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Theologies of Remembering

Islamic Humanities

Shahzad Bashir, Series Editor

Publication of this Luminos Open Access Series is made possible by the Islam and the Humanities Project of the Program in Middle East Studies at Brown University.

Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, by Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination, by Tony K. Stewart

God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State, by Nada Moumtaz

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul, by Timur Hammond

Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India, by Amanda Lanzillo

Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation, by Emily Drumsta

The Gabriel of Madness: Islamic Poetry and Ethics in an Age of Hindu Nationalism, by Anand Vivek Taneja

Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia, by Verena Meyer

Theologies of Remembering

Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia

Verena Meyer

University of California Press

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2026 by Verena Meyer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license.
To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.

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Suggested citation: Meyer, V. Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia. Oakland: University of California Press, 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.274

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meyer, Verena (Historian) author

Title: Theologies of remembering : modernity, ambiguity, and transcendence in Islamic Indonesia / Verena Meyer.

Other titles: Islamic Humanities 8.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2026] | Series: Islamic humanities ; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025054705 (print) | LCCN 2025054706 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520428126 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520428133 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520428140 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Muslims—Indonesia—21st century

Classification: LCC BP63.I5 M495 2026 (print) | LCC BP63.I5 (ebook) | DDC 297.09598—dc23/eng/20260220

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For Kyle

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Names, Dates, Translation, and Transliteration

Introduction: Two Sons of Kauman

1 · An Epistemic Opening

2 · Modernity’s History

3 · A Museum Without a Past

4 · Grave Matters

5 · Good Muslims Remember, or The Politics of Coherence

6 · The Power of the Chain

Epilogue: Theologies of Remembering

Notes

References

Acknowledgments

It takes a village to write a book, and mine was filled with some of the best neighbors I could ask for.

During my doctoral training, the Religion Department at Columbia University was a happy intellectual home for me. Thank you to Matthew Engelke, Nancy Florida, Najam Haider, and Jim Hoesterey for being on my dissertation committee and for all the support over the years. I am especially indebted to my advisor, Katherine Pratt Ewing, whose brilliance and academic rigor never diminished her understanding and kindness, and who continued to mentor me far beyond graduate school.

Friends and colleagues read one or several chapters and gave invaluable feedback. Many thanks to Megan Abbas, Ismail Fajrie Alatas, Ben Arps, Daniel Birchok, Kenneth George, Nico Kaptein, David Kloos, Imron Ali Mahmudi, Jeremy Menchik, Saskia Schäfer, Teren Sevea, and Martin Slama. James Hoesterey reread the entire manuscript before I sent it off into peer review and gave me the invaluable gift of telling me it was ready to go. Carla Jones helped me at several critical junctures in the process. Thank you also to Shahzad Bashir, the editor of the Islamic Humanities series, for seeing potential in the project; to Niels Hooper, the press editor, for seeing the book through to publication; and to Leah Caldwell for the copyediting. I am also grateful to the two reviewers and a board member of the University of California Press, who saved me from some unforgivable blunders. All remaining shortcomings are my own.

In Yogyakarta, I received institutional support at the State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Kalijaga. Muhrisun from the Lembaga Penelitian dan Pengabdian kepada Masyarakat (LPPM) agreed to be my sponsor for the research visa, and the Institute of Southeast Asian Islam (ISAIs) provided office space and much good company. Thank you especially to Teh Wiwin! Beyond UIN, I had many wonderful conversation partners in Java. In particular, I want to thank Adib Sofia, Aida Hidayah, Ali, Arief Budiman, Faisal Kamandobat, Ghifari Yuristiadhi, Harianto, Hastuti Naibaho, Irfan Afifi, Jazilus Sakhok, Lien Iffah Naf’atu Fina, Muhammad Ichsan Budi Prabowo, Muyassaroh, Nur Khalik Ridwan, Rudi Casrudi, Syifa Widigdo, Widiyastuti, Yaser Arafat, Yuni Asryanti, and Abdul Jalil, who passed away at such a young age. I would also like to express my gratitude to all other interlocutors and interviewees, who so generously agreed to take the time to talk to me, even when I was sometimes quite slow in understanding. I thank you and apologize that I cannot thank all of you in person. I have anonymized everyone except for public figures, although some may have hoped to appear by name. I hope to have represented what you shared with me accurately and fairly, and I apologize for when I have failed to do so.

In the course of my dissertation research, I was fortunate to participate in the research group “New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature,” which convened in Jerusalem in 2018–19. When in early August 2018 my Indonesian research visa still had not come through, Ronit Ricci, the organizer of the group, generously allowed me on short notice to change my plans and to join the group much earlier than I had planned. Studying with experts in Javanese literature opened new exciting avenues of investigation for me. In addition to Ronit Ricci, I must thank Ben Arps, Els Bogaerts, Tony Day, Nancy Florida, Willem van der Molen, Siti Muslifah, George Quinn, Yumi Sugahara, and Edwin Wieringa. Opan Safari, who did not live to be thanked in person, was also a kind and thoughtful interlocutor. I will always be grateful to the group for being so supportive of a junior scholar.

Many other mentors, colleagues, friends, and students have helped me in other ways over the years. My teacher Yosephin Apriastuti Rahayu has helped me with Javanese ever since I started to learn the Javanese alphabet. Diah Puspita, my ever-resourceful research assistant, managed to find access to the most reclusive kyai, find the most obscure pieces of information, track down interlocutors on every topic imaginable, and occasionally go on photo hunts for me. She also watched my children so I could go and meet people, thus helping with one of the most invisible types of labor in scholarship. Suheri and Pandji assisted with transcripts and sometimes accompanied me to events and interviews. Dorieke Evers found some very elusive typos in the manuscript, and Yasuko Kobayashi corrected an important error in my historical overview. Sarah Cramsey always helped with practical advice on how to navigate the challenges of academic publishing. Jamie Edmonds and Claire-Marie Hefner were great interlocutors for all things relating to the pleasures and challenges of field research and Islam in Java, and Richard Fox always encouraged me to dare to be more ethnographic, more philosophical, and more philological. Thank you to all of you.

The research and writing of this book would not have been possible without the generous support of different funding agencies, including the Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship, the Global Religion Research Initiative Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University, which awarded me both a summer fellowship and a dissertation fellowship. My postdoctoral fellowship at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society provided me with time and space to revise the dissertation. At MF, I am grateful to Liv Ingeborg Lied for inviting me to present a part of what became chapter 4 at an MF CASR Lunch, and to Iselin Frydenlund for her mentorship. Parts of chapters were presented at invited talks and conferences too numerous to list here. I would, however, like to mention the State University of Yogyakarta, the University of Nahdlatul Ulama Yogyakarta, the National University of Singapore, the University of Oslo, the (now sadly defunct) Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, Lund University, and the Austrian Academy of Science for their kind invitations, and the audiences at these and other events for their constructive and critical feedback. The Leiden Institute of Area Studies at Leiden University has become my new academic home, and I am deeply thankful to my colleagues and students for making it an engaging, interesting, and fun one. Special thanks to my colleagues in South and Southeast Asian Studies (SSEAS) as well as the Leiden University Center for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR).

Finally, this book would not have been possible without the support I received from my family. My parents, Erna and Karl Meyer, always encouraged me to pursue my studies, even if it took me far away from them. My children, Rasmus and Peter Meyer Rader, did something just as important by always encouraging me to take breaks, especially with them. The biggest gratitude goes to my partner, Kyle Rader, for always being on my side during the research and writing of this book, throughout travels, international moves, and academic precarity, even when it meant putting his own career on hold. Many of the thoughts in this book were first developed in conversation with him, and he believed in the project even when I did not. For this, I am immensely grateful and dedicate the book to him.

Note on Names, Dates, Translation, and Transliteration

With the exception of public figures, whose views cited in this book are a matter of public record and who would be easily identifiable, all names have been changed. All dates follow the Common Era calendar, and all translations are my own unless indicated. The following key applies to non-English terms: A. for Arabic, I. for Indonesian, J. for Javanese, and Skt. for Sanskrit. Proper names are not specified by language. Transliteration of Arabic words follows standard transliteration with full diacritics, except where words have entered the English language (e.g., hajj) or where terms as they have entered the Indonesian language in vernacularized form became prominent in my research (e.g., ziarah instead of ziyāra). When the meaning of the Arabic and the vernacular form of a word differed in their use, both may be given (e.g. tahlil and tahlīl). In transliterating the Javanese script, I use ě for the pěpět and e for the taling (without differentiating between é and è). Indonesian and Javanese terms are written in their modern spellings, with older spellings retained where contextually appropriate.

My decisions as to whether to present a word in its Arabic, Indonesian, Javanese, or English spelling are admittedly sometimes arbitrary, and the reader may on occasion notice different conventions coexisting alongside each other. Not fully standardizing the representation of originally Arabic and other words was a conscious decision, as this diversity reflects the very multilingual world in which my interlocutors are moving. Imposing a monolingual order would have flattened this multiplicity.

Introduction

Two Sons of Kauman

in july 2019, I was invited by the University of Nahdlatul Ulama (UNU) in Yogyakarta to give a talk about my research. Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the university’s sponsoring institution, is an Islamic mass organization in Indonesia, centered especially in Java, that identifies as traditionalist. Shortly before my talk, on June 21, the Jakarta Post, one of Indonesia’s main English-language newspapers, had reported that NU and Muhammadiyah were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Muhammadiyah is also an Indonesian Islamic mass organization, but it calls itself modernist and progressive. Citing various experts and proponents of the nomination, the article explained that the two organizations were the “‘backbone’ of moderate Islam in Indonesia” and were “stemming the tide of religious extremism” (Patria 2019). That day at UNU, I began my talk on the two organizations’ self-understandings by showing a slide with this Jakarta Post article, commenting on how NU and Muhammadiyah, albeit different in some ways, are nonetheless often perceived as sharing common goals. In the Q and A session, one of the organizers of my talk spoke up. I did not seem to understand, he said, that Muhammadiyah was, in fact, not a moderate organization. They were drifting to the right, had become almost indistinguishable from radical Muslims. Yes, their leadership was trying to make it look as though they held moderate views, but he, and most others in NU, were skeptical that those claims had any traction with the organization’s base and the majority of their constituents.

Over the course of my field research, I had heard many times from members of either organization that the others were not real moderates. Those associated with Muhammadiyah would accuse NU of being corrupt, undemocratic, and stuck in the past. NU affiliates, by contrast, often found that people in Muhammadiyah were spiritually vacuous and lacked a thorough religious education, which made them vulnerable to being influenced or even subsumed by Indonesia’s Islamist organizations. That said, not everyone held such negative views of the other organization. A traditionalist teacher (J. kyai) once explained to me that Muhammadiyah and NU were like two companions walking on opposite sides of the road—sometimes a bit closer together, sometimes a bit farther apart, but always headed the same way. And a Muhammadiyah university professor mused that the border between Muhammadiyah and NU had become increasingly thin in the last few decades, and that as far as their values were concerned, the two organizations had become almost indistinguishable.

None of these statements, and the contradictions among them, were news to me. Both in Indonesia and beyond, Muhammadiyah and NU are sometimes seen as constituting Indonesia’s middle-of-the-road Muslims who are observant without being militant, and committed to the nation’s democratic order while wary of the dangers of unchecked Westernization; and sometimes they are constructed as fundamentally different orientations with opposing beliefs that result in completely incompatible ideological and political affiliations. This book seeks to untangle these different strands of thinking about Indonesia’s traditionalists and modernists to interrogate the relation and meaning of these two orientations within the larger movements of Islamic revival and their self-understanding vis-à-vis Islamism and Western modernity. Identities like traditionalism and modernism are not sui generis or stable, as Megan Abbas (2021) has reminded us. They are situationally contingent constructs that are not neutral and descriptive, but always harbor the potential of becoming political forces in their own right. The label of “moderate Islam” and the political privileges it carries in the contemporary world are a case in point. Because a great deal is at stake in these identities, a lot of work goes into erecting, maintaining, or contesting these labels, to claim them for oneself or to deny them to others. Because these categories are embedded in a multitude of sometimes incommensurable agendas and concerns, they are not stable but fragmented, and constantly shift in scope and meaning.

Over the last decades, scholarship on Indonesian Islam has emphasized that the conventional boundaries between modernist and traditionalist Islam, and hence between Muhammadiyah and NU, have become increasingly porous (Feener 1999; Howell 2010; Sila 2020), or that the two organizations are no longer as important in the identity politics of Indonesian Islam as new movements have emerged (Edmonds 2019; Feillard and Madinier 2011; Hamayotsu 2011). This body of scholarship has been important, exhibiting that in the context of an ever-increasing variety of competition from new Islamic movements and forms of authority (Hefner 2022; Ibrahim 2018; Nisa 2018), many of the prototypical contrasts in the thought and practice of the two organizations and the ideological orientations they represent have indeed softened. Yet, I found that these dynamics have entailed less of a convergence than a shift in how traditionalism and modernism are understood, as moments of rapprochement have coincided with equally strong countercurrents and efforts to construct new boundaries between the two Islamic identities.

Because the complexity, fragmentariness, and instability of Muslim ideologies and identities are not unique to Java and Indonesia, my findings can cast light on Islamic traditions and modernities in postcolonial societies, where modern subjects navigate the conflicting demands of local, national, and global interests. The focus on Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population of any country in the world but often neglected in Islamic Studies as peripheral, is significant in itself. Here, I join a host of other scholars who have argued for a re-centering of the discipline and a broader interest in Islam in a global Southeast Asia (Alatas 2021b; Formichi 2020; Jones 2019, 2021; Sevea 2023; Slama 2020; Yang 2023). By situating my research on Java in the broader discipline of Islamic Studies, I hope to contribute to these efforts and to disrupt established paradigms of centers and peripheries that continue to dominate the field.

Ambiguity, Paradox, and Modernity

One night during my field research, I was sitting with an active member of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s modernist reformist Islamic mass organization, at a local eatery in the university district of Yogyakarta, Central Java. Muhammadiyah was founded in 1912 in Yogyakarta by Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan, who sought to cultivate Islamic subjects who were both pious and modern. The man—I will call him Pak Agus—hailed from a family of Muhammadiyah supporters. His grandfather had been one of Dahlan’s students, and many of his descendants had followed in his footsteps as active members of the organization. Because of his family history, he had agreed to talk to me about some of the stories he had heard growing up. Throughout the interview, he emphasized to me numerous things that one would expect a reformist modernist to emphasize. His family, and Muhammadiyah more broadly, had always been invested in fighting ignorance and backwardness. In this regard, they were completely unlike so many traditionalists who were all too invested in things that, according to the reformist modernist mindset, were superstitious or extra-Qur’anical innovations. In Java, the main framework of reference for traditionalist Islam is Nahdlatul Ulama, which was founded in 1926 with the specific intent to protect traditional Islamic thought and practice in a rapidly modernizing world. Some of the traditions commonly practiced in NU, like praying at the graves of the deceased in hopes of absorbing their knowledge and blessings, or holding their teachers and their opinions in the highest esteem, would fall under the categories of ignorance and backwardness for Pak Agus and hence something Muhammadiyah had been campaigning against. He had told me that his grandfather, Ahmad Dahlan’s student, had laughed at people who believed that any person—dead or alive—might hold any special powers, and that this grandfather had encouraged all of his children to become either teachers or doctors, the two professions he considered most important for promoting a modern, rational attitude among other people.

Pak Agus was a good storyteller, and it was obvious he enjoyed sharing his memories. The formal part of the interview was over. I had already put away my recording device, but Pak Agus, perhaps still inspired by my earlier questions, suddenly thought of another anecdote he wanted to share. His tone changed as he told this last story. He was now staring into the flame of the candle on our table, lost in thought, as though oblivious to my continued presence. The story made me perk up because it didn’t really fit—although in another sense it did fit. It went approximately like this:

His grandfather had leased a piece of land and didn’t get around to paying for it before he passed away. His descendants were supposed to take care of the matter, but in the chaos and grief around his death, the affair was just forgotten. Then, decades later, his son—Pak Agus’s uncle—saw his father in a dream—and in the dream the father was crying. The uncle was first confused, but then someone remembered the affair with the unsettled payment, and he took care of it. That accomplished, the grandfather reappeared to him in a dream, but this time he was smiling. At this point in the story, Pak Agus shifted, looked straight at me, and said, “My uncle said it was just a dream, he said that it had nothing to do with whatever” (I. tidak ada kaitannya dengan yang macam-macam). He then explained in a sober tone that not associating the dream with “whatever” was a way of fighting irrational thought. Others, those who were less rational than his uncle, would surely have associated this dream with “whatever,” but not him.

The “whatever” Pak Agus referred to was the—in his mind, irrational—idea that there was any possibility to have an ongoing relationship with those who had died. His view that the dead, once gone, were no longer present and accessible for the living is often used, both implicitly and explicitly, as an identity marker of modernist Islam. Whatever appeared in his uncle’s dream, he thus seemed to suggest, someone like him would never be tempted to mistake it for his grandfather delivering an urgent message. On the other hand, the debt of which the “whatever” experience reminded Pak Agus turned out to be very real. And the normative content that Pak Agus’s uncle took the dream to have—that he needed to settle his father’s financial affairs—is not at all controversial from a mainstream Islamic perspective. According to an oft-cited Prophetic Hadith, the soul of the believer is locked in the grave and unable to enter heaven until this debt is settled, whether it be paid back or pardoned (Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 1078). But while the dream’s message is pretty uncontroversial, the medium is anything but. Pak Agus’s account of the dream reflected this fundamental ambiguity, as he seemed to suggest that although associating the dream with “whatever” was of course nonsense, it didn’t need to keep anyone from acting upon this “whatever.” The situation, as he presented it to me, seemed quite paradoxical.

Over the last years, scholars of Islam have gotten quite used to thinking about ambiguity and paradox in relation to our field of study. This trend is in no small part attributable to the publication of two highly influential works in the field: Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, published in 2015; and Thomas Bauer’s A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam, published in German in 2011, but which gained international prominence after its translation into English in 2021. According to Ahmed’s now almost canonical work, premodern Muslims, until about 1850, communicated primarily in a language of paradox. Bauer, although using the term “ambiguity” rather than “paradox,” agrees with the judgment, saying that premodern Islam was characterized by a pervasive “culture of ambiguity,” a high tolerance for the coexistence of multiple truths and values.

Bauer adopts the terminology of “tolerance” of ambiguity from psychology, where it often denotes enjoying and excelling in the performance of ambiguous tasks, whereas “intolerance” indicates the perception of ambiguity as a threat (Bauer 2021, 17). According to Bauer, premodern Islam actively cultivated, domesticated, and celebrated this multiplicity as an expression of God’s multifacetedness and ultimate unknowability. But, he argues, the process of modernization, brought about by the enforcement of Western epistemic parameters through colonialism and its associated disciplinary apparatuses, resulted in the annihilation of ambiguity in Islamic communities. Modern Muslims, including on the one hand reform Muslims who embrace modernity and, on the other, fundamentalist or Salafi Muslims who are often thought to reject modernity but, as Bauer demonstrates, embrace many of its epistemic parameters, are especially notorious for their rejection of ambiguity (34). In the contemporary era, the remains of the once dominant culture of ambiguity can only be found in traditionalist circles that self-consciously reject the norms of Western modernity. Although less explicitly, Ahmed, by letting his analysis end in 1850, also seems to suggest that paradox is no longer as pervasive in modern Islam as it was in the past.

In parallel to this movement, scholars, including especially anthropologists of Islam, have increasingly approached the non-sensually manifest as a site of ethnographic inquiry. Their studies have demonstrated the social and political power of forces conceptualized as the realm of the “imaginal,” a translation of the Arabic khayāl or takhayyul. This realm of the imaginal is an old concept in the work of speculative Sufism, perhaps most prominently in the work of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), where it is understood as an intermediate space between God’s pure being and the phenomenal world (Chittick 1989, 14). More than an abstract philosophical concept, the imaginal also plays an important role among contemporary Muslims’ everyday understandings of how believers can know and encounter the ghaib, or that which is hidden. As Amira Mittermaier wrote in her pathbreaking work on dreams in Islamic Egypt, the imaginal references a “range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception, and conceptualizations of the real” (2011, 3). Mittermaier is joined by other scholars who have similarly examined the diversity of epistemologies as a constitutive space of meaning-making that disrupt conventional understandings of truth, virtue, subjectivity, or temporality (Pandolfo 2018; Taneja 2017). Engagements with the imaginal often serve to demonstrate the exploratory character of Islam, which, in the words of Shahab Ahmed, allows for a “multiplicity of truths and values” (2016, 286) as opposed to an orthodoxizing trajectory and impulse (Alatas 2019, 71), thus giving rise to the ambiguities and paradoxes Bauer and Ahmed have described.

Although not explicitly endorsing the paradigm we find in Bauer, much of this scholarship has focused on the imaginal among self-consciously traditionalist, Sufi communities. Implicitly or explicitly, these traditionalists are often portrayed as being in an antagonistic relationship with self-identified modernist or Salafi Muslims, who quite self-consciously locate their understandings of what counts as real in materialist and rationalist epistemologies that leave little room for the non-sensually manifest. As a result, scholarship on the imaginal has rather conveyed the impression that its exploratory character and underlying ambiguous acceptance of multiple truths is the prerogative of traditionalists, while implying that the imaginal, and the paradoxes it produces when we look at it from a more rationalist perspective, is inherently oppositional to the project of modernity. The explicit articulations of this binary by Bauer and, to a lesser degree, Ahmed, are really just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, making explicit what the field, in at least some of its moods, has long been taking for granted.

With this book, I hope to complicate these binaries by showing that modernity’s so-called epistemic norms cannot be mapped quite so neatly onto this traditionalist-modernist conceptual pair, and that the capacity to tolerate ambiguity may take different forms. It is worth remembering that “tolerance” and “ambiguity” are not emic categories but heuristics adopted to understand certain historical shifts in Islam. As such, they generalize as an overall trend a movement that has been nowhere near this clear-cut or linear. It is true that there are a range of terms in Arabic, Indonesian, and other Islamic languages that could be translated as “ambiguity,” “contradiction,” or “paradox,” such as the Arabic words iltibās or ihtilāf, or Indonesian words, originally imported from Dutch or English, like paradoks and ambigu. None of these terms is a semantically precise match of the English expressions, and neither have they been stable in their meaning and use throughout history. What is more, none of these terms played a significant role during my field research. Instead, I found that my interlocutors conceptualized their experiences with contradictions in very different ways. For these reasons, I do not adopt any of these concepts as an emic analytic category and instead I show how my interlocutors’ understandings are irreducible to any single paradigm.

Scholars of multiple modernities have long shown that modernity has more than just one trajectory (Eisenstadt 2000)—an insight that is true for Muslims as much as for anybody else. Indeed, life in the contemporary world, crisscrossed by competing globalized discourses and practices with their associated norms and values, is bound to generate moments of ambiguity, and rather than attempting to eradicate or just endure these moments, I found that modernists are quite capable of tolerating and even making productive use of a multiplicity of truth and value (Meyer 2024a). Yet at the same time, in my conversations with self-identified modernists, they would often invoke the idea that modernists were always logical, rational, and coherent. In other words, this alleged incapacity to tolerate ambiguity has become an identity marker in its own right. To distance themselves from Muslim orientations they reject, modernists often conceptualize ambiguity in terms that are quite different from the ways familiar to us from premodern, traditionalist, or Sufi conceptualizations. Still, in each case, the tensions that emerge among different truths result in an appreciation for and exploration of the unknowable. In this regard, my findings also speak to broader interests in Islamic Studies in the reckoning with a divine figure that exceeds the human imagination, sometimes called an anthropology of God (Mittermaier 2021), since for both traditionalists and modernists, discursive contradictions often ultimately gesture toward metaphysical truths beyond discourse.

In studying the capacity of self-identified traditionalists and modernists in NU and Muhammadiyah to tolerate ambiguity and paradox, I employ memory, or more specifically the understanding and representation of their movement’s historical becoming, among members of these two organizations. With their self-identification strongly wrapped up in taking “tradition” or “modernity” as a normative framework of reference, both orientations have a very specific historical vision; yet both of these visions are complex and fractured. Muhammadiyah, like many other self-consciously modernist movements, generally has an uneasy relationship with remembering the past because of its strong commitment to go with the times (Habermas 1986). But to be intelligible as a coherent movement at all, modernist organizations still have to acknowledge some historical continuity. This tension is also present in Muhammadiyah’s contemporary memory practices, where the strong desire to innovate sometimes coexists uneasily with the equally strong desire to celebrate the organization’s long history and its role in building a pious, empowered, and modern Indonesian nation. Traditionalism, by contrast, cannot escape modern pressures to innovate and therefore searches for ways of renewing without breaking tradition (Effendi 2008). Over the last few decades, NU has responded to the demands of modern life by reforming key domains of traditionalist organizational life and religious practice. For example, Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), the general chairperson of NU from 1984 to 1999, promoted the reformation of traditionalist Islamic education through the introduction of integrated educational programs whereby students could follow the national curriculum alongside their religious education.¹ With the introduction of various secular modern school subjects, traditionalist Muslim students were socialized into typical modern rationalist and empiricist understandings of history that coexist alongside traditional memories, sometimes generating clashes.

More broadly, memory may well produce community and belonging, as scholars of collective memory studies beginning with Maurice Halbwachs (1980, 1992) have shown us. But memories are also prone to contradictions, for example, when a community’s priorities shift, requiring representations of the past to transform and speak to new causes (Zurbuchen 2005); when certain memories are unspeakable and unheard but nonetheless continue to haunt individuals or communities (McGranahan 2010; Steedly 2019); or when memories have to serve different, sometimes competing and clashing purposes as they are called in the service of authenticating participation in frameworks of reference as diverse as particular visions of Islamic orthodoxy, the Indonesian nation state, or global modernity. Ideology, as Mary Steedly puts it, is a “maze of ambiguity” (2019, 27), and memories, often especially dense nodes in this maze where competing self-understandings, desires, and anxieties intersect, are thus bound to produce incoherences. As such, memory is especially well suited for a study of how contradictions are handled.

The Legacies of Kauman’s Two Sons

The two protagonists of this book, two founding figures of the modernist and the traditionalist Islamic movements in Indonesia, were born within two years of each other in Kauman, a neighborhood in the historical heart of Yogyakarta. The first of these two figures is Kyai Haji (KH) Ahmad Dahlan, who founded Muhammadiyah in 1912. The second is Muhammad “Mbah” Munawwir, the founder of a prestigious and influential Islamic school (J. pesantren), which is aligned with and embedded in NU. Kauman is a small quarter, only a few hundred yards from one end to the other, traversable by foot in just a few minutes—and it has to be by foot, as the lanes of Kauman are too narrow for cars. Motorcycles have to be turned off and pushed, as a resident was quick to point out to me when I came for the first time, unaware of this rule that makes Kauman completely unlike the rest of the congested city. In 1934, the Dutch Orientalist and advisor to the colonial government G. F. Pijper described Kauman as “a maze of narrow lanes dead-ending in white walls, where strangers can barely find their bearings. . . . Here, right next to the great Mosque that splendidly rises over the low houses, lives a pious community.” Due to an old privilege from the sultan, only Muslims are allowed to live in Kauman. “Whenever someone causes grievances through a neglect of their religious obligations, it will be made clear to them that they better live elsewhere” (Pijper 1934, 1).

figure 1. Kauman, Yogyakarta. Photo by the author.

[picture]

In many Javanese court cities, the kauman is a quarter adjacent to the royal palace of the sultan (J. kraton). Yogyakarta’s Kauman, too, is immediately adjacent to the kraton, the seat of the Yogyakarta Sultanate, which was founded in 1755 after the Kartasura Sultanate was divided between the Sultanate of Surakarta (Solo) and the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. The name kauman is derived from the Javanese term kaum, the religious officials of the palace, who populate Kauman. The kaum have been in charge of administering the Sultanate’s Great Mosque (J. Masjid Gedhe), which has been located at Kauman’s eastern extremity since it was built in 1773. In addition to their religious functions, the people of Kauman were engaged in the batik trade, which afforded the neighborhood a relatively high economic status until the collapse of the batik industry in the 1970s (Darban 2010, 103–7). Before he founded Muhammadiyah, Ahmad Dahlan—to whose story we turn now—was also a religious official and batik trader in Kauman.

Reforming Kauman, Reforming Indonesia: Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan

Muhammad Darwisy, who would later change his name to Ahmad Dahlan, was born in 1868. His father, Kyai Haji Abu Bakar, was a religious official of the Yogyakarta kraton and a teacher at the Great Mosque, and his mother also came from a family of religious officials. After having received his primary education from his father, Darwisy continued to learn with other teachers in the region. Darwisy left in 1890 for Mecca, where he stayed for a year to pursue more advanced studies. During this time, he took the name Ahmad Dahlan, probably after the influential Shaykh al-Islām² and Mufti of the Shāfiʿī school of law in Mecca, Aḥmad ibn Zaynī Daḥlān, who had died in 1886, just before Darwisy’s arrival in Mecca.³

Upon returning to Yogyakarta, Dahlan assisted his father as a religious teacher, traded batik, and settled down with his family. In 1889, before leaving for Mecca, he had married Siti Walidah, the daughter of another religious official at the kraton. While Dahlan would marry additional women in the course of his life, Siti Walidah was the only one to whom he stayed married until his death in 1923. Siti Walidah is also the only one among his wives to become a central figure in the organization’s dominant narratives about their beginnings, especially since the foundation of Aisyiyah, the women’s branch of Muhammadiyah, is often attributed to her.⁴

Upon his father’s death in 1896, Dahlan took over his father’s position as one of the twelve khatib of the Great Mosque, a title that was high up in, but not at the top of, the hierarchy of the kraton’s religious officials. He also took over his father’s prayer house in Kauman, the Langgar Kidul or Southern Prayer House, where he taught some of the students who would become his fellow Muhammadiyah activists. From 1898 to 1899, Dahlan and some of his supporters began to advocate for a correction of the prayer orientation (A. qibla) at the Great Mosque. With the help of his globe and compass, Dahlan had established that his fellow Kauman Muslims were not directing their prayers to Mecca, but to Africa’s east coast.⁵ His superiors at the Great Mosque were, however, unimpressed by his rationale and unwilling to give in to his request. When Dahlan installed the qibla he had determined to be correct at his prayer house, the head of the Great Mosque, angered about Dahlan’s disobedience, had his prayer house with its offensive orientation demolished.

Disappointed that his native Kauman was so unreceptive to his suggestions, Dahlan left for Mecca a second time in 1903, this time staying for more than a year. He studied with the prominent Sumatran scholar and reformer Aḥmad Khātib and reportedly encountered the work of the Egyptian modernist Muḥammad ʿAbduh while there. But even though ʿAbduh’s influence in particular is often emphasized by scholars and Muhammadiyah members alike, Dahlan’s reform was very different from ʿAbduh’s.⁶ Whereas ʿAbduh was primarily concerned with the intellectual dimensions of reform, Dahlan was much more practically minded. For him, reform entailed above all service, such as enlisting his fellow activists to clean up the streets of Kauman to improve the conditions of hygiene in the quarter (Noer 1973, 74). The ideological contours of his activism were not “modernist” in a way that would immediately be recognized as such today.⁷ Some therefore claim that Dahlan himself was still a Shāfiʿī traditionalist, although the truth of this statement and its significance are contested in contemporary narratives of his life.

In the following years, Ahmad Dahlan intensified his teaching and began to take an interest in community organization, especially through his involvement with Boedi Oetomo, an organization associated with the beginnings of Indonesian nationalism.⁸ On November 18, 1912, alongside a group of his close companions and students, Dahlan submitted Muhammadiyah as an official organization for the recognition by the Dutch authorities. Under Dahlan’s leadership, the basic organizational infrastructure was developed that Muhammadiyah has retained until today. Until his death in 1923, Dahlan widened the scope of the organization’s reach and activities. In 1915, the organization’s official magazine, Suara Muhammadiyah (The Voice of Muhammadiyah) was established, making it Indonesia’s oldest continuously published magazine. Originally in Javanese, the magazine switched to Malay/Indonesian as the organization’s base broadened in the 1920s.

In 1917, with a group of his female students, Dahlan established Aisyiyah, the women’s branch of the organization. With Aisyiyah’s help, Muhammadiyah founded the first elementary school in Kauman in 1923 (Mu’arif 2012), followed by thousands of additional schools over the following decades. In 1920, the organization’s social welfare department, PKOe (for Penolong Kesengsaraan Oemoem, or General Relief of Hardship), was instituted. It would later establish many orphanages and clinics (Noer 1973, 78–79). When in 1917, Boedi Oetomo held its congress in Yogyakarta, Dahlan seized the opportunity to network with delegations from all over Java and subsequently received requests to set up branches of the organization in their respective cities. In 1920, the organizational statutes were changed to expand their activities to all of Java, and in 1921, to all of the Netherlands East Indies.⁹ In 1923, by the time of Dahlan’s death, Muhammadiyah was highly organized although it was still small, with 2,622 men and 272 women, most of whom lived in Yogyakarta (Peacock 1978, 45). By 1937, Muhammadiyah’s membership had reached 112,850. Today, estimates of the total number of members diverge widely, especially since not everyone who identifies with the organization is also a registered member; but estimates typically range between ten million and twenty million.

From Kauman to Krapyak: Muhammad Munawwir

While Ahmad Dahlan’s biography is relatively well documented, we know much less about Muhammad Munawwir, often called Mbah, a Javanese honorific. Our knowledge of him relies less on academic books and studies and more on stories shared in his community, a contrast that rings familiar in the context of traditionalist-modernist identity politics, but that the following chapters will also complicate. Munawwir was born in 1870, two years after Kauman’s other famous son. Given how small Kauman is, it is inconceivable that the two would not have known each other from a young age. Like many aspiring scholars at the time, Munawwir was educated by some of Java’s greatest scholars, including Sholeh Darat from Semarang (d. 1903) and Seh Kholil Bangkalan (d. 1925). He also studied in the Ḥarāmayn, but stayed for a whole twenty-one years and thus much longer than Dahlan, spending most of his time with Qur’an scholars in Medina. While in Medina, he received his sanad, his intellectual genealogy of Qur’anic memorization, which linked him to the Prophet Muhammad by way of twenty-eight intermediaries. His studies were sponsored by a benefactor from Cirebon, Haji Ali. Upon his return in 1909, he first settled in his native Kauman to set up a religious school, but soon Haji Ali provided the funds needed to buy land and build a mosque in Krapyak, which, at the time, was a village outside of Yogyakarta where the royalty of the kraton had established a hunting lodge.¹⁰ By November 15, 1911, Munawwir had accomplished his move.

Perhaps, some have speculated to me, Munawwir left Kauman on the eve of Ahmad Dahlan’s foundation of Muhammadiyah because he wanted to dissociate from these modernist trends; but others presented the two as colleagues and friends. It is recorded, for example, that Dahlan and Munawwir paid each other visits (As’ad et al. 1970, 15). Some also mention that Dahlan was married to Mbah Munawwir’s younger sister Nyai Rum, an alliance that may have been intended to strengthen the ties between Kauman and Krapyak, although the marriage did not last for long and did not result in any surviving offspring.¹¹ Most people agree, however, that Munawwir was too preoccupied with his work as a scholar and teacher of the Qur’an to bother with organizational politics, including the formation of Nahdlatul Ulama. NU was founded in 1926 in reaction to what was perceived as an increasing marginalization of traditionalist interests. The immediate catalyst for NU’s foundation came from the Hijaz, which had just been conquered by Ibn Saʿūd in 1925. Shortly after the conquest, during the 1926 hajj season, Ibn Saʿūd called for a World Congress of leading ulama. His invitation to Javanese Muslims to send delegates to the World Congress was discussed at congresses in Java dominated by modernist factions. When the general chairperson of Muhammadiyah, Mas Mansur, and Cokroaminoto, the head of the Islamic party Sarekat Islam, were elected to represent Java at the World Congress and declined a traditionalist proposal to demand from Ibn Saʿūd that he respect traditionalist practice in his kingdom, the traditionalist participants walked out of the congress in January 1926 to establish a committee of their own to dispatch to the World Congress. At a meeting in Surabaya on January 31, 1926, under the leadership of prominent kyai including Hasyim Asy’ari and Abdul Wahab Chasbullah, this committee was transformed into Nahdlatul Ulama. By 1927, the organization’s aims had broadened from the specific problem of Ibn Saʿūd’s World Congress to a concern with strengthening traditionalist Islam in Java through the promotion of adherence to one of the four legal schools, especially the Shāfiʿī madhhab, and providing infrastructures for traditionalist teaching at mosques, prayer houses, and pesantren (Noer 1973, 228–30).

Seemingly uninterested in these developments, Mbah Munawwir focused on his pesantren, which grew quickly. Whereas in 1911 there had been six students (J. santri) who were all accommodated in a single dormitory, by 1920, the number had already risen to sixty. Later in his life, he sometimes had as many as two hundred santri board at Krapyak to study with him (As’ad et al. 1970, 25–26). Among them were several who would establish prestigious pesantren in their own right, including Arwani Amin from Kudus and Hasan Tholabi from Wates. By founding their own schools, these santri widely transmitted Mbah Munawwir’s sanad of Qur’anic memorization, making it dominant all over the archipelago. After his death in 1942, Krapyak was taken over by his two sons, Abdullah Afandi and Abdul Qodir, under whose leadership Krapyak continued to grow and began to become an increasingly complex institution with multiple dormitories and teachers, a process that is ongoing. Mbah Munawwir’s successors, including his sons, students, and especially his famous son-in-law Ali Maksum, integrated Krapyak and its networks firmly into the institutional structures of NU.

The Question of Equivalence

One might reasonably object that a comparison of how Ahmad Dahlan and Muhammad Munawwir are remembered in their respective communities is uneven or even misguided, given that, structurally, the status of these two men in relation to the communities remembering them is completely different—Muhammadiyah’s founder on the one hand, and a Qur’an teacher with no involvement in the central leadership on the other. Many of my Indonesian interlocutors of either organization asked me why I was not comparing Ahmad Dahlan and Hasyim Asy’ari, the kyai credited with the foundation of NU. There are two reasons for this. First, because of the marked differences between the two organizations in terms of their institutional culture and structure, Dahlan and Munawwir are more similar than initially apparent. Muhammadiyah is much more tightly structured than NU. The central leadership, with its various councils, makes decisions that are then implemented by leaders on the local level. NU also has a centralized leadership, but its reach at the grassroots level is almost always mediated by the kyai and their pesantren. Famous NU kyai can be very influential in their communities and beyond, especially when their pesantren and sanad played as foundational a role as Munawwir’s. In terms of his influence and status, Munawwir is therefore not comparable to an individual teacher in Muhammadiyah with no involvement in the central leadership, whose status in the organization and society as a whole is much lower and who would be quickly forgotten.

The second reason for selecting these two figures is that I am not attempting to offer a comprehensive documentation of the memories that the two organizations have cultivated around their beginnings and founding figures. Instead, I want to exhibit how they remember and how they handle moments when memories fail to cohere with straightforward characterizations of who they are as organizations. Such moments where simple self-understandings fail are often brought about through contact. Ahmad Dahlan and Muhammad Munawwir lived in close proximity, as do the communities that understand themselves to be the primary stewards and authorities of their life stories—the Muhammadiyah headquarters and its associated branches on the one hand, and the pesantren complex at Krapyak on the other. Both organizations navigate a landscape where the remains of their legacy are still physically palpable, and they also navigate each other navigating the same landscape. A study of the legacy of Hasyim Asy’ari, who was based in faraway Jombang in NU-dominated East Java, would not have allowed a study of such encounters.

Why Memory?

The meaning of memory as we know it took shape throughout the nineteenth century and was gradually consolidated around the turn of the twentieth century in the form of different theories. Figures including Sigmund Freud, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Frederic Bartlett all explicitly discussed the ways in which recollections of the past affected people on both an individual and a communal level. Maurice Halbwachs, whose works were published between the 1920s and 1940s, is now usually credited with the invention of social memory studies as a field. As an orthodox Durkheimian sociologist, Halbwachs emphasized that all memory is social, a reconstruction of the past that is contingent on the social beliefs and concerns of the present (Halbwachs 1992). The translation of his work into English in the early 1990s coincided with the beginnings of—and further propelled—the so-called memory boom (Olick et al. 2011, 139), a phase of increased interest and productivity in studies on memory.

Since those days, the field of memory studies has transformed, due in part to contact with the theoretical frameworks of other disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology. Anthropologists—many of whom did their research in Indonesia—played no small part in articulating new frameworks for the study of how people remember. Instead of taking for granted memory as a coherent reflection of contemporary social concerns, their studies have highlighted memories that are visceral, intimate, not to be integrated into dominant histories or their subversion, and sometimes all together beyond narrative availability (Stoler and Strassler 2000). They have reoriented our interest from content to form and style, as well as genre and audiences (Steedly 2013), and they have asked how memories can be fractured and displaced by violence and trauma (Bubandt 2008; Stoler 2008). Scholars have also invited us to rethink the relation between individuals and the community in “collective” memories,¹² showing how narratives, including narratives of the past, constantly produce and disperse subjects who move through the life world engendered by this narrative, a life world that is never entirely private but inhabited and sometimes even overwritten by other people’s memories (Steedly 2019, 20–22; see also McGranahan 2010). The vignette of the dream account with which I opened this chapter makes this obvious, as Pak Agus’s personal recollection is possessed by other accounts, including Muhammadiyah’s more official history and his uncle’s story, yet offers no clear way to disambiguate between them. Others have attended to the question of the effects of memory, decentering familiar notions of remembering as a process that is primarily cognitive or psychological. Scholars from Marc Bloch to Kerwin Klein have criticized social memory studies that invoke some sort of anthropomorphized, hypostasized group mind as a kind of active agent, spirit, or hero (Bloch 2011, 152; Klein 2011, 125)—but such understandings of an agentive memory may work well for recollections of the past beyond the West. As I explore in the last chapter of this book, memory in Indonesia can well be endowed with a compelling force that is activated when it is invoked (Florida 1995, 52; Spyer 2000, 76).

More broadly, scholarship over the last decades has blurred any lines between memory studies and related approaches making use of categories such as heritage, genealogy, or ancestrality. Sometimes, memory is also studied as “history,” calling into question problematic assumptions about objectivity or authenticity in different accounts of the past. This development has been useful as it has shown that the study of memory is not self-contained and that it needs to take different forms, depending on the variety of mechanisms involved in remembering the past in specific communities. Given this broader trend away from studying memory as a distinct and stable process, why do I retrieve memory in this book?

In short, my use of memory is neither meant as an analytic category nor a heuristic, but rather as a convenient shorthand for a range of engagements with the past that exceed any of the more specific disciplinary orientations. To grasp this diversity of engagements with the past, I make use of a variety of approaches to investigate my interlocutors’ relationships to the past in their complexity and multiplicity. Scholars have urged us to take seriously that there are multiple temporalities, that modern, linear time does not always do justice to Islamic temporal imaginaries (Jordheim 2014; Bashir 2014, 2022). Following Shahzad Bashir’s call, I understand my interlocutors “as active interpreters who create new forms of Islam in conjunction with their reading of the past and the circumstances of the present” (2014, 544). Modern synchronizations, albeit globalized and present, are never all-present, but they do coexist, sometimes uneasily, with other ways of imagining the passing of time.

In the following, I briefly discuss these different approaches, paying special attention to the ways in which these related disciplines relate to memory while showing how some of the critical debates that emerged around memory studies in relation to related disciplines are generative in my work.

History

Critics of social or collective memory have noticed the tendency of many scholars to approach memory as an archaic or sacred way of engaging with the past that explicitly contrasts with history as a modern and neutral form (Klein 2011, 114–15). Often, such romanticized understandings of memory draw on Pierre Nora, for whom memory is “affective and magical,” whereas history is an “intellectual and secular production” (1989, 8–9); or on Walter Benjamin, who found that capitalist modernity had displaced traditional forms of recollecting the past (1969, 83–110). For Nora, like for Benjamin, modernity has led to the collapse of true memory and the emergence of what he calls “modern memory,” a new way of remembering that is heavily influenced by the episteme of history because it is above all archival (Nora 1989, 13). While it is uncontroversial that there have been shifts in how most people relate to the past, most contemporary scholars would agree that a clear boundary between history and memory is analytically untenable (see Novick 1988). Indeed, as Nada Moumtaz (2021, 10) put it, ruptures are never neat, which means that shifts are never absolute. Rather than conceptualizing these shifts as transitions between distinct “historical regimes” (Hartog 2012)—a project that would run the risk of reifying such regimes as stable and self-contained—I am more interested in the fragmentary coexistence of different processes that can be called either “history” or “memory,” and how seemingly incompatible ways of knowing the past are held in tension.

But the conventional difference between “history” and “memory” also figures in my work in another way. We may agree that their difference is conceptually problematic, but that does not change the fact that the binary between them, and their association with related sets of antinomies, has entered everyday language across the world, including Indonesia. What is more, these categories are rarely politically neutral. On the one hand, older scholarship has often framed the difference as a binary where memory is primarily the domain of those who cannot do history proper; for example, women, people of color, the traumatized, or more generally those who cannot be trusted to be rational and neutral. History, by contrast, is male, white, privileged, and assured of its objective accuracy. In postcolonial and postmodern discourse, the values undergirding this binary have sometimes been inverted, whereby memory becomes the history of the oppressed and is called into the service of a redemption of those erased by the authors of the master narratives—an assumption that is just as problematic (for a critique, see Stoler and Strassler 2000). More than just an academic framework, the difference between history and memory has gained enough traction that we have to reckon with it as an ethnographic fact. In chapter 1, for example, we will see traditionalists differentiating between proper, objective accounts of Mbah Munawwir’s life and the tales about him that were not suitable for a researcher like me. In chapter 5, we see that at other times, it may also be politically opportune to invoke forms of recalling the past that self-consciously differentiate themselves from modern, rational forms. Rather than dismissing the boundary between history and memory as unscientific, it is important to pay special attention to where the boundaries are drawn, whether they shift, and how they are called upon in the service of the traditionalist and modernist project more broadly.

Heritage

Like the study of history, heritage studies is closely related to memory studies. Scholars of both memory and heritage are interested in how communities make use of a shared past to construct and claim identities, values, and meanings for the present. Both approach objects as media through and with which the past is socially constructed rather than as evidence of historical facts, and both pay special attention to these constructions’ historical contingency and their transformation over time (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995; L. Smith 2007; Viejo-Rose 2011). There are significant overlaps in how the disciplines are practiced today, due in part to the complexity and fluidity of the two terms’ conceptual boundaries and their continuously expanding scopes (Viejo-Rose 2015).

As an academic discipline, heritage studies emerged in reaction to an increased interest worldwide in history and its material remnants. This development is sometimes called a “global heritage turn,” a somewhat misleading expression given that it is less of a turn than a globalization of a much older trend that can be traced back to the nineteenth century and the beginnings of national and racial discourses as well as the emergence of a public sphere as we know it today (Anderson 2006; Graham et al. 2016; Harrison 2013). Over the twentieth century, heritage became increasingly bureaucratized and professionalized, as UNESCO and other institutions promoted a global vision of a responsibility to preserve heritage on behalf of humanity while providing infrastructures that internationalized particular Euro-American experiences of commemorating the past. As a result, the conceptual understanding of heritage in its everyday and institutional use of the term continues to be firmly rooted in a modern, Western, and largely secular understanding of the world.

Scholars of heritage have explored the effects of this globalization by focusing on processes of education, preservation, consumption, and management of heritage sites (L. Smith 2007; for an Indonesian example, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2019). Sometimes, the conception of “heritage” becomes problematic as it is perceived to clash with religious sensibilities—something for which Islam has become especially notorious in public discourse (Flood 2002; Rico 2017, 2019b). Due to such clashes with religious or other traditional views, some scholars have called attention to the role of indigenous engagements with heritage that are now at risk of being displaced (Karlström 2013)—although we are also cautioned of once again falling into binaries between indigenous, traditional, religious approaches to heritage on the one hand, and Western, modern, secular approaches on the other (Berliner 2013). Proponents of a critical turn in heritage studies have emphasized that the relation between religion and heritage is contextually contingent (Rico 2021, 2), for example, when the reclassification of sites as “heritage” transforms how they are perceived and used—implicitly or explicitly—in a religious way, such as when active places of worship are musealized (Miura 2005; Taneja 2017; Rots 2019). Of course, such transformations are never complete or unanimously accepted.

Indonesia in general, and Islamic Java in particular, is participating in this increasing interest in heritage, and the classification of an object or practice as heritage (I. warisan) results in a change in status that can be strategically deployed. As we see in chapters 3 and 4, this is especially the case in Muhammadiyah, where the language of preservation and heritage can neutralize concerns of clinging to a bygone era, precisely because it sounds modern and Western. Here, “heritage” can be religiously useful precisely by creating a certain distance to religion. Like with the concept of history, I thus pay attention to how the concept of heritage is used on the ground and what its effects are.

Genealogy and Ancestrality

Yet another scholarly approach in different communities’ engagements with the past has been to focus on their ongoing relations with their predecessors, especially as they are articulated through genealogies or lineages that, in a traditional Islamic context, can be biological, intellectual, or spiritual and are referenced by a range of terms in Arabic or vernacular languages, including nasab, sanad/isnād, or silsila. Genealogy in this Islamic sense is different from the Foucaultian genealogy, a methodology uncovering the accidents and contingencies that have constituted the formation of truth and value. More than a historical record, genealogies in Islam are mechanisms that facilitate the transmission of knowledge, blessings, or tradition across time and space. Well known as a means of verifying and legitimizing claims to authenticity and for producing in- and out-groups, Islamic genealogies are also crucial for creating community and relationships among people, living and dead (Alatas 2021b; Bashir 2011, 87–96; Birchok 2015; Ho 2006; Shryock 1997).

Genealogy has an ambivalent relationship with dominant constellations of power, something I also explore in chapters 5 and 6. While evidence of genealogical linkage is often used to legitimize the actions of those who are already powerful, it can also become a weapon of the weak, where the oppressed claim their own genealogical connections to powerful forebears or activate genealogies connecting them with traditions that have been violently erased. Genealogy in this latter sense is not limited to Islamic Studies; it has also gained prominence in Black Studies, where scholars have invoked Toni Morrison’s figure of the “ancestor” as a means to recover the past of communities that were cut off from their kinship and traditions through the genocidal politics of colonialism, slavery, and settler colonialism (Morrison 1988; see also Ferguson 2021; Morris 2023). In Indonesia, scholars have similarly noticed how encounters with the dead speak against the grain of dominant representations of the past, even if these communications remain embedded in systems of domination and subordination, where remembering always remains shadowed by fear (Steedly 2019, 238–40).

Genealogies are known to play an important part in the temporal imaginaries of traditionalist Muslims. Authority figures in Nahdlatul Ulama tend to be from families with high pedigree, and marriages are often arranged to forge alliances among powerful families and pesantren. In addition to their biological descent, famous kyai are likely to boast intellectual lineages that connect them with important scholars in both Java and the Middle East. They may also be initiated into Sufi lineages (A. ṭarīqa), providing linkages of initiation that often go back, by way of the ṭarīqa’s founder, to the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammadiyah modernists tend to dismiss the significance of these traditionalist lineages and decry them as corrupt. While genealogies do also play a role for them, they are reconfigured and reconceptualized to be compatible with modernists’ understandings of transmission, temporality, and reform. Genealogy is thus significant in this study as yet another way in which self-identified traditionalists and modernists engage with their histories.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 introduces one of the book’s primary field sites, the pesantren complex Krapyak, founded by Munawwir in 1910, in the south of Yogyakarta. It maps constructions of Munawwir’s hagiographic persona through memories of him among Krapyak’s teachers and students, showing that while these memories are frequently invoked, they are also incomplete, fragmented, and often contradictory. Different epistemic registers are activated when the teachers and students at Krapyak explain Munawwir’s extraordinary gifts as either miraculous or mundane—or do not talk about them at all. I highlight how these multiple versions embrace traditional and Islamic ways of knowing the past while also adopting modern Western historiographic approaches. Challenging entrenched notions of traditionalist memory as either unproblematically enchanted or co-opted by modernist temporalities, this chapter takes the tensions that arise through this epistemic multiplicity as the primary site of inquiry. I show that the contradictions and ruptures produced by incommensurabilities among the different historical visions are generative for ideological positioning and theological articulation. Giving access to situationally contingent and strategic ways of self-representation, these clashing memories also communicate the deeper understanding that no epistemology in and of itself can capture the multiplicity, complexity, and irreducibility of God’s manifestations in history.

While the epistemic multiplicity and openness we encountered in chapter 1 is often considered the exclusive domain of traditionalists and especially Sufis, chapter 2 argues that we can find similar ambiguities in modernist engagements with the past. This chapter focuses on the relation between unchanging essences and the spirit of renewal within Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously progressive and modernist organization that orients toward the present and the future, even as it remembers and values the trajectory of its own historical beginnings with Ahmad Dahlan. The chapter follows Muhammadiyah’s various intellectual lineages by mapping out the ideological location of prominent spokespeople over time. Conscious—and sometimes proud—of their intellectual genealogies with reform movements around the Islamic world and figures as diverse as Sayyid Quṭb and Fazlur Rahman, these reformers also emphasized their role as instigators of a rupture with the past. Adopting Azyumardi Azra’s vocabulary of “reform isnād” in conjunction with Derrida’s language of erasure and the trace, I propose that “reform isnād” can be a useful analytic concept to conceptualize the historical memory of Islamic reformism as a history of continuous renewal that seeks to put under erasure the historical contingencies of prior reform movements to leave behind only traces of Islam’s timeless truths.

Chapter 3 builds on and concretizes the preceding one by observing how the tensions between continuity and renewal have played out in the planning process of a new Muhammadiyah museum, which opened in November 2022. The curatorial practices of material objects representing the organization’s past are complicated not only by their potential to signal and promote a backward orientation, but also because physical objects, in Muhammadiyah’s modernist discourse, always harbor dangers of shirk or fetishization. The curators of the museum thus had to look for strategies to exhibit Azra’s “reform isnād” in the presentation of historical objects and to mitigate dangers of idolatry in the museum’s displays. They did so by mediating the historical content and objects using cutting-edge technology and modern, popular art forms. Similarly to the strategies described in the previous chapter, these curatorial programs put under erasure the pastness of the past, allowing the timeless truths of Islam to appear through a particular aesthetic of reform. The chapter closes with a broader reflection on the role of technology in self-consciously modernist and explicitly religious mediations of the past, calling for a reconsideration of entrenched understandings of authenticity, objectification, and transcendence.

Turning from the museum to graves, chapter 4 extends the consideration of the ambiguous status of material history in Muhammadiyah by shifting focus from questions of mediation and aesthetics to politics. Pilgrimage (I./J. ziarah, from A. ziyāra) and different memory practices at graves, in Indonesia and elsewhere in the Islamic world, have become an identity marker for traditionalist Muslims and especially Sufis, in contrast to Islamists who are often associated with the destruction of graves or the prohibition of ziarah. While Muhammadiyah modernists have typically objected to grave visitations and considered the practice idolatrous, the organization’s leadership simultaneously seeks to differentiate their variant of modernist Islam from Islamist organizations by positioning the organization as moderate and therefore a trustworthy pillar of Indonesia’s independence and democracy. Graves, in this context, become the site where Muhammadiyah’s conflicting anxieties and desires are negotiated and staged, and where performances of doubt, disagreement, and disinterest authorize Muhammadiyah modernists to remember. Through this reluctant memory, they connect their piety to particular local and national histories and to contemporary culture, thereby authorizing their claims to moderation. In the process, they navigate the conflicting demands of a fragmented world in which it is impossible to achieve all ideals simultaneously, but where the failure to do so opens up possibilities for articulating complex ideals and positionalities that do not neatly conform to the traditionalist-modernist binary.

The final two chapters continue the discussion on graves by shifting the focus back to NU traditionalists. These two chapters form a complementary pair, offering contrasting answers to the question of why some self-identified traditionalists visit the grave of Ahmad Dahlan, Muhammadiyah’s founder, despite the fact that they often express strong misgivings about the modernist organization and report that they are afraid to enter the cemetery where he is buried. Chapter 5 connects with the previous chapter’s discussion on constructions of moderate Islam. It argues that traditionalist ziarah to Dahlan’s grave, and the discourses around these visits, locate Dahlan in a traditionalist genealogy while disavowing his contemporary followers as potential Islamists who have become disloyal to his legacy. As I examine my traditionalist interlocutors’ different rationales given for reframing Dahlan as a traditionalist, I situate their arguments in shifting, and sometimes contradictory, strands of a global discursive formation that correlates characteristic ways of engaging with the past, as well as the deployment of coherence and paradox, with either moderate or radical Islam. In these reproductions of the “good” and “bad” Muslims in Indonesia, memories become a site where traditionalists are able to claim and produce a moderate identity.

Whereas chapter 5 gives a sociopolitical answer to the question of why traditionalists visit the grave of Ahmad Dahlan and remember him as one of theirs, chapter 6 suggests that phenomena like grave visitation are irreducibly complex. Without discounting the political maneuvering that accompanies ziarah as invalid or secondary, this chapter argues that theological understandings of memory also transcend contemporary discursive and cognitive processes, and with them, any self-conscious political posturing. By putting these two chapters in dialogue, I suggest that power politics and an orientation toward that which transcends all such interests cannot always be made fully commensurate in our analyses. Analytical efforts to synchronize different interpretations risk eliding the tensions felt in daily life. Chapter 6 presents common traditionalist conceptualizations of the grave, as well as the prayers uttered there, as an interface between the past and the present, a point of access to the imaginal realm and to different temporalities where those who remember forge ties of identity and belonging that exceed the organizational boundaries of Muhammadiyah and NU. Lineages that are activated through memory are irreducible to the identity politics of the day because they transcend individual choice and even include those who seem to disagree, because the power of the chain is stronger than they are.

