Various criteria have been formulated to deter­mine whether or not someone should be classified as an intellectual. These criteria range from patterns of recruit­ment to responses to various cultural or political move­ments.  This paper is devoted, however, to exami­ning the rise of Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia in the last three decades of the twentieth century. It highlights, as a subject of analysis, the significance of socio-political (and even religious) context as well as the educational background upon which the forma­tion of those Indonesian Muslim intellectuals is based. An important finding shows that the rise of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals in such a time frame resulted mainly from three vectors, movements in Islamic thought, socio-political relations between the government and the Muslim community, and developments in education. The educational background of Muslim intellect­tuals, as another finding encapsulates, is not monolithic since some of them pursued their studies in Islamic educational institutions, and some others in more general, public ones.