Milton Public Library

Bandit saints of Java, how Java's eccentric saints are challenging fundamentalist Islam in modern Indonesia, George Quinn

eng

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non fiction

Bandit saints of Java

electronic resource

dictionaries

George Quinn

how Java's eccentric saints are challenging fundamentalist Islam in modern Indonesia

Java's pilgrimage culture is a dense, batik-like pattern of contradictions: seriousness collides with laughter; curiosity with bewilderment; piety with skepticism; 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 civilization. It paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it is practiced today, largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists, by many of Java's 130 million people

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