Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

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SESSION II
for the non-textual, which are seen as not only to
be acceptable within this unity of belief, but in fact
contributes to the strengthening in the belief itself.
As I will further argue, an important factor which has
greatly contributed to the development of a
viable tradition of religious plurality in Indonesia is
not necessarily Indonesia’s ability to favourably
respond to some singular chronological precedence,
but it is its geo-chronology. As a periphery of the Muslim
world, it has been able to maintain its own
chronological plurality—its pre-Muslim past is still
alive in the Muslim present. Thus, the primacy of
“modernity” can well destroy the plurality of Indonesian
Islams, the very structure of its openness, because
modernity as a temporal “right of time” tends to destroy
chronological plurality. 4
The appearance of neutrality in the schematic grids of
discontinuities in advocating “modernity” will often be
undone when values such as unmodern, non-modern
and anti-modern wander into the exercise and reveal
its moral and ideological partialities. The danger of
restructuring time into nicely broken discontinuities
is that it tends to make us oblivious to this relative
quality of all human transcendental experiences. In
my view, dissenters belong to the realm of democratic
sophistication, which is not at all a modern invention,
and not in some temporal priority.
In my travels across 10 provinces on 5 different islands
where Muslims form the majority, except for Bali, this
experience of dissent mingles antiquity with modernity,
historicity of facts with timeless myths and even logic
with magic. Indonesia’s dissent is multi-dimensional,
participated by actors interested in the rational and the
mythological, from the urban to the rural, using
contemporary and traditional vocabularies, to articulate
the modern and non-modern.
The subsequent parts of the paper are organised
around the main contexts of these disagreements, be
they manifested at personal or organised levels or as
cultural forms although the contexts of disagreements
are not necessarily similar and the ensuing process of
making sense of spirituality and piety can be divergent
indeed. The longest focus is given to the Javanese santri
community involved in challenging the Muslim orthodoxy
and the rest deals with other viable points of contestations,
namely, gender, the arts, sexuality and local cultures.
THE JAVANESE SANTRI: THE POLITICS OF
RELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS, THE THEOLOGY
OF PIETY
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
Etymologically, santri, the Javanese word for a Muslim
religious student boarding at a pesantren, or the section
of Javanese community more involved in normative piety,
may well have Sanskritic roots. Shastri is derived from
shastra, which refers to sacred books or books of great
knowledge. A shastri is therefore a learned scholar. The
Javanese pesantren itself, the Islamic religious boarding
school which used to be independent village Islamic
learning institutions that today have taken more organised
and formal forms, have been suggested to originate
from similar institutions, whose existence can be traced
back to Java’s Hindu-Buddhist past. 5
Ethnographic studies, most notably by Geertz (1960),
tend to view that the majority of the Javanese Muslims,
who comprise the abangan peasants and the priyayi
aristocracy, as only nominal Muslims, the former still
attached to the veneration of indigenous supernatural
forces, the latter maintaining its Hindu-Buddhist leanings.
Against this backdrop, Geertz and others begin to regard
the santri community as the purest and most committed
of all Javanese Muslims.
Such a typology has long been criticised by others
[Woodward (1999) quotes Hodgson (1974), Bachtiar
(1973) and Suparlan (1976)]. 6 Geertz’s own understanding
of Islam seems to be limited to the tone of the Muslim
modernist reform movement, with its focus on the
legal dimensions of piety and the development of an
empirical Muslim identity, an attempt which at best
displays a systematically careless ignorance on Islam’s
multidimensionality and international history.
The heavy nuances of mysticism in Javanese Islam have
led many scholars to speculate that the Sufis were the
primary agents of conversions in Java. Then again those
like Ricklefs (2001) are always quick to remind us that
there is little evidence of the existence of organised Sufi
brotherhood in the early period of Islam in the region. 7
For me, the analyses of historic mass conversions into
Islam outside of Arabia, have long suffered from the
recurring mishap of overdoing Islam as a Middle
Eastern affair. As such, this limits our capacity to
analyse the reverse psychology of conversion processes
and the politics of mass conversions, which could shed
considerable light on the experience of potential
Muslimness which is relatively independent from
Islam’s centre of origin. As such, there is tendency to
give too much credit to the authority of this foreign
construct which has resulted in our sporadic attention
to the existing spiritual infrastructure which may
facilitate the changes of a collective spiritual paradigm.
Religious conversions in many cases are an interactive