<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head><meta name="charset" content="UTF-8"/><title></title><link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css"/> </head> <body><h3>Santri versus Abangan: General Differences</h3> <p>comparing the abangan and santri variants of the Modjokuto religious pattern, two very striking general differences, other than their differential evalu-</p> <p>* 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.</p> <p>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 scintris the concern with doctrine almost entirely overshadows the already attenuated ritualistic aspects of Islam.</p> <p>An abangan knows when to give a slametan 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 occasion), but he will be little upset if someone else gives a different interpretation. 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.</p> <p>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 interpretation of it. They seem especially interested, particularly the urban “modernist” santris<sub>}</sub> in apologetics: the defense of Islam as a superior ethical code for modem man, as a workable social doctrine for modern society, and as a fertile source of values for modem culture. In the countryside the 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 dimensions 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 vary 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.</p> <p>One result of this difference of emphasis is chat the curiously detached unemotional relativism that abangans evince toward their own religious customs, an attitude not entirely unlike that of the dilettante ethnologist collecting 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. <a id="footnote1"></a><sup><a href="#bookmark0">1</a></sup><sup></sup></p> <p>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 believe 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.</p> <p>The second obvious way in which the abangan and santri religious variants 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 household—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 ldtchens 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, fraternities, 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 organization, 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 community, 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 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, perhaps 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), someone 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.”</p> <p>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 communicate 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 regulated by an objective system of law is quite real in santri minds.</p> <p>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. Admittedly, 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 sacrifice 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.</p> <p>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 conceive of it as institutionalized in some social group: the santris in their neighborhood, or all those they consider such in the Modjokuto area, or all Indo-nesian Moslems, or “the Islamic world.” When they speak of Islam, there is almost always in the back of their minds a social organization of some sort in which the Islamic creed is the defining element. It may be a charitable organization, a woman’s club, the village mosque committee, a religious school, the local office of the religious bureaucracy, or their political party at either the local, regional, or national level.</p> <p>These two distinguishing features of the santri religious pattern—a concern for doctrine and apology and for social organization—crosscut one another to produce the internal structure of the Moslem community in Modjokuto. On the doctrinal level there is only one major distinction of importance, rather less marked now than it was in the years before the war: that between the “modern” (modéren) and the conservative or “old-fashioned” (kolot) variants of the creed. From 1912 almost until the war the conflict between those Indonesian Moslems who had been influenced by modernist Islamic reform movements originating in Cairo, Mecca, and, to a far lesser extent, in parts of India, and those who reacted against this influence, was indeed a sharp and bitter one. Today, this once entirely religious conflict has been transformed in part into a political one as the leaders of both groups have come to accept a general and watered-down version of modernism and have shifted their interest more and more towards the ever intriguing question of how they are going to get into power. But the old division still remains. Although many of the leaders of the “old-fashioned” group have abandoned the extreme reactionary position, many of the rank-and-file members have not; and the general distinction between modern santris, who accept the twentieth century with enthusiasm and see its complexities as but a challenge to be dealt with, and those who are at best resigned to it and its pitfalls for the pious, is still of fundamental importance within the Modjokuto ummat.</p> <p>On the organizational side, Islam in Modjokuto is focused around four major social institutions: the Moslem political parties and their associated social and charitable organizations; the religious school system; that division of the central-government bureaucracy—largely under the Ministry of Religion—which is concerned with the administration of the Moslem law, the preservation of mosques, and other similar duties; and the more informal land of congregational organization which focuses around the village mosque and the neighborhood prayerhouse. These four institutional structures interweave with one another and with the modéren and kolot ideological patterns to provide a complex framework for almost all the Moslem religious behavior which takes place in Modjokuto.</p> <p><a id="bookmark0"><sup><a href="#footnote1">1</a></sup></a></p> <p> 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</p> </body> </html>