Julian Millie

Splashed by the Saint

Sanctity is a concept recognized by Muslims throughout the Islamic world, and often motivates observances with highly localized characteristics. Julian Millie spent a year attending a supplication ritual in which Muslims of West Java directed their prayers to Allah through ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaelani (d. 1166). This man, whose tomb even today is a popular pilgrimage site in Baghdad, is widely considered the most powerful intercessor of all the saints of Islam. The supplication takes the form of reading or singing the narrative proofs of ‘Abd al-Qadir’s saintliness in a ritual context. The ritual has deep roots in the Sundanese culture of West Java. The book captures the variety of understandings that participants bring to the ritual when it is held in various contexts, including Java’s largest Sufi order, religious schools and private homes.

Introduction: Studying Indonesian media worlds at the intersections of area and cultural studies

When preparing this special issue,1 our discussions with the editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS) included a moment of simultaneous surprise and reflection, which we would like to use as a starting point for our introduction to the articles appearing here. This occurred during communications about the number and length of the articles required for a special issue. The board’s representative stipulated that a specific number of articles were to be written by Indonesian scholars. The request surprised us. We had neither discussed nor anticipated ethnic or national quotas for authorial participation. But although the request caught us off guard it also stimulated us to think about the two disciplinary terrains traversed in the articles to follow.

The situated listener as problem: ‘Modern’ and ‘traditional’ subjects in Muslim Indonesia

This article explores the ways in which evaluations of media forms, and specifically religious oratory, reveal a differentiated Muslim community. Indonesia’s Muslims attend oratorical events (preaching) in great numbers, and frequently do so within routines following the Islamic calendar and other schedules. But, despite their popularity, conventions of Islamic oratory are interpreted by the country’s Muslim progressives as inefficacious and anachronistic. This article explores the models of individual subjectivity that underpin critiques of oratory, noting how the ‘Muslim listener’ is caricatured as lacking in autonomy, incapable of deliberation and passive. It argues that a rival subjectivity, one that constructs listening as a legitimate form of engagement with Islam, emerges from the ideology and preferred communication forms of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars, or NU). This legitimisation provides an alternative to the idealised narrative of modernity against which oratory is judged as a form of mediation belonging to Indonesian pasts.

Regional Aspects of the Indonesian Ulama Council's Ideological Turn

When national governments support homogenising religious programs within plural populations, scholars are called to pay close attention to the subsequent interactions between state power and religious projects/actors. This article responds to this need by providing a sub-national perspective on Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI), a national body seen by some as a state-supported homogenising project. Based on fieldwork in the Indonesian cities of Tasikmalaya and Malang, the article describes the ideological diversity that exists between the central MUI and its regional branches. In the regions, the MUI is supported financially by regional governments, and in this way, its branches are shaped by local political conditions rather than by allegiance to ideological programs promoted from the centre. The authors observe the openness of the Tasikmalaya MUI to a wide range of Islamic movements, and contrast this with the ideological homogeneity of Malangs MUI, where the regional government is intent on restricting Islamic programs that threaten religious and social diversity. The contrasting religio-political positionings of the regional MUI signal the ideological heterogeneity to be found within the Indonesian Islamic Scholars’ Council and shed light on the importance of sub-national factors in shaping Indonesias institutional responses to religious diversity.

Preaching over Borders: Constructing Publics for Islamic Oratory in Indonesia

This chapter explores the role of oratory in Indonesian Islam through an examination of two books: the 1964 book of Muhammad Isa Anshary entitled The Da’wah Struggler (Mudjahid Da’wah), and the 1967 work of Toha Jahja Omar, The Science of Da’wah (Ilmu Da’wah). These two accounts concern preaching by Muslims for Muslims, and were created by Indonesian intellectuals working from contrasting positions in Indonesia’s variegated Islamic and political landscape, and project differing conceptions of diversity and tolerance in that landscape. Normative writing about oratory provides insight into contestations over pluralism and difference within Indonesia’s Islamic community, and offers insight into the border conflicts in contemporary Indonesia in which the single public and counter-public positions are instrumental.

The Poem of Bidasari in the Maranao Language

In the course of preparing a manuscript for a book presenting the well known Malay poem entitled Syair Bidasari, I was surprised to come upon evidence that the work was enjoyed over a far wider region than was previ ously known to scholars of Malay studies. In the library of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde there resides a volume authored by Ester Vallado Daroy entitled Bidasari. This volume, coming to 91 pages, was published in Quezon City, the Philippines, in 1980. The contents are best described by quoting the authors preface: This story Bidasari is a rendition of a Maranao legend which I stumbled upon while working on a research grant in the University of the Philippines in 1968. While I kept the basic storyline as translated in English from the original Maranao dialect in verse, I have taken many liberties with the scenes, incidents and descrip tions. I therefore beg the indulgence of the native Maranao or of the scholar on Muslim literature; whatever beauty it may exude, I ascribe to the Mara?aos, and whatever outrages the scholar may uncover, I am fully to blame. No other information concerning the provenance of the story is given. The Syair Bidasari is one of the best known and widespread of the roman tic syair, and it is likely that only the Syair Ken Tambuhan rivals it. We know from recollections of the poet Amir Hamzas youth that the poem was one of the works read in the homes of the aristocracy of Langkat (Bagian Kesenian 1955:10). Ch.E.P. Kerckhoff described this work as one of those adapted to theatrical performance in Padang in the 1880s (Robson 1969:140), and accord ing to W.W. Skeat the story was used for theatrical representation in the Mendu theatre (Skeat 1900:520). In 1965 a feature film of the story was made in Malaysia by the Shaw Brothers Film Agency. Some thirteen manuscripts of the work are kept in institutions the world over, and one manuscript is in pri vate hands in Sri Lanka. A prose translation in the Makassarese language and Bugis script is also held in the Leiden University library. Four editions of the Malay poem have appeared in published form (Van Ho?vell 1843; Klinkert