The ethnographic research for this book was carried out in and around the city of Yogyakarta over a nine-month period in 2018 and 2019 and during one-month follow-up visits in 2020 and 2023. I made use of interviews, all conducted in Indonesian, and participant observation, for which I developed a good passive understanding for the spoken Javanese often used in Yogyakarta. Before I formally began my research, I had been regularly visiting Yogyakarta for about a decade, as a result of which I already had many friends and academic contacts in the city. This network proved invaluable in an environment where newcomers—foreign or not—rely on existing connections introducing them to others. To this effect, I also worked with three research assistants who were college students at the time and who had a background and training in the religious environments where I did my research. They not only helped me with interview transcripts and surveys, but also with navigating interactions with their peers and religious authorities. The traditionalist Islamic world in particular is very gender segregated, and the (usually male) authorities need to be met with deference and respect. While I was granted a great deal of privilege as a foreign, white woman, and many male authorities overlooked my frequent ignorance of gendered and other rules of etiquette, it was in part through my research assistants that I was able to build trust with my interlocutors. One research assistant took on an especially proactive role in my research and, during interviews, asked questions of her own, thus facilitating a more relaxed atmosphere that also allowed me to observe how religious authorities address different audiences.

It would be wrong not to admit that it was in part due to my privilege as a Western researcher that I was granted access to certain religious authorities. At the same time, this privilege also meant that people without an official role were sometimes hesitant to share their thoughts with me because they believed they didn’t have the license to do so. As a result, my research is tilted toward the two organizations’ elites. Remembering may take different forms at the grassroots level—something I hope future studies can bring into focus.

One

An Epistemic Opening

“how does it look?” I asked, pulling on my headscarf, the jilbab. My friend Anisa eyed me critically. “May I help you?” She rearranged my headscarf and fastened it with a pin, then nodded, looking satisfied, and we set out from her dormitory at Krapyak—the neighborhood in the south of Yogyakarta where the city’s largest traditionalist Islamic boarding school (J. pesantren) is located—to the square next to the mosque. The mosque, a new multistory structure, was built after the 2006 earthquake destroyed the pesantren’s original prayer house. Normally the square was an empty space for students (J. santri) to amble or for the teachers’ (J. kyai) children to run around and play, but that night, a huge tent had been set up that extended over the whole square. At its center was a small, elevated platform covered in green rugs where male santri were scooching around on their knees to set up refreshments. All around the square, even far beyond the tent, straw mats were spread out for Krapyak’s santri and guests like me. It was the evening of February 13, 2019, and the first major event for the occasion of the eightieth haul (derived from A. ḥaul, “year”) was about to take place. Celebrated on each eleventh of Jumādā al-ʿĀkhira, the haul is an annual commemoration of the death day of Krapyak’s founder, Mbah Munawwir.

Traditionalists are known for deriving religious authority and pious inspiration from unbroken chains of transmission and hagiographies. Yet such commemorations can be characterized by tensions. In this chapter, I explore these tensions by analyzing different ways of narrating the past that were in play at Krapyak, especially in relation to the life of Mbah Munawwir. I focus on different epistemic registers that are activated as santri and kyai explain Mbah Munawwir’s extraordinary gifts as either miraculous or mundane—or do not talk about them at all. I highlight how these multiple versions embrace traditional Javanese and Islamic ways of knowing while also adopting modern Western epistemologies. This multiplicity of different, even incommensurable, epistemic registers accords well with what scholars have suggested about the fragmented subjectivity of postcolonial Muslims. Simultaneously, the tensions and ruptures produced by the different versions’ incommensurabilities are productive vehicles for ideological positioning and theological articulation. To investigate the meaning of these ruptures, I draw on as diverse a group of theorists as my interlocutors did in their narratives of Mbah Munawwir. I show that these narratives are grounded in a deep understanding that all epistemic registers are bound to fail in adequately expressing the lives of those who knew God best. Even as these variable registers are useful for strategically situating traditionalism and for navigating the conflicting demands of modern Indonesian life, the tensions among them also create an epistemic opening to the God who transcends all epistemologies.

The site for these discussions is a pesantren, one of the many schools that constitute the beating heart of traditionalist Islam in Java.¹ Pesantren are under the leadership of kyai, who are at once teachers, community leaders, and scholars of Islamic sciences. During much of the colonial period, pesantren were institutions of learning and important centers of political organization (Dhofier 1999, 34–40) with ties of alliance, or sometimes opposition, to the royal courts.² Over the course of the nineteenth century, a standard curriculum emerged,³ consisting of Qur’anic recitation, the classical legal texts of the Shāfiʿī school of law (A. madhhab), theological works of Ashʿarī theologians, and the Sufi works of al-Ghazālī (Van Bruinessen 1990). Often abridged, the texts were read in Javanese translation or, in the case of the most advanced santri, in Arabic. Today, pesantren are scattered all over Java but are particularly numerous in East Java.⁴ Students at the pesantren can be as young as six or seven, but most are middle-school-aged and older. The oldest are young adults who board and study at a pesantren while working their first jobs or taking classes at a nearby college, as was the case with Anisa. Many of these college santri at Krapyak had previously lived and studied at other pesantren. Learning from kyai with different areas of expertise and receiving their respective certificates of religious knowledge (A. ijāza) upon graduating, they are today’s wandering scholars, continuing an old tradition of Islamic learning in Java (Kumar 1985) and beyond (Gellens 1990).

The main event of that night in February 2019 was a collective performance of Qaṣīdat Burda, an ode in praise of the Prophet Muhammad written by the Egyptian poet al-Būṣīrī (d. ca. 1295). We had arrived at the event’s advertised start time, which of course meant that no one else was there yet. “When is this supposed to start?” I asked, confused. Anisa seemed unperturbed. “Later,” she said and maneuvered me to the front of the women’s section, where, though we would have a good view of the platform and the area where the musicians and reciters would sit, we were not covered by the tent. “What if it will rain?” I asked, eyeing the night sky nervously. It was February, the rainy season in Java. “Hopefully it won’t rain,” Anisa said cheerfully and we sat down. An hour later, the square was packed with thousands of santri and visitors, mostly clad in white shirts. Although we were crammed together so close that we could barely move, there were not enough mats for everyone and those who came late had to make do with plastic bags or other makeshift surfaces. The platform in the middle was filling up as Krapyak’s kyai trickled in one or two at a time. At their front and center was Mbah Najib, one of Mbah Munawwir’s grandchildren and Krapyak’s Supreme Guardian from 2014 until his death in January 2021. The orchestra, made up of a few dozen male santri singing and playing the tambourine (I. rebana), began to perform devotional songs in Arabic, songs in praise of Mbah Munawwir and the Prophet Muhammad: “Sīdanā al-nabī . . . Mbah Munawwir al-Krapyakī, ḥabīb al-nabī.” The performance culminated in the recitation of the Burda, for which everyone who had remembered to bring a copy of the text joined in.

Kyai Haji Muhammad Munawwir founded a small pesantren in Krapyak, which at the time was a village south of Yogyakarta, on November 15, 1911, to train a few santri in Qur’anic recitation. Since his time, the pesantren has grown and achieved great success in producing some of the most famous kyai in Java and beyond. With the expansion of Yogyakarta, the village of Krapyak became an urban neighborhood, and as more and more santri came to Krapyak, the small pesantren became a complex institution, split up into numerous schools and dormitories, led by kyai who are either descendants of Mbah Munawwir or who married into the family. While Munawwir himself was not active in any Islamic mass organization, the second generation of kyai firmly established Krapyak as a center of Yogyakarta’s Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). Munawwir’s son-in-law K. H. Ali Maksum, Krapyak’s Supreme Guardian (1968–89) and NU’s General Leader (Rais ’Aam) (1980–84), consolidated Krapyak’s significance for the organization. It was also during Ali Maksum’s leadership that the pesantren’s popularity peaked.⁵ After Ali Maksum’s death, disagreements over the question of succession led to the establishment of two distinct branches: Pesantren Krapyak of the Ali Maksum Foundation and Pesantren al-Munawwir. Although today the two branches have their own characteristics, and sometimes underlying tensions come to the surface, they are often thought of as a confederacy and simply referred to as “Krapyak.” Santri of all complexes, approximately 3,500 in total, honor the memory of both founding figures, as was the case that night at the commemoration of Mbah Munawwir’s death day.

When the joint recitation of Qaṣīdat Burda was finished, one of the kyai on the platform took the microphone. The Burda, he said, is a special text. Its composer, al-Būṣīrī, was very ill, at the brink of death even, when he wrote this ode in praise of the Prophet of God. As he was writing, one night he dreamed he met the Prophet Muhammad, who covered him with his mantle (A. burda). When he woke up, he had completely recovered from his illness. There was even an eyewitness for this interaction with the Prophet, another person who dreamed he was present when al-Būṣīrī was given the mantle. The Burda, the mantle that is a poem, was thus directly received from the Prophet, which is why there was no other ode equal in spiritual strength and blessings that it imparted. In the accounts of Mbah Munawwir’s life, there was evidence that he liked and read the Burda and that he received his certificate for learning this ode during his studies in the Hijaz from a teacher from Egypt, where al-Būṣīrī’s poem had been passed down for generations. Just like Mbah Munawwir had emulated his teachers and his teachers’ teachers by cherishing the Burda, he concluded, the santri should take the tradition of reciting the Burda wherever they went.

The haul commemorates the life of a founding figure like Mbah Munawwir and lifts up him (or, rarely, her) as an example in devotion and knowledge and as the pesantren’s institutional raison d’être. It locates the educational lineage of the pesantren in this founding figure and celebrates the accomplishments of the santri in whose spirit they are educated. Such stories of traditionalist masters are often intertextual, also celebrating the work of other great Muslims, as was the case in this kyai’s speech. In fact, in his speech, Mbah Munawwir and the story of his life almost disappeared behind the intertextual reference to the memory of al-Būṣīrī. Nevertheless, it was Mbah Munawwir who is the occasion for recollecting and commemorating this lineage, and the Burda’s recitation is framed by his life, even if nothing more is said about it. As I examine the role of prior texts as a narrative model and reference, I ask how stories of other saints (wali) or scholars are emulated and refracted when Mbah Munawwir’s stories are told. I not only parse the narrative conventions that point to common expectations and understandings of wali-hood, but also analyze the changes and silences in new iterations of the old stories that provide the framework for memory and transmission.

Historians of religion have demonstrated that hagiographies can be read strategically to illuminate encoded social history (Bynum 1987, 1991), for example, through diachronic comparisons that bring to light changing religious imaginaries (Castelli 2004; Novetzke 2008), or by parsing single texts to reveal accommodations of different theological agendas and practices within a single framework (Stewart 2010). This chapter adopts a similar approach, attuned to historical change and ambiguities facilitated by multiple levels of interpretation. Moving beyond the analysis of texts, I observe and converse with living storytellers to understand the processes of hagiographic construction as a conversation among multiple interlocutors. While attentive to the strategic and political underpinnings of a community’s memories, I use the differences and ambiguities among the stories about Mbah Munawwir as entry points to truths beyond the human horizon. Following calls by anthropologists of Islam to formulate a more rigorous theorization of the transcendent (Mittermaier 2021; Birchok 2022; Moll 2023), I exhibit how the transhistorical becomes manifest in historical narratives.

An Old New Story

At their General Congress in 2015, Nahdlatul Ulama adopted as their official agenda the promotion of “Islam Nusantara,” the Islam of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. NU’s general chairperson Kyai Haji Said Aqil Siradj (2010–21) advocated for this branding because he found that Indonesians were incapable of differentiating between Arab culture and true Islam, trying to emulate the former while losing their own cultural identity. But true Islam, Siradj argued, could accommodate and even celebrate local traditions (Hoesterey 2018, 410–12). In a statement published in one of NU’s official media outlets in preparation for this General Congress, Islam Nusantara was defined as “distinct as a result of interaction, contextualization, indigenization, translation, and vernacularization of universal Islam with the social, cultural, and literary realities of Indonesia” (Mahbib 2015). Elsewhere, an NU spokesperson defined Islam Nusantara as “the result of a dialectic between written shariah law and local realities and cultures” (Muhajir 2015, 67).

The adoption of Islam Nusantara as an official program coincided with the launch of Progressive Islam (I. Islam Berkemajuan) at Muhammadiyah’s 2015 General Congress, a term indicating openness to change and a commitment to use rationality to respond to change in the spirit of Revelation. In one sense, neither of these two terms has added anything fundamentally new to the long-standing ideological contours of the two organizations. Najib Burhani (2015) called them different responses to the same challenges: the globalization of Western culture and knowledge on the one hand, and “Arabization” or the spread of radical Islam on the other. In chapters 4 and 5, I discuss the political dimensions undergirding the adoption of these mottos invoked by Burhani in more depth. Here, I want to focus on how their adoption has supplied the two organizations with a conceptual vocabulary and corresponding body of narratives to define themselves in differentiation from both these global currents and each other. With their embrace of Islam Nusantara, NU has specifically claimed the wali sanga or nine saints, credited by tradition⁶ with the Islamization of Java, as their organization’s foundation and transhistorical essence.

The vast body of stories around the wali sanga is historically linked to the fall of the medieval kingdom of Majapahit.⁷ Within the temporal vision of Islam Nusantara, the wali sanga’s way of proselytization continues to characterize Islam in the region and makes Islam Nusantara distinct. Because their missionary work and their exemplary comportment made people want to embrace Islam of their own accord, there was no hardship or compulsion in their conversion. This, the argument goes, makes Islam Nusantara more peaceful than Arab Islam, which was spread by the sword.⁸ Contemporary traditionalists often highlight that the wali sanga made skillful use of local aesthetic forms and cultural institutions, like the Javanese shadow puppet theater, to convert people, or that they handed out food or other useful provisions to those in need. Their tolerance for different cultural expressions notwithstanding, they never compromised on the requirements of Islamic law. These stories, which have been disseminated through NU-affiliated institutions and their respective media channels,⁹ have played a significant role in the branding of traditionalist Islam as Islam Nusantara.

The constructions of Mbah Munawwir’s hagiographic persona and their situatedness in the narrative world of Islam Nusantara show how Javanese Muslims who understand themselves as NU traditionalists inhabit this ideological and narrative landscape in their self-representations. The stories about Mbah Munawwir and his formation as a great scholar or, according to some, a wali of the Qur’an, are embedded in a literary legacy that provides the narrative conventions of Javanese hagiographies. These literary genealogies connect Mbah Munawwir with the stories of other famous Javanese saints, especially with Sunan Kalijaga, probably the best known¹⁰ of the wali sanga. Indeed, it would be difficult to find someone in Java who is not familiar at least with the story of his conversion, his youth as a highwayman, his encounter with and failed robbery of the wali Sunan Bonang, and his decision to repent and become Sunan Bonang’s student. Narrations of his life are omnipresent in the Javanese public sphere and broadcast in numerous formats including books, social media, and Friday mosque sermons. His stories have also become imprinted onto Java’s landscape through monuments commemorating his spiritual accomplishments. Around Yogyakarta, these include the large banyan tree of Kotagedhe he is said to have planted as he predicted the coming of the Mataram kingdom; the water spring of Kasihan that he brought into existence by tapping his staff on the ground when he had no water for ablutions; and the Opak River, where he is said to have meditated.

The stories around Sunan Kalijaga, as narrative and symbolic resources for new stories, can be understood in Paul Ricoeur’s language as a “repertoire” or “preunderstanding” of the world, common to both poets and their readers, upon which “emplotment” is constructed.¹¹ Alton Becker, a philologist of Southeast Asian languages, had a similar notion of such a prefiguration as a precondition for new narratives. To tell stories that make sense and evoke certain cognitive or emotional responses, the narrator draws on a group’s “lingual memory” of “prior texts,” the body of utterances, written and unwritten, that are remembered or even half-remembered in a community and give resonance and meaning to what people say or hear.¹² The stories of Sunan Kalijaga, as part of the lingual memory of the Javanese, provide the cartographies that make wali-hood intelligible and communicable within a group organized around common interpretations of a body of texts and shared ideals.

A contemporary example for these dynamics is the wali-hood of Abdurrahman Wahid, better known as Gus Dur (d. 2009), NU’s general chairperson (1984–99), the first democratically elected president of Indonesia (1999–2001) after the fall of the New Order, and, according to some, Java’s tenth saint. George Quinn (2010) showed that stories about Gus Dur have textual antecedents in Javanese literature, especially the literary traditions around Seh Mlaya, another name by which Sunan Kalijaga is known.¹³ The different versions of the Seh Mlaya are, in turn, embedded in their own nexus of prior texts, including the Old Javanese poem Dewa Ruci and the Qur’anic story of Khiḍr. Because these two literary traditions are also significant in the hagiographies of Mbah Munawwir, I briefly introduce them.

Probably composed around 1450 in Old Javanese and based on the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata but Javanese in origin, the Dewa Ruci (The Subtle God) tells the story of Bima (Skt. Bhīma), the second of the five Pandawa (Skt. Pāṇḍava) brothers, also known by his Javanese name Wrěkudara, who is instructed by his teacher Durna to go on a quest for the water of life. During his search, Bima finds Dewa Ruci, a miniature replica of himself, who invites Bima to enter him through his ear. Bima complies and, once inside, attains mystical realization. In the eighteenth century, this Old Javanese text was reworked by poets at the Surakarta court into modern Javanese poetry, the Sěrat Dewa Ruci,¹⁴ transforming Bima’s journey into an allegory of the seeker’s progress on the Sufi path (A. ṭarīqa) that culminates in the realization of God’s oneness (A. tawḥīd) (Arps 2011). The Islamization of the story was further intensified in adaptations of the narrative in the Seh Mlaya, where Bima becomes Sunan Kalijaga, thus relocating the story within the historical context of Java’s Islamization, and Dewa Ruci becomes Khiḍr, God’s mysterious friend and companion of the Prophet Mūsā in the Qur’anic Sura of the Cave (18:65–82).

The Sura of the Cave (A. Sūrat al-Kahf), the eighteenth chapter of the Qur’an, is made up of three principal narratives, which, however, elude coherent narrativization. The story of Mūsā and Khiḍr, an enigmatic figure with knowledge that exceeds even Mūsā’s, is the second of these three stories. It begins in medias res, with Mūsā announcing to his servant his intention to travel to the place “where the two seas meet” (18:60). From the beginning, the story remains elusive since little is explained about Mūsā’s journey or what he is looking for. Arriving where the two seas meet, they find “one of Our servants—a man to whom We had granted Our mercy and whom We had given knowledge of Our own” (18:65). Mūsā is eager to follow this servant of God to be taught God’s guidance, but the latter warns Mūsā that he would not be able to bear with him patiently; for “how could you be patient in matters beyond your knowledge?” (18:69). And, indeed, as they journey on, Mūsā fails to comprehend the mysterious figure’s behavior: sinking a ship on which they are taking passage (18:71); killing a boy (18:74); and repairing a wall in a town where they had been refused hospitality (18:77). In the end, the stranger demands to part ways with the impatient Mūsā, but first he explains his actions, revealing that he has knowledge of the future and hidden things that make his incomprehensible actions reasonable and good.

The story of Khiḍr proved especially productive for Sufis. Exegetes like al-Qushayrī and Rūzbihān Baqlī interpreted the story and Khiḍr’s demand that Mūsā be obedient as exemplary for the relationship between Sufi master and novice (Halman 2013). Ibn al-ʿArabī, who famously claimed to have been initiated by Khiḍr, understood the story as a representation of the tensions between the law (represented by Mūsā), and the immediate knowledge that transcends the law (represented by Khiḍr) (Austin 1980, 250). In popular traditions across the Islamic world, Khiḍr became associated with certain holy sites as well as bodies of water and came to be thought of as a timeless being with whom the most accomplished of Sufis can meet (Soeratno 1978).

To show what new emplotments of these prior texts looked like in traditional Javanese literature, I offer a brief discussion of a version of the Seh Mlaya in macapat verse¹⁵ titled The Story of Seh Mlaya Beginning at the Time When He Was Not Yet a Wali (J. Cariyosipun Seh Mlaya Awit Kala Dereng Juměněng Wali). This version is part of a Surakarta Manuscript (MS Museum Radya Pustaka 333, henceforth RP 333) titled Various Books and Poems and Shaṭṭārīya Teachings (J. Sěrat Suluk Warna-Warni tuwin Wirid Syattariyah),¹⁶ inscribed in 1864 for K.G.P.H. Cakradiningrat by R. Panji Jayaasmara.¹⁷ I especially focus on Khiḍr’s role in the narrative trope of the wali’s education, a theme common in Javanese hagiographies and present in the stories of both Sunan Kalijaga and Mbah Munawwir.

The text begins with the familiar story of Sunan Kalijaga, a.k.a. Seh Mlaya, in his youth as a criminal who tries to rob the wali Sunan Benang (more commonly known as Sunan Bonang) but is defeated by the latter’s spiritual powers. This experience leads to Sunan Kalijaga’s conversion and his discipleship with Sunan Benang. Having completed an education consisting of extraordinary feats of obedience and asceticism, his teacher declares him not only a wali, but even the seal (J. panutup) of the religious commanders (J. panatagama), pointing to the finality of his message.¹⁸ Sunan Benang furthermore tasks him with the instruction of Islamic law, the law of belief (A. īmān) and guidance (A. hidāya).

Asmaradana¹⁹ (Canto II)

The revered teacher said softly:
“Your name shall be Seh Mlaya.
You were running [mlaya] then.²⁰
Seh: Beloved by the Immaterial [Hyang Suksma]
as you have been capable of
not eating for one year,
a sign you are permitted to succeed.”

Having already studied at length,
he received no ultimate direction,
and did nothing but austerities,
because he was ordered to constantly do austerities
by Susunan Benang,
ordered to guard the great banyan tree,²¹
he did not move for a year.

In the middle of the mountainous forest
he guarded the banyan tree
for one year.
Then he was ordered to entomb himself,
to be buried in the middle of the forest
for one year; then he was dug up
by the noble Susunan Benang.

Then he was ordered to move,
to meditate at the Jaga River [Kalijaga],
wherefore he was given his name.
One year he was not allowed to sleep
or eat.
He was left behind when to Mecca went
the noble Susunan Benang.

Because one year had already elapsed,
before long he paid a visit to Seh Mlaya,
finding him sunk in meditation.
The noble Susunan said:
“Aye, young man, be released.
You shall be called a wali
the seal of the religious commanders.

“Do well in your practice of religion
for religion is rules of proper conduct,
the rules by the grace of the All-Seeing [Hyang Manon].
If you command religious laws,
all the laws of faith and guidance [ngiman hidayat],
the guidance is God Almighty.
Great are His blessings.”
(RP 333, 222–23/II:1–6)

Sunan Kalijaga, however, is not satisfied: He asks Sunan Benang to explain to him the meaning of belief and guidance with utmost clarity. But Sunan Benang himself does not know. All he can do is impart the advice to Sunan Kalijaga that if he wants to understand, he needs to increase his austerities, to “kill his body” or overcome his passions, and learn to die.

Seh Mlaya said softly:
“I, your servant, am very grateful.”
Kalijaga offered his reverence.
“But your servant says to you, lord:
I ask for all of it:
The truth of the Most High
that is called faith and guidance.”
(RP 333, 223–24/II:9)

Sunan Benang said softly:
“If you want to achieve the ultimate
kill your body
learn to die
indeed, in the midst of life.
Do austerities in the great forest.
Do not let anyone know.”
(RP 333, 224/II:15)

Obedient to his teacher, Sunan Kalijaga enters the forest and practices the tapa ngidang, the asceticism of living like the deer,²² but even after years of doing so he still does not feel any closer to the realization of guidance. Sunan Benang gives him one last piece of advice: Go on the hajj to Mecca and find guidance. And Sunan Kalijaga obeys. But his path ends at the edge of the ocean, where he cannot continue his way to Mecca and stops, dejected that after all his discipline and obedience, his efforts are thwarted. This is where he meets Khiḍr, called Nabi Kilir in Javanese, who informs him that guidance cannot be obtained through one’s own efforts but has to be granted through divine grace.

Durma²³ (Canto III)

Traversing forests, climbing hills, descending ravines,
tumbling down slopes,
running into gorges
without thought of danger,
he reached the edge of the coast,
confused in his heart
about the difficulties of the passage.

The edge of the ocean was too far,
a long way off, not to be seen.
Simply dejected,
at the edge of the ocean,
there was one who became manifest:
Sang Makbudingrat²⁴
brought news to the pitiful.

“Not receiving guidance on your path,
Seh Malaya, sorrowful,
you desire to know divine guidance
indeed, not through teaching,
(but) dangerous spiritual intermingling,
impossible to find
unless you are granted God’s grace.”
(RP 333, 231–32/III:18–20)

Nabi Kilir continues on for a few stanzas, emphasizing that Sunan Benang’s path has led to a dead end. His words resonate with Seh Malaya.

Then Seh Malaya said softly:
“I surrender to you, wise teacher.”
The sage said:
“Indeed, you also
became infatuated with sacred guidance,
with the ultimate things of this world,
in order to see truth.

“Following your teacher’s advice
Sunan Benang the wise
his advice for you was
to head to Mecca
indeed, to go on the hajj
because of this
life is hard.

“Do not go if you don’t yet know the destination,
and also, do not clothe yourself,
if you don’t yet know
the shape of the dress.
Don’t be too quick to eat
if you don’t yet know
the name of the food.”²⁵
(RP 333, 232–33/III:26–28)

Then, as in the Dewa Ruci, Nabi Kilir invites Sunan Kalijaga to enter him through his ear, where Sunan Kalijaga is bestowed God’s gift of attaining true guidance and mystical realization.

Two teachers thus contribute to Sunan Kalijaga’s becoming a wali. Sunan Benang is remembered as a historical figure through whom Sunan Kalijaga receives a lineage of initiation and learning and is admitted into the ranks of the wali sanga. Nabi Kilir, by contrast, is a transhistorical figure who turns up unexpectedly to meet those on whom God has freely chosen to bestow divine favor and knowledge. These two teachers represent two moments in the attainment of mystical realization with corresponding conceptualizations that have long had currency in Javanese Islam. The first of these two—Sunan Benang’s demand for unconditional obedience, or, more broadly, the novice’s obedience to the master—is characteristic of many Sufi lineages. But, more specifically, the reference to hidāya, the guidance Sunan Kalijaga is seeking, has conceptual resonances in the larger compilation of RP 333, which also contains a partial translation of Ghazālī’s The Beginning of Guidance (A. Bidāyat al-Hidāya).²⁶ The work by Ghazālī (d. 1111) has been influential in Islamic Southeast Asia since the beginnings of Islam in the region (Drewes 1978), especially after some of his key works, including The Beginning of Guidance, were transmitted into Malay (Peacock 2024, 220). Although it is difficult to know with certainty if the author of the Seh Mlaya or the compiler of RP 333 intended for Seh Mlaya’s reference to guidance to reflect Ghazālī’s text, the multiple references to guidance in the same textbook invite a reading of Seh Mlaya’s quest for guidance that is conceptually oriented toward Ghazālī’s text, and the wide currency of Ghazālī’s thought makes such a reading entirely plausible.

The Beginning of Guidance, one of Ghazālī’s most widely read books, is a short treatise containing practical guidelines for the daily obligations of the devout Muslim. It was written alongside and corresponds in terms of content to Ghazālī’s magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences (A. Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn). Examining the value and meaning of daily activities, it gives advice on how to guard one’s senses and heart from sinful behavior, and encourages good manners vis-à-vis God and fellow humans. The text’s partial Javanese translation in RP 333 likewise enjoins the readers to be obedient and meticulous in their performance of their everyday duties.

When Sunan Kalijaga asks Sunan Benang for guidance, he tells him to stay in place and wait for him to return, in the process of which Sunan Kalijaga’s conversion occurs. For the novice in particular, the meaning of obedience and the nature of their duties is defined in relation to their teacher. In The Beginning of Guidance, Ghazālī directly addresses the significance and indispensability of obeying a teacher’s every direction.²⁷ Furthermore, Sunan Benang’s advice to intensify his ascetic exercise echoes Ghazālī’s recommendation to subject all daily routines to rigorous discipline. Only after having mastered this obedience and discipline, spiritual secrets and depths of understanding will be revealed for the faithful.²⁸ While the rigorous training with and obedience to Sunan Benang imparts to Sunan Kalijaga the status of a wali with superior knowledge, ultimate realization of God’s truth remains out of reach, unattainable through effort alone. Guidance cannot be forced. And yet, obedience is a good in itself, irrespective of its proximate consequences and irrespective even of whether the desire for knowledge and guidance will be fulfilled.

The Ghazālī scholar Ebrahim Moosa has used the metaphor of the threshold, or dihlīz in Arabic and Persian, to characterize Ghazālī’s thought as occupying a position that straddles irreconcilable difference. The threshold is a liminal space between the inside and the outside from which different spaces are accessible but which does not resolve the antinomies between them (Moosa 2005, 29). When Sunan Kalijaga reaches the edge of the ocean, he is in a similar threshold position. He is determined to follow Sunan Benang’s order but sees no way forward, and his capacity for obedience fails. In this moment he meets Nabi Kilir. According to Moosa, in The Revival of the Religious Sciences, it is through the destabilization of closure at the threshold that the heart and the soul are opened and expanded to encounter the Ultimate Other. For Ghazālī, Moosa writes, “not only does reason recognize its own limits, but at the precipice, or dihlīz, of its limits reason opens up onto an ontological shore” (2005, 187). In the case of Sunan Kalijaga’s encounter with Nabi Kilir, the ontological shore is also a literal one. Their encounter at the edge of the ocean is beyond epistemic grasp; it entails, rather, an ontological transformation.²⁹

Sunan Kalijaga’s certainties in his quest for guidance are destabilized as his capacity to obey Sunan Benang has reached its possible limits. Likewise, the story’s expression of Ghazālī’s theory and precepts are also destabilized by the central paradox of Sunan Kalijaga’s spiritual practice. Guidance is not just the desired outcome but also a precondition for understanding; or, put differently, the desired end is also the means of its own attainment. The practices prescribed by Sunan Benang, Nabi Kilir explains, cannot effectuate realization because Sunan Kalijaga does not know yet what he is looking for. He is like someone who wants to put on a garment without knowing which one. If, however, Nabi Kilir’s appearance destabilizes Ghazālī’s theory and precepts, this destabilization is not against but with Ghazālī. After all, he reported in his testimony The Deliverer from Error (A. Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl) that it was at his own moment of despair that theological discourse was incapable of answering his most pressing questions and that he was cured of his malady through “a light which God most high cast into my breast” (Watt 1953, 25). It is in the moment of Sunan Kalijaga’s final failure to obey Sunan Benang, or the moment that Ghazālī realizes the limitations of theological discourse, that both of them are granted access to guidance and, along with it, the secret truths of God’s nature and relationship with the world. Like the means of their attainment, these truths transcend discursive knowledge and conventional channels of transmission.

Two Teachers at a Different Time

The stories around Mbah Munawwir, like the ones around Gus Dur, strongly draw on the literary tradition of Sunan Kalijaga and its own prior texts about Dewa Ruci and Khiḍr as cartographies of the communicability of wali-hood. Their narrative features, however, are not static, but are constantly transformed to speak to the life world beyond the narrative, including the formations of power and knowledge of which they are a part. According to Asad, “When a project is translated from one site to another, from one agent to another, versions of power are produced” (1993, 13). Although new versions are neither entirely predictable nor fully controlled by this life world, its politics crucially limit the possibilities of divergence (Steedly 2019, 30). Contemporary traditionalists at Krapyak narrating Mbah Munawwir’s biography no longer operate within the same episteme³⁰ but are separated from the author of the Seh Mlaya in RP 333 by shifts leading to fundamentally different notions of what it means to write about the past. Traditional Javanese historical writing recognized the presence of living pasts in the process of inscription. The post-Enlightenment historical project, by contrast, understands historical writing as a search for what really occurred while assigning to the past a position of absolute alterity (Florida 1995, 52). Modern historiography’s ideal of objective representation, alongside positivistic understandings of reality, results in a deep skepticism of the miraculous.

Of course, this binary is not truly a binary. For one, ruptures are never neat, as Nada Moumtaz (2021, 10) argues, neither in Java nor the West, and historical thinking of a very traditional sort continues to exist alongside positivistic and rationalist modes, without either of them achieving clear hegemony. Moreover, Islamic historiography as a third way of engaging with the past also plays a significant role in historical accounts of Mbah Munawwir’s life. Nonetheless, the ruptures incited by modern epistemes provide a useful heuristic for approaching the shifts in the narrative landscape of Javanese hagiographies. For although critiques of history’s scientific objectivity have unsettled notions of an oppositional relationship between modern academic historiography and more traditional ways of remembering, modern historiography’s episteme nonetheless functions as an identity marker of human emancipation from the confines of tradition, an identity marker of which my interlocutors took careful note and which they aptly deployed. When the Seh Mlaya as a prior text is transformed into new stories of Javanese wali like Mbah Munawwir, the reference to events deemed incompatible with modernity’s dominant understandings of reality is more than just a literary convention. It intersects with the audience’s life world as an ideological identity marker. In this context, Khiḍr is not only a well-known companion of many Javanese wali and thus a narrative symbol of wali-hood, but also associates those who talk about him with traditionalism and Sufi thought. This is especially the case at Krapyak, a traditionalist boarding school in a predominantly modernist city. By locating Khiḍr’s presence and absence in Mbah Munawwir’s hagiographic corpus, I ask what difference he makes in an account, thus exhibiting the tensions of contemporary traditionalist thought as they become visible in Mbah Munawwir’s different hagiographies.

In order to map out the landscape of memories of Mbah Munawwir, during my first few months at Krapyak I would begin most interviews by asking my interlocutors, santri and kyai alike, about Mbah Munawwir’s life story. What made him distinct? How did Krapyak reflect his gifts and values? What meaning did specific anecdotes have for them? I would soon learn that although references to Mbah Munawwir were ubiquitous, finding any stories about his life was surprisingly difficult. The one single picture that survives of Mbah Munawwir (fig. 2), often featured on publicity materials, illustrates this. It is too grainy to make out any distinctive features—so grainy, in fact, that Krapyak’s kyai don’t even all agree that it actually depicts him. In other respects, his life is equally obscure. The kyai, the official sources and guardians of Mbah Munawwir’s memory, rarely share concrete information publicly—to the extent that an event that is held explicitly for the purpose of celebrating his memory foregrounds the life and accomplishments of another person, the composer of the ode he loved, al-Būṣīrī.

figure 2. The controversial photograph of Mbah Munawwir. Photo by an unknown photographer, public domain.

[picture]

The main source of information about Mbah Munawwir’s life is a book first published in 1975 by a committee of kyai at Krapyak and then republished with some minor changes in 2011. But this book is hard to come by. It is unavailable in most of Yogyakarta’s libraries, bookstores, or even at Krapyak itself. The kyai usually knew about it and had often read it, but most santri I spoke with didn’t even know it existed. What is more, the book is not a comprehensive or coherent biography. It is only about seventy pages long, the bulk of which is made up of genealogical tables, both intellectual (A. sanad) and biological (A. nasab), as well as lists of Krapyak’s various institutions. Interspersed between these lists and tables, we find some anecdotes about Mbah Munawwir’s life narrated on the authority of one of his famous santri. The book’s emphasis on genealogy evokes central concerns of traditionalist and Sufi Islam with its attention to unbroken lines of transmission and initiation. By verifying information with reference to its authoritative source, it invokes the high standards of historical verification of Hadith scholarship and the styles of certain genres of classical Islamic historiography that often favored lists (Robinson 2003, 65–68). These markers of allegiance to traditionalist Islam are packaged in a medium that also invokes certain post-Enlightenment historiographic sensibilities: Large parts of the book are closer in form to a curated archive, a collection of lists and reports, rather than that of a coherent historical narrative. According to Ricoeur (2004, 146–81), the moment when information enters the archive is a crucial moment in the transition to modern historiography, as the archive allows the historian with particular questions to critically appraise the archive’s contents to make them usable as documentary proof.

Yet a strong subjective element remains in this process, as the historian must supply the causal links between the different events documented in the archive. This is especially true for this book, where a large amount of the burden of emplotment is on the reader because few causal connections are made between separate anecdotes or sets of data. The book seems less like an official biography than like an aid to the storytellers. The work of emplotment, of explaining the connections between the events, of drawing on this skeletal information and of articulating its significance while deciding how to represent the story according to the needs of the moment, is left to the members of Mbah Munawwir’s community. Their stories emerged, like in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, from the ongoing and often routine practices of the community (Benjamin 1969, 84–85), where stories are remembered and reproduced to affect the lives of those who tell and listen. “The storyteller,” Benjamin wrote, “has counsel for his readers” (1969, 86), a counsel through which the storyteller’s craft makes a claim on its audience. This kind of storytelling also exists in Indonesia, where tales and songs about the past are in direct conversation with the contemporary life world, evoking bygone times to be continually storied in “new ways out of, into, and across” the landscape in which they are embedded, as Patricia Spyer (2000, 80) observed on the Eastern Indonesian Aru archipelago. Likewise, traditional Javanese poets often encourage their future readers to actively take part in a production of meaning that is partially of their own making (Florida 1995, 2). The biography of Mbah Munawwir offers mnemonic materials to those who invoke his life to others, who must decide what story to tell and how. Storyteller and audience participate in meaning-making and in determining what story is told, how to emplot themselves in the story, and what it all means. If the format of the book on Mbah Munawwir’s life shows its participation in particular epistemes, a narrator’s emplotment of the data can also signal alignment with a range of positions regarding what it means to know and talk about the past.

Sometimes, the decision about how to emplot themselves and myself as their audience into their stories themselves took the form of not telling me anything at all. Students would often decline to answer my questions about Mbah Munawwir, claiming not to know anything. And even the kyai were not always forthcoming with what they knew. “All we know is in the book,” one kyai told me. “We don’t know anything else with certainty because all those who knew him are dead now.” “But aren’t there any stories?” I asked, incredulous that the memory of a figure as important as Mbah Munawwir could be lost in his own community only two generations after his death. “Oh yes, there are stories,” he said, laughing dismissively. “But those are not reliable, you would not be able to use them for your scientific research!” I explained that my research was about how Mbah Munawwir was remembered, not about historical facts, but he would not budge in his resolve: Because the stories were not reliable, I was better off not knowing them at all. While this reference to reliability may also have been partly influenced by the academic standards of classical Arabic historiography, the kyai’s reference to my “scientific research” made clear what standard he was primarily implying: Not all stories about Mbah Munawwir fit easily into the positivist outlook of academic historiography that I likely represented for the kyai. Such stories must be handled carefully. In deciding not to tell me what he knew, this kyai was making a judgment about what I represented. But his hesitancy to dwell on such “unscientific” stories also indicates a discomfort that transcends the dynamic of the interview (Stoler and Strassler 2000, 11–14) and that reflects a fundamental change in the power/knowledge formations that make telling a story possible and its contents relevant. On Benjamin’s account, as the communicability of human experience over routine communal activity was lost, storytelling declined, replaced by information (Benjamin 1969, 83–84, 88–89). In the official book, and in the santri and kyai’s inability or reluctance to tell stories, Mbah Munawwir appears to have disappeared behind the mere fact of an archive and what the archive stands for.

And yet, this does not mean that the stories of Mbah Munawwir are all together lost: They remain accessible in the community when they are wanted. Epistemes are situated, contingent on specific relationships and contexts. Particular stories of the life of Mbah Munawwir may be incompatible with certain epistemes and are therefore neither significant nor intelligible. But other versions may emerge in epistemes that accompany other relationships or contexts, where such unreliable stories may be quite significant and intelligible. As people fluidly shifted among these different epistemes, what they remembered and how they emplotted themselves in relation to it and to me also shifted. I had different relationships with different kyai, who themselves had different relationships to the stories of Munawwir, and some where happy to tell what they knew. Either way, they had counsel to impart.

Of Reason and Weirdness

A group of santri who had claimed ignorance of Mbah Munawwir informed me that the best person to talk to was Ahmad, a Krapyak alumnus and now a teacher himself. He had been around for a long time and would know everything. It was also Ahmad who pointed me to the book on Mbah Munawwir’s life and who had his own book copied when I could not obtain it anywhere else, although he warned me that the book was rather incomplete—but, as he echoed the santri, he had been around for a while and knew most things worth knowing. And so, when we met, he told me what he thought I ought to know, emplotting the facts he remembered.

Mbah Munawwir’s biography begins with lists of the children of Mbah Munawwir’s grandfather, K. H. Hasan Bashori, and his father, K. Abdullah Rosyad. The reader learns that K. H. Hasan Bashori was an officer in the Dipanegara War,³¹ and his father, Abdullah Rosyad, was a kyai in Kauman. Both aspired to memorize the Qur’an but failed.

K. H. Abdullah Rosyad: Like his father, he also made great efforts to memorize the Qur’an, he practiced asceticism and controlled his passions for nine years in the attempt to memorize the Qur’an. When he was in the holy land of Mecca, he received the same divine revelation that his father had received, that his descendant would be granted the divine gift of memorizing the Qur’an.

And when he had received the divine gift of a son (in this case, K. H. M. Moenauwir), as a motivation (targhīb) to read the Qur’an aloud, he gave the gift of money in the value of Rp. 2,50 if he finished the entire Qur’an in the period of one week. Indeed, this was done well, and even when the gift was no longer given, the son would still do it. (As’ad et al. 1975, 4)

Ahmad also began his narration of Munawwir’s life with this story of his father’s and grandfather’s revelation, followed by the strong Qur’anic discipline his father instilled in him as a child. Moreover, Ahmad explained, his potential as a great scholar and a wali of the Qur’an was predicted before his birth and already recognized by the greatest kyai of his generation, including Kholil Bangkalan, who let the boy lead the prayer at his pesantren, a privilege reserved for Qur’anic scholars. At that point in his life, Munawwir had not even formally begun his memorization of the Qur’an, which he would do later in Mecca and Medina. “We don’t know much about his time in the Hijaz,” Ahmad said. Only few of his Hijazi teachers were listed in the book. There was no documentation on what else he did while there. Ahmad was, however, able to share that upon his arrival in the Hijaz, Munawwir did not immediately begin his memorization. He was waiting for a sign that he was truly meant to do so, which soon came. At this point, Ahmad suddenly seemed to be uncomfortable with his own narration. He smiled apologetically and informed me that this was a bit of a mystical story. “Some people say that it was Nabi Khiḍr who told him that he could start with his memorization of the Qur’an. But,” he added, “not everyone believes that this is true.” We also find this story, with a similar nod to its controversial authenticity, in the biography of Mbah Munawwir:

A Story

During one journey from Mecca to Medina, he met an old man he did not know, and invited him to join hands. At that time, he asked for prayers that he would become a person who was truly a Hafiz al-Qur’an. Then the other one answered, “Insha’Allah” (According to KH Arwani Amin, Kudus: this person was Nabi Khidir, a.s.; and the incidence happened in Rabigh). (As’ad et al. 1975, 5)

Ahmad’s emplotment of the available data indicates that, mirroring the narrative of Sunan Kalijaga, Munawwir’s encounter with Khiḍr was preceded by a long period of preparation through discipline and obedience, of cultivating an openness and readiness to receive God’s gift. In both cases, this gift is eventually given through Khiḍr’s appearance. But Ahmad’s version of Munawwir’s story also reflects the shifts in epistemes and in understandings of the purpose of historical writing that separate it from Sunan Kalijaga’s story in RP 333. In his narrations of Mbah Munawwir’s becoming a scholar and wali of the Qur’an, he expertly navigated the demands of scientific rigor of post-Enlightenment historiography. He referenced a scarcity of source material to explain a gap in the story and then called the story about Nabi Khiḍr a “mystical story” that was unlike the rest of the historically verifiable narrative. Similarly, in the book the episode is prefaced with the words Suatu Kisah (A Story), indexing the testimony archived in this book as having a distinct epistemological status from independently verifiable history. The interpretation of the story is then attributed to the authority of a particular person, KH Arwani Kudus, a renowned scholar whose testimony is certainly weighty but not weighty enough to elevate the story’s status to that of historical fact. By separating the historical from “stories” and their “mystical” interpretation, Ahmad participated in the work of emplotment in such a way as to make explicit the critical historical consciousness that is implicit in the book.

The book does not report what happened with Mbah Munawwir immediately after this encounter, but Ahmad filled in some details for me: Feeling that he had been granted permission to begin his memorization of the Qur’an, Munawwir wrote a letter to his parents in Java informing them that he was going to memorize the Qur’an. After some time, his parents received another letter with the news that he had completed his memorization. Ahmad couldn’t recall how much time elapsed between the arrival of the two letters, but he said that it was unimaginably short. I heard from others that it was one month, or perhaps even just a week.³² Even without Ahmad being able to recall the exact data, the miracle of Munawwir’s quick memorization was verifiable by the historical documents of the two letters. But to what extent could the miracle itself be integrated into the historical narrative? “When I tell this story to my students,” Ahmad explained, “I always emphasize to them that his miracle (I. karomah, from A. karama)³³ did not happen in an empty space. Munawwir did not simply all of a sudden memorize the Qur’an in this record amount of time, but he had, through long daily devotion and discipline, familiarized himself with the Qur’an to an extent that memorization came easily to him.”

Even as Mbah Munawwir’s encounter with Khiḍr is claimed in Ahmad’s emplotment, the accuracy of this story is simultaneously questioned, on the one hand by marking it as distinct from the rest of the account that is based on historically verifiable facts, and on the other by offering an alternative explanation for his miraculously fast memorization. Through these strategies, Ahmad relativized the significance of Khiḍr’s presence and, with it, the miraculous nature of Mbah Munawwir’s becoming. While downplaying the extraordinary channels of divine transmission represented by Khiḍr, Ahmad instead emphasized the mundane causality associated with the significance of dedication and following a teacher. What is at stake here, among other things, is how to understand karomah. Sunan Kalijaga evinced his favor with God through his performance of miraculous deeds, like surviving for a year without eating or sleeping—by doing things that simply do not make sense, at least when positivistic rationalist standards are applied. Yet Mbah Munawwir’s karomah, so I have been told repeatedly by the kyai and santri of Krapyak, his quick memorization of the Qur’an and his lifelong dedication to it, “make sense” (I. masuk akal). There is nothing irrational about it.

One of Krapyak’s kyai articulated this viewpoint even more forcefully. When I asked him what Mbah Munawwir’s karomah was, he hesitated and said, “Karomah is difficult.” He then asked me what I thought karomah meant, and when I said that, as far as I understood, it could either be the capacity for miraculous feats or the fruits of a person’s labor and struggles, he nodded. Mbah Munawwir’s karomah, he said, was the result of his steadfast dedication to doing all of his daily tasks with integrity (A. istiqāma). He recalled that Ali Maksum, Mbah Munawwir’s famous son-in-law and his own grandfather, had once said that karomah has nothing to do with miracles. The kyai laughed scornfully as he said the word keajaiban, which, in Indonesian, has a somewhat wider semantic range than the English “miracle” and can also mean “weirdness.” “Karomah,” he said, “is about habituating yourself to a certain behavior, which will result in excellence.” He pointed to the water bottles on the coffee table between us: “Someone who drinks a lot of mineral water may be able to tell the difference between Clio and Aqua,” two popular brands of bottled water in Indonesia, he said, adding, “Karomah is about cultivating a professional attitude. Ali Maksum explained it very clearly: All people can have karomah if they just try hard enough.”

I had already learned that karomah can be difficult, as the kyai said. Before I had decided to focus on Krapyak and Mbah Munawwir, I had visited the graves of several other distinct figures in and around Yogyakarta. In one such community I had had preliminary conversations with the descendants of this wali who, like Sunan Kalijaga, had encountered Khiḍr and had performed miracles. While some of his descendants had been reticent to share stories with me, others warmed up more quickly. I seemed to be off to a promising start. But one afternoon, I received a phone call from one of the most senior members of the family who, as she said, had been designated to ask me some questions about the motivations of my research. She quizzed me about my background and then asked what I was going to write about the wali, her ancestor. When I told her that I was interested in his relation to Khiḍr, she informed me that the family would not accept such research. But what really bothered her was something else: “If you are interested in stories about his karomah,” she snapped, referring to the questions I had asked during my recent visit, “just go online and read what people have written.” Didn’t I know that such stories could cause strife and divisions?³⁴ When I hung up the phone, I was so devastated to have been kicked out from a research site that I was almost in tears. Later I learned that the family had been the target of hostilities because of social media posts about the wali, in which his karomah was misconstrued and misunderstood. Not everyone has a charitable attitude toward stories about miraculous feats. As unpleasant as this experience was, it taught me an important lesson: Miracles are dangerous business.

Wali-hood and Modernity

As a center of NU in Yogyakarta and beyond, Krapyak represents NU’s traditionalism, which, as discussed, has come to be narrativized as Islam Nusantara, the Islam of the wali sanga. NU’s claim to be the wali sanga’s heirs means that the resonances between the Seh Mlaya and the narratives around Mbah Munawwir’s becoming a wali are not neutral, but a marker of identity and belonging, especially when miracles or encounters with Khiḍr are involved. The wali sanga, including Sunan Kalijaga, are well known for their karomah, but the question of how to understand their stories often separates traditionalists from modernists, as the latter are likely to insist on more allegorical interpretations. A teacher at a mosque with strong Muhammadiyah leanings near Krapyak told me that literal understandings of the stories of the wali sanga narratives were just the kind of misinterpretations one would expect from ignorant people. “We are told that Sunan Kalijaga transformed things into gold,” he exclaimed, “but this is just a metaphor. What is meant by gold is truth!”

Many of Krapyak’s kyai and santri were acutely aware of their neighbors’ opinions. “We have to be careful,” the kyai who had defined karomah as a professional attitude told me. “This is Yogyakarta. We live close to the sultan’s palace; and among our neighbors are abangan,³⁵ Catholics, and Muhammadiyah.” The presence of Muhammadiyah is especially strongly felt. Located in southern Yogyakarta, Krapyak is surrounded on all sides by Muhammadiyah strongholds and historic centers, including Karangkajen, Jogokaryan, and Dongkelan. Kauman, Nitikan, and Kotagedhe are just a little farther away. In this context, karomah can indeed be difficult, as the kyai had said. Some kyai and santri have learned that sometimes it is best not to talk at all about Mbah Munawwir’s karomah with outsiders, Muhammadiyah modernists or Western researchers, or perhaps even with younger santri who cannot yet be trusted with such difficult stories. Others have learned to explain their pesantren and Mbah Munawwir in a way that their Muhammadiyah neighbors can understand. This also entails a rationalization of Mbah Munawwir’s karomah as the result of hard labor or “a professional attitude.” The conceptualization of karomah as an optimization of efficiency and productivity suggests a thoroughly modernist reinterpretation of the concept. According to Weber (2001), the ideology of modernity, and especially modern capitalism, is characterized by disciplined labor and maximized efficiency through rigorous calculation and goal-oriented rationalization. Discipline and efficiency in pursuing one’s work is a central virtue that is indexed by wealth and profit; or, in Mbah Munawwir’s case, his knowledge of the Qur’an for which he became famous, became a sought-after teacher, and established a network of scholars and students that extends all over Java and beyond.

Scholars of postmodern or postcolonial theories have critiqued modern historiography’s claim of operating with positivistic rationalism as an epistemically privileged historical moment by historicizing the claim itself, especially in relation to colonial productions of knowledge (Florida 1997; Said 1979; Stoler 1995). Official historical accounts telling the history of victors also come with the victors’ epistemic frameworks and systems of discipline through which their power is sustained. This epistemic bias means that not all events or concepts are legible as relevant or true, thus being erased (Guha 1982; Spivak 1999; Trouillot 1995). Postcolonial studies scholars have shown that to some extent this bias is unavoidable because it is impossible to think and write about a modern subject or community without invoking Western paradigms. Examining specifically the issue of historicism, Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed to the inescapability of the ideology of progress measurable by certain markers of rationality, including the acceptance of a secular temporality and of human ontological singularity, precluding the possibility of metaphysical actors in history (2000, 15–16). Enforced by the “truth-games” of the modern nation-state, these categories take on the status of a meta-narrative, always threatening to erase or turn into an anachronism whatever does not fit (2000, 12). And yet, Chakrabarty wrote, Western categories are not all-encompassing and cannot entirely mute the “plurality that inheres in the ‘now,’ the lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one’s present” (2000, 243). This plurality is irreducible to a simple binary between the domination by and resistance to modernity, as becomes clear in Krapyak’s engagement with Mbah Munawwir’s story.

For one, this is because the embrace of modernity brings with it contradictions that seem to oppose modernity in other respects. While the relative downplaying of the miraculous represented by Khiḍr appears to embrace rationalist and capitalist notions of labor, it also increases the significance of hierarchy and obedience. Without Nabi Kilir, Sunan Benang becomes the only vehicle for attaining knowledge and realization. For Mbah Munawwir, it was his father who drilled the boy in Qur’anic recitation. And for the santri, it is the kyai. Indeed, what was special about pesantren for Qur’anic memorization like Krapyak, a kyai I will call Usman told me, was that the bond of loyalty between santri and kyai, their relationship of mentorship and obedience, was not just instrumental but absolute: It was about “life and death.” As for Sunan Kalijaga, for the santri at Krapyak, obedience is a good in itself, irrespective of the proximate aims of any specific instruction.³⁶ In modernist ideologies, such obedience is called blind or uncritical, an offense that, as I show in chapter 2, is bad—as bad as or possibly even worse than the belief in miracles, which modernists often consider at least theoretically possible, even if the authenticity of specific contemporary instantiations is denied. The relative de-emphasis of Khiḍr may be considered an appropriation of karomah into modernist, rationalist ideologies, but the resulting emphasis on the virtue of obedience is irrational and corrupt within the framework of modernist epistemology and ethics. “Resistance is the Other of the despotism inherent in capital’s logic,” Chakrabarty (2000, 59) wrote. The same can be said for rationalizations of karomah: Inherent in their embrace are moments of resistance.

Moreover, because this embrace of positivistic rationalism is situated in a particular episteme, it is not all-pervasive. What in the first few weeks of my field research looked to me like a complete erasure of Mbah Munawwir’s miracles ultimately turned out to be a much more complicated dynamic. Soon enough I found kyai and santri who were happy to tell me stories in which Mbah Munawwir’s karomah had little to do with a professional attitude. One kyai told me that Mbah Munawwir was able to recite the entire Qur’an between two prostrations (A. rakʿa) during the late afternoon prayer (maghrib). Anyone else would take many hours to do so, but he had finished by the evening prayer (ʿishāʾ), even though he was using tartīl, the slow, melodic kind of Qur’anic recitation. In Mecca, he would recite the whole Qur’an in just one circumambulation of the Kaaba. He once had a santri recite the Qur’an by heart in his presence so he could check it for accuracy, and he completed the examination within one hour. The normal laws of time were suspended for him. In these stories, his karomah is no longer just his area of professionalization, but a gift from God irreducible to his own efforts, as marked by Khiḍr’s miraculous appearance. It extended from his mastery of the Qur’an to other aspects of his life: When he walked at night, his body would shine like a lamp. His miracles even affected those who were close to him, like his younger sister Nyai Rum, whose belly projected Qur’anic recitation like a loudspeaker. When I asked one kyai who had been willing to share stories of Mbah Munawwir’s miracles with me why these stories were not told more widely, he replied without hesitation: “The stories of Mbah Munawwir were erased and intentionally made to disappear.” He explained that some people didn’t want Mbah Munawwir to be “considered too holy.” Things about him were supposed to be “just logical,” and so all the stories about Mbah Munawwir’s karomah that transcend the conceivable, that simply do not make sense (I. tidak masuk akal), were being hushed up.

For those telling the stories of Mbah Munawwir, the choice of epistemic or narrative register is thus in part strategic, governed by what they expect their conversation partner would receive favorably, or how they want to emplot themselves and others. But their being strategic does not make them inauthentic or disingenuous. Their multivocality simply indicates that NU’s ideological position with regard to modernity’s epistemology is not easily confined. This multivocality, as Katherine Ewing has argued, shows that hegemonic discursive formations like modernity do not encompass all aspects of human experience because subjects are not unitary but rather constituted by a web of discourses and relations of which they are a part (1997, 35). As modern subjects navigate clashing ideologies, their subjectivity and consciousness are irreducible to their investment in one such ideology or discourse. In their various relationships, and in the context of the immediacies of everyday life, narratives emerge that incorporate multiple emplotments with a certain degree of slippage in the narrator’s positioning. Through stories of the past, varied audiences with their competing ideologies can be addressed while avoiding being limited to a single subject position (Ewing 1997, 129), as each emplotment makes meaning and facilitates, to echo Spyer again, new ways out of, into, and across the life worlds where people find themselves.

The variable ideological positionings in NU thus attest to the diversity of viewpoints within the organization, showing that the relation of tradition and modernity is irreducible to the binary of compliance and resistance. They also show under what circumstances traditionalists may not feel safe to tell narratives that are irreducible to modernity’s ideologies or epistemologies and therefore slip into rationalist registers. But this variability also points to a more fundamental dynamic in the epistemology of my interlocutors at Krapyak. Like the author of RP 333 who made use of Ghazālī’s theological framework, my traditionalist interlocutors inhabit a third space in Bhabha’s sense that, more than a hybrid, creates an instability (1994, 56) that is creative and productive. Their threshold position between different epistemologies is another fundamental parallel between the Seh Mlaya as a prior text and the contemporary stories of Mbah Munawwir. Where the former destabilized Ghazālī’s theory and precepts in The Beginning of Guidance to open up the reader’s heart and soul for the realization of God, the narrators of Mbah Munawwir’s story offer multiple versions that appeal to different epistemological commitments. By offering incommensurable versions, they destabilize all epistemic registers, using the story as a living past to open the hearer to greater truth.

Between the Cracks of Knowledge

Moosa emphasized that Ghazālī’s situatedness at the threshold or dihlīz of different disciplines and epistemologies did not result in his taking on an intermediate position between conflicting attitudes. He straddled antinomies without resolving them (Moosa 2005, 29). Similarly, contemporary traditionalists at Krapyak also navigate and make use of incommensurable systems of knowledge when they remember their pesantren’s founder and his extraordinary love for the Qur’an. Ghazālī’s Beginning of Guidance, which we encountered in the same textbook as the Seh Mlaya, remains influential in the pesantren milieu, where Ghazālī is one of the most widely read authors on Sufism (Van Bruinessen 1990). Although my interlocutors did not explicitly draw on Ghazālī to conceptualize this multiplicity and incommensurability of epistemic registers to me, the currency of his works in traditionalist Java vindicate my use of his thought as a theoretical framework for thinking through the relation among the different epistemologies underlying these memories of Mbah Munawwir, as it is a framework my interlocutors would recognize.

For Ghazālī, knowledge is the point of departure for the cultivation of the pious subject. The first book of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, The Book of Knowledge (A. Kitāb al-ʿIlm), represents such a framework within which the remaining books of the Revival are supposed to be read (Ghazālī 2015, xxix). Here, Ghazālī distinguished what he calls the “knowledge of human action” (A. ʿilm al-muʿāmala) from “knowledge of the unveiling” (A. ʿilm al-mukāshafa).³⁷ The latter eludes discursive knowledge and could not be recorded in writing. He further subdivided the knowledge of human action into outward (A. ẓāhir) knowledge or the knowledge of the senses, and inward (A. bāṭin) knowledge or “knowledge of the functions of the heart” (2015, xlv). Whereas outward knowledge is concerned with acts of worship and custom, inward knowledge consists of intellectual reflection that is then applied to one’s own cultivation of piety and devotion.³⁸ Rather than ends in themselves, these sciences are just instruments (110). The goal of their pursuit is precisely that which cannot be named: The knowledge of human action is “merely a path that leads to unveiling” (xlv). While intellectual reflection may be particularly “noble” (247) compared to other kinds of knowledge of human action, it is still distinct from an experience of unveiling God’s secrets. These different types of knowledge of human action as classified by Ghazālī are all functionally equivalent to obedience in The Beginning of Guidance in the sense that their cultivation prepares in the pious the hermeneutic setting within which a fuller realization of the divine can be achieved—but neither obedience nor the different types of knowledge of human action are in themselves sufficient for such a realization.

There is a more detailed classification of the different human cognitive faculties in The Niche of Lights (A. Mishkāt al-Anwār), in which Ghazālī interprets the so-called Light Verse of the Qur’an (24:35). Without attempting to give justice to the complexity of text and its interpretations,³⁹ I want to focus on a passage in which Ghazālī likens the five similitudes in the Light Verse—the niche, the lamp, the glass, the tree, and the oil—to the five cognitive faculties of the human soul. These five cognitive faculties are ranked such that the lowest, the sensible spirit (A. al-rūḥ al-ḥassās), is present among all living beings, including even animals and infants, whereas the imaginal spirit (A. al-rūḥ al-khiyālī), the capacity to store and process information, can only be found among some kinds of animals and constitutes a step in the cognitive development of the child. The rational and the reflective spirit (A. al-rūḥ al-ʿaqlī and al-rūḥ al-fikrī) only emerge with increased maturity, if at all. The fifth and highest faculty, the holy prophetic spirit (A. al-rūḥ al-qudsī), is reserved for the prophets and some of the wali (Ghazālī 1998, 36–41). What is crucial, however, is that these five spirits are co-present among those who have achieved this highest cognitive level. Even if niche and glass belong to an inferior register than tree and oil, they are still needed for the lamp’s effectiveness as a vehicle of light. Yet none of these similitudes or cognitive faculties are themselves coextensive with God’s light. Even the highest, the oil, would be useless were it not lit by a flame. This flame itself is completely external to the workings of the lamp and the human cognitive faculties they represent.

The point of the preceding discussion of Ghazālī’s conceptualization of the different cognitive faculties and their relevance for the knowledge of God is to suggest that we can understand the divergent memories of Mbah Munawwir as employing different epistemic registers to describe something that is beyond epistemological reach. And yet these registers’ insufficiency to communicate that which lies beyond any epistemic register does not mean they are useless. The lamp in the niche is not God’s light, but it is nonetheless an effective vehicle of light. In the same way, the stories of Mbah Munawwir’s virtue, his life’s dedication to studying and teaching the Qur’an, fall far short of the truth of Mbah Munawwir’s virtue—and yet they inspire the same virtue in those who remember. Like the lamp that needs to have all its parts in place to shine, the different versions of the story all make their own indispensable contributions to gradually preparing in those who remember a hermeneutic setting to grasp that which lies beyond what any of these stories can tell. The different versions of Mbah Munawwir’s karomah, while seemingly incommensurable, work together in achieving this goal.

In book 36 of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, The Book of Love, Longing, Intimacy, and Contentment (A. Kitāb al-Maḥabba wa’l-Shawq wa’l-Uns wa’l-Riḍā), Ghazālī wrote that everything in the world, in all its multiplicity, is a witness and proof of God’s presence. But while this multiplicity is a blessing of God’s abundance, it may also confuse people, who may believe that difference points to multiple orders of ultimate existence. Instead of focusing on the superficial entities they perceive, those seeking to increase their knowledge of and love for God need to learn to see the oneness of God (A. tawḥīd) in the multiplicity of all the things that exist in God’s creation (Gramlich 1984, 679–81; see also Moosa 2005, 167–68). Things of the phenomenal world that can cause confusion also include the multiple human cognitive faculties Ghazālī described in his other works when they are thought of as providing a sole, privileged avenue to knowing God. Similarly, the knowledge and love of God and the Qur’an that a wali or scholar like Mbah Munawwir displayed during his lifetime not only transcend the possibilities of one particular epistemic register while privileging others, but transcend all of them.

The different epistemologies are thus not just in a relation of complementarity but also exhibit each other’s limitations, their inability to express ultimate truths. They are like different languages that all somehow fall short of conveying information perfectly. “Each language represents a different equation between manifestations and silences,” wrote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (cited in Becker 1995, 6; see also Ortega y Gasset 1957, 246–47). Such silences are normally invisible but become apparent in translation, when incommensurable silences need to be overcome. Silences constitute a challenge for the translator and render all demands for equivalence in translation impossible; but silences also have a unique potential. In his essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin suggests that translation is not primarily about the accurate transmission of a text’s positive content, which, for him, is “inessential” (1969, 69). Instead, the translator’s task is to make visible “pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished” (1969, 80). Rather than an insurmountable weakness, Benjamin saw the differences between languages as an opportunity to look beyond the content or information contained in an utterance, and to see in the cracks constituted by their difference an epistemic opening to “pure language,” a mode of understanding that no longer depends on discourse—an understanding that also resonates with the thought of some Sufis (Meyer 2019). Speaking with Ghazālī, the openings or cracks⁴⁰ between the different languages or epistemic registers are a vehicle for the transcendence of the epistemic that gives way to an ontological transformation through the realization of tawḥīd.

Conclusion

I began this chapter with a story of Mbah Munawwir’s eightieth haul, a yearly occasion to commemorate the founder of the pesantren, whose exemplary knowledge and love of God is considered worthy to be recalled and emulated. But in the kyai’s speech, the details of Mbah Munawwir’s life remained obscured behind an intertextual reference to al-Būṣīrī. The kyai lifted up a particular manifestation of God in the cosmos as significant, but he simultaneously marked it as not ultimately known for its own sake, but for the sake of something to which it points. Mbah Munawwir’s life as a scholar and wali of the Qur’an, just like al-Būṣīrī’s love for and devotion to the Prophet that cured his illness, are but expressions of the incomprehensible and incommunicable reality of God. The divine can only be known through those realities through which it has chosen to manifest itself, and the stories of wali are particularly suitable points of access for Muslims in some contexts. But narrating the life of Mbah Munawwir—in however much or little detail, with or without miracles or prophetic apparitions—is not an end in itself. The seeker ultimately has to recognize that the multiplicity of God’s wali, as well as the multiplicity of epistemologies in which they can be understood, are no more than vehicles for understanding if one comes to see the limitations these vehicles have. Only then one comes to search for the real between the narrative and epistemic cracks.

I have argued that narrative models, like the ones provided by the traditional stories about Islam Nusantara’s wali, are not stable in meaning and use even if they remain recognizable, and that these stories’ transformations indicate changing religious, political, and ideological contexts within which remembering occurs. Against the background of NU’s program of Islam Nusantara, the reference to the miracles of Sunan Kalijaga and the other wali sanga is no longer just a literary convention but also an ideological identity marker that needs to be dealt with carefully in a place like South Yogyakarta, one of the centers of Muhammadiyah modernism, especially when a foreign researcher is poking around. But even if Mbah Munawwir’s karomah has been appropriated into modernist, rationalist ideologies in some of these narratives, the opposite is also the case: Modernist discourse has been appropriated and made to fit into the self-understanding of NU’s traditionalism. There is no doubt that modernist ideologies have shaped traditionalism’s self-understanding and self-representation, and the conceptualizations of karomah as making sense and as a professional attitude certainly are, in part, strategic, directed at outsiders seen as representing one or another strand of modernism, whether they are from Muhammadiyah or Western secular academia.

While in part strategic, however, these rationalizations are not insincere; they are one of many ways to talk about Mbah Munawwir’s incomprehensible knowledge of and devotion to God and the Qur’an. Neither are these rationalizations hegemonic in the sense that they preclude other modes of understanding. They coexist, in their incommensurability, alongside understandings of karomah that are known from the wali of Islam Nusantara like Sunan Kalijaga: karomah as the fruit of obedience, or karomah as keajaiban, miracles, weird things that don’t make sense. No one can entirely mute the stories of Mbah Munawwir’s miracles, nor is there any desire to do so. These different ways of conceptualizing karomah are like different languages, incommensurable and irreducible to each other, but between their cracks becomes manifest the same truth that transcends all of them, Sunan Kalijaga’s truth of the most high, the ultimate. What some might consider a gradual erosion of traditional discourses by modernity is in fact one of traditionalism’s most quintessential characteristics, the tolerance for paradox and ambiguity, remaining intact. The self-understanding of Krapyak’s traditionalists and their interpretation of their own stories evince an epistemological openness in which traditionalism does not need to reject modernity because modernity is but one set of epistemologies that can be deployed strategically to communicate that which cannot be communicated.

Two

Modernity’s History

“they say we are not what we used to be,” said Fajar, an editor of Suara Muhammadiyah. I was sitting at the long table in the conference room of the headquarters of Muhammadiyah’s periodical, which, having been published without interruption since 1915, is Indonesia’s oldest existing news source. Interested in my research and happy to help, the editorial team had invited me to attend one of their meetings. We had spent the first half-hour or so discussing my research questions and sharing insights about them. Now it was time to turn to logistical matters and plan the periodical’s upcoming issues. In this context of debating ongoing projects and setting goals for the future, Fajar brought up that some people—not people from within the organization, he said, but outsiders—claimed that Muhammadiyah had changed a great deal since the organization’s beginnings and was no longer the way it had previously been. “But,” Fajar said, “this is not true.” And not only was it not true, but they could prove it because Suara Muhammadiyah had ceaselessly documented what Muhammadiyah had been like in the past. “We have to find these continuities in the old issues of Suara Muhammadiyah,” he said. “We need to read all of them.”

A few months later, I attended a meeting of a group of volunteers planning a Muhammadiyah Museum, a space showcasing and educating people about the organization’s profile and accomplishments over time. The time of my field research coincided with an active phase for the committee, which was working toward an opening of the museum in late 2020—a date that later had to be postponed to November 2022 because of COVID-19. That day during our meeting, we had talked about the fact that Muhammadiyah was all about keeping up with the times. “What is great about Muhammadiyah is change,” one volunteer said. But another one found this idea of constant change not quite so unproblematically great. He turned to me. “Do you think there is an essence in Muhammadiyah that is always the same?” he asked.

This and the following chapter seek to answer this question about the relation between unchanging essences and the spirit of renewal within Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously progressive and modernist organization that seeks to be oriented toward present and future, even as it remembers and values its own historical becoming. Ahmad Dahlan’s activism and the organization’s beginnings are considered somehow normative, even as it is clear that the contemporary Muhammadiyah looks very different from the organization of 1912. As the opening vignettes show, today’s activists are often acutely aware of the tensions between continuity and change in their organization’s trajectory. Looming in the background—and what Fajar referenced when he talked about accusations that they no longer were what they used to be—was a public discussion of Muhammadiyah’s early history, attested especially by the 2013 publication of a book with the provocative title Muhammadiyah Is NU! Authored by NU authority Mochammad Ali Shodiqin—perhaps one of those “outsiders” that Fajar mentioned—it caused a significant splash in the debates around Muhammadiyah identity politics. In this book, the author analyzed a fiqh document brought out in 1924 by the organization’s branch for publications. According to Shodiqin, both in terms of form—written in Javanese with the Arabic Pegon script—and content, the fiqh document was basically a traditionalist Shāfiʿī text promoting ritual practices like tahlil and qunut¹ normally associated with traditionalists, making it indistinguishable from comparable manuals published in the NU milieu (2013, 12). Although Shodiqin’s declared objective was to tear down the divisions between the two organizations and to point to their common origins (4–5), during my field research his book was most often mentioned to me by traditionalists who—sometimes with quite a bit of glee—cited it as evidence that contemporary Muhammadiyah members did not properly understand and had moved too far away from what their organization had originally been about.²

Muhammadiyah members will often respond to these charges by saying that all of this was true, that Ahmad Dahlan had indeed done things very differently from how they were doing them today, that after all they were not Dahlaniyah, imitating whatever their founder had done, but Muhammadiyah, following none other than the Prophet himself. Nonetheless, the accusation of such a complete lack of continuity sits just as uneasily with many activists, who are seeking to articulate in what way the current organization is still meaningfully part of Dahlan’s mission. These tensions, which other scholars have also recognized as inherent in self-consciously Islamic reformist movements (Brenner 2012; Hourani 1962, 161; Slama 2014, 127), will be the focus of the following two chapters, where I show that in reformist thought such tensions can be equally productive as in the thought of the traditionalists we encountered in the previous chapter.

In Islamic reformism, these tensions came into focus in the late nineteenth century, a time when a new understanding of transmission, or how the timeless truths of Islam could be known in history, became increasingly dominant. According to Azyumardi Azra, a historian of Islam in Southeast Asia, these truths were simultaneously a timeless present, which Azra called the zaman Islam, or time of Islam.³ Up until the eighteenth century, the actualization of zaman Islam was achieved by and made historically demonstrable through lineages, both intellectual lineages of learning (A. isnād, sanad) and Sufi lineages of initiation or bloodline (A. silsila),⁴ and as teachings transmitted through networks that bridged the historical past with the present. By 1800, however, the various parts of the Islamic world became increasingly dominated by European powers. Colonialism, as Jacques Derrida suggested, imposed a kind of “monolingualism” (1998) on its colonized subjects, globalizing a singular temporal sense of modernity accompanied by its Protestant missionaries and scholarly apparatuses. Despite the fact that all ideologies, including Western modernity with its so-called Protestant underpinnings, were never singular but plural, contested, and fragmented, the language of modernity appeared in the colonies with the promise of a uniquely privileged epistemic status. By “coming from the other” (1998, 68), the colonizer, it instituted a binary between a modern Western subject on the one hand, and a non-Western, colonized, and backward subject on the other (see also Fabian 2014). This conceptual hierarchy deeply affected Muslim thought and was most explicitly reproduced by modernist reform movements, which often targeted their criticism and reform efforts at traditionalist Muslims’ reliance on chains of transmission while relating these Muslims’ “blind” allegiance to the teachings of yore to intellectual stunting, backwardness, and civilizational decay. Because of this, Azra argues, Islam itself, including its own understanding of temporality and transmission, came to be defined in the terms of Western modernity: “The zaman Islam, while timeless and true, was also in European zaman, which imposed its own time” (2004, 150).

Of course, the matter turned out to be nowhere near this clear-cut, but rather confirmed that there is not just one but multiple modernities in Islam. European hegemonic understandings of basic concepts like progress or stagnation—never stable to begin with—were not simply adopted by colonized communities, but transformed by existing conceptual frameworks and appropriated to speak to local concerns, controversies, or rivalries (Ghazal 2010; Hussin 2016; Loimeier 2018; Zaman 2012). Identifying as “Western” or “modern” through the use of a particular conceptual vocabulary was a performance that could carry an authority of its own, even if the form packaged positions that may have had little to do with any recognizable understanding of Western modernity. Indeed, what was at stake was sometimes something very different. Teren Sevea, for example, has shown in relation to colonial Malaya that reform Islam became folded into competitions for power and influence that long pre-dated the modernist-traditionalist binary, where self-declared reformists appropriated Western concepts to condemn competing Muslim authorities as backward or heretical (2020, 23; see also Zaman 2018, 17). How self-consciously modernist subjects deal with temporality, and how they understand their engagement with it as specifically modernist, is not stable but situationally contingent.

Building on these works, I show how these dynamics play out in the understanding of temporal transmission undergirding many of the organization’s self-representations. I argue that the timeless truths of Islam that Azra calls “zaman Islam” play a crucial role, albeit not in a straightforward manner. This is characteristic of reform movements more broadly. According to Azra, around 1900 the traditional lineages for transmitting the timeless truths of zaman Islam came to be replaced among some Muslim groups by what he calls “‘reform isnād and silsila” (2004, 151). While Azra never defined these terms, his juxtaposition of “reform,” indicating change, with “isnād” or “silsila,” claiming continuity, points to a fundamental ambiguity in the reformism of the modernist movement. Conceptualizing Azra’s nomenclature through a Derridean theoretical framework, I propose that “reform isnād” can be a useful analytic concept for describing the specific temporal sense undergirding reformist thought. In this context, I use the terms “reform” and “reformist” as a shorthand despite their woeful lack of precision, not to suggest that there is no meaningful difference among different Islamic reforms, but rather to point to the centrality of renewal in different reformers’ self-understanding, sharing the notion of rupture with a corrupt or degenerate present to renew Islam in a specific context. The significance of rupture makes the very notions of lineages, transmission, or continuity problematic in reformist projects like Muhammadiyah’s modernism, even inimical to the very spirit of renewal the organization claims to have continuously promoted. On the other hand, the notion that the organization has continuously worked against these norms already assumes a continuity within Muhammadiyah’s own history. As we saw in the opening vignettes of this chapter where Muhammadiyah activists were wrestling with the question whether their organization had an unchanging essence or whether constant change was good, balancing these two seemingly contradictory impulses can be challenging. By focusing on characteristic discourses among the Muhammadiyah leadership engaging with continuity and change while exhibiting the wide ideological range of reformist discourses on which they draw, I decenter modernism as a coherent ideology. In Ken George’s words, modernism is better understood as a “set of local dilemmas rather than a set of globalized certainties” (2010, 30). By analyzing these dilemmas, I seek to speak to broader debates about how to conceptualize the temporal sense of Islamic reform movements in the contemporary period.

Genealogies Erased

My interest in the tensions between continuity and change in Muhammadiyah’s modernist ideology was originally kindled during a preliminary research visit in 2017, when a Muhammadiyah university professor explained to me that Ahmad Dahlan was a ninth-generation descendant of Muhammad Ainul Yakin, better known as Sunan Giri.⁵ One of the wali sanga, Sunan Giri was reportedly most invested in the purification of religion, but he understood that it was not going to be him but one of his descendants who would succeed in effectuating a purification of Islam in Java. Back then, I had never heard it claimed before that Ahmad Dahlan was a descendant of one of the wali sanga and was stunned that a Muhammadiyah member would express such a view in a completely matter-of-fact-way, especially given that, as discussed in the previous chapter, the historical status of the wali sanga is uncertain according to scholars and controversial among Javanese Muslims. The professor seemed to sense my surprise. “Yes,” he said with a smile, “it is true. But we don’t talk much about this genealogical link because we don’t really care about it.”

As I conducted more field research, I learned that Ahmad Dahlan’s descent from Sunan Giri (and sometimes, by implication, the Prophet Muhammad) was a generally accepted fact among wide segments of Muhammadiyah’s constituents and was even invoked in Ahmad Dahlan’s biographies and other media about his life. And yet the professor was right: These genealogical credentials were almost never mentioned in public discussions or informal conversations, except if I brought them up. And when I did, my interlocutors were almost always aware of this genealogy and invariably took my question as an opportunity to lecture me that Dahlan’s genealogy did not matter much for the organization. “Muhammadiyah is interested in knowledge, not in a famous person’s status,” many said, invoking the common narrative of Islamic reform, that Muhammadiyah’s mission had precisely been to put an end to this traditionalist overinvestment in things like genealogies. “For the traditionalists, it doesn’t even matter what this or that kyai did or what they fought for; they only care about the silsila,” I often heard.⁶

Muhammadiyah’s dismissal of the significance of genealogies—whether biological, intellectual, or spiritual—is commonly legible as a typical characteristic of modernist Islamic reform as it emerged in the late nineteenth century. Although reform had always been present in Islam and the novelty these new reform programs presented should therefore not be overstated (Brown 2015), the reformers of the late nineteenth century explicitly framed their initiatives in the globalized languages of modernity. In particular, they rejected any attachment to intellectual or spiritual continuities with scholars of the past as a shackle inhibiting progress. This rejection of history as a source of authority crystallized conceptually into the transformation of two foundational principles, originally technical terms from Islamic jurisprudence, into terms with highly variable meanings that served as ideological identity markers of traditionalist and revivalist orientations: taqlid and ijtihad. In classical Islamic jurisprudence, taqlid is a method of following juridical precedents, whereas ijtihad is the exertion of effort to extract rules from Revelation while following a process of reasoning established by legal theory (Hallaq 1997, 117). In modern times, some Muslim revivalists and Western scholars made the—now falsified⁷—claim that the gates of ijtihad were closed. The image of the closed gates of ijtihad became a rallying point for revivalist and modernist activists around the Muslim world. In Islamic Southeast Asia, the range of legitimate ijtihad was a central controversy between the movements of the kaum tua (the old generation, or traditionalists) and the kaum muda (the young generation, or reformists),⁸ and the organizations that came to be associated with them, including Muhammadiyah and NU.

Although there was no monolithic view of ijtihad among different reformist figures and orientations, a clear trajectory emerged in their new discourses. Whereas ijtihad had previously been a technical legal method and the exclusive province of a limited number of trained legal scholars, reformers promoted a new understanding of the term as something every educated Muslim could and, in fact, should do. This new understanding constituted a major epistemological shift. True knowledge, or Azra’s zaman Islam, was now thought of as being obscured by historical transmission and tradition and could only be recovered by Muslims’ intellectual engagement with scripture. Within this framework, ijtihad and the rejection of taqlid was often conceptualized as both modern and a simultaneous return to the path of the early Islamic community from the time before Islam had become corrupted. As the concept of ijtihad became increasingly broad in meaning to designate personal, innovative thought guided by reason,⁹ its opposite was no longer only taqlid with its original, narrow legal meaning. In this reconfigured terrain, the term came to take on the pejorative meaning of being thoughtless or gullible, taking for granted the truth and value of an opinion just on the basis of a person’s pedigree, their status as a kyai, their intellectual sanad, and of course their biological lineage.¹⁰ Likewise, although following the opinion of someone because of their prestigious bloodline is not considered taqlid in the technical legal sense, for modernists it nonetheless represents the opposite of the independent reasoning they demand from all believers.

In reformist thought, even in its premodern variants, adhering to the opinions of another person because of their status, including their status based on their bloodline, has often been associated with corruption. The South Asian revivalist Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762) and the Arabian Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb were among the first reformers who became well known for their denunciation of the belief that an imam could be infallible or that it would be obligatory to follow him.¹¹ Centuries later, the West Sumatran Muhammadiyah figure Hamka (d. 1981) argued similarly that corrupt religious leaders intentionally withheld knowledge from their followers to exploit their ignorance and uninformed loyalty for their own purposes (Hamka 2015, 2, 126–29). During my field research, I often heard echoes of these views when Muhammadiyah members talked about how not the brightest student but the kyai’s son, no matter how lazy or stupid, would be sent off for further studies and take over the pesantren one day; how traditionalists nonetheless believed everything the kyai say because of their prestigious family lineage; and that the kyai were all rich because they took material advantage of those who thought they depended on a kyai for their spiritual well-being.

At the same time, however, the rejection of a genealogy’s authority does not amount to a complete indifference toward it, because otherwise Ahmad Dahlan’s lineage would not need to be mentioned at all. When I asked my Muhammadiyah interlocutors why so many publications mentioned his line of descent if it was not important, I was told that it was just provided by way of information, as a fact with some historical and cultural value. But what kind of informational value does this fact have when it does not matter? To add to the seeming contradictions around Dahlan’s genealogy, prominent voices within Muhammadiyah have raised doubts about how historically accurate the stories about Sunan Giri actually are (Simuh 1995). Yet the historical veracity of Ahmad Dahlan’s ancestral chart was never seriously called into question in any conversation of which I was a part. It was accepted as a given, had become a fact of Muhammadiyah’s historical archive, and continued to be reinscribed whenever new works about his life were written.

Ahmad Dahlan’s genealogy makes manifest an ambiguity, whereby a legacy—like a lineage—is rejected even as it continues to be asserted as true. This wavering attitude regarding the significance of his lineage, and of the past more broadly, invites comparison with the work of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, one of the principal defenders of modernity in Western philosophy. Because the modern temporal sense is characterized by the desire to perform a break with the past to signal a commitment to the ever-changing present, modernity inevitably results in contradiction—both because any performance of breaking with the past needs to first produce a past to reject, and because any rejection of the past has to fall back on established forms of communication and reasoning to be communicable at all.¹²

In his work, Habermas takes to task a heterogeneous group of thinkers for giving up on the project of modernity by seeing in these aporias modernity’s own negation, proposing instead to find a “way out” of these aporias (1988, 189; 2019). Based on my encounter with the temporal imagination of different Muhammadiyah thinkers, I want to argue that this contradiction between continuity and change need not be understood as a problem demanding a rational or pragmatic solution. For my modernist interlocutors, these tensions can open up a space for articulating and actualizing the meaning of the timeless truths of Islam in history. In order to reconceptualize the tensions around Dahlan’s lineages as productive rather than contradictory, I borrow from the conceptual vocabulary of Jacques Derrida—one of the thinkers Habermas criticizes—to say that his genealogy is “under erasure.” Rather than understanding contradictions emerging in articulations of the past as a problem to be solved, Derrida emphasizes that there is no possibility of recalling the past in a simple and transparent manner because there is no original presence that can be recovered and reproduced. As Rosalind Morris suggested, his approach is especially useful for anthropologists studying memories with a complicated relation to an original event (Morris 2007, 361), where the relations among memory and articulation is not entirely straightforward. Here, memory becomes riddled with the kind of absence or alterity that Derrida calls erasure, a process whereby a word or sentence is written and then crossed out; then, one is able to point to both word and deletion to make a point. “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible,” Gayatri Spivak wrote in her preface to Derrida’s On Grammatology (1976, xiv). The crossed-out word then becomes a “trace,” the never quite erased tracks of the other in a sign.

Anthropologists have made ready use of the concepts of erasure and the trace in relation to memory, especially in the context of studying selective erasures of history written by the victors, or of traces as haunted silences in relation to histories of trauma (Dragojlovic 2018, 2021; Gordon 2008; Weller 2021; Yoneyama 1999). But here, Derrida’s erasure appears in a different register, one that is oriented toward the production of meaning rather than indexing oppression and disciplining. When Muhammadiyah members erase Dahlan’s genealogy, they gesture toward a fundamental insight of modernist Islam that is neither fully representable, nor even consciously represented, but becomes legible in and through negation. Traces of erasures are the precondition for understanding or meaning-making of any sort. For Derrida, no sign has meaning of its own. Signs are always inhabited by other signs, including that which they are not. In this case, the rejection of the significance of genealogy, which is constitutive of the organization’s identity, can only be significant if its significance “make[s] its necessity felt before letting itself be erased” (Derrida 1976, 61). The erasure of Dahlan’s prestigious genealogy is only meaningful if it is made clear that his is the kind of genealogy about which one could boast if one were the sort of person who cared to boast about such things. The fact that they decline to do so defines the organization through a performance of not caring, putting under erasure that which the organization is not.¹³

I suggest that Derrida’s concept of the erasure offers us a fruitful framework for building an analytic concept that complements Azyumardi Azra’s language of the reform isnād. Azra only hints at how this new temporality, the European zaman, interacted with Islamic understandings of transmission, noting how direct, in-person transmission increasingly came to be replaced through new print media (2004, 151), an insight corroborated by many other studies.¹⁴ Building on this work but taking it in a different direction, I want to probe more deeply how reform isnād engendered changes not merely in terms of their preferred media or functionality, but also introduced a new sense of transmission in time, how the interplay and tensions between continuity and change gave rise to a novel understanding of how the timeless truths of zaman Islam become manifest in the here and now.

Traces of Other Reforms

The ambivalence around Ahmad Dahlan’s descent from Sunan Giri is only one example of the contemporary tensions around the organization’s historical legacy. Another is connected to the well-known fact that Dahlan was influenced by others when he founded Muhammadiyah. He is said to have brought back books by al-Afghānī and ʿAbduh from his sojourn in the Middle East and to have held a subscription to Rashīd Riḍā’s magazine Al-Manār.¹⁵ These intellectual lineages are often a source of pride and self-identification for Muhammadiyah members. During one of my visits to the Suara Muhammadiyah headquarters, one staff member happily told me that Al-Manār had been the model for Dahlan when he established Muhammadiyah’s own magazine. At other times, however, people were more interested in emphasizing the ruptures and innovations that Suara Muhammadiyah represented—that within just seven years of being published for the first time, it transformed from a paper written in Javanese targeted at an audience of Javanese literati to a paper written in the more cosmopolitan Malay language and the Roman script;¹⁶ that they also made heavy use of the Dutch language to signal their participation in modern politics and bureaucratic processes; and that this changed again in the 1950s, when English became the language of the future. Just like Dahlan immediately innovated and transformed whatever he adopted from others, so has Muhammadiyah appropriated impulses from other reform movements of the twentieth century while adapting them to their own social and historical context. Every moment of transmission, in other words, has to be accompanied by innovation and its own transcendence to make manifest the timeless truths of Islam anew. In the remainder of this chapter, I locate Muhammadiyah ideologically by showing what these transmissions of other reforms were, and how they have been transcended through innovation and recontextualization. Then, in the following chapter, I address the related question of how Dahlan himself is transcended in characteristic discourses and practices in Muhammadiyah today.

Renewing Renewal

Consider the following beginning of a programmatic article titled “Muhammadiyah as a Movement of Enlightenment [I. gerakan pencerahan],” authored by General Chairperson Haedar Nashir and published in March 2020 in Suara Muhammadiyah: “Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan was born to become the enlightened one [I. sang pencerah].” The image of “light,” as will become apparent, is quite fundamental for Muhammadiyah’s understanding of reform. “On history’s stage,” Nashir continues, “he was born to become a renewer [I. pembaharu] who churned the consciousness of the umma at his time” (2020b). Not mentioned in this particular article, but clear to any reader familiar with Muhammadiyah’s historical self-understanding more broadly, is that Dahlan came at a particular moment of crisis, when Indonesian Muslims had been led astray by corrupt religious officials and colonial oppression, resulting in ignorance, superstition, and the utter inability to practice independent thought. “Indonesia, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a depressed country,” we read, for example, in the first sentence of a book published by Muhammadiyah on the occasion of the organization’s one-hundred-year anniversary in 2010. As a result of colonialism, the vast majority of Indonesia’s population suffered from “poverty . . . , ignorance [I. kebodohan], and backwardness” (Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah 2010, 2). It was in this situation that Dahlan began his work. Elaborating on the image of light, Nashir explains that the Prophet Muhammad brought light into darkness to illuminate all nations, and that Muhammadiyah was founded to do the same: “This is the message of Islam’s enlightenment [I. pencerahan], the model for Muhammadiyah’s mission as an Islamic movement” (2020b). In this account, an explicit parallel is drawn between the Prophet Muhammad’s enlightening message of Revelation on the one hand, and the enlightening message of renewal promoted by Ahmad Dahlan on the other. Ahmad Dahlan “became a presence through great ideas that brought enlightenment [I. mencerahkan] in the midst of the nation’s miserable fate under the yoke of colonialism” (Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah 2010, 3). Muhammadiyah’s understanding of enlightenment, according to Nashir, is based on a Qur’anic concept, which often connotes moral and religious improvement, as for instance in Sūrat al-Baqara 257: “God is the ally of those who believe: He brings them out of the depths of darkness and into the light [A. nūr].” Based on this verse, he defines enlightenment as “lead[ing] the human community out of a state of ignorance [A. jāhiliyya] without divine guidance to walk a straight path under the shelter of Allah’s guidance” (Nashir 2020b).

Nashir’s depiction of Muhammadiyah’s history as an extension of sacred history, and especially his language of the renewer bringing light in a state of ignorance, shares its conceptual language and temporal imagery with other Islamic reform movements of the twentieth century.¹⁷ Through an analysis of this rhetoric and its traces of global networks and prominent figures of Islamic reform, I situate Muhammadiyah within this broader landscape. To conceptualize these global networks in relation to reform isnād, I turn to Teren Sevea’s (2009) study of twentieth-century trends in Islamic reformism and Islamism in South and Southeast Asia, which offers a useful way for understanding such processes in relation to communities that are skeptical of imitation or taqlid. Debunking core-periphery understandings of transmission in Islamic reform movements as a unidirectional process from Middle Eastern centers like Cairo and Mecca to South and Southeast Asia through the dissemination of Al-Manār and other print media, Sevea argues that by its very self-understanding, the reformism that was shared among diverse figures was characterized by “dynamic, multidirectional connections” (2009, 152) among different regions. These reformers self-consciously held the view that the realization of true Islam is not contingent on the faithful adherence to an ideal disseminated by an authoritative center, but rather constitutes a “transcendental ideal that could be revived in various local contexts” (2009, 154–55). The project of reviving true Islam in different historical situations entailed a recentering of the umma from the traditional centers to local groups that realized an authentic Islamic community in a modern, continually changing world.

Specifically, Sevea focuses on connections between the Indo-Pakistani Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (d. 1979) and the Indonesian Mohammad Natsir (d. 1993). Haedar Nashir’s language of the renewer bringing enlightenment in a state of ignorance, albeit not equivalent in content or meaning, is broadly located within this same lineage and points to similar multidirectional connections within which the thought of older figures is recontextualized and transcended to revive true Islam in the new context.

Mawdūdī, a journalist, theologian, and major player in the foundation of the Pakistani state, may seem like an odd link in Muhammadiyah’s reform isnād, given that he is often associated with an Islamist or fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, whereas Muhammadiyah—at least in its current leadership—is invested in embodying a moderate religious vision. But Mawdūdī’s thought was influential among a broad range of Muslim orientations, including many that made use of aspects of his legacy to articulate very different political views.¹⁸ Among his books is a short volume originally published in 1940, A Short History of the Revivalist Movement in Islam, which propounds an understanding of reform that clearly resonates with Nashir’s writing discussed above. In this book, Mawdūdī represents the history of Islam as an ongoing conflict between Islam and un-Islam. Islam, for him, is a comprehensive social and political system covering all aspects of human life that is realized in an Islamic civilization, the ultimate aim of all the Prophets of Islam (Maududi 1998, 23–25). The Prophet Muhammad completed this task, but, soon after, “ignorance [A. jāhiliyya] began eating into the body of the community life like cancer” (1998, 27). Ignorance was often working in the guise of Islam by professing belief in God and scripture, thus gaining trust and rising to power in Islamic politics and institutions. Mawdūdī saw the evidence of ignorance in his homeland, where the centuries-long incorporation of local customs had led to the corruption of Islam and the decline of Muslim power (Nasr 2008, 102). The fight against ignorance, according to Mawdūdī, was the task of the renewer (A. mujddid), as “such persons as will rise in the face of ‘Ignorance’ and endeavour to purge Islam of all kinds of impurities and enforce its system in the world in its original form and spirit” (1998, 34).

In using the language of ignorance or jāhiliyya and the renewer, Mawdūdī—and later Nashir—drew on an old discursive tradition in Islam. Jāhiliyya is an originally Qur’anic term¹⁹ that usually refers to the time of idolatry and polytheism in Arabia before the Prophet Muhammad, the time when people were ignorant (A. jāhil) of God’s word. At a more basic level, jāhiliyya is a condition of moral degeneration that Islam has come to eradicate. In this sense, it is a derogatory rather than just descriptive term as it inscribes not just temporal, but also moral difference: As the opposite of everything Islamic, it may be a historical period, but it can also be a social condition or state of mind that contravenes Qur’anic teachings (Ewing 2026).

Mawdūdī’s concept of the renewer or mujaddid also makes use of and reappropriates a long-established concept in Islamic theological discourse. The concept of the renewer is based on a Hadith transmitted by Abū Dāwūd, according to which “Allah will raise for this community at the end of every hundred years the one who will renovate [A. yujaddid] its religion for it.”²⁰ Albeit an old concept, in the discourse of figures like Mawdūdī the renewer became folded into the narrative of anti-taqlid as a means to overcome stagnation and backwardness.²¹ Islamization, within this framework, is the same as modernization, a modernization that looks for a blueprint in Islamic history rather than the contemporary West. 22 In Mawdūdī’s language, the renewer is a key figure in the sacred history of Islam, which extends from scriptural times to the present. Not unlike a prophet,²³ a renewer has the “power to think independently of the contemporary and centuries-old social and other prejudices, courage to fight against the evils of the time” and “an unusual competency to undertake ijtihad and the work of reconstruction” (1998, 36). Endowed with these qualities, prophet and renewer also undertake the same kind of work: to cleanse Islam of all un-Islamic elements to turn it into its pure, original form.

In their deployment and similar interpretation of these classical Islamic concepts, Mawdūdī’s and Nashir’s accounts are undergirded by the same temporal sense. Despite the fact that jāhiliyya as a state was ended by the Prophet Muhammad through the revelation of God’s word, ignorance may always return, especially in the context of social and religious corruption and stagnation. Mawdūdī called for a renewer to cleanse Muslim cultures of corrupting influences. In Nashir’s article, Ahmad Dahlan was such a renewer who brought light to his fellow Muslims in the Dutch East Indies by leading them out of the state of ignorance prevalent at the time, reactivating the original prophetic movement from darkness and ignorance to light.

As we recall, Sevea characterized reformism as a constant revival of a “transcendental ideal” in specific contexts by way of dynamic, multidirectional connections. Bringing this framework into conversation with Mawdūdī’s and Nashir’s understanding of the renewer bringing light in moments of ignorance allows us to articulate more concretely what a reform isnād entails. The thought of other reformers cannot be present in the form of a direct line of transmission, like an isnād or silsila. Zaman Islam is not contingent on unbroken chains of transmission with a putative center of religious authority; in fact, true Islam is even potentially incompatible with such structures of authority and power because jāhiliyya can only be kept at bay through constant renewal. These earlier renewers are, however, visible as a trace, in the sense that Nashir’s language situates Muhammadiyah into a lineage of other reforms that likewise transcended old traditions through renewal.

Because this erasure reactivates the timeless truths of Islam in the here and now, it becomes a metaphysical movement, the transcendence of all that is contingent on time and space. The trace of other reforms can only point toward, but is irreducible to, that transcendent truth. While this metaphysical dimension of the trace goes beyond Derrida’s concept of the term, it resonates with its understanding by Emmanuel Levinas (2006, 38–44), from whom Derrida adopted the term and the concept of the trace (Derrida 1976, 70). Levinas differentiated between two different kinds of absences. The first is a momentary absence of something that can be expected to return. Such a momentary absence does not leave a trace. Actual traces can only be left by a metaphysical Other, pointing to something that lies completely beyond this world and conventional ways of understanding.²⁴ This metaphysical Other is utterly different from the world, irreducible to our ontological categories, and exterior to history—but it becomes manifest as a trace whenever a renewer reforms Islam, thus extending sacred history into the present. These reforms are normative in the sense that they constitute an example of how renewal can be accomplished. But they cannot be normative in the sense of an example to be followed directly. Renewal has to be constantly renewed. Only as a trace can these prior reforms point toward zaman Islam, the timeless truth of revelation that became history with the Qur’an and the Sunna, or become what Levinas called “the very pass to a past more distant than all past and all future . . . , toward the past of the Other where eternity is designed, absolute past that reunites all times” (2006, 43). Present as a direct source of influence or authority, these previous reforms would inhibit the emergence of the true Islam recovered by an umma that is centered in itself. But their traces, the crossed-out but nonetheless visible lineages of Azra’s reform isnād, point to the real Islam that both they and Indonesian modernists revived in their respective situations.

A Refracted Network of Change

Unlike traditional isnād, which are depicted visually as a single, unidirectional chain, the connections among reformists were, in Sevea’s words, dynamic and multidirectional (Sevea 2009, 159), pointing to a complex network of intersecting chains rather than a single succession of links. This refracted network is held together not by a shared ideological commitment, but—as we saw in the case of Mawdūdī and Nashir—by the shared mandate of renewal, whatever this renewal may mean in practice. Attuned to a shared conceptual vocabulary and the mandate of renewal but aware of their differing contexts, reformers activated these intricate connections as they articulated their own understanding of reform. Muhammadiyah’s connections in this complex network encompass a broad range of ideological perspectives. The specifics of the ideological perspectives may be erased and transcended, but, in their absent presence, they still constitute the broad ideological scope of Muhammadiyah today.

One figure in this broad isnād network, perhaps the person who has come to be best known for understanding ignorance as endemic in contemporary societies, was the Egyptian Islamist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood Sayyid Quṭb, executed in 1966. Quṭb’s understanding of jāhiliyya was informed by Mawdūdī’s, but it was also fundamentally shaped by the political struggles of which he was a part (Khatab 2006, 59). Quṭb associated jāhiliyya with materialism and hence with the influences of the West in colonial and postcolonial structures of domination. But jāhiliyya was not limited to the West. Even those who considered themselves Muslims could be agents of jāhiliyya if they had become corrupted.

Most broadly, Quṭb conceptualized jāhiliyya as the binary opposite of Islam. This binary was absolute for him, such that one could only fall on one side or the other, as he bluntly put it in his exegesis of Q5:50: “It is either God’s law or man-made law, based on inadequate knowledge and vain desire. There can be no meeting ground between the two” (Quṭb 2023, 112). Quṭb related jāhiliyya directly to the question of a community’s legal basis: In addition to being the opposite of Islam, jāhiliyya is also the antithesis of sovereignty (A. ḥākimiyya), the rule by Islamic law (Khatab 2006, 5). As a result, the term received an especially sharp political contour in his work. His own Egyptian government was firmly located on the side of jāhiliyya and therefore needed to be replaced. More than a moral category, jāhiliyya in Quṭb’s framework is also a call to action, a plan to initiate reform for the establishment of an Islamic social and political order, a process that, as Quṭb was well aware, would require the sacrifice of many Muslim activists, himself included. In this regard, he likens his own reform project to the creation of the first Islamic community by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions (Soage 2009), thereby placing it in the trajectory of sacred history akin to the way we saw in Mawdūdī and Nashir.

The thought of both Mawdūdī and Quṭb was transmitted to Southeast Asia through print media, one of the preferred communication platforms of reform isnād (Azra 2004, 151). Their work found a receptive audience in Indonesia, where twelve translations of Quṭb’s and ten of Mawdūdī’s books were published from 1982 to 1986 (Hassan 2003, 444). The Indonesian who was most instrumental in the introduction of Mawdūdī’s and Quṭb’s reform program to the local Muslim community was Mohammad Natsir.

Whereas Mawdūdī and Quṭb are well-known figures in the field that require no further introduction, Natsir is relatively obscure by comparison.²⁵ Born in West Sumatra in 1908, he joined the nascent Islamic nationalist movement as a youth and later became one of its most influential proponents. He became president of Masyumi, an Islamic political organization founded in 1943 during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia that turned into a political party after Indonesian independence. As a proponent of an Islamic government and disappointed by the Indonesian constitution, he emerged as the most prominent voice of Islamist opposition in Indonesia and resisted Sukarno’s rule until the latter prohibited Masyumi in 1960. After this expulsion from party politics, Natsir established the Dewan Da’wah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII), a Council for Islamic Mission inspired by and vaguely modeled after the Muslim Brotherhood. Its goals were promoting Islam through political opposition to the government, campaigns against Christian missionary efforts, and the transmission of reformist thought elsewhere in the Islamic world, especially the Middle East (Van Bruinessen 2002, 123). To this end, DDII facilitated the translation of works by figures including Mawdūdī and Quṭb. Natsir’s own publications—albeit complex and nuanced in their reception of these other reform figures, shifting over the course of his career, and also receptive to other sources of influence²⁶—echo some of their ideas. They include the central impulse that Islam was an all-encompassing system of law and needed to be implemented as such to facilitate the Muslim community’s flourishing.²⁷ Although he did not employ the vocabulary of jāhiliyya, Natsir understood the Indonesian revolution as an expression of Islam’s revolutionary spirit against all forms of injustice (Natsir 2016, 11–13), thereby situating his political struggle in a broader sacred history.

Natsir’s central concern was the relation between Islamic religious ideals and the Indonesian nation-state. With the crackdown on Masyumi and the increasingly hostile relationship between Masyumi and the Sukarno government, Natsir, like Mawdūdī and Quṭb, found resonance with the idea of Muslims living within a jāhiliyya as an antagonistic political environment (Laffan 2003, 407). However, he never advocated for a break with the current political order like Quṭb, or rejected democracy like Mawdūdī. Instead, throughout his entire career he professed the ideal of a somewhat vaguely defined “Islamic democracy” that would reconcile the caliphate as the political system of the first Muslim community with a modern parliament and multiple parties in order to realize universal Islamic ideals within a democratic framework (Natsir 1950; see also Kahin 2012, 173). While openly admiring Quṭb and Mawdūdī, he understood that their political programs were not a good fit for a renewal of Islam in Indonesia.²⁸

Natsir’s commitment to democracy also entailed a shift in his understanding of renewal. His work no longer featured the renewer as an individual agent recovering truths that could be found in the earliest history of Islam, and only there. He understood renewal as more of a communal process of all Muslims participating in ijtihad and drawing on a variety of sources, including Western ones (Mahendra 1996, 66–68). This process, as he argued in his “Islam and Independent Reason” (I. Islam dan Akal Merdeka), entailed a differentiation between things that belonged to the realm of religion (A. dīn) and those that pertained to the world (A. dunyā), and to leave the former intact while using one’s reason to create Islamic societies that are well adapted to their time and context (Natsir 1988a, 32). He was aware of and embraced the fact that such a democratization of ijtihad would result in difference and disagreement (Rais 2004, 26), an understanding that, as we will see, continues to play a significant role in Muhammadiyah today.

Natsir was never a Muhammadiyah member, but he expressed deep appreciation for the organization, especially in his early years. During his tenure as Masyumi’s chairman, Muhammadiyah and other modernist organizations constituted the basis of support for Natsir.²⁹ After the forced disbanding of Masyumi in 1960, however, Muhammadiyah disavowed party politics and shifted its central focus to the question of how to align religion and the political order and how to reimagine the umma from the vantage point of a depoliticized organization and within the existing Indonesian state (Feener 2007a, 142). Meanwhile, Natsir, through his foundation of DDII, sought to provide a more boldly political alternative for modernist Muslims (Hefner 2000, 106–7). Their fundamentally different political strategies caused Muhammadiyah and Natsir to drift apart. And yet, his initiatives significantly influenced Islamic political thought in Muhammadiyah throughout the following decades, both through his dissemination of intellectual trends from the wider Islamic world, and because of his own work.

Natsir is an especially interesting node in this network of reform isnād, because his example underscores the tensions between continuity and change in the transcendence of prior reforms. Admiring and disseminating the work of Quṭb and Mawdūdī in Indonesia, even lifting them up as the contemporary thinkers who had influenced him the most (Hassan 2003, 443–44), he nonetheless articulated political visions that squarely broke with their views because the fundamental truths that Quṭb and Mawdūdī endorsed could only be realized anew by breaking with them. Through him as a link in this reform isnād, the influence of prior reforms became further refracted in Indonesia, inspiring or anticipating new trends that continued to be relevant in Muhammadiyah over the following decades.

One Muhammadiyah figure who placed himself explicitly among Natsir’s intellectual heirs was Amien Rais, who was elected Muhammadiyah’s general chairperson in 1995 but stepped down in 1998 to pursue political office.³⁰ In his youth, Rais participated in campus programs sponsored by DDII, where the Muslim Brotherhood was upheld as inspiration and model and where the translated works of authors including Mawdūdī and Quṭb were disseminated. Yet, just as Natsir did not fully embrace their specific agendas, Quṭb’s more radical ideas likewise never quite caught on in these circles (Van Bruinessen 2002, 125). The study groups nonetheless sensitized students to the political mandate of Islam and encouraged them to partake in political activism. Later in his life, Rais often acknowledged Natsir’s influence on him, calling himself at times a “Natsir-ist” (Platzdasch 2009, 65) and reminiscing about their connections in a short memoir titled Studying under M. Natsir (I. Berguru kepada M. Natsir) (Rais 2004, 21–30). During the last years of the New Order, Rais emerged as a figure of Islamic opposition to Soeharto’s New Order regime, much as Natsir had been under Sukarno’s Guided Democracy, and played a fundamental role in Soeharto’s resignation.³¹

The trajectory of Rais’s religious and political thought and activism makes him another complex figure in Muhammadiyah’s reform isnād. Coining the concept of “social tawḥīd” (I. tauhid sosial), he called for social activism rooted in and motivated by the belief in the one God (Rais 1998; see also Rais 1995, ix–x; Latief 2017, 39). His notion that “the Quran must be treated as a reference for human beings in developing their day to day life, in accordance with the development of time” (Künkler and Stepan 2013) indicates his intellectual kinship with the other figures in this network for whom Islam was also an all-encompassing system for modern societies. Rais explicitly understood his concept of tauhid sosial to be an extension of both Mawdūdī’s and Natsir’s political thought (Rais 1998, 86–87; see also Hassan 2003, 445). He acknowledged that their political systems were based on the same premise, and he linked his proposed program of giving charity (A. zakāt) to Quṭb’s views of social justice (Kailani and Slama 2020, 75). At the same time, he was aware that his own program was no mere copy, that “the methods of the struggle always have to be adapted to its context” (Rais 1998, 87). In his youth, likely due to influences by Mawdūdī and others,³² he still envisioned a realization of this mandate through an Islamic state. This changed later, due in part to his disappointment with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which he considered too rigid to adapt to changing times (Abbas 2021, 144). He reconfigured his reform project as part of a democratic framework, a process that culminated in his own involvement in party politics and presidential campaign in 2004.

In spite of Rais’s avowed embrace of democracy, the trajectory of his political thought and actions also reveals illiberal currents within the network of his reform isnād. Like Natsir (1988b), Rais has seen Islam to be in competition with Christianity, calling for a “jihad” against Moluccan Christians in the 1990s (Sidel 2006, 183) and inflaming public outrage against a Chinese Christian political candidate and facilitating his conviction of blasphemy.³³ In the presidential elections of 2014 and 2019, he supported Prabowo Subianto, who at the time allied with Islamists and ran a campaign of demagoguery against an alleged Jewish-Christian conspiracy (Menchik 2019, 419). Of the prominent spokespersons within the organization, Amien Rais is usually considered to represent the more conservative wing; for many people outside of the organization, he represents the Islamist tendencies in Muhammadiyah.

While we have to take account of such traces of Islamist reforms when we locate Muhammadiyah ideologically, Amien Rais’s own example also demonstrates just how refracted reform networks are, cutting across and exceeding familiar understandings of what counts as Islamist, conservative, moderate, or liberal and establishing multidimensional links among figures associated with such orientations. This is because Rais was also an important transmitter of a very different kind of reform isnād, one normally associated with liberal Islam. His reorientation from the idea of an Islamic state to a democratic ideal, while already exemplified by Natsir, was by his own account the result of his formation as a PhD student at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of Leonard Binder and the prominent Muslim scholar Fazlur Rahman, whose mentorship made him come to the conclusion that an Islamic state was contradictory in theory and ill-suited to tackle contemporary problems in practice (Abbas 2021, 144).

Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), one of the most influential scholars of Islamic Studies of the twentieth century, has become associated with progressive or liberal Islam and is thus located opposite Mawdūdī and Quṭb on the ideological spectrum of contemporary Islamic thought as it is conventionally understood. In Amien Rais’s ideological trajectory, however, the line between these orientations becomes completely blurred.³⁴ This ideological indistinctness is made possible by the deeper understanding all reformist figures share, that Islam is an all-encompassing system that can and should be applied to contemporary circumstances through renewal and reform to safeguard the well-being of the umma. Take, for instance, Rahman’s programmatic book Islam, in which he laid out his understanding of Islamic reform. Looking back into history, his depiction of figures he understood to have been exemplary in their reform initiatives closely resembles the mujaddid in the work of figures like Mawdūdī, although Rahman did not employ the same terminology. Like many other reformist thinkers invested in renewal, he singled out the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) as instigating a first major “reform” (Rahman 1979, 109) in the history of Islam. Ibn Taymiyya, according to Rahman, was exemplary in his promotion of a program that restated Islamic law and value in his time (111) and that moreover instigated a succession of further reforms up until the present (114–15). Sacred history continues to unfold whenever reformers fight for “a general orthodox revival” (196) vis-à-vis political corruption and moral degeneration. His list of reformers overlaps to a large extent with Mawdūdī’s, and, like the latter, Rahman understands the contemporary moment to be in dire need of reform due to widespread “ignorance and superstition” (Rahman 1981, 300). At the same time, Rahman squarely contradicted Mawdūdī’s view that Islam was incompatible with a modern Western democracy. While he agreed that the leaders of the government had to perform ijtihad to arrive at rulings appropriate for the contemporary moment, Rahman also suggested that their rulings should be subjected to the popular vote (293).

Rahman’s liberal program became another important element in Muhammadiyah’s reform network. The organization’s reception of these liberal values has become associated especially with another one of Fazlur Raman’s Indonesian doctoral students. This was Syafii Maarif (d. 2022), who became Amien Rais’s successor as Muhammadiyah’s general chairperson when the latter stepped down to pursue political office in 1998.35 Maarif’s intellectual biography, just like Rais’s, also reflects the porous boundaries between the so-called liberal and Islamist reformist orientations. As he acknowledged in his autobiography, in his youth, Maarif was a follower of Mawdūdī’s thought, including his call for an Islamic state. In the words of the Muhammadiyah intellectual and scholar Najib Burhani, “It was Fazlur Rahman who guided Syafii Maarif’s conversion from a fundamentalist Muslim to a ‘liberal’ one” (2013b, 33). Maarif drew on the characteristic reformist premise shared among Rahman and many others that the Qur’an as a comprehensive source of ethics and normative blueprint for social coexistence needed to be activated to mitigate any contemporary crisis (Rahman 1980). Diagnosing such a crisis in his contemporary Indonesia, Maarif found that political and economic problems could only be resolved on the basis of this Qur’anic morality that would drive out the “disease of ignorance” (Maarif 2018, 64) and that would restore a sense of humanity and responsibility (see also Maarif 2005b; Burhani 2013b, 38). In this regard, Maarif’s vision was not fundamentally different from Sayyid Quṭb’s sociopolitical critique. But whereas Quṭb used the term jāhiliyya to mark his opponents as un-Islamic, Maarif was careful to use less divisive language to show that the Indonesian government may have erred but were no enemy, that its officials were simply fellow Muslims in need of correction and guidance (Burhani 2013b, 44). During his tenure as general chairperson, from 1998 to 2005, Maarif pursued a self-consciously liberal agenda, which earned him the widely held reputation as being one of the most progressive voices in Muhammadiyah. His tenure is remembered for its initiatives for interfaith relations, for improving the status of women in the organization, and for its more accommodating stance toward cultural forms of religious expression.³⁶

Maarif and Rais, with their very similar story of participating in different strands of this multidimensional reform network, represent a spectrum of ideological views prevalent in the contemporary Muhammadiyah. The two of them have mentored and influenced almost all figures who have had authority in the organization over the last decades. Albeit different in the specifics of their sociopolitical agendas, they have firmly established Muhammadiyah’s self-understanding as a promoter and even buttress of the Indonesian nation and democratic order. In their perception, the Indonesian nation and Islamic reform are intertwined as results of Muhammadiyah’s embrace of and commitment to renewal. Independent Indonesia is freed from the yoke of colonialism that constituted the background of the jāhiliyya that Ahmad Dahlan encountered and overcame by enlightening his umma and the Indonesian nation. This struggle for renewal is ongoing in the contemporary organization. But unlike Quṭb and Mawdūdī, and even to a lesser extent Natsir, mainstream Muhammadiyah discourse no longer understands this struggle as an adversity with the government, but rather as a partnership where the government can be criticized from a place of deep affection and stewardship, conceptualized as fighting falsehood (A. kidhb) or promoting common kindness (A. māʿūn) to restore moral sensitivity (Burhani 2013b, 44).

Timeless Truths in Temporal Disagreements

We began this chapter with Muhammadiyah’s emphatic lack of interest in genealogies, conceptualizing this performance of disinterest as a strategy for articulating insights into the possibility of making manifest timeless truths in history and for understanding the significance of earlier reform movements—be they Islamist, liberal, or any other sort—in Muhammadiyah today. Most spokespersons would dispute that the organization is, institutionally or ideologically, the product of a particular thinker’s program. Through a variety of strategies, some “conservative” and some “liberal,” contemporary followers of Muhammadiyah must actualize zaman Islam, to which these traces point, in ever-new contexts. This context, for today’s organization, is the Indonesian democracy, which its spokespersons seek to renew through processes of guidance and participation. Muhammadiyah’s self-declared commitment to democracy goes even deeper, however. We saw above that Natsir, already invested in an “Islamic democracy,” no longer understood the performance of ijtihad as the prerogative of a single renewer. This insight is central for the organization’s self-understanding today. Renewal is a communal endeavor. Ahmad Dahlan may have been their first renewer, but millions of others have followed since.

The history of Muhammadiyah as it is told today is therefore also the history of a democratization of reform. For example, Suara Muhammadiyah has published a new column since 2017 titled “Footsteps of the Organization” (I. Jejak Persyarikatan), managed by a Muhammadiyah member and academic historian Muhammad Yuanda Zara, a faculty member at Yogyakarta State University. He told me that he had been approached by the journal’s editors because they felt that their coverage of the organization’s history was often limited to a handful of familiar accounts about Ahmad Dahlan and other famous figures. As a historian, he could do research and tell new stories, such as one about a 1935 soccer tournament fundraiser in which a Muhammadiyah soccer team played against others, including an NU team (Yuanda Zara 2020), or how the early Muhammadiyah activists went around on bicycles to conduct their outreach activities more quickly and efficiently (Yuanda Zara 2021). He shared with me that he was currently interested in Muhammadiyah’s modern innovations at their general congresses in the 1920s and 1930s, like having marching bands. In this column it was important to him, he explained, not to focus too much on the well-known figures but to shed light on people’s everyday experiences, reflecting that Muhammadiyah lives primarily from its normal constituents who have continued to enlighten others, in marching bands, on bicycles, and on soccer teams.

When renewal is a communal project, disagreement on how to implement the timeless truths of Revelation becomes inevitable. This is especially the case in an organization like Muhammadiyah with its diversity of ideological orientations resulting from its broad network of transmission made up of numerous refracted reform isnād. Muhammad Natsir was already aware that there was no democracy without disagreement, exhorting his students not to think of those who disagreed with them as being lesser Muslims or incapable of performing ijtihad. “If even dry grass can still be beneficial, how much more so are your friends who have a different opinion,” he reportedly told them (Rais 2004, 26–27). More than just tolerating disagreement, Natsir—here in Amien Rais’s memory—celebrated it as good and useful. This same aspiration or ideal, where disagreement is not a bug but the feature, was also prevalent in many of my conversations with Muhammadiyah members. Their appreciation of debate and disagreement takes us back to a thinker who appeared earlier in this chapter: Jürgen Habermas. Although we saw that his conception of an impasse in modernist temporal understandings seems like a poor fit in relation to modernist understandings of reform isnād, other aspects of Habermas’s quintessentially modern thought do have echoes in the organizational self-understanding of many Muhammadiyah modernists. In this final part of this chapter, I therefore return to Habermas’s work, and specifically his theory of communicative action, to discuss how, in both everyday discourse and formal communications, disagreement is conceptualized as a virtue that results from the democratic spirit of ijtihad.

If being progressive has no positive content but only provides a conceptual framework of the relation between timelessness and history, among the ways for people in the organization to concretize and determine such positive content is a medium that Habermas considers to be key in overcoming the aporias he detects in other philosophers’ thought: free discourse and debate. Through their speaking and acting with each other, subjects constitute an intersubjectively shared world within which the validity of certain assertions or the legitimacy of norms is justified when someone is able, when criticized or questioned, to point to appropriate evidence that makes their assertion congruent with the expectations of this shared world. To establish normatively valid claims that can be accepted by all, it is necessary that the discursive situation is understood to approximate as closely as possible an ideal speech situation (Habermas 1983, 76–81) governed by rules. These include, among others, that everybody is allowed to participate, that any issue can be brought up, and that there must not be any coercion.³⁷

This is not to say that the speech situation in Muhammadiyah—or anywhere else, for that matter—is in fact free of coercion. Coercion comes in many forms, and Habermas, too, acknowledged that, in the real world, an ideal speech situation is counterfactual. Yet for agreed-upon norms to be acceptable as valid within a community, it is nonetheless crucial that the rules governing this speech situation as fair and free of compulsion are presupposed. And indeed, the speech situation in Muhammadiyah is generally accepted as approximating the ideal Habermas described. Muhammadiyah members often emphasized to me that the culture of debate in their organization was egalitarian and free, especially in comparison to NU, where people allegedly just did what their kyai told them to do. Muhammadiyah members did not just follow the leader. There would be discussions and challenges. In the weeks leading up to the 2019 presidential election, I talked to a Muhammadiyah member on a local campaign team for Prabowo Subianto. “It will be hard to win,” he predicted, “because all of NU will just do as their kyai say and vote for Jokowi.” When I asked whether he thought that the votes of Muhammadiyah members could tip the scales in the other direction, he said no. “That’s the problem with Muhammadiyah,” he half-joked. “People form their own opinions and do what they want, not what their leaders tell them to do.” Irrespective of whether this is true—and irrespective of whether the 2019 election provided the best evidence in support of this idea³⁸—it is crucial that this is widely understood to be the case. It is also a precondition for debates to become a medium that actualizes zaman Islam in the here and now.

Debates among people with different opinions are an intrinsic part of the organization’s culture. Public events in Muhammadiyah often take the form of seminars, where one or several speakers give a presentation that is followed by a long discussion with challenges, counterpoints, and critical questions. What does it mean to be innovative today? Is Muhammadiyah ready for the digital era? What are the most pressing social concerns the organization should address? And how can it best reach its constituents? The virtue of discussion is already cultivated in children. A teacher at Madrasah Mu’allimin Muhammadiyah, a middle and high school for boys and the organization’s oldest and most prestigious boarding school in Yogyakarta,³⁹ told me that Syafii Maarif would come to the school to lead discussions with the students and that he would encourage them to speak their minds and to disagree with him. He marveled at the fact that Syafii Maarif, one of the most respected and senior figures of the organization, former general chairperson with a PhD from the University of Chicago, treated these children as equal discussion partners. “Syafii Maarif just said their arguments had to be good,” the teacher added. “And if their arguments were good, he would accept them.” Of course, acceptance must not entail a reification of any argument as truth. Whatever broad consensus emerges through disagreement and debate, it is only temporary and situationally contingent, subject to revision and new debates at any moment. The present is put under erasure as much as the past. Even the present, in its fleetingness, is only a trace of something absent. Habermas might find this intersubjective metaphysical program contradictory, but it is not an impasse or a failure. It is how Muhammadiyah indicates the ever-present and ever-elusive goal of the eternal truths of the Qur’an that are only ever accessible in time.

Conclusion

Despite being long past, the golden age of Islam, when the Prophet lived in Mecca and Medina, remains accessible through the figure of the renewer who intervenes in moments of crisis to actualize the timeless truths of Islam in the contemporary moment. Like other Islamic reformers, Ahmad Dahlan diagnosed such a crisis as a result of widespread ignorance stemming from the stagnation of Islamic teaching in forms that were no longer appropriate and the assimilation of un-Islamic norms as constantly encroaching upon and corrupting the Islamic community. Nor were Dahlan and later Muhammadiyah figures unique in seeing this corruption as linked to colonialism or toxic postcolonial power dynamics. Many contemporary Muhammadiyah modernists’ understanding of how to actualize these timeless truths is influenced by other Islamic reform movements. At the same time, their way of inhabiting Dahlan’s and other reformers’ legacies has a unique inflection, largely owing to the way the organization has claimed stewardship of a pluralistic Indonesian democracy.

Muhammadiyah’s self-understanding in discourse and practice thus embodies tensions between intellectual and ideological continuity and lineages on the one hand, and innovation and the rupture of these lineages on the other. I have argued that these tensions are undergirded by the imperative to constantly access zaman Islam anew, and, in doing so, to appreciatively abandon every previous instantiation of it. Ahmad Dahlan and his successors appropriated elements of other reform movements to respond to new situations, but they remained wary that their interventions, their rearticulations of zaman Islam, might acquire normative authority. In the language of the Western philosophers I have borrowed, it is a modernist temporality that performs a break with the past (in Habermas’s terminology) by putting itself and its own lineages under erasure, letting them be present only as traces (in the language of Derrida and Levinas). That the thought and self-articulation of a self-consciously modernist organization resonates with both Habermas and thinkers Habermas considered antimodern confirms that, indeed, modernities are multiple, and that Western modernities are not a blueprint for modernities elsewhere—all epistemic violence notwithstanding—but become refracted and appropriated in new contexts.

In the next chapter, I build on these insights to investigate different strategies within Muhammadiyah to curate and appreciate their past or how to cultivate an active memory culture when the past is put under erasure. In particular, I show how in specific self-representations, the past becomes normative as a self-undermining moment authorizing future self-undermining moments.

Three

A Museum Without a Past

there is a famous photograph of Ahmad Dahlan, taken in 1921, just a short while before he died in 1923. Photography, especially scenes caught of living people in a moment and stilled, became a popular medium among Indonesians in the late colonial period, through which they signaled their participation in the modern world (Strassler 2010, 5–6). The embrace of this new medium, I have often been told by contemporary Muhammadiyah interlocutors, signaled the organization’s early activists’ modern and progressive orientation, setting them apart from the traditionalist kyai who supposedly still believed that the camera was a device of the devil. According to Rudolf Mrázek, colonized Indonesians like Ahmad Dahlan used photography much like the Dutch in their documentation of what the “colony more and more intensely wanted to be” (2002, 110). What, then, was it that Dahlan wanted to be? Clad in a white shirt and sarong, Dahlan is sporting eyeglasses, the latest trend among Indonesians at the time and so popular that those who did not need them for medical reasons would put on fakes made of window glass.¹ Clearly, Muhammadiyah’s founder was going with the times. Dahlan’s hand is resting on a pile of books on a table to his right—and next to the books, at the edge of the photo, there is an object that has come to be associated with Muhammadiyah’s founder more than almost any other: his globe. The globe conjures up the famous story of how the younger Ahmad Dahlan, who had just returned to Yogyakarta from his studies in the Middle East in the 1890s, antagonized the chief religious official (J. penghulu) of the Great Mosque of Yogyakarta by promoting a change of the qibla, the direction of prayer. With the help of his compass and this globe, Dahlan had worked out that his fellow Yogyakarta Muslims did not face the Kaaba when praying, but missed Mecca by several thousand miles and directed their prayers to East Africa. The books next to the globe, we could surmise, might include the Qur’an, or possibly the writings of Muḥammad ʿAbduh, which Dahlan is said to have read. These texts would have corroborated for him, as they do for Muhammadiyah members today, that Islam is not only compatible with, but in fact endorses science and technology, and has always done so, ever since Dahlan purified and reformed the Islam of the Javanese by correcting their direction of prayer with the technological device of the globe.

Ahmad Dahlan was not the only Muslim at the time to experiment with new gadgets to improve religious thought and practice. In the early twentieth century, the embrace and Islamization of European devices and technologies became increasingly common among Muslims in the Netherlands East Indies (Ali 2016, 44) and elsewhere (see Gelvin and Green 2014; Green 2009; Robinson 1993). While technological innovation was not without controversies among Muslims (Abaza 2002; Mrázek 2002, 175–77), modernist reformist movements in the colonial and postcolonial period often embraced the adoption of modern gadgets that had originated in the West as long as they were seen as advantageous for the Islamic umma. For some Muslim reformers, the instrumental utility of modern gadgets even transcended their immediate practical use: In their view, such modern instruments had the potential to enable their fellow Muslims to become modern, enlightened subjects, empowered to rise to emancipation from colonial rule, world power, and economic affluence.

The desire to be up to date when it comes to technological innovation points to the same temporal sense I discussed as characteristic of modernist movements in the previous chapter, according to which going with the times and innovating is a good in itself. As I argued, self-consciously reformist Islam is often characterized by an understanding of the transmission and actualization of zaman Islam as a rupture with a past whose timeless truths can only be present as a trace. This chapter builds on the preceding one by observing how the tensions between continuity and renewal play out in practice, when Muhammadiyah members remember Ahmad Dahlan as their movement’s founder and continuing inspiration. While his example is understood as normative in some sense, his life and actions must be exegeted to separate the timeless truths they embody from the historical contingencies of his situation, a process that requires careful attention to his biographical data. Presenting Dahlan’s life to the public poses further challenges, as mediations of the past must be accomplished in a way that simultaneously signals an orientation toward progress and the future. In examining these processes, I focus on the Muhammadiyah Museum, which opened its doors in November 2022. The curatorial practices of material objects representing the organization’s past are complicated by their potential to signal and promote a backward orientation. Therefore, the curators of the museum had to look for strategies to exhibit Muhammadiyah’s reform isnād in the presentation of historical objects.

figure 3. Ahmad Dahlan with his globe. Photo by an unknown photographer, public domain.

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A Tradition of Change

At their 2015 General Congress (Muktamar) in Makassar, Muhammadiyah officially promoted the label of “Progressive Islam” (I. Islam Berkemajuan) as the organization’s program and vision. At that point, the concept was no longer all together new. It had already been discussed at Muhammadiyah’s previous General Congress in 2010, after which it was taken up by a group of activists and intellectuals from the organization’s liberal wing. They included Dr. Haedar Nashir, who would be elected Muhammadiyah’s general chairperson (I. ketua umum), the highest position in the organization, at this same 2015 congress. In a 2010 publication, Nashir defined his notion of progressive Islam as an Islam that not only embraces innovation and change, but also becomes an active agent of modernizing society. Among Muhammadiyah’s defining characteristics, he wrote, was “to regard Islam as a progressive religion” and to engage in all aspects of doctrine, worship, ethics, and worldly matters equally through a process of missionary activity [I. dakwah, from A. daʿwa] that would “enlighten social life” (Nashir 2010, 164).

Despite the fact that the term “progressive” as a designator for Muhammadiyah’s program only became current after 2010, it was not considered a recent invention. Instead, it was conceptualized as a recovery of the spirit and language from Muhammadiyah’s beginnings and the struggle of Ahmad Dahlan himself, who is cited for having used the term in its Javanese form. From a historical perspective, his embrace of the term is entirely consistent with the ideological atmosphere of the day, as kemajuan or maju, advance or progress, had significant political traction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Often undergirded by a normative understanding of progress to modernity as coterminous with Westernization, it was used by a broad range of organizations, both Islamic and other. Sarekat Islam, originally an association of batik entrepreneurs in Solo founded in 1912 that soon morphed into a nationalist political organization, explicitly stated in their statutes that their raison d’être was to uplift each other in striving for progress (Shiraishi 1990, 42). An article in a 1916 edition of Sarekat Islam’s journal, Al-Islam, framed monotheistic religion as a principal vehicle of progress (kemajuan), whereby progress, in turn, was understood to pave the way for the intellectual independence of the Muslims of the Dutch East Indies and to fuse religious and patriotic devotion (Laffan 2002, 178). While Ahmad Dahlan was at times involved in Sarekat Islam and may have been inspired by its understanding of progress, his use of the term was less overtly political. His vision, as argued in chapter 2, was more focused on the reform of Islam as a movement from darkness to light, which entailed both the recovery of the Prophet Muhammad’s original teachings and the orientation of Islam to the present age.

Our contemporary knowledge of Ahmad Dahlan’s life is in large part based on the first substantial biography written about him, published in 1963 by Muhammadiyah member Solichin Salam. In spite of its age, it continues to be authoritative and has reached an almost canonical status as a study on which most contemporary biographies implicitly or explicitly draw. In it, Muhammadiyah’s founder is quoted as having urged his contemporaries to be mindful of “movement in the world,” a movement “toward progress [kemajuan].” And what was progress? It was a trend heading toward something Salam glosses by the Indonesian word keselamatan (1963, 72), a word with a wide semantic range that indicates material prosperity and safety as well as spiritual welfare, hinting even at an eschatological horizon of salvation. Progress, in this citation, is thus a moral and religious imperative. This accords well with the previous chapter’s findings, according to which zaman Islam must be made manifest by each community in their historically contingent situations, which can only be accomplished if they embrace the spirit of the times instead of being stuck in the past. When doing so, the salvific truth of zaman Islam becomes manifest. But the conceptualization of progress in Solichin’s biography of Dahlan does not merely confirm, but helps us further develop, our understanding of the interplay between past and present in the crossed-out lineages of reform isnād. Remembering Dahlan’s hope about Muhammadiyah’s future invokes a normative past—but, paradoxically, this normative past prescribes a break with itself. In other words, the past is not just crossed out but rather crosses itself out. The past, as it is represented in this example, is self-undermining.

This reference to a self-undermining past is very common in the organization today, for example, when Dahlan is remembered as having promoted progress. Among the references in Muhammadiyah publications to how Dahlan himself coined the term for the organization, the one most frequently invoked is his encouragement of others to become progressive teachers of religion (kyai) who would “never tire of working for/on Muhammadiyah.”² Others invoke Muhammadiyah’s Articles of Association from 1912, in which one of the organization’s goals was stated as “advancing [I. memajukan] religious matters for its members.”³ According to an article written by Haeder Nashir for Suara Muhammadiyah, Dahlan stated that Muhammadiyah had to be “in accordance with both the teachings of Islam and the progress [I. kemajuan] of the times.”⁴

figure 4. Poster of Ahmad Dahlan. Photo by the author.

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Many popular stories about Dahlan, originally transmitted by Solichin Salam and widely taken up in the organization’s contemporary discourse, are self-undermining in this way. Among Salam’s list of Dahlan’s most important “teachings and words of wisdom” are several that have assumed the status of unofficial mottos for the organization, including, “The Muhammadiyah of today is different from the Muhammadiyah of the future” (Salam 1963, 70), an utterance for which Salam provides no context but that is often understood as the words with which Dahlan bequeathed the organization to his successors. And, perhaps even more famously, he is thought to have said on his deathbed: “I entrust Muhammadiyah to all of you, hopeful that you will nourish and guard Muhammadiyah wholeheartedly so Muhammadiyah can continue to develop forever.”⁵ In these last words, Dahlan explicitly connected good stewardship of this struggle and movement with continuous transformation and further development.

A reform isnād, we saw, is characterized by the erasure of authoritative moments that allows traces of the timeless truths of Islam to become manifest in the here and now. These authoritative moments must be newly instantiated in every present, whereby every instantiation marks itself as obsolete as soon as it is available for citation. Muhammadiyah thus derives its normativity from a past that is erased, that is not accessible as a presence but only as a trace. The memories of Dahlan’s use of the term “progressive,” as well as his explicit mandate to his followers to continue renewing and developing, show that the past, in these erasures, is not merely passive, an object to be erased, but assumes an agency of its own as it actively erases itself. As a present absence that opens signification beyond linear temporality and questions of identity, the authoritative moment performs its own status as a mere indicator of zaman Islam.

This tension is neither a Habermasian aporia nor Bauer’s “contradiction,” a discursive limitation and dead end that has no prospect of being resolved (Bauer 2021, 184), for my interlocutors. Instead, it opens a productive space for coming to terms with that which is beyond being and temporality, and what this beyond means for the here and now. Dahlan’s mandate to his followers, rather than any positive law or morality, is a task with a responsibility to zaman Islam alone. But how is this mandate negotiated in practice as contemporary Muhammadiyah members commemorate this self-undermining past and implement its normative content in different media and contexts?

Exegeting History

Widiyastuti, a fourth-generation descendant of Ahmad Dahlan, was the brains and heart of the team planning the Muhammadiyah Museum.⁶ The successful opening of the museum in November 2022 on the grounds of Campus IV of Ahmad Dahlan University in South Yogyakarta was in no small part due to her tireless work coordinating the other volunteers, negotiating with the leadership, and planning the minute details of the museum’s operation. It was she who came up with the agenda of and moderated the weekly meetings during my field research in 2018 and 2019. I often attended the meetings of the group, held most Tuesday nights at the Muhammadiyah headquarters on KH Ahmad Dahlan Road in downtown Yogyakarta over cups of sweet tea and coffee and takeout dinners in cardboard boxes. One evening, the planning team was called to a less formal gathering at her house in Kotagedhe, one of Yogyakarta’s historical Muhammadiyah neighborhoods. Since no pressing matters had to be taken care of on that day, the meeting provided an opportunity for discussing some more basic questions and to chat instead of dealing with logistics. The planning committee had been joined that night by three college students from the Muhammadiyah University in Surabaya and active in IMM, the Muhammadiyah student organization. They had come to Yogyakarta for research to produce a short film on the history of Muhammadiyah for their IMM’s local chapter. “Here in Yogya we are working on a museum and in Surabaya they are making a film,” one of the planning team members said to me, pleased that so many initiatives were underway to present the organization’s past to a broader public. Indeed, during the time of my research, it seemed that Muhammadiyah activists on all levels were engaged in commemorations of Muhammadiyah’s history.⁷

As we were chatting, Widiyastuti, or Wiwit, as she is called by her friends, explained one of the fundamental convictions underlying her work for the museum and the organization more broadly: “Muhammadiyah is all about change.” Ahmad Dahlan had smoked because at the time people didn’t know that smoking was unhealthy. More recently, Muhammadiyah’s Council for Legal Reasoning and Renewal (Majelis Tarjih dan Tajdid) took into consideration the scientific insights regarding smoking and health and declared smoking haram.⁸ “Some of us still smoke,” a member of the planning committee quipped, and we all laughed. “Yes,” Wiwit said, now serious again, “and perhaps in ten years smoking will be halal again because new scientific inquiries will show that it is not unhealthy after all. What is great about Muhammadiyah is the organization’s capacity to change.” It was at this point that one of her colleagues turned to me and asked the question with which I began the previous chapter: In light of all this change, was there still such a thing as an essence of Muhammadiyah that was always the same? I did not answer but laughed, saying that this was precisely what I was hoping to find out from them, and directed the conversation back to Wiwit. She reiterated that Muhammadiyah always transforms from one era to the next to incorporate changes and to innovate. “But,” Wiwit said, “this does not mean that they got it wrong in the past.”

As argued above, Muhammadiyah’s understanding of history is informed by a particular reading of Islamic salvific history, whereby the revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad marked the transition from the jāhiliyya, the period of ignorance and polytheism in Arabia, to the beginnings of Islam. The return to this moment of revelation and its application in contemporary times is the task of the renewer (A. mujaddid, I. pembaharu), as articulated by Mawdūdī, Rahman, and various voices within Muhammadiyah. This temporal understanding became manifest especially in the modernist hermeneutic of interpreting scripture, as modernist reformists demanded that Qur’an and Hadith needed to be read and interpreted anew (ijtihad) instead of relying on the understandings of prior scholars (taqlid). But returning to the decisive moment of Qur’anic revelation does not entail a break with all that has happened between that moment and the present, precisely because of the renewer figure. This renewer functions as an extension of the sacred history of the earliest Islamic community into the present. There will never be another prophet, but a renewer can apply the Prophet’s enlightenment of the ignorant to his own time, which involves not a repetition, but a new manifestation of revelation.

“We have to do ijtihad of [I. mengijtihadkan] Ahmad Dahlan’s life,” Ibu Wiwit explained. As the organization’s early history, and especially the life and struggle of Dahlan are integrated into sacred history, they too become an object of interpretation by future generations in order to understand what about it was significant for its own time and what is significant for the present. The renewer’s significance is derivative of the Prophet’s but is still part of the same sacred history by virtue of being subject to the same sorts of interpretation. Dahlan may have been an exemplar in his piety and his struggle for Islamic reform. And yet, his example must not be blindly followed, lest Muhammadiyah itself becomes a new madhhab with its own taqlid. Put differently, Muhammadiyah prioritizes the original moment of revelation in such a way as to apply its hermeneutic by extension to its own founding figures, thus locating the local story of their own renewing figure and the movement he founded within the universally applicable story of Muhammad. Following Dahlan’s renewal of the prophetic message is only possible if it is not a matter of taqlid, which would obscure the timeless truths to which his action and thought pointed. It must be a matter of ijtihad, whereby one simultaneously transcends the concrete things he said and did. Indeed, Dahlan did not get it wrong. But one should still not smoke just because he did.

Then what, specifically, did Ibu Wiwit mean when she admonished her fellow activists to do ijtihad of Dahlan’s life? To begin answering this question, it is useful to consider a typical modernist elaboration on ijtihad of the Qur’an and to consider it as a model and blueprint for ijtihad of the renewer’s example. For this, I turn to Fazlur Rahman’s famous program of Qur’anic exegesis, both because it is representative of the modernist reformist movement more broadly and because it has been influential among a whole cohort of scholars around the Islamic world,⁹ including—as shown in the previous chapter—Indonesian Muslims active in Muhammadiyah. In his book Islam and Modernity, Rahman proposed a program of Qur’anic hermeneutics that consisted of a “double movement, from the present situation to Qur’anic times, then back to the present.” In the first step, the interpreter needed to undertake thorough historical research about the social historical context in which the Qur’an had been revealed. According to Rahman, the Qur’an was a direct response to the problems and concerns of seventh-century Arabia; and yet, “[a]ll values that are properly moral . . . have also an extra historical, ‘transcendental’ being, and their location at a point in history does not exhaust their practical impact or, one might even say, their meaning” (1982, 5). It is up to the interpreter, then, to separate in Qur’anic injunctions the ethical universals that are valid at all times from the contextual particulars of these specific injunctions. In Rahman’s second movement, scholars were tasked with determining how to apply the universal messages of the Qur’an in contemporary contexts. When contemporary Muhammadiyah members discuss the normative import of what Dahlan said and did, the hermeneutic they apply mirrors Rahman’s program of Qur’anic exegesis, whereby the historically contingent is separated from the universally valid. Levinas’s absolute past that reunites all times then becomes manifest as a trace in the self-undermining memories of what Dahlan said and did, pointing to the real Islam that he revived in his specific situation.

A famous story about Muhammadiyah’s founder illustrates this transition from biography to normative principle through ijtihad. In the years leading up to the 2010 General Congress in Yogyakarta, Muhammadiyah spokespersons increasingly adopted the terminology of Fikih al-Maun, meaning the fiqh of common kindness, derived from a Qur’anic sura of the same name. The name evokes a particular memory of Dahlan’s life and activism that, during my time in Yogyakarta, was ubiquitous in publications, seminars, and conversations.

In a biography of Ahmad Dahlan written by the same Widiyastuti who was also the leader of the team planning the museum, the story is told as follows: “The Sūrat al-Māʿūn became a very well known Sura in the history of Muhammadiyah because KHA Dahlan taught his students this sura repeatedly. Whenever a student asked, why are you always teaching the same sura?, KHA Dahlan would invariably reply, are you already carrying out [the teachings of] this sura?” (Widiyastuti 2010, 4).

The Qur’anic Sūrat al-Māʿūn (Q. 107) is one of the final and shortest suras of the Qur’an. Its content seems simple enough: It urges the faithful to observe common kindness (A. māʿūn)—something that, according to the story, is apparently easier said than done.

In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

[Prophet], have you considered the person who denies the Judgment? It is he who pushes aside the orphan and does not urge others to feed the needy. So woe to those who pray but are heedless of their prayer; those who are all show and forbid common kindness.

When I discussed the meaning of Fikih al-Maun with Muhammadiyah members, they would often emphasize that according to Dahlan’s demands, it is explicitly more than a theology. Its proper understanding transcends the cognitive as it is to be put into practice, like fiqh, the mechanism by which divine law is translated into regulating instruments in society (Maarif 2010). Just understanding the import of the sura is not enough, it also needs to be actualized. Dahlan, as a renewer, pointed to the insufficiency with which the teachings of the Qur’an were implemented in the world. His story, as well as his efforts in founding orphanages and other charitable institutions, provides Muhammadiyah with its program. By doing ijtihad of Sūrat al-Māʿūn and showing that its true meaning was its continuous application, he extended the original moment of revelation to his time.

Today, more ijtihad needs to be carried out to discern the meaning of revelation, and Dahlan’s realization of it, in contemporary society, and to recognize who the Qur’an’s orphans are. “Ahmad Dahlan interpreted Sūrat al-Māʿūn, and now we have to do it again,” an Aisyiyah activist explained to me. “It is not just about orphans. We have to ask, who are the most vulnerable today?” Muhammadiyah, in its social outreach activities, always seeks to address new kinds of disempowerment and vulnerability, for example, through initiatives to help victims of human trafficking, or children who are at risk of “stunting” or malnutrition. “And the spirit of al-Maun isn’t just limited to charity,” she added. “It is more broadly about empowerment or advocacy when there are structural problems. This is what Ahmad Dahlan’s example showed.”

Fikih al-Maun is not without controversies, but these controversies all relate to the question of whether it truly captures the spirit of Dahlan’s reform movement, as those who criticize the program always give historical reasons to substantiate their objections. Abdul Munir Mulkhan, a prominent public figure in Muhammadiyah who served as the general secretary of the organization from 2000 to 2005 under Syafii Maarif, told me that he had never come across a historical document that would verify the authenticity of this story. “It is just a legend,” he said. “The legend of al-Maun.” Of course, he clarified, Dahlan cared about the poor and he could well have said, if you are praying but you don’t help those who need you, you are lying. But the way it was reported to have happened had no historical basis. Pak Munir’s main issue with Fikih al-Maun was, however, something different: He found that the program Muhammadiyah has articulated on the basis of Fikih al-Maun was just too exclusive. It was all about doing things in the name of the organization, about turning everything into Muhammadiyah, about Muhammadiyah being better or faster than anybody else. “NU builds a hospital and instead of being happy that more needs are met, Muhammadiyah is petty about it,” Pak Munir said, “as though hospitals were the prerogative of Muhammadiyah.” He suggested that the story about Dahlan’s tafsīr of Sūrat al-Māʿūn was misunderstood if it was taken to be about Muhammadiyah running all the social services, putting their stamp onto everything. For him, the role of Muhammadiyah members in society was not to build up an organizational or charitable empire, but to become forces of change in their respective communities in an informal way, to strengthen the community rather than the organization.¹⁰ This, he said, was the original spirit of Dahlan’s movement. But because Muhammadiyah’s activists today did not read the original documents and put too much stock in legends, they were incapable of understanding the true impulses of the historical Ahmad Dahlan.

Pak Munir is not the only prominent critic of Fikih al-Maun. Pak A. R. Syukrianto, another lifelong activist¹¹ who has produced a number of films for Muhammadiyah on the history of the organization,¹² did not go as far as to question the historicity of the story of Dahlan teaching Sūrat al-Māʿūn like Pak Munir, but he told me while Dahlan taught Sūrat al-Māʿūn for only three months, Dahlan taught Sūrat al-ʿAṣr (The Fading Day, Q. 103) for a full eight months although it is shorter than Sūrat al-Māʿūn. It reads as follows:

In the name of God, the Lord of mercy, the Giver of mercy

By the fading day, man is [deep] in loss, except for those who believe, do good deeds, urge one another to the truth, and urge one another to steadfastness.

Sūrat al-Māʿūn, according to Pak Syukrianto, was about doing charitable works, and that was of course important. But Sūrat al-ʿAṣr was about implementing discipline and building character, and thus covered the charitable works prescribed by Sūrat al-Māʿūn but went further, including also disciplined action in politics and economics. Without denying the historical factuality of Dahlan’s long dwelling on Sūrat al-Māʿūn, Pak Syukrianto cited other historical data to contextualize Dahlan’s agenda and to put his focus on Sūrat al-Māʿūn into perspective.

It is significant that neither of the two men criticizing the contemporary status of Fikih al-Maun questioned the significance of Dahlan’s historical actions for the organization’s current norms. Neither is the normativity of Dahlan’s example ever called into question. On the contrary, according to Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, the problem was precisely that Muhammadiyah members did not know their history well enough. As Pak Munir criticized very explicitly, what other activists were doing was to project the present into the past. His critique articulates an insight familiar from social or collective memory studies as formulated by Maurice Halbwachs and his successors, that because memory is constituted by the frameworks and needs of present society, it has little to do with what actually happened. Pak Munir feared that Muhammadiyah members were doing a superficial exegesis of Dahlan’s life, simply accepting hearsay without inquiring into its reliability. Doing so leads to a collapse of the alterity of the past, leaving one with an unimaginative present and a subtly self-serving agenda. His insistence on proper historicity—utopian as this ideal may be—emphasizes that, for him, the organization’s focus on present and future does not erase the responsibility the living have to the past. This responsibility is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.

Just like the authority of the Qur’an is not called into question among Islamic reformists (or really, most Muslims) on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the same is true for Muhammadiyah’s understanding of the normative content of Dahlan’s life. At the same time, as is the case with the Qur’an, understandings of the message’s normative essence, separated from the historically contingent and applied to contemporary times, often widely diverge from one interpreter to the next. For some prominent voices in the organization, the historiographic and hermeneutic process needs to be improved, because a faulty understanding of Ahmad Dahlan’s life ultimately leads to decay and corruption. People like Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto seek to provide corrections through debates that take the form of seminars, publications, or, in Pak Syukrianto’s case, films. The point of these debates is not so much to reach an authoritative conclusion, but—as detailed in the previous chapter—to keep the conversation open, to challenge and dispute dominant views, and to revise insights based on increases in knowledge and changing times. Disagreements and changing views about the significance of Dahlan, or even of Muhammadiyah, are not an obstacle to overcome but rather are constitutive of Muhammadiyah’s identity and, from a contemporary retrospective vantage point, its historical essence. Since Ahmad Dahlan’s memory declines to lend its authority to any concrete form of its own but rather encourages change and progress through traces, the only kind of life world it could authorize is an ongoing discernment or discourse about its own significance. It is also the inevitable result of ijtihad, which, in its reformist understanding as an obligation for each Muslim (A. farḍ ʿayn), is irreducibly multivocal, held together loosely by an ideological orientation that is itself malleable and subject to controversy and debate. This essential nature of change becomes a particular challenge, however, when representations of this historical essence are bound to be more static or reduce this multivocality to a common object. The planning team for the Muhammadiyah Museum were especially aware of this challenge, to which I turn now.

Curating Reform

The museum, as is well known, is an especially charged place, both politically and ideologically. With its key competences of collecting, exhibiting, and educating (Boast 2011, 65), it is a quintessential modern institution that replaced older institutions like cabinets of curiosities, places that were not meant to be universally accessible and where objects were ordered through analogies or correspondences (Walsh 1992, 18–19; see also Foucault 1973, 17–24). Museums as we know them today emerged on a large scale in the second half of the nineteenth century, a development often attributed to the sense of instability and dislocation people experienced due to modernization and industrialization and their desire to find a rootedness and steadiness in history (Nora 1989; Korff and Roth 1990, 14). These first museums sought to provide their visitors with a “modern experience” by enshrining a linear, didactic narrative of progress, proved by displays of a distant and completely remote past (Bennett 1995; Errington 1998; Tarulevicz 2004; Walsh 1992).

It is no accident that this first boom of the museum coincided with the age of intensifying—and increasingly ideologized—colonialism. Colonial exhibitions and fairs like the one in Amsterdam in 1883, the first significant one to be held in the Netherlands, sought to show and explain to the masses objects from the Indies, coupling this educational experience with new forms of entertainment while kindling bourgeois desires for novel commodities (Mrázek 2002, 46–47; see also Benjamin 1986, 151–53). As Margaret Wiener and others have observed, the colonial museum reenacted in cultural terms the military defeat of the colonized—not only because many of the exhibits were objects looted in military campaigns, but also because the museum produced knowledge and discourses about these objects and the “culture” they represented from a claimed vantage point of epistemic superiority—for example, through deliberately iconoclastic curatorial practices (Wiener 1994, 350; Bouquet 2012, 46). The museum and the exhibition also became popular in the colonies, including the Netherlands East Indies, where they helped to establish a sense of the metropole’s power and presence (Mrázek 2002, 47–48). After independence, like many other newly independent countries, Indonesia accepted the museum as an institution from the colonizers and also inherited many of the colonizers’ “forms of political museumizing” (Anderson 2006, 183).

In Indonesia, the Indonesian National Museum is perhaps the most notorious example of this development. As the postcolonial continuation of the old Dutch Batavia Museum,¹³ the museum left the colonial institution’s collections and their presentation virtually unchanged for decades. Indonesian cultural politics in the National Museum seemed to reify the Indonesian nation much in the same way the Dutch had done with the Netherlands East Indies—and just like the Batavia Museum had once fetishized ethnic groups and presented them as static, the Javanese-dominated new nation did the same with ethnic communities from other islands (McGregor 2004, 20–22). Yet, as scholars of postcolonial societies have warned us, we should be cautious of reducing museums in formerly colonized countries to unchanged colonial formations of knowledge. Even a museum with as clear a colonial legacy as the National Museum can be reinterpreted and has taken on new meanings (Rizqika 2017). Indeed, in the words of Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, Indonesian museums—like many other museums elsewhere in the formerly colonized world—have looked “simultaneously in two directions” (2004, 173), whereby transnational orders of cultural forms, while present, get appropriated and transformed in their local contexts (see also Kreps 2003; Muan 2006).

The Muhammadiyah Museum also makes such transformations manifest. Although it is clear that both the medium of the museum and the exhibitions’ message of progress have their roots in colonial history, it cannot be reduced to this trajectory. If there is a prototype of the modern, postcolonial museum that undergirds normative understandings of temporality, the Muhammadiyah Museum sometimes reproduces this model but diverges from it at other times. Modern, postcolonial museums often present a linear narrative of history that emphasizes the distance between the past and the present and culminates in the status quo, in which history finds its fulfillment (see Bennett 1995, 46; Tarulevicz 2004). At times, this linear trajectory is also noticeable in the Muhammadiyah Museum. One of the main rooms on the second floor features a historical timeline on the wall that begins with the 1912 foundation of the organization and highlights important milestones of the organization until the present. At other times, however, this temporal linearity, while still present, is subordinated to a more thematic representation of history. Among the first exhibits are collections of images showing all the organization’s general chairpersons in historical order, beginning with Ahmad Dahlan and ending with Haedar Nashir, and posters of general congresses over the years, from 1923 to the most recent one. Here, visitors do not wander through time to experience history beginning with a completely remote past that gradually culminates in the present, as is so typical for the modern museum. Instead, they are presented with a curative model that flattens historical difference while emphasizing comparable events and achievements across time. Rather than singling out the present moment as the fulfillment of historical processes of modernization, they emphasize each generation’s commitment to renewal and modernization, a process that still continues. Instead, it becomes a space where the organization’s complex understanding of history and temporality are curated and exhibited for the public.

This complexity was already palpable at the planning stage. Since the idea of a museum showcasing Muhammadiyah’s historical becoming seemed quite problematic to many constituents, the team had to navigate fraught ideological terrain in advocating for the museum, deciding what it should show and how its contents should be curated. When I met Wiwit for the first time, she told me that the desire to open a Muhammadiyah Museum went several decades back and that the planning process had not been easy, that there had been a lot of pushback from Muhammadiyah members because they were wary that such a museum would nourish a cult of the past. She used the Indonesian word kultus, a word I would often hear in the debates around which exhibits were acceptable in the future museum and which ones were not. It took her and her collaborators a long time, she said, to convince both the leadership and the general public that the museum as they envisioned it presented no such risk at all.

When the concept of kultus and the anxiety of inadvertently promoting it came up in the meetings I attended, it normally had one of two partly overlapping connotations. The first was the perceived risk of presenting the past in a way that enshrined a historical snapshot as though it was valid for all times. The second pertained to the materiality of authentic historical exhibits and the—according to many modernists—misguided belief that such objects are endowed with special or transcendent powers. The latter of these two anxieties will be the principal subject of the next chapter. Here, I discuss how the volunteers planning the museum addressed the first one, asking how to exhibit the past when the past’s normative content is precisely the mandate to change.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we still had Ahmad Dahlan’s globe?” asked Zaki, a college student in his early twenties and a volunteer on the planning team for the Muhammadiyah Museum. The globe is gone, along with most other things that Dahlan owned. While not exactly a recent invention in the early twentieth century, the globe was innovative in the context of establishing the qibla in Java and thus a witness to Dahlan’s openness to science. Because of this, Zaki thought it to be a suitable object for the museum. But some of the other volunteers felt that the lack of original objects from the time of Dahlan was far from regrettable and was actually entirely appropriate. Today, more than a hundred years after Dahlan introduced his innovative technologies, any of the objects that were new and revolutionary for him or his associates are out of date. The globe is gone, and even if it were not, why would anybody hold on to an old globe when much better gadgets are available today to measure cardinal directions, when there are even handy smartphone apps to determine the direction of prayer?

Muhammadiyah is rich in stories, Ibu Wiwit would often say, but poor in material objects that could be exhibited. Very few historical objects could be secured for display in the museum, like a table that used to stand in Dahlan’s house, or a little bench that was used in one of the first schools founded by Muhammadiyah, marking the innovation of the school system where students no longer sat in a circle on the floor around their teacher, but at tables. This poverty in material objects was itself often framed as one of the organization’s virtues. The first Muhammadiyah activists refused to cling to their stuff and the past they represented but looked to the present and future and therefore gave their belongings away to the poor or traded them in to help raise money for the organization. In 1921, for example, Dahlan reportedly sold off much of the family’s possessions to pay the teachers at the Muhammadiyah schools (Syukrianto 2020). The lack of objects points to the organization’s strong commitment to ensuring that empowerment and Islamic reform continue uninterrupted.

If the lack of objects is normally understood as a virtue, it is clear that the sudden appreciation of these objects and their elevation as museum exhibits is complicated for many Muhammadiyah modernists and had to be justified somehow. In the debates among the planning team’s members, this was often accomplished by emphasizing that the objects that did happen to still be available were never meant to be preserved, that they just happened to survive. One of those accidental remnants is the table of Ki Bagus Hadikusuma, one of Dahlan’s first associates and later the general chairperson of Muhammadiyah (1944–53). It had to be retrieved from the descendants of one of Ki Bagus’s neighbors, a poor family at the time to whom Ki Bagus had given the table because they didn’t have one. It was only after much asking around that the old table was finally identified. No one had been so foolish as to attribute special significance to the table just because it had originally been Ki Bagus’s. Such stories are significant because they prove that the museum is not the problematic result of a preoccupation with the past. Just like Dahlan’s genealogy that is mentioned just to be erased, the exhibition of Ki Bagus’s table in the museum must also communicate that nobody really cares about this table, that what might be mistaken for a misguided attempt to halt time is in fact a trace that points beyond itself. But how is it possible to demonstrate the original object’s insignificance when it is exhibited in a museum?

Because of the difficulties involved in accomplishing such an exhibition, in the months during which I attended the planning meetings for the Muhammadiyah Museum and their discussions with the wider Muhammadiyah community, the question of what to exhibit in the museum and how was a topic of constant debate. In these discussions, the volunteers often envisioned certain types of Indonesian museumgoers. One type was the one running real danger of being tempted by the normative appeal of historical exhibits and adopting a backward-looking attitude. The other type was a modern and progressive Indonesian, the kind already socialized into the virtues Muhammadiyah has promoted for so long. This kind of Indonesian, I was often told, does not like museums because all you see there is “old” (I. kuno) stuff. All you see is the past. It is dark. It is “boring” (I. bosan). The Muhammadiyah Museum was supposed to be nothing of the sort: not kuno but “millennial” (I. milenial). Kuno is some obsolete object; old, broken, or at least hopelessly antiquated, and useless if it were not on display in some glass case somewhere. Kuno denotes the inability or unwillingness to update, clinging to some bygone past. Kuno also evokes the high culture of yesteryear, like Jawa Kuno, the classical Javanese literature of past centuries, very sophisticated and valuable in its own right, of course, but only intelligible for the most learned of scholars, the greatest of nerds, not normal people with normal interests and concerns.¹⁴ In this sense, for my interlocutors, the display of things that are kuno in their museum, like Dahlan’s globe, was not just an unwise decision that would turn the museum boring, but also an ethical failure: an indulgence of interest in the kuno indicates a lack of interest in things that are of real, legitimate concern or practical use today.

In a meeting of the planning team with a focus group of Muhammadiyah members, one of the attendants suggested that perhaps a faithful replica of the original globe could be commissioned and displayed, or even some other old globe, just to give people an idea of what it might have looked like. He was immediately overruled by all other attendants. “We don’t want old stuff in a glass case,” one said. “People would just run away!” The globe by itself, whether the original or in replica, would be boring, and no one in their right mind would be interested in that. Yet, at the same time, the objects from the organization’s early years that did happen to survive are now of historical interest. They are appropriate for display in the Muhammadiyah Museum because they are a witness of this early interest in technology and innovation. While the organization’s history can only be represented through media like the globe, while the message of this early commitment to innovation must be mediatized to be communicable at all, the historically contingent that these historical objects represent and that make them kuno must be stripped away. To ensure that the museum will neither tempt people to imbue the past with some undue normativity nor bore the ones who already know that the past as past is boring, the curators of the museum had to make sure that the past was represented in a way that could not be easily misunderstood. If Muhammadiyah’s emphatic rejection of taqlid and the significance of not simply following the opinions and practices of Dahlan is constitutive of the organization’s identity, this identity is articulated, in the Muhammadiyah Museum, by displaying historical objects in a way that is similarly self-undermining.

Technologies of Progress

“So what do you do,” I asked Ibu Wiwit in my first conversation with her, “to make sure that these historical objects do not turn into a cult of the past?” How to deal with something that is kuno while avoiding the epistemic fallacies and moral dangers associated with it? She immediately perked up: Clearly she had thought about and discussed this question before. The solution to this difficult question was, put simply, the deployment of cutting-edge technology in the mediation of the exhibits. “We take the table, or the school bench, as a gateway [I. pintu masuk], and then we use IT to tell people, for example, about Muhammadiyah’s charitable work, or about the reformation of the school system,” she explained. Over the following months, during the regular meetings of the Muhammadiyah Museum planning team, one of the most frequently discussed topics was how contemporary cutting-edge technologies could be used to curate the organization’s past. Ideas included a hologram to greet people as they came in, to inform them about the contents of the museum; a speed drawing of the history of Muhammadiyah; and, if a historical object was displayed, it should be accompanied by an augmented reality experience, where visitors could use their own gadgets, or borrow gadgets from the museum, to not just look at the historical object but to also have it presented through an array of computer-generated input and information.

The use of technology in the Muhammadiyah Museum to mediate religious insights immediately brings to mind and challenges the so-called secularization thesis, the idea that modernity’s scientism has displaced religious traditions. Scholars beginning with Max Weber and his invocation of the “iron cage” (Weber 1992, 123–24) have often suggested that the relation between religion and technological progress is at best uneasy. The philosopher Charles Taylor, for instance, one of the most prominent proponents of this thesis, has argued that in the early modern era the world became disenchanted as the purpose of things in the world came to be perceived no longer as God-given, but as extrinsic and utilitarian. This development, he proposed, also correlated with the mechanization of the world (Taylor 2007, 97–99). In Taylor’s narrative, over time, the transcendent came to be displaced through technological innovation (433). While this idea continues to hold some sway, especially in the secularizing West, a host of scholars have worked on deconstructing the underlying binary in a vast variety of religious and historical contexts, showing that both historically and in the present, religion and technology have been mutually supportive and even constitutive as often as incompatible or in conflict.¹⁵ As Derrida aptly put it, “Modern technology, contrary to appearances, although it is scientific, increases tenfold the power of ghosts” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 115).

In the context of Islam, Muslims have often pointed to Qur’anic injunctions and the prophetic example to pray for an increase in knowledge that is useful and beneficial for the umma as an endorsement of certain types of science and technology (Bakar 2016, 17). When used in agreement with the laws of Scripture, technology would produce a divinely ordered world—which also meant that making use of technology could amount to doing good acts of virtue and worship, helping to ensure a good afterlife. In modern times, more controversial than science and technology per se was the adoption of technological innovations understood as Western, such as Dahlan’s compass and globe. The embrace of Western technologies often became an identity marker of the modernist orientation in Islam.¹⁶ Among the most prominent proponents of Western innovation was the Egyptian reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, whose famous journal Al-Manār (The Lighthouse) disseminated a very positive view of scientific innovation in Islam. Addressed to an elite audience, Al-Manār’s circulation was not enormous, but the journal nonetheless became influential as it reached a globalized, trans-imperial community of educated Muslim readers. Until his death in 1935, Riḍā made use of Al-Manār as a platform to issue fatwas in response to his readers’ questions. Many of these questions pertained to the legal status of new European technologies and patented commodities that were circulating in the colonized world, ranging from toilet paper to record players. Riḍā, Leor Halevi (2019) showed, repeatedly argued that Islamic laws presented no barriers to modern technologies, even if they had been invented by the European colonizers. Dahlan, a reader of Al-Manār, had a similar understanding of modern and Western gadgets, though this need not mean that he adopted all his views from Riḍā. Rather, Dahlan, Riḍā, and many others were part of the same movement that promoted Western technologies as a potential tool for cultivating modern, rational subjects. Dahlan proved the superiority of these technologies when, with the help of his globe, he demonstrated that his fellow Javanese Muslims were not fulfilling their daily obligation of prayer correctly and, through it, helped them become better Muslims.

In addition to these affinities with global Islamic reform movements, Muhammadiyah’s understandings of the meaning and use of modern technologies are also embedded in a specific Indonesian context. Indonesian nationalism, as Rudolf Mrázek observed, was closely entwined with the embrace of and expertise in new technologies, especially among the santri, the colony’s Muslim scholars and students. Believed by the colonial government to be among the most subversive elements in society, these santri were reportedly also among the most enthusiastic clients of the colony’s trains and trams (Mrázek 2002, 11). We can only guess what it meant for these santri to take the train, and what their embrace of this new mode of transportation might have had to do with either their decolonial aspirations or their understanding of Islam. But these subversive colonial subjects’ enthusiasm for technology may well have anticipated the views of the eminent Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who explicitly correlated the development of a modern rationality and the displacement of a traditional Indies worldview with techno-scientific progress. Despite the fact that Pramoedya did not specifically address these issues within an Islamic framework, and although his endorsement of rationalization for the sake of “demagicking” (Cheah 2003, 269–70) appears at first glance inimical to religious beliefs, his views are not entirely demystified. Techno-scientific progress, according to Pramoedya, facilitates the emergence of a national consciousness, which, for him, is a transtemporal power struggling for life and hence a spiritual force in its own right. Echoing Pramoedya, many Muhammadiyah publications likewise emphasize how the organization’s modernizing mission, mediated at least in part by their embrace of new technologies, not only activated the timeless truths of Islam but, through their modernizing mission, also contributed to Indonesia’s national becoming.¹⁷

In independent Indonesia, the links between technology, Islam, and political ideology persisted but were redefined. This was especially true for Soeharto’s New Order (1966–98), a regime called a technocracy by some political scientists (Fakih 2020, 13–14). Crucially, Soeharto’s aggressive development agenda, which resulted in the country’s industrialization and modernization, coincided historically with the rise of the global Islamic revival in Indonesia.¹⁸ Many Muslim public figures joined the New Order administration in calling for modernization and development, framing it as a way to strengthen Islam and the Indonesian umma (Federspiel 1998, 117–30). According to Suzanne Moon (2020), Indonesian Islamic activists during the New Order period firmly established technology as a site of both religious and political action.¹⁹ Like many other Muslims before them, they explicitly promoted a vision according to which acquiring knowledge, including knowledge about science and technology, was mandated in Islam as a way for humans to deepen their knowledge about the greatness of God and God’s universe, and to facilitate a better world in which the community of believers would best thrive. While none of these arguments were especially novel or unique to the New Order period, they reemphasized the relation between religious knowledge and devotion and technological expertise. Technology, and the progress it enables, was explicitly bestowed with a sacred purpose and salvific role as it defined the ideal Muslim as a “technoscientific self” (Moon 2020, 250).

Against the background of such a high regard for technology in Indonesian Islam, it is clear that its use in the museum is all but neutral. In a seminal essay, Hent de Vries called for a more vigorous analysis of “the significance of the processes of mediation and mediatization without and outside of which no religion would be able to manifest or reveal itself in the first place” since “mediatization and the technology it entails form the condition of possibility for all revelation—for its revealability, so to speak” (De Vries 2001, 28). Bestowing Muhammadiyah Muslims with a similar sacred purpose and salvific role that Moon recognized during the New Order, technology in the Muhammadiyah Museum becomes instrumental in the revealability of the sacred in history. Instead of displacing the transcendent, the erasure of historical objects through technology generates the productive tensions that allows Muhammadiyah to articulate the timeless truths of Islam in history through a new reading of their past that is contemporary and modern. As showed above, in Solichin Salam’s biography of Ahmad Dahlan, Muhammadiyah’s founder is cited as establishing a relation between progress (I. kemajuan) and salvation (I. keselamatan) when he exhorted his followers to let Muhammadiyah develop (I. berkembang) and to continue changing and transforming (Salam 1963, 72). While media and technology are inescapable vehicles for revealability, as De Vries wrote, the specific forms they take are neither epiphenomenal nor neutral. More than just the packaging of a specific religious content, specific media are part of the message itself as they fold into each other religion, aesthetics, and understandings of temporality (see also Hirschkind and Larkin 2008, 2). As Ibu Wiwit told me, by adopting the newest technology in the museum exhibits, they would show, not just tell, that the adoption of innovative gadgets and media has always been Muhammadiyah’s hallmark.

To bring the relation between progress and salvation into focus, medium and content had to be carefully brought into alignment. The idea of exhibiting a replica of an early-twentieth-century globe was rejected by most of the museum’s planners because such an old, boring, kuno thing would contradict the very message of progress the globe seeks to tell. It was only when someone brought up the possibility of creating an augmented reality experience with this replica that visitors could access with their phones that some of the attendees became more interested. Technology without the right content, however, was just as inappropriate. When during a brainstorming session someone proposed an augmented reality experience where visitors could have their image with a particular attire projected onto a screen, none of the others were particularly interested. “This is just for fun, not for learning?” Wiwit asked, and once it was confirmed that this was indeed the case, the group quickly moved on to the next idea. Only when medium and message were brought into alignment could the timeless truths of zaman Islam become manifest.

Another challenge the planning team faced was that technology progresses quickly, therefore any attempt to exhibit it might quickly be outdated and stultify. In a few years, the cutting edge of now may look almost as antiquated as Dahlan’s globe. Ibu Wiwit was aware of this: The museum would need to be continuously updated to keep up with technological innovations. “If you come back in five years,” she told me during our initial meeting, “the museum might be very different from how it will be when it first opens.” This process of updating is akin to modernism’s critique of the taqlid of the traditional legal schools: In the spirit of ijtihad, each generation has to discern anew through which technologies the timeless truths of zaman Islam are most effectively implemented in the here and now. In this sense, technology is both a tool of ijtihad and also subject to ijtihad’s critique in every moment.

When I visited the newly opened museum in 2023, I saw that the implementation of such constant innovation may even call the use of technology into question. It turned out that, in fact, a variety of gadgets were used in the museum. They included an app to be used on Android phones that provided more information and augmented reality experiences for certain exhibits as well as screens with rotating photographs and running text. But overall, I found that technology wasn’t anywhere near as prominent as I had expected, based on having attended the meetings in 2018 and 2019. Instead, it was various artworks that were most prominent in the exhibition. They included a small replica of the kind of steamship that Dahlan would have taken to Mecca, against the background of abstracted drawings of the landscapes he would have passed on the way; a spray-painted artwork representing Dahlan’s correction of the qibla; and several paintings featuring calligraphy of Qur’anic suras. I brought this up to one of the volunteers who had been present during the planning sessions and had since been put in charge of overseeing the museum’s daily functioning. He immediately got excited and explained that there was currently a huge “hype” around visual art, that ARTJOG, the biggest art exhibition in Southeast Asia, was happening in Yogyakarta right now. Everybody was interested in art at the moment, and so it was clear that they would exhibit art in their museum. When I asked about the use of IT, he agreed there was less of it than previously discussed. It seems that, to some extent, even technology, no matter how cutting-edge, may need to take the back seat when there is a new hype, even if this new hype seems at first glance traditional.

In some exhibits, art and technology go hand in hand. Among the museum’s most impressive pieces is a large rectangular screen showing scenes of Muhammadiyah’s early history. Rather than engaging with this screen directly as one is accustomed to, the visitor has to watch it through long transparent shrouds suspended from the ceiling on which a projector casts light and other visual effects. The display is reminiscent not only of the shadow puppet theater (J. wayang kulit), a quintessential Javanese art form, but also of the diorama, an especially popular medium in Southeast Asia’s postcolonial museums. As Klaus Schreiner observed, dioramas transform history into “a myth that is handed down and even reenacted in political rituals” to cultivate and shape the perfect Indonesian (1997, 106). With a similar pedagogical mission of trying to form an ideal reformist Muslim, the myth that is handed down here is that the traditional has always been modern—at least potentially.

And what about Dahlan’s globe? A visitor of the Muhammadiyah Museum will look in vain for its replica, even one mediated by modern information technology. But—representative of its important symbolic status in the organization—the globe features repeatedly in the museum. Most prominently, visitors will find one as a centerpiece of the first floor. It is a huge inverted half-globe, a giant bowl with the eastern hemisphere painted on its inside. This bowl is sitting on an elevated platform and surrounded by a half-circle of shelves filled with dummies of books, broken up by occasional screens displaying changing phrases evocative of the organization’s central commitments or activities—phrases like “kesejahteraan ummat” (the welfare of the umma). When a museum volunteer showed me around, she made sure to demonstrate for me the augmented reality experience that accompanied this exhibit in the app: When pointing the camera toward the globe, it would show a beam of light rising up from the globe into the air and up, toward the second floor with its exhibits. Again, the image of light features as a symbol of enlightenment. As she explained, the light symbolized how Muhammadiyah’s enlightening message, its rationalization through science (as represented by the globe) and learning (as represented by the books) continued to illuminate the organization and all who come into contact with it. In the words of Hirschkind and Larkin (2008, 5), this exhibit of the globe facilitates an “[eruption] of the sacred in the signifier itself,” as technology and artwork mediate this message by demonstrating the continuing aspiration to illuminate in a way that a simple replica could not.

figure 5. Ahmad Dahlan’s globe in the Muhammadiyah Museum as interpreted by artist Agus Suwage. Photo by the author, used with permission from the Muhammadiyah Museum, Yogyakarta.

[picture]

“The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility,” wrote Walter Benjamin (1969, 220). According to him, modern, capitalist conditions of production, including the mechanical reproduction of works of art, have made us blind to the irreducibility of the original. Reproducing a work of art, no matter how sophisticated, results in the depreciation of “the quality of its presence” and the elimination of its “aura” (221). Form and content, Benjamin seems to say, cannot be separated, because the content is intrinsic to the form itself. Muhammadiyah embraces the modern conditions of production that Benjamin thought to have severed the intimate link between form and content, and yet, the planners of the museum would likely agree that form and content are inseparable; but here, this authenticity or aura is not attached to the original but to the reproduction, because the authenticity of the form is contingent on its own constant renewal. Even the museum’s recent turn toward seemingly traditional art forms needs to be understood against this background. What made art meaningful and special in 2023 was its reproduction of a timeless sentiment in its most contemporary form. Art, in this sense, also becomes a technology of change, allowing Muhammadiyah to articulate its commitment to modernity without falling victim to modernity’s aporias. In the discourse and practice around Muhammadiyah’s curation of the past in the museum, technology puts historical objects under erasure to be a present absence, a trace in Levinas’s sense, thus becoming a vehicle to that which is beyond ontology and beyond history, Azra’s zaman Islam. Modern technology transforms the kuno into the milenial and demonstrates the contemporary significance of the past, not as an indulgence of the boring historian, but as an example that points beyond itself to timeless truths. The erased past in the museum gestures to the true Islam these past moments embodied. They cannot be directly present as past, but they are made absent as their kuno aspects are being stripped away, opening signification beyond linear temporality. Because history is represented through a medium that makes progress manifest, what remains of the past is Islam’s timeless truths that have to take on a different shape for each new generation of believers.

Conclusion

In one of the discussions among the volunteers during the planning phase, Ibu Wiwit suