E-Book Buku

The essays included in this volume were written between 1985 and 2010. They
are based on three decades of ethnographic research in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta
and other regions of the Indonesian island of Java and on close readings of con-
temporary and historical Indonesian Islamic texts. Versions of all but two have
been published previously. Those which have appeared previously have been greatly
revised and expanded to reflect, and attempt to explain, the ways in which Javanese
and Indonesian religions, cultures and societies have changed since I first came to
Yogyakarta, and in response to more recent scholarship. They also reflect the devel-
opment my own theoretical interests in nationalisms and problems of religion and
violence. Many are nearly double the length of the originals. I have also included
occasional references to others parts of Muslim Southeast Asia I have had to oppor-
tunity to visit over the years, especially Jakarta, East Java, Lombok and Sumatra
in Indonesia as well as Malaysia and Singapore. All are informed by comparisons
with other lived and mediated Islams and by Pan-Islamic Arabic textual traditions
that have shaped the development of Javanese and Indonesian Islams. 1
All of these essays are products of a research program that commenced in the
late 1970s with a study of the local Islams of the Yogyakarta Kraton (palace) and
the kampung (named residential quarters) surrounding it that resulted in my first
book: Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta.
With interludes that have taken me to Burma and Singapore, I have continued to
visit Yogyakarta, the Kraton and the kampung for more than 30 years. The young
children who crowded around me yelling “Hello mister!” nearly every morning as
I left home, now have children of their own, who greet me in much the same way.
Friends of my own age are now grandparents. Many of my elderly teachers, from
whom I learned most of what I know about Java and Islam, have now, as Indonesians
often put it, “Returned home to the mercy of God.” I can now only bring flowers and
incense to their final resting places and continue to ask their blessing and guidance,
in keeping with the most Javanese and most Muslim tradition of ziyarah