The plans for the project, co-financed with Surakarta businessman, Setiawan Djody, include the building of a shopping mall, a business centre, and luxury apartments at one of Jakarta's most prestigious locations. This chapter contributes to the discussion on globalization, by studying the intermediate institutions that generate the counterflow of metropolitan cultural forms. It focuses on the publishing house of 'Bulan Bintang', which constituted a dominant force in the field of Islamic media right up the 1970s. Several aspects that characterized Islamic publishing of the period will be singled out and these general characteristics illustrated by providing specific details of Bulan Bintang, the most succesful Islamic publisher of the Sukarno era. After the nationalization of Dutch-owned enterprises in 1958, Bulan Bintang operations were continued by the new state-owned companies, to be replaced again by private enterprises under the New Order.
