By the early nineteenth century, Islam had come to be the religious element in Javanese identity. But it was a particular kind of Islam, here called the 'mystic synthesis'. This Javanese mysticism had three notable characteristics: Javanese held firmly to their identity as Muslims, they carried out the basic ritual obligations of the faith, but they also accepted the reality of local spiritual forces. In the course of the nineteenth century, colonial rule, population pressure and Islamic reform all acted to undermine this 'mystic synthesis'. Pious Muslims became divided amongst adherents of that synthesis, reformers who demanded a more orthoprax way of life, reforming Sufis and those who believed in messianic ideas. A new category of Javanese emerged, people who resisted Islamic reform and began to attenuate their Islamic identity. This group became known as abangan, nominal Muslims, and they constituted a majority of the population. For the first time, a minority of Javanese converted to Christianity. The priyayi elite, Java's aristocracy, meanwhile embraced the forms of modernity represented by their European rulers and the wider advances of modern scientific learning. Some even came to regard the original conversion of the Javanese to Islam as a civilisational mistake, and within this element explicitly anti-Islamic sentiments began to appear. In the early twentieth century these categories became politicised in the context of Indonesia's nascent anti-colonial movements. Thus were born contending political identities that lay behind much of the conflict and bloodshed of twentieth-century Indonesia. This work is a copublication with NUS Press. Brill has distribution rights for Europe and the US.

In the course of the nineteenth century, colonial rule, population pressure and Islamic reform all acted to undermine this 'mystic synthesis'. Pious Muslims became divided amongst adherents of that synthesis, reformers who demanded a more orthoprax way of life, reforming Sufis and those who believed in messianic ideas. A new category of Javanese emerged, people who resisted Islamic reform and began to attenuate their Islamic identity. This group became known as abangan, nominal Muslims, and they constituted a majority of the population. For the first time a minority of Javanese converted to Christianity. The priyayi elite, Java's aristocracy, meanwhile embraced the forms of modernity represented by their European rulers and the wider advances of modern scientific learning.

"By the early nineteenth century, Islam had come to be the religious element in Javanese identity. But it was a particular kind of Islam, here called the 'mystic synthesis'. This Javanese mysticism had three notable characteristics: Javanese held firmly to their identity as Muslims, they carried out the basic ritual obligations of the faith, but they also accepted the reality of local spiritual forces. In the course of the nineteenth century, colonial rule, population pressure and Islamic reform all acted to undermine this 'mystic synthesis'. Pious Muslims became divided amongst adherents of that synthesis, reformers who demanded a more orthoprax way of life, reforming Sufis and those who believed in messianic ideas. A new category of Javanese emerged, people who resisted Islamic reform and began to attenuate their Islamic identity. This group became known as abangan, nominal Muslims, and they constituted a majority of the population. For the first time, a minorit.

"First published by NUS Press, National University of Singapore."

This book is the most comprehensive and ambitious study of the Javanese and their society since Raffles's 1817 The History of Java. It includes detailed accounts of Javanese history, peasant and urban culture, religion, and values and symbols.

Javanese Culture and the Meanings of Locality: Studies on the Arts, Urbanism, Polity, and Society is an examination of the social and cultural geography of Java. This book penetrates and surveys the Javanese world, and examines the traditions, customs, arts, urban habitation, polity, history, and belief systems of people who speak the Javanese language and live on Java Island in the Indonesian archipelago. A primary focus in these essays is to analyze the meanings of locality in the context of arts, architecture, polity, and society, with the hope of unveiling the potential of local culture in enriching and strengthening the diversity of the global world.

This book is a closely-observed anthropological study of life in two small Javanese towns and, at the same time, it attempts a general analysis on sociological lines of some key characteristics of contemporary Javanese society. In particular, the author's examination of the manner in which a pre-existing authoritarian system is being adapted to republican institutions grounded in democratic ideas helps us to understand many of Indonesia's present-day social and political problems.

Over the last few decades historians and other scholars have succeeded in identifying diverse patterns of connection linking religious communities across Asia and beyond. Yet despite the fruits of this specialist research, scholars in the subfields of Islamic and Buddhist studies have rarely engaged with each other to share investigative approaches and methods of interpretation. This volume was conceived to open up new spaces of creative interaction between scholars in both fields that will increase our understanding of the circulation and localization of religious texts, institutional models, ritual practices, and literary specialists. The book’s approach is to scrutinize one major dimension of the history of religion in Southern Asia: religious orders. “Orders” (here referring to Sufi ṭarīqas and Buddhist monastic and other ritual lineages) established means by which far-flung local communities could come to be recognized and engaged as part of a broader world of co-religionists, while presenting their particular religious traditions and their human representatives as attractive and authoritative to potential new communities of devotees. Contributors to the volume direct their attention toward analogous developments mutually illuminating for both fields of study. Some explain how certain orders took shape in Southern Asia over the course of the nineteenth century, contextualizing these institutional developments in relation to local and transregional political formations, shifting literary and ritual preferences, and trade connections. Others show how the circulation of people, ideas, texts, objects, and practices across Southern Asia, a region in which both Buddhism and Islam have a long and substantial presence, brought diverse currents of internal reform and notions of ritual and lineage purity to the region. All chapters draw readers’ attention to the fact that networked persons were not always strongly institutionalized and often moved through Southern Asia and developed local bases without the oversight of complex corporate organizations. Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia brings cutting-edge research to bear on conversations about how “orders” have functioned within these two traditions to expand and sustain transregional religious networks. It will help to develop a better understanding of the complex roles played by religious networks in the history of Southern Asia.