Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

spiritual adaptation—gradual, highly contested,
disorienting, most likely bitter and usually political.
“Converts” choose, adapt and make sense of the
priorities and burdens of the new spiritual paradigm
they encounter.
In this regard, the Javanese Muslims have always been
confounding for their heavy focus on mysticism and
other locally fashioned spiritual paraphernalia – native
spirits, local saints, wayang kulit [shadow puppet play],
sacred tombs, burning of incense and kemenyan
[solidified benzoin gum], amulets, magic spells, trance
and meditation.
Against this backdrop, Woodward (1999) eloquently
argues that normative piety and mysticism, the more
successful variant in Java, are both equally valid
articulation of Muslim piety, notwithstanding the fact
that the two entities are separated by critical points of
divergence at some instances. 8
Like Woodward, I see the influence of Sufism
on Javanese Islam as evident—from the collection
of Javanese court literature and folk traditions to the
architecture of the earliest mosques in Java. Riddell
(2001) meanwhile notes that in the Middle East, Sufism
emerged systematically several centuries after the Arab
world had been Islamicised, but in the Southeast Asia,
Sufism came to be normative during Islam’s formative
years before a more legal approach became widespread.
Indeed, historical Javanese religious literature is filled
with curious characters like those of the oversexed
Cebolang from Serat Centhini and the theological escapades
of Syeikh Siti Jenar. Such characters may be used to
demonstrate some very different points, but they
certainly reflected the ubiquity of mystical thought
circulating in Java’s history and served to magnify the
tension between the legalistic and formalist approach
to religiosity, and mysticism in the region.
From Mulder (1999), we can infer how the spiritual
insight of the cosmology, mythology and mystical
conceptions of the “older forms of society” of South
Central Java, linked to the Mataram royal houses of
Yogjakarta and Surakarta, transcends Abrahamic
theological categories, even with some Islamic input.
Nonetheless, whether it reinforces the centrality of
noble refinement or sustains folk autonomy, or
articulates a nexus between the two, and despite the
high degree of ambivalence shown towards the Muslim
identity with some variants even expressing open
hostility towards it, the range of the Javanese
mystical premise in its countless permutations, prizes
that heightened state of consciousness and encourages
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 83
the endeavour towards certain psychological states, capable
of transcendental intuition, contemplation and
mystical knowledge.
Thus, if we consider reversing the traffic—we could
possibly consider the Javanese, to some extent, as the
active actors who were attracted and accepted an Islam
which carried the priorities of Sufism. 9 This can lead
us to consider the possibility of a conversion process
which lacks the power to assert parallel organised
commitments. If we are able to consider this, then the
answer to Ricklefs’ question would be too obvious. A
possible reason for the lack of organised Sufi
brotherhood during the early period of Islam in Java
was that the people had little practical need for them.
The Javanese were already accomplished mystics.
Long before Islam came, Java had developed
a sophisticated approach of adapting its mystical
speculations, which displayed the incorporation of
diverse indigenous variations, to that of foreign sources,
be they Buddhist or Hindu in inclination, 10 in a fluid
process which did not necessarily entail the destruction
of the old as a prerequisite to the new, but instead by
adding new layers to an existing construct. A new spiritual
consciousness need not necessarily invent new piety—
away from its canonised forms, it could give way to
the multiple possibilities of piety. The ambitious high
culture of the Mataram aristocracy, which many credit
as the primary player in the Islamicisation of Java,
could have not been so supportive of the wholesale
replication of foreign superiority.
It is against this backdrop that I’d like to introduce the
individuals below from four different organisations.
They are all of impeccable religious pedigree, products
of the pesantren system and all were either raised by
families who ran their own pesantren or were regarded
as communal religious leaders. They would later engage
in the various fields of Islamic and Arabic studies at
tertiary level, and would at least be fluent Arabic readers, but
most are fluent speakers as well. They would have made
the perfect candidates as the future members of the
Indonesian Muslim clerical elite that would sound more
like other orthodox ulama [leading religious scholar] in
other Muslim settings.
But instead today, they have become the unequivocal
Muslim voices that are partial to internal and external
religious pluralism and equally important, the separation
between the state and religion. They are all intense students
of modern social and political thought, but without
exception, all of them express a gratitude for their classical
training in Islam, which allows them to engage in many
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows