M. Syafi'i Anwar is an Indonesian historian and journalist. He is a senior research fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation as well as the executive director of the International Center For Islam and Pluralism.[1][2]
Anwar was instrumental to the founding of the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals, having participation in the 1990 meeting with B. J. Habibie that led to the organization's establishment.[3] Anwar has defended the IAMI as a middle-class organization, stating that the Indonesian middle-class of the 1980s and 1990s was culturally self-confident and lacked the inferiority complex toward the modern world, supported by non-Muslims and Javanists, that had been imprinted on Muslims during the colonial era.[4]