Chapter 9
In addition to the distinction between abangan, santri, and prijaji which I have been stressing, there is a second distinction to be made without which much religious belief and behavior in Modjokuto is extremely difficult to interpret. This is the distinction between kuna (or kolot) and modéren. Kuna means old-fashioned, traditional, the ancient way. Modéren means exactly what it sounds like—modern; and the contrast between the very Javanese word and the second term, which strictly speaking is not Javanese at all but Dutch borrowed by way of Indonesian, gives something of the contrast between religious, ideological, and moral beliefs to which the terms refer. For kuna people the ways of their fathers are good enough, and the temptations of the present a snare and a delusion; for modéren people, mostly but not entirely clustered in the town, there is a need to reform the beliefs of the past to make them consonant with what they take to be the demands of the present. That such reform should paradoxically sometimes take the form of a return to a supposed earlier and purer form of belief considered to be more adequate than the degenerations which followed it is not so surprising in the light of anthropological studies of revivalist religious movements in different parts of the world, or, in fact, in the light of our own religious history; our prophets, too, condemn the present in terms of the past.
The kuna-modèren contrast appears most sharply among the santris, where it has led to a serious internal rift within the group, but it cuts across the entire society and all the categories, giving rise among the abangans to one of its most interesting manifestations—a politico-religious sect in which “original” Javanese religious beliefs are fused with a nationalistic Marxism which enables its adherents both to support Communist political policy in Indonesia and to purify abangan rituals of even the remnant of
Islam still contained in them. This sect, Permai,1 2 represents an attempt to lend contemporary relevance to traditional abangan beliefs, to give Javanese spirit ideas, slametan practices, and curing techniques a meaning within a social context far different from that in which they arose, and, so far as its leaders are concerned, to reap some political advantages from this transformation.
On the national scene, Permai is a political party with members in the parliament, a central organization, and a platform. The general nature of the latter may be ascertained from the following excerpt from the statement of the Permai position in an official almanac of political parties published by the government Ministry of Information in 1951 : 1 1
Thus the “common people”! are those who, although oppressed, exploited, and despised, still have belief in their own power, which they organize in order to oppose and evict, indeed to shatter, imperialism and capitalism, and to destroy all arbitrary oppression and exploitation. The common people . . . is that group in society composed of those who have indeed become poor and despised, but who still respect themselves as human beings who must live in the world and are conscious of their rights. With this consciousness there arises a flaming will to claim those rights.
In Modjokuto this aspect of things is largely confined to the leaders, one of whom, a young, highly urbanized man, was said by one of the members of the party to be “in contact with the Central Governing Board” and may have been a professional organizer. (He left Modjokuto in the middle of my stay.) Among the, for the most part, politically naive abangans Permai represents three things: a powerful curing cult; a set of esoteric beliefs patterned on typical abangan ones but with special twists and hidden meanings accessible only to the initiates; and a vigorously anti-Islamic social organization composed mainly of town laborers, employed or unemployed, impoverished rural radicals, and estate workers past and present.
Permai, its adherents hold, is based on “pure native science,” on “original” Javanese beliefs as they were before they were corrupted with Hindu and, most particularly, Islamic additions. “Each people has its own science,” one of the leaders explained. “The Westerners have theirs, the Moslems have theirs, and we Javanese have ours. It fits in with modern life just as well as any other. The trouble is that Indonesians have always tried to be Hindus, or Arabs, or Dutchmen, rather than Indonesians. Now that we are free, we have to seek the philosophy of our ancestors and throw away all those foreign sciences.” Permai anti-Hinduism is merely pro forma, and many of the ideas and practices these people take for “original” are Indian in origin, but the opposition to Islam is extremely virulent and well worked out.
He (a Permai member) went into a diatribe against the Moslems. He said there were two kinds of Islam in Indonesia, Arabic Islam, which was foreign, and Islam higu (literally: “starting capital”). This latter was the original religion here, and the other was a foreign importation. Then he went through a point-for-point comparison of the two. He said the Arab Moslems have the five prayer times, but the Javanese Moslems pray just any time; they may pray forty times a day or may not pray at all, depending on the situation. In addition, they can’t be seen when they pray. It is an interior thing and nothing is said aloud, it is all in the head, whereas the santris pray aloud and move their bodies through the various prayer postures. Secondly, the alms. For the santris it is so much once a year, a fixed amount, rice given to the poor. Permai people, he said, regard the banana-leaf baskets of food one gives out at a slametan as alms, and they do this all year round; they don’t just wait for Rijaja (the holiday that ends the Fast). For the abangans, if one is eating and a man outside is hungry, one should give him half one’s food. The Pilgrimage, he said, is not necessary, in the sense of going to Mecca. For him it is just traveling around, mixing with people and gaining experience, and one can travel anywhere. He said the pilgrims were actually the victims of a colonialist plot. Mecca was owned by the British, and the Dutch, being under the British, then deceived the Javanese into going there and throwing all their money away. . . . For the “original” Javanese it is the way a man behaves that is important, and the mere fact that a man has been to Mecca doesn’t make him anything special; he may be doing bad just the same. “In fact,” he said,
“it takes a lot of money to be a pilgrim, doesn’t it? Thus they are mostly rich, which shows they are more dishonest than other people.” He said, “Some pilgrims enter Permai, but they have to take off their turbans and become Javanese again. As for the Confession of Faith, the Permai people have their secret word.”
To join the organization one must take a secret oath, sealing it by drinking a cup of tea in the presence of other members; and it is said that if a member reveals the secrets of the organization he will sicken and die or go insane. One also learns a secret word, whispered to the novice six months after his initiation in the dead of night, which when pronounced soundlessly over tea enables one to cure illness. Here, evidently, the basis of curing ability has been shifted from individual spiritual discipline to organizational membership as symbolized by the single secret word; for the curing ability is said to be universal among members, and I know of a few cases in which Permai members not otherwise dukuns have attempted to cure fairly serious diseases by the secret-word method.
In addition there are books, mostly written by the founder of the movement,* with glosses giving esoteric significance to key words in the text—“unlike the Koran, where everything means what it says.” The content
* The founder is, as a matter of fact, not a Javanese but a Sundanese from West Java. He is supposed to have come upon the science in the traditional manner—by meditating in the woods.
of the doctrine thus revealed in these otherwise straightforward nationalist pamphlets being secret, I had only partial access to it. In general, it seems to consist of a fusion between modern nationalist ideology, particularly as set forth in the Pantjasila, President Sukarno’s famous “Five Points” (Monotheism, Nationalism, Humanism, Social Justice, and Democracy), which are the official philosophical base for tie new Republic of Indonesia, and such traditional Javanese religious patterns as calendrical divination, food symbolism, and methods of spiritual discipline, plus a new note of explicit moralism designed to combat Moslem moralism on the one hand and to connect up traditional peasant values such as rukun (“cooperation” in house building, irrigation, etc.) with Marxist ethics on the other.
All these themes appeared quite clearly in the public meetings Permai held in several villages in the Modjokuto area on or about the first of Sura, the beginning of the Javanese New Year, in 1953, a day in itself symbolic of “Javanese” as against “Moslem” belief. In my village, something of a Permai stronghold, this annual meeting was held at the home of a hospital worker. His small bamboo house was decorated for the occasion as though he were marrying off a daughter or circumcising a son. Yellow coconut branches were bent over the gateway, the house was draped with red and white bunting, and a temporary matted-leaf roof extended out over the yard to protect the male guests from the rain. The women sat, as usual, inside the house. On the front porch there was a speaker’s stand piled high with various kinds of farm products: corn, cassava, peppers, soybeans, onions. On the front of it hung a large Indonesian flag.
The meeting opened with a brief slametan with rice cones, incense, and all —although there was no Arabic chanting. Pale Min (the hospital worker) went through the usual forms of politesse. He explained that this was a Permai meeting, that Permai was a religious science, and that the intent of this science was to enable everyone to rukun—to be able to live together peacefully and to help one another advance in these new times. Wito, the aggressive young leader of the group from Modjokuto, attired in a snappy grey business suit, two-tone shoes, and a loud tie, leapt to his feet at this point and led us in Indonesia Raya (the Indonesian national anthem) and in several vigorous shouts of “Freedom” (the slogan of the Indonesian revolution). Min then presented a four-page “special message” from party headquarters in Djakarta, which turned out to be not on political matters but on religious ones. As it was in Indonesian, which I imagine very few people in the audience could follow, the rest of the meeting was largely spent in explicating this text in Javanese. The first speaker to attempt this was a young man dressed in very traditional style—complete with turban, black-and-brown striped jacket, and hand-painted sarong. He looked like a picture in the ethnography books. Very nervous and shy, he spoke in a mechanical mumble and kept getting coached from the sidelines. He explained the meaning of the Javanese months as they were set forth in the text. For example, “Sura (the name of the first month) means courage; so we must have courage to do the right.” He went through a similar routine with the letters of the Javanese alphabet, each letter starting a sentence of general moral instruction—like “A is for Always wash your face before dinner” in the old primers. In both cases the original sentence in the text was first quoted in Old Javanese and then translated into Indonesian, and the boy said the sentences were actual sentences written a long time ago by the audience’s ancestors and so represented the wisdom of the ancients. He said that this wisdom had been neglected, nay, suppressed in the colonial period, but was now being taught again by Permai. He said this wisdom was still useful today as a “compass,” and we shouldn’t just ignore it. An older man followed him, explicating a complicated numerical divination system which was also in the original text, but which was so complex: that I understood little of it in either language. Next came a lively little man hopping up out of the audience and placing himself back of the speaker’s stand with all the farm products on it. He gave a long, very clever (and evidently very funny, because he had the audience in the aisles, though most of the jokes went by me), and seemingly impromptu speech. He snatched up each of the fruits and vegetables in turn and gave a short political-moral sermon on it. “See,” he said, “how all these bananas are joined together at the base,” holding a bunch aloft. “This is how we must all hang together if we are not to be kicked around. All these crops grow easily in fertile Java, but we, the children of the land in this country, are all still unhappy and hungry because the imperialists steal most of them from us.” Lastly, we got Wito. He spoke with a very demagogic delivery. He waved his hands and mopped his brow, paced up and down, shouted and whispered, repeated continually for emphasis, and demanded responses from the audience (“Is there anyone here who is not a man?”—“No!”—“Is there anyone here who is a carabao?”—“No, there isn’t anyone!”—“Who here is an ox?”—“No one, there aren’t any oxen!”—“Then why, my brothers, should we stand being treated like carabao and oxen?” Nobody seemed to know.) “Indonesians are free now,” he cried. “There are no more colonists here. But we are still fighting among ourselves (a reference to the Moslem rebellion then going on in West Java). Why is this? Because we were set one against the other by the Dutch for three hundred years.” He attacked the Dutch for not turning over West New Guinea to Indonesia as they promised, attacked Islam for “insulting” womanhood by permitting polygyny, and attacked the Ministry of Religion for not allowing civil marriage for non-santris (i.e., a ceremony in which it would not be required to repeat the Moslem Confession of Faith). He went over each point in the Pantjasila, giving it a vaguely Marxist political interpretation (“We must demand social justice for the poor as well as the rich!”), and ended his speech after a half hour of intense exertion with a cry of “Freedom!,” collapsing exhausted into his chair to receive the only applause of the evening. The meeting closed with a minute’s silent meditation during which Wito asked us to concentrate our thoughts to the end that the reactionaries who were trying to take over Indonesia and oppress the common people might not succeed.*
The doctrine concerning “non-Islamic” marriages and funerals is not merely theoretical but has actually led to some of the sharpest open conflicts between cibangcins and scintris in the Modjokuto area. The marriage argument is perhaps the strongest from an abstract point of view, especially since the government allows Christians to have their own ceremonies. It is also the most difficult to carry out because, in the absence of a government decision either recognizing Permai as an official religion—as Islam and
* This is not a direct transcription of my fieldnote on the meeting but a slightly reorganized synopsis of it.
Christianity—or legitimizing completely secular marriages, any Fermai members who marry without repeating the Confession of Faith before the subdistrict religious officer ( the naib ) are living in sin, and this stigma is difficult for the rank-and-file members to bear even in the name of anti-Islam or the Rights of the Common Man. A very violent Moslem speaker from Djakarta speaking in a town near Modjokuto got his greatest ovation when he accused Permai and the Indonesian Communist Party (which also supports secular marriage) of intending to raise a generation of bastards in Indonesia.
So, for the moment, Permai is reduced on the marriage question to lobbying in Djakarta. On the local level little can be done, although a few sporadic attempts have been made.
I asked the religious officer—moclin—of my village about marriage. Do the Permai people go to the naib for that? He said that they tried not to in a nearby village not so long ago. As all the people involved were Permai members, they went to the village chief with a written contract and a tax stamp and wanted him to sign it and bring it in to the subdistrict officer—that being the whole of the ceremony. The subdistrict officer refused to allow this, and so all these people along with the Modjokuto heads of Permai went in and made a big fuss with the subdistrict officer, but didn’t get anywhere. He said that the Ministry of Religion recognized only Christian and Islamic marriage ceremonies, and he just carried out government regulations. They went to the district officer and got the same answer. The district officer said he couldn’t set up his own country; he had to follow the decrees of the central government.
But the funeral situation is rather different, for the employment of the modin at a funeral is not a law but a custom, and, at least theoretically, one is free to use him or not. After Permai leaders complained vigorously about Islamic funerals for non-Islamic corpses to the subdistrict officer, the latter warned all the modins in his bailiwick that they would be well advised in cases of Permai death just to take down the name, age, and illness of the deceased and go home. Otherwise, they might get into trouble, and he, the subdistrict officer, would not be responsible for them if they did. The hitch in this logically impeccable abstention doctrine is that since the modin is also the technical and the religious specialist in preparing people for burial, the Javanese “undertaker,” people are rather lost without his help.
Also, since it is only rarely that someone dies who has been consistent enough to have only Permai people for relatives, under the stress of grief, when people are not much interested in social reform in any case, there is always strong pressure for a traditional funeral. The woman I mentioned earlier as having hanged herself because of debts incurred in giving an overelaborate circumcision ceremony was married to a Permai man. The second in command of Permai in Modjokuto, a shoe repairman, hurried out to the village where she lived and told the modin on duty that the husband was Permai and that he should go home and mind his own business; which the modin, mindful of the subdistrict officer’s advice, did with all haste. But the husband, broken up enough over his wife’s death by her own hand and not wishing to incur any more problems, shortly thereafter came weeping to the modin's home and asked him for God’s sake to go through the Islamic routine of bathing, wrapping, and praying over the body; and the modin, I imagine with some satisfaction, obliged.
An even more dramatic case of the same conflict occurred in my neighborhood. A young boy of about ten or eleven who was living with his aunt and uncle, the latter a street peddler of iced drinks and a strong Permai member, died very suddenly. The modin, following the subdistrict officer’s policy, refused to officiate. As a result, the funeral stalled completely, and the boy’s body lay all morning in the house without anything being done to prepare it for the grave. After a while a santri acquaintance of the uncle—less rigid than most—tried to help out and bathe the body; but he was advised by the modin that he was talcing on a great responsibility and so hesitated in fear of committing a mortal sin. All the guests just sat around, expressionless as ever, in an atmosphere of growing tension, wondering what would happen next. (Because of the pull of the tradition that all neighborhood people should turn up at a funeral, there were both abangans and santris present, but they sat separately.)
After about an hour, the father and mother of the child arrived from their home in Surabaja, and, probably in part stimulated by the general disorganization, the mother and aunt soon dissolved into hysterics, the only case of emotional outburst at a funeral I saw in Modjokuto. The santri friend of the uncle now approached the father—the modin, as a government official, did not feel that he himself should do it—and asked him if he wanted an Islamic funeral. The father, not being Permai, said yes. The modin thereupon leapt gleefully back into his role and the funeral was completed in the usual pattern. The third-day siametan, however, turned out to be a political meeting of Permai at the uncle’s home rather than the usual feast and chanting, and no santris were present.
Perhaps the most interesting tiring about this whole affair was the fact that at one point the modin asked the leaders of Permai to officiate at the funeral, but, lacking confidence, they refused. And they lost yet another test case when the father eventually accepted the Moslem ritual. (When asked if he wanted it, he said, “Of course, I don’t hold much with religion, but I’m not a Christian!”) Had they accepted, we would have seen a genuine case of ritual change in action. We would have caught the historical process at the elusive point at which things stop being what they were and become something else, where a pattern dissolves and a new one replaces it. In any case, in the Permai movement one sees the abangan religious system as it attempts to widen out to include a new social experience, as it readjusts itself in a context where things once held immutable have altered and where more than simple reciprocity and emotional restraint are demanded. It is a religious system designed for a peasant come to town.
THE
“SANTRI”
VARIANT
Islam is a religion of ethical prophecy. Muhammad’s break with tradition was sharp and clear, and his message, or the message of God revealed to him, was essentially one of rationalization and simplification. Where there had been many gods, he preached one; where there had been extensive harems, he preached a four-wife polygamy; where there had been a bottomless self-indulgence, he preached a moderate asceticism, forbidding drinking and gambling. He rejected rich symbolism, simplified ritual, proclaimed the universality of his message, and urged a holy war to spread it among the unbelievers. Although Muhammad saw himself as but a vessel for the word of God, the directions of his religious interests were not transcendental but this-worldly. His reaction to the world of men as he found it was not a radical rejection, a turning away into mysticism with disgust and despair, but a direct attempt at active mastery of it. “From the beginning of his career as a preacher,” the British Islamic historian H. A. R. Gibb has written, “his outlook and his judgment of persons and events were dominated by his conceptions of God’s government and purposes in the world of men.”:|!
Prophecy, however, is a fleeting thing, for much of its immediacy departs with the prophet. Succeeding generations have read the message Muhammad brought mostly as it has been translated by those who come after him. His followers live now not so much in the brilliant glare of religious innovation as in the half-light of doctrinal orthodoxy, for, as with Christianity, a great swarm of learned doctors—the ‘Ulama (“the knowing”)—surrounded the original core of Islam and covered it with a great honeycombed construction of doctrine and law, of exegesis and codification.
The core of Islam rests in the Koran and the Hadith, the Koran being 3
the collection of the words of Allah spoken by Muhammad during the years 610-622 A.D., and the Hadith collections of short narratives (each called a haditli) told by people who knew the Prophet personally during his lifetime and which, handed down through the ages, describe some act or saying of the Prophet which is to be taken as a guide.
Taking the Koran and the Hadith as given, the lUlama piled on top of them the Shciri'a—the Moslem law, a complex codification of legislation covering almost every field of social life, but particularly emphasizing the domestic. The law has been for Moslems, as Jewish law has been for the Jews, a substitute for the formal church organization they have never been able or willing to erect. Without priests and without popes, the lUlama, a class of experts professionally occupied with the interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith, became the heart and soul of Moslem orthodoxy. The lawyer who is at the same time a teacher has set the form and determined much of the content of Islam.
The multiple legal interpretations of the Koran and the Hadith finally crystallized into four orthodox schools, all considered equally valid and sacred. After the second and third Islamic centuries, no further extension of the Law was permitted; the “gate of itjihad” (individual interpretadon of the Koran and Hadith) swung shut, and henceforth no scholar, however eminent, could qualify as an authoritative lawmaker. The body of orthodox Islam (called Sunnite Islam after the Arabic sunna, “custom”), made up of the contents of the Koran, the Hadith, and the Shari 'a, has been fixed since the tenth century A.D.
Islam means “surrender.” The world-famous Moslem confession of faith— “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his Prophet”—repeated over and over again by one-seventh of the world’s population, states the terms of this surrender. The Confession is the rock bottom of Islam, for anyone who repeats and believes this phrase is a Moslem; and in the nation of equal believers that is Islam no one has the right to call anyone else’s faith into question.
Allah, this single God, is Almighty, Self-sustained, and Inscrutable. He decides all according to His Will, which is Incalculable save as He from time to time makes that Will known to mankind through a series of prophets sent to the different races of man. Altogether, twenty-eight prophets are mentioned in the Koran, including Adam, Moses, Jesus (whose divinity is denied), and John the Baptist. All these prophets, as well as others not mentioned (e.g., Buddha), are legitimate, bringing the genuine word of God, and Muhammad is but the special prophet of the Arabs. Nevertheless, there has been an evolution in prophecy toward the final and perfect revelation of Muhammad, the last and Seal of the prophets. All the prophets are but men, including Muhammad; they have no laiowledge of the supernatural beyond that revealed to them, no miraculous powers. They have all brought a similar message: “Come ye unto God or be damned.”
To avoid an adverse decision on Judgment Day, five ritual acts—the so-called Five Pillars—are obligatory for each believer. The first is the Confession of Faith. The second is the prayers. The prayers are said five times a day: at daybreak, at noon, in the mid-afternoon, after sunset, and in the early evening. They consist of the recitation of a few set Arabic phrases, two to four prostrations toward Mecca, and a few other ritual incantations. The noon prayer on Friday is preferably to be performed in a mosque with at least thirty-nine other Moslems and with a leader to set the pace. Ablution before prayers—a washing of the hands, face, and ankles at least, with sand if no water is available—is strictly enjoined.
Fasting, the third pillar, is prescribed in the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the lunar year, with complete abstinence from food or drink in the hours of daylight, from the time you can tell a black thread from a white one until you again cannot. The pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj) is prescribed at least once in a lifetime for those who have sufficient wealth to accomplish it (for those who have not, it is forbidden), in the twelfth lunar month Dluïl-Hijja. The fifth pillar is the zakah, the religious tax, the proceeds of which are to go to the poor, the needy, debtors, stranded travelers, new converts, religious students having no means of support, and to prosecute the Holy War. Alms suited to the individual purse and given at irregular times to the needy of one’s own choosing are also required.
This is the essential substance of Islam, perhaps as simple and easily marketable a religious package as has ever been prepared for export. Lacking a formal church organization by means of which they could enforce orthodoxy, the learned doctors of Islam have of necessity a gradualist position: first the Confession, then the Pillars, later the piety, and after that the learning and the Law. This is the course Islam has taken in Java, where over 90 per cent of the population has confessed to being Sunnites of the Shcifi'ite law school for four centuries, but where only recently has a large minority of the population come to understand very clearly what it was they were confessing and to make any serious attempt to carry out the commands of God upon which their religion is based.
That serious attempt is the result of a shift in attitude which has not endeared the minority to those of their compatriots for whom the syncretic Islam of Sunan Kalidjaga—the culture-hero, who, after suitable meditation apd ascetic practice, is represented to have introduced the shadow play, the percussion orchestra, the slametan, and the Koran and the Pillars into Indonesia4 —is still the ideal. It is this minority, these “true Moslems,” as they call themselves, or “Javanese Arabs,” as their enemies call them, to whom the term santri (originally applied only to religious students) is given.
SNOUCK HURGRONJE, Holland’s great Islamic scholar, wrote of Indonesian Islam as he found it in 1892:
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 ornamental 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 supports of the holy building have been planted beside the original five and have to a considerable extent robbed them of their functions.5
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”;6 and a generation of scholars echoed him—in despair if they were Islamologists, in triumph if they were ethnologists dedicated to preserving 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 organizations” 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 religion 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-
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 Indonesians 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, Indonesians 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.”7
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 scintris—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, mystically 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 to produce a greater militancy among the explicitly Moslem, that Islam became 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 iimmat, 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 century, has a history lying almost entirely within this period in which a self-conscious 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 Islamic areas of northern Java—Demak, Kudus, Gresik—where the Moslem tradition brought by the earliest traders never wholly died out, Modjokuto has experienced each phase of reform and counter-reform within the Islamic community in Indonesia during this century until today perhaps a third of the population—as a rough estimate—are santris. Grouped into their own neighborhoods (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.
Permai is short for Persatuan Rakjat Marhaen Indonesia, which roughly translated means “Organization of the Indonesian Common People.” Actually, the short name forms the kind of abbreviating pun of which modern politicized Indonesians seem especially fond; for the contracted form in itself has a meaning. Permai is an Indonesian word for “beautiful.”
Kepartaian cli Indonesia (Djakarta, 1951). The expositions of party programs in this almanac were prepared not by the Ministry of Information but by the respective political parties, and thus represent authoritative statements of their public platforms as of the date of publication.
f Permai uses a special term for “common people,” marhaen; and the Permai doctrine is known as “Marhaenism.”
H. A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism (London, 1949), p. 24.
Sometimes the non-lslamic elements of this complex—the shadow play and so forth—are said to have been invented by the pre-Islamic culture-hero, Radèn Pandji.
C. Snouclc Hurgronje, The Achehnese (Leyden, 1906), p. 313.
Ibid. He also noted that “The [indigenous customs] which control the lives of the Bedawins of Arabia, the Egyptians, the Syrians, or the Turks, are for the most part different from those of the Javanese, Malays and Achehnese, but the relation of these [customs] to the law of Islam, and the tenacity with which they maintain themselves in despite of that law, is everywhere the same. The customary law of the Arabs and . . . of the Turks differ from the written and unwritten [customary law] of our Indonesians, but they are equally far removed from the revealed law, although they are equally loud in their recognition of the divine origin of the latter” (p. 280). t Ibid.
C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1931), p. 291.