Java’s pilgrimage culture is a dense, batik-like pattern of contradictions: seriousness collides with laughter; curiosity with bewilderment; piety with scepticism; intense spirituality with, in some places, the joy of shopping. The pilgrimage culture on the island of Java in Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim country – is a rebuke to the conservative orthodoxy that has been gaining ground in Indonesia’s religious landscape since the 1980s. In the rhetoric of this orthodoxy the “real” Islam is pure and exclusive. Piety comes from obedience to religious authority and its rules. Local pilgrimage is anything but pure and exclusive or rigidly authoritarian. It is powerfully Islamic but it fuses Islam with local history, the ancient power of place and a pastiche of devotional practices with roots deep in the pre-Islamic past. Quietly but tenaciously – just outside the great echo chamber of public space – it is growing as fast as the higher profile neo-orthodoxy. Bandit Saints of Java delves deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities and stories in the weird world of local pilgrimage, where Middle Eastern Islam wrestles with the ancient power of Javanese civilisation. It paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it is practised today – largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists – by many of Java’s 130 million people.
A brilliant book—one of the most engaging, memorable and genuinely insightful works on Indonesia published in recent years: a perfect model for what popular scholarship can achieve in terms of accessibility. It deserves a wide readership.
Bandit Saints of Java paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it's actually practiced today by many of Java's 130 million people. The author is a superb, witty and entertaining writer who vividly records what he saw and felt close-up on the ground. The book's most vital contribution in my mind is that it gives one faith that Indonesia's lovely, animist native kajawen beliefs will endure in the end under the onslaught of the harsh tenets of hardline Islamist Wahhabism imported from Saudi Arabia. This erudite and well-researched study gives us the hope that Java will continue to hold dear its own soft, Sufi-inspired interpretation of Islam.
This is the most entertaining book in English on the mystery and magic of Indonesia since Elizabeth Pisani's "Indonesia Etc.".
