‘Looking for God in Java’

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

They had taken the best of Islam, its simple egalitarianism, its ability to infuse drab lives with dignity, without devaluing their earlier achievements. The Javanese retained their own history and architecture, their own names, their own dress and dance and music, their own rituals at birth and marriage and death, even their own conception of the afterlife. It was these, expressed in a million subtle ways in gesture and carriage and voice, that gave their civilization such a high gloss at what remained, after all, a very low level of income.

It was these that the wave of orthodox Islam that had washed over Indonesia in the last thirty-odd years threatened to extinguish.

via Guernica / The Colonized Mind.

I’ve long been struck by how much of the global debate about radical Islam is focused on the mechanics of terrorism, and how little on the harder to measure, but (to me) infinitely more interesting, question of cultural change. How do people and societies make the transition from one way of approaching god to another? What can be openly celebrated and what must be furtive? Who makes the rules?

In this essay for Guernica I examine the ongoing Arabization of Indonesian Islam through a visit to the Dieng plateau in central Java, home to the oldest Hindu temples on the island. It’s a snapshot of a civilization in transition, a place caught between an Indic past and an Arabized future. It has nothing to do with terrorism, or for that matter with textbook radical Islam, the drive to order every aspect of society and the state according to sharia law. Yet, I can’t help but feel that twenty years from now, when we look back on Indonesia, it is this moment of cultural change that will be seen as more important than the much more narrowly focused war against the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.