Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

cultural particularity cannot provide grounds for
authenticity. As such, the search for Islamic authenticity
would in the end suffer from shortcomings when moving
from the particularities to grand universalism. “The claim
of difference necessarily accompanies any theory of
authenticity, but to acknowledge that claim in every case
is to accept ontological and political anarchy, hence
utter relativity, which every quest for authenticity would
wish to avoid.” (Lee: 1997, 177-178)
For me, such a predicament is best demonstrated by
the employment of jurisprudence as the grand stand
of Muslim piety, which even if progressively revised
as demanded by today’s modern Muslim intellectuals,
is still dominated by the historical priorities of a Middle
Eastern particularity and would subordinate other
religious particularities like mysticism, which in turn
explains why piety as explored by Sufism or the Javanese
continues to be regarded as its lesser forms, if not downright
heretical.
We are still in a sense, geographically incidental Muslims,
and I hope we will always be. When the first Muslims
first conducted their political expansion, it was for
economic reasons, and conversions were not even
encouraged. 28 Muhammad brought a revealed experience
to start a social movement with a spiritual particularity
from his own locality.
My travels compelled me to ask, why should we, as
Southeast Asians, doubt our own spiritual sufficiency,
sabotage its viability and then take great pains to defy
geography just to be a participant of either party in this
foreign battle? The sophistication of our own spirituality
had always been way above the simplicity of a
postcolonial timespace.
In Java, I visited the ten sacred tombs of their Sunan
[Javanese Muslim holy saints], whose identities are
replete with expressions of normative piety, mysticism
and magical abilities, until you can’t tell one from the
other, not unlike Muhammad. I was raised not to
indulge my piety on such “spiritual middlepersons”,
and was incredulous when I saw visitors at the first
tomb-complex that I visited belonging to the Sunan
Tembayat in Klaten, Central Java hugging the tombstones.
I was frightened, but conceited, until I realised there is
little difference between what takes place at Bayat and
those during the Muslim pilgrimage where normative
Muslims would shove and push to kiss the holy stone
of Hajarul Aswad near the cubicle stone structure of
Kaabah in Mecca, to cleanse their sins. When I was
coaxed to drink the water straight from the spring at the
Sunan Syeikh Maulana Malik Ibrahim at Gresik, East
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 93
Java, by its gracious jurukunci (literally “key keepers”,
custodians of Indonesian holy sites), the only reason I
did it was because I did not want to be rude, and I even
worried if I would suffer from diarrhoea afterwards. But
slowly, I began to question the fundamental difference
between the Gresik water and the holy water of Zamzam
from Mecca which is often brought home by Muslim
pilgrims back to their countries.
Structurally, such religious articulations are similar,
despite the complexity of the particularities of holiness,
spiritual devotees all gravitate towards the perceived
sources of holiness. Many Muslims condemn such
practices, but my conversations with several jurukunci
of such places and perhaps, my own mad insistence of
participating in something which I had no understanding
of, elucidated to me, that beyond the technicalities of
worship infrastructure, such practices serve to articulate
the larger picture of spiritual humility, a priority in the
Javanese spiritual particularity.
In Lingsar, Lombok Island, home to the Sasak Muslims,
I visited a kemaliq—a Sasak temple with no endorsed
religion, erected at the site where one Javanese Sunan is
believed to have knocked the ground with his staff that
resulted in the creation of a spring, with water of healing
powers. The waters may or may not be able to cure
but the fact remains that the kemaliq is maintained by
Muslims who adhere to the many tenets of normative piety
but the kemaliq is open to any believer to offer their
prayers and conduct other rituals so long that they do
not bring pork or beef into the compound and behave
decently. When I asked Inak Sanusi, a Muslim native
of Lingsar in her 50s, as to why she visits the kemaliq
instead of the mosque to seek spiritual solace, she tells
me, “I go the mosque, but I also have go the kemaliq.”
For so long, this has been the wisdom of Indonesian
Islam, which can offer so much to the world, but its
intense particularities do not invite universal inclusion
from the Muslim traditional clergy or modern
intellectuals alike. Even the dissent of many Indonesian
Muslim intellectuals well-versed in ‘modern’ thought,
seems to have stemmed from their refusal to accept
the particularities of another culture as standards they
must adhere to. Former President Abdurrahman Wahid
(1997) once wrote in jest that in Java, the hostility
between the different articulations of the Muslim identity,
from the santri to the arts community, is managed by
a ceasefire of sorts. This is to me a clear sign that even
many Javanese santri would rather not trap themselves
in the fallacy of authenticity claims. Inherently
sophisticated, Indonesian Muslims have always relished
in the particularities of their piety, lived the relativity of
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows