these, then, are the dimensions along which doctrinal distinctions within the Modjokuto ummat tend to arrange themselves: a “fated” life versus a “self-de
termined” one; a “totalistic” view of religion versus a “narrowed” one; a more “syncretic” Islam versus a “pure” one; an interest in “religious ex
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« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A perience” versus an emphasis on “the instrumental aspects of religion”; the justification of practice by “custom” and “scholastic learning” versus justification by the “spirit of the Koran and the Hadith” in general and “prag
matically.”
It is no accident that the kolot side of these equations appears in each case to place them very near to the kind of world view I have already de
scribed as abangan. The extreme kolot santri, despite the fact that he is often called “orthodox,” is not actually the most Islamic of Javanese Moslems but the least. It is he who has made the minimum shift from the traditional re
ligious system in which “animistic,” Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic elements found a stable balance toward the situation where Islam and the world view associated with it have been fully taken up into the self, have been internalized in the individual psyche so that they actually control behavior rather than merely putting a gloss on it to hide the values which are really determining individual action.
It is very hard, given his tradition and his social structure, for a Javanese to be a “real Moslem”—to accept fully at the deepest emotional levels a re
ligion which, in the words of H. A. R. Gibb, “set[s] the terms of a new ex
periment in human religion, an experiment in pure monotheism, unsupported by any of the symbolism or other forms of appeal to the emotions of the com
mon man, which had remained embedded in the earlier monotheistic re
ligions.”* The otherness, awfulness, and majesty of God, the intense moralism, the rigorous concern with doctrine, and the intolerant exclusivism which are so much a part of Islam are very foreign to the traditional outlook of the Javanese. Even the modernists, supported as they are in their effort by some marked changes in the forms of social organization, succeed only part of the time in actually organizing their behavior in these terms—but then most Christians are pagans much of the time.
It would be a mistake to draw from this the conclusion—and it has often been drawn—that Islam is really of no importance in Javanese life and that the difference between abangan and santri is merely one of terms and protesta
tions. For, even among the most kolot of santris, there has been a crucial shift when a man, propelled by class, occupation, geography, or family history, or, who knows, by an inner psychological need for a different sort of religion from that which his culture offers him, becomes a santri. He starts a process of genuine religious conversion which, if it cannot be completed in him, may well be in his children. Even the minimal santri has adopted, however vague and ill-understood they may be, several principles which, given time and in
creased social-structural support, may end in a totally different orientation toward the world: the idea of a distant and powerful God who is concerned with the moral worth of the individual believer; the idea that secular be
havior must somehow be justified in terms of religious doctrine; and the idea that among the proposed paths to religious understanding, one is correct and all the others are wrong.
Nor can one simply say that the kolot-to-modèren scale measures the degree to which these principles have taken hold in the essentially abangan
* H. A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism (London, 1949), p. 70.
mentality of the Javanese. Rather, they represent two alternate ways in which these principles can in part be realized in a still mainly non-Moslem social context. The modernist emphasizes the way of radical disassociation from that context and the purification of doctrine within a small group of religious leaders; the conservative tries to work out a halfway covenant with the reigning tradition which will both make his own transition easier and lessen the tension between himself and his neighbors who do not agree with him. It is well to remember, however, that not everyone is so consistent as to choose the same side of each of my oppositions nor is everyone so vigorous as clearly to choose one or the other side in any one of them. There is much indistinct
ness, ambivalence, and flaccidity of belief; and what one finds is a continuum from the koiot to the modéren along which people fall, many of them at neither extreme but somewhere in between. Tendencies are only tendencies after all, even if, as here, they are quite striking ones; and when one comes to consider the manner in which these variations in Islamic religious doctrine are institutionalized in Modjokuto, the social form they take, and the social context in which they exist, the picture gets not clearer but fuzzier.
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Chapter 13 Patterns of Internal Organization of the
OSantri Community
There are two main santri political parties in Modjokuto, Masjumi and Nahdatul Ulama (NU) ; one minor one, Partai Sarekat Islam Indonesia (PSII) ; and one social organization concerned with education and various charitable activities which claims to be nonpolitical but which is in fact indissolubly linked with Masjumi, Muhammadijah. Most generally, Masjumi-Muham- madijah is said by almost everyone to be “progressive” or “modernist,” and NU is said to be “conservative” and “old-fashioned.” (PSII, in Modjokuto, is usually grouped with the modernist sector.)
It would be simple if one could merely accept this common stereotype and identify modéren ideology with Masjumi and kolot with NU; but un
fortunately the situation is much more complex than this. The relationships be
tween cultural patterns—beliefs, values, and expressive symbols—and the set of social structures in which they are embedded is only rarely one to one, because the general problems of human living to which the cultural, most especially religious, patterns are a response are not the same as the specific social exigencies to which the social structures are a response. Thus in Modjo
kuto the problems inherent in organizing a mass ummat containing old and young, male and female, peasant and trader, educated and illiterate so that the values it holds should have an effect upon the wider society make it nearly impossible that ideological standpoints and political party membership would have any simple relationship. Politics make strange bedfellows in Java as elsewhere.
Taking the Modjokuto ummat as a whole, almost everyone in it belongs either to Masjumi or to Nahdatul Ulama, or at least considers himself a fol
lower of one or the other. In contrast to both abangans and prijajis there are almost no politically neutral santris. In comparison with American attitudes the political party plays a much less functionally specific role in the life of Modjo
kuto santri than the Republican and Democratic parties play for most middle- class urban Americans. As in certain rural areas in our Midwest and South
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and, until recently at any rate, among certain depressed ethnic groups in our cities, political parties for the Javanese santri are not merely loose conglomer
ates of people with similar voting habits. Rather, they are social, fraternal, recreational, and religious organizations within which kinship, economic, and ideological ties coalesce to press a community of people into the support of a single set of social values which are not just concerned with the proper exercise of political power but condition behavior in many different areas of life. To join a Moslem political party is to commit oneself to one or another of the variant interpretations of Islamic social doctrine.
Insofar as the preceding paragraphs are contradictory, their resolution is this: In addition to the fact that the “public reputations” of the two parties, one for conservatism, the other for modernism, tend to bring the conservatives into one and the modernists into the other, other social considerations tend to bring about the reverse. In general, in both parties, the young, the educated, the urban, and the weakly religious tend to be more modem. The coalescence of kinship, economic, and ideological ties in either party is inexact, distorted both by accident—so that the modern-minded son of a kolot kijaji may end up an NU leader out of opportunity rather than out of conviction—and by design—so that a modernist may enter NU simply because he thinks he can get a more powerful position there due to the lack of educated leaders. Even geography makes a difference. Certain villages tend to be mainly Masjumi, others mainly NU; and the modern-minded man in an NU village will have to decide for himself whether ideological or neighborhood ties shall predominate.
What this means is that a man who is old, rural, uneducated, and deeply pious is very likely to be strongly kolot and very likely to be in NU; a man who is young, urban, and educated (he may or may not be deeply religious) is quite probably in Masjumi; but the loyalties of people in whom these at
tributes are mixed, such as old, uneducated urbanites, are less easy to predict.
When we consider that there are also pressures—such as kinship ties, geo
graphical considerations, and desire for personal power—which may act to make an individual go against the grain, we see that things are not so clearly marked off as the simple fact that even the most backward santri peasant knows NU to be “conservative” and Masjumi “progressive” and that he con
siders himself an adherent of one or the other would lead one to believe.
Patterns of Internal Organization of the