SNOUCK H U R G R O N JE , Holland’s great Islamic scholar, wrote of Indonesian Islam as he found it in 1892:
* Sometimes the non-Islamic elements of this complex—the shadow play and so forth—are said to have been invented by the pre-Islamic culture-hero, Radèn Pandji.
»124« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A To follow up the image of the five pillars (of Islam), we might say that the pointed roof of the building of Islam is still mainly supported by the central pillar, the confession that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, but that this pillar is surrounded with a medley of orna
mental work quite unsuited to it which is a profanation of its lofty simplicity.
And in regard to the other four, the corner pillars, it might be observed that some of these have suffered decay in the long lapse of time, while other new pillars, which according to the orthodox teaching are unworthy to be sup
ports of the holy building have been planted beside the original five and have to a considerable extent robbed them of their functions.*
Hurgronje was referring specifically to Acheh in northern Sumatra, but his simile would have applied even more aptly to Java, where the pillars were scarcely visible among the buttresses. Aside from a conviction that they were Moslems and that to be a Moslem was in general a good thing, Hurgronje found among the inhabitants of tropical Indonesia little of the desert-dried Near Eastern monotheism he had (perhaps) known in Mecca, where he^had lived, a Christian disguised as a Moslem pilgrim. Indonesians, he said, “render in a purely formal manner due homage to the institutions ordained of Allah, which are everywhere as sincerely received in theory as they are ill-observed in practice”;** and a generation of scholars echoed him—in despair if they were Islamologists, in triumph if they were ethnologists dedicated to pre
serving native customs in their pristine beauty.
But Hurgronje was writing at the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Twenty years after he wrote, Muhammadijah, a vigorously modernist Islamic society, was founded in Djokjakarta, the very center and climax of Hindu-Javanese culture, heralding what the Javanese call “the time of the or
ganizations” and announcing the final arrival on the Indonesian social scene of the self-conscious Moslem, the man not only fond of his religion in theory but also committed to it in practice. The appearance of such a man was not as sudden an occurrence as it looked to some, surprised by signs of life in a re
ligion they had long accounted lacking in either internal dynamism or in basic appeal to what they took to be “the Indonesian soul.” Hurgronje, wiser than most and knowing that changes in the sphere of Islamic life and doctrine were taking place even in his time, warned his readers that these changes were so gradual that “although they take place before our eyes they are hidden from those who do not make a careful study of the subject.”!
Islam came to Indonesia from India, brought by merchants. Its Mid-
* C . S n o u c k H u r g r o n je , The Achehnese ( L e y d e n , 1 9 0 6 ) , p . 3 1 3 .
** Ibid. H e a ls o n o te d t h a t “ T h e [in d ig e n o u s c u s to m s ] w h ic h c o n tr o l th e liv e s o f th e B e d a w in s o f A r a b i a , th e E g y p tia n s , th e S y ria n s , o r th e T u r k s , a r e f o r th e m o s t p a r t
different f r o m th o s e o f th e J a v a n e s e , M a la y s a n d A c h e h n e s e , b u t th e r e la tio n o f th e s e [c u s to m s ] t o th e la w o f Is la m , a n d th e te n a c ity w ith w h ic h th e y m a i n t a i n th e m s e lv e s i n d e s p ite o f t h a t la w , is e v e r y w h e r e th e s a m e . T h e c u s to m a r y la w o f th e A r a b s a n d . . . o f th e T u r k s d iffe r f r o m th e w r itte n a n d u n w r itte n [ c u s to m a r y la w ] o f o u r I n d o n e s ia n s , b u t th e y a r e e q u a lly f a r re m o v e d f r o m th e r e v e a le d la w , a lth o u g h th e y a r e e q u a lly lo u d in t h e i r r e c o g n itio n o f th e d iv in e o r ig in o f th e l a t t e r ” ( p . 2 8 0 ) .
I Ibid.
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Eastern sense for the external conditions of life having been blunted and turned inward by Indian mysticism, it provided but a minimal contrast to the mélange of Hinduism, Buddhism, and animism which had held the Indo
nesians enthralled for almost fifteen centuries. Although it spread—peacefully for the most part—through almost all of Indonesia in a space of three hundred years and completely dominated Java except for a few pagan pockets by the end of the sixteenth century, Indonesian Islam, cut off from its centers of orthodoxy at Mecca and Cairo, vegetated, another meandering tropical growth on an already overcrowded religious landscape. Buddhist mystic practices got Arabic names, Hindu Radjas suffered a change of title to become Moslem Sultans, and the common people called some of their wood spirits jinns; but little else changed.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the isolation of Indonesian Islam from its Mid-Eastern fountainhead began to break down. From the Hadhramaut, that barren ground of Moslem medievalism at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, came Arab traders in ever increasing numbers to settle in Indonesia and transmit their fine sense for orthodoxy to the local merchants with whom they dealt. And, with the growth of sea travel, Indo
nesians began to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca in such numbers that by the time Hurgronje lived there in the 1880’s the Indonesian colony was the largest and most active in the entire city. “Here,” he wrote, “lies the heart of the religious life of the East-Indian archipelago, and the numberless arteries pump thence fresh blood in ever accelerating tempo to the entire body of the Moslem populace in Indonesia.” *
At the other end of these arteries, in Java, were rural Koranic schools in which the returning pilgrim taught, if not the content of Islam (for the most part neither he nor his peasant students could understand any Arabic, although they could chant it well enough), at least a sense for the austerity of its form and for the fact that it was different in spirit from the polytheistic mysticism to which the Javanese had been so long accustomed. Around these schools and around the mosques attached to them, a space for orthodoxy was cleared;
and those who lived in this clearing—the santris—began to see themselves as minority representatives of the true faith in the great forest of ignorance and superstition, protectors of the Divine Law against the pagan crudities of traditionalized custom.
But even in this context the drift toward orthodoxy was slow. Up until about the second decade of this century the various Koranic schools located around the countryside remained independent, mutually antagonistic, mys
tically tinged religious brotherhoods in which a certain compromise was reached with the religious beliefs of the abangans on the one hand and the fears of the colonial government of an organized and socially conscious Islam on the other. It was in the towns, where continued contact with Hadhramaut Arabs, a developing merchant ethic, the growth of nationalism, and modernist influences from the Islamic reform movements of Egypt and India combined
Santri
versusAbangan
* C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1931), p. 291.
»126« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A to produce a greater militancy among the explicitly Moslem, that Islam be
came a living faith in Indonesia.*
With the founding of Muhammadijah by a returned pilgrim in 1912, and the birth of its political counterpart Sarekat Islam ( “The Islamic Union” ) in the same year, the awakened sense for orthodoxy spread beyond the towns to the villages. Conservative organizations arose to combat what they took to be dangerous departures from the more medieval Islamic doctrines in the programs of the modernist groups, but, details apart, the recognition that there was at last a true Islamic congregation in Indonesia—a genuine wnmat, as Moslems call the community of true believers—was finally inescapable.
Even those who had ignored Hurgronje’s warning to make a close study of the subject could now see that Indonesian Islam had changed and that in almost every village and town in Java there was a group, often living in a separate neighborhood, commonly made up of petty traders and richer peasants, to whom Islam was no longer another mystic science among many but a unique, exclusivist, universalist religion demanding total surrender to a distant God and dedicated to an eternal struggle against the unbeliever.
Modjokuto, having been founded in the latter half of the nineteenth cen
tury, has a history lying almost entirely within this period in which a self-con
scious Moslem community crystallized out from the more general abangan background. The great majority of its prewar trading class and much of its peasant population having been drawn through migration from the heavily Is
lamic areas of northern Java—Demak, Kudus, Gresik—where the Moslem tra
dition brought by the earliest traders never wholly died out, Modjokuto has experienced each phase of reform and counter-reform within the Islamic com
munity in Indonesia during this century until today perhaps a third of the population—as a rough estimate—are saniris. Grouped into their own neigh
borhoods (less so now than before the war, but still noticeably clustered), their own political parties, and their own social organizations, and following their own ritual patterns, this group represents a genuine variant of Modjokuto culture.
Santri versus Abangan: General Differences
comparing the abangan and santri variants of the Modjokuto religious pat
tern, two very striking general differences, other than their differential evalu-
* Actually, a more orthodox version of the Moslem creed has been characteristic of the peoples of the north coastal areas and of the small urban Javanese trading classes scattered throughout the larger and smaller towns all over Java since the conversion of the island to Islam in the fifteenth century. In these groups, where the mercantile tradition has also remained stronger, Islam has been rather less diluted with mystical and animistic elements than it was either in the great inland courts, such as those at Djokjakarta and Surakarta, or in the rice-plain peasant villages of the Solo and Brantas rivers, where syncretism was, and is, very strong. Thus the recent growth of Moslem orthodoxy in Java is, in part, a strengthening and widening of this persistent minority tradition, not a wholly novel development.
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ation of Islamic orthodoxy, are immediately apparent. In the first place, abangans are fairly indifferent to doctrine but fascinated with ritual detail, while among the santris the concern with doctrine almost entirely overshadows the already attenuated ritualistic aspects of Islam.
An abangan knows when to give a siametan and what the major foods should be—porridge for a birth, pancakes for a death. He may have some ideas as to what various elements in it symbolize (and as often he may not, saying that one has porridge because one always has porridge on such an oc
casion), but he will be little upset if someone else gives a different interpreta
tion. He is tolerant about religious beliefs; he says, “Many are the ways.” If one performs the correct passage rituals, one is not an animal; if one gives the slametans in the Fast, one is not an infidel; and if one sends a tray off to the
“cleansing of the village,” one is not a subversive— and that is enough. If one doesn’t believe in spirits or if one thinks God lives in the sun, that’s one’s own affair.
For the santri the basic rituals are also important—particularly the prayers, the conscientious performance of which is taken by santris and non- santris alike to be the distinguishing mark of a true santri—but little thought is given to them; they are simple enough in any case. What concerns the santris is Islamic doctrine, and most especially the moral and social interpreta
tion of it. They seem especially interested, particularly the urban “modernist”
santris) in apologetics: the defense of Islam as a superior ethical code for modern man, as a workable social doctrine for modern society, and as a fertile source of values for modem culture. In the countryside die doctrinal aspect is less marked; there the santri ethic remains somewhat closer to the abangan. But even in the countryside a santri differs from an abangan not only in his self-declared religious superiority to the latter, but also in his realization, if only vague, that in Islam the main religious issues are doctrinal; and in any case the rural santri follows an urban leadership. For the santri the dimen
sions have shifted. It is not the knowledge of ritual detail or spiritual discipline which is important, but the application of Islamic doctrine to life. The kinds of santris vaiy from those whose difference from their abangan neighbors seems to lie entirely in their insistence that they are true Moslems, while their neighbors are not, to those whose commitment to Islam dominates almost all of their life. But, for all, a concern for dogma has to some extent replaced a concern for ritual.
One result of this difference of emphasis is that the curiously detached unemotional relativism that abangans evince toward their own religious customs, an attitude not entirely unlike that of the dilettante ethnologist col
lecting quaint customs among the heathen, tends to be replaced among the santris by a strong emphasis on the necessity for unreserved belief and faith in the absolute truth of Islam and by marked intolerance for Javanese beliefs and practices they take to be heterodox. I
I talked to Abdul Manan from the village (some distance away from Modjo- kuto) where we stayed for a while a few months back. . . . Asked him about pundèns (spirit shrines) there, and he said there is one there with the same
Santri
versusAbangan
»128« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A name as the one here— mBah Buda—just down the street from his place.
People give slametans there just as here, in order to fulfill a vow that they would do so if cured and so on. He said he as a good Moslem doesn’t be
lieve in it, and said he proved this one dark night by taking the statue of a man that was there and carrying it off to the mosque and breaking it into pieces.
Nothing happened, he said, which proves it was just a statue. He said there is a statue of an ox there now and people still go on holding slametans there as usual, but only those who are too stupid to know any better.
The second obvious way in which the abangan and santri religious vari
ants differ from one another is in the matter of their social organization. For the abangan the basic social unit to which nearly all ritual refers is the house
hold— a man, his wife, and his children. It is the household which gives the slametan, and it is the heads of other households who come to attend it and then carry home part of the food to the other members of their families. Even the bersih désa, the “cleansing of the village” ceremony, the closest thing to a public or super-household ritual that one can find within the abangan system, is but little more than a compound of separate slametan contributions from each of the village’s households rather than a ritual of the village as a whole; it is food from separate kitchens brought together, rather than food from a common kitchen divided up. Aside from coming with their food, there is little that the participants are called upon to do, and the kind of large-scale religious ritual carried out by special clubs, fra
ternities, and associations one finds in, say, Melanesia, parts of Africa, or among the American Pueblos is quite foreign to the Javanese tradition.
With the exception of Permai, a latter-day development indeed and largely politically inspired at that, there is nothing in abangan religious life which could even in the remotest sense be called a church or a religious organiza
tion, and there are no temples either. The Javanese peasant, who has so often been held to be a featureless cipher swallowed up in his social whole, actually holds himself rather aloof from it, keeping his thoughts to himself and willing to give others only what tradition assures him they are going to give back to him; and his religion shows it. There is no organic religious com
munity, strictly speaking, among the abangans: in contemporary Modjokuto at least, there is only a set of separate households geared into one another like so many windowless monads, their harmony preordained by their common adherence to a single tradition.
For the santri, the sense of community— of ummat—is primary. Islam is seen as a set of concentric social circles, wider and wider communities—
Modjokuto, Java, Indonesia, the whole of the Islamic world—spreading away from the individual santri where he stands: a great society of equal believers constantly repeating the name of the Prophet, going through the prayers, chanting the Koran.
Usman (a local Koran teacher, speaking to about twenty mostly illiterate peasants in a small, heavily santri village near Modjokuto on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday) gave as usual a series of unrelated commentaries on hadiths and Koranic passages. He started by saying, “The world is round, is it not, my brothers? You’ve seen it on the Nahdatul Ulama (one of the two
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major Moslem political parties) flag haven’t you, and it is round, isn’t it? Thus it is different times in different places, so that if it is evening prayer here, per
haps it is already morning prayer in Mecca, and further west in Cairo or Morocco it is already perhaps noon prayer, and there are all gradations in between, in Djokjakarta, in Djakarta, in Pakistan. There are three hundred million Moslems, my brothers, so that every minute of every day someone is saying Muhammad ar-Rasulullah (Muhammad, the Prophet of God), some
one is saying it around this round globe. And this has been going on, my brothers, for 1,344 years. No one’s name has been spoken so often as that of the Prophet, is it not true? If there is someone whose name has been spoken more often I would like to know who he is! We here in Sidomuljo, in a tiny village out in the corner of the countryside, are only a part of a great ummat Islam; in Modjokuto, in Djakarta, in Mecca, all over the world right now as we chant our prayers, Moslems just like us are chanting theirs.”
Before the power and majesty of God all men are as nothing, and in their nihility they are equal. Cut off by an absolute gulf from direct experience of God and so restricted to the books of prophets, and especially to the Koran and the Hadith, for their knowledge of Him, mankind—a part now, the whole of it later—has bound itself into a legal community, defined by its adherence to a set of objective laws based upon the revelations God has seen fit to com
municate to man. There are no priests, because no man is any closer to God or of any greater intrinsic religious worth than any other; but the law must be communicated, interpreted, and administered, and so there are teachers, judges, and officials, and schools, courts, and religious bureaucracies. It is the adherence to an objective, deductive, abstract law that defines a Moslem and defines the Moslem community; and, although in Java, as I imagine elsewhere, the greater flexibility of the inductive, relativistic, pragmatic customary law tends to be in practice more attractive to santris as well as abangans than the rigid beauties of the Koranic law, the sense for a concrete community regu
lated by an objective system of law is quite real in santri minds.
We got on to Islam and he went over the usual business about the importance of the law as a compass, as a way of choosing between right and wrong. Ad
mittedly, some people who don’t know the law are good, but they don’t have a sure guide and they may go wrong. Only those who have the Koranic law really can find their way safely through life to the afterlife. He read me a Koranic passage saying that the true Moslem is willing to labor and to sac
rifice his money, his property, and all his personal resources for the good of society, to build mosques, schools, and so forth; and he said that this social conscience is obligatory to Moslems. It is like making a suit of clothes, he said. To make clothes that fit and won’t fall apart the tailor needs to make measurements. For life, individual and social, we need measurements too, and there are in the Koran and the law.
This concern with the community means that, despite their tremendous interest in doctrine, Modjokuto Moslems never see their religion as a mere set of beliefs, as a kind of abstract philosophy, or even as a general system of values to which as individuals they are committed. Instead, they always con
ceive of it as institutionalized in some social group: the santris in their neigh
borhood, or all those they consider such in the Modjokuto area, or all Indo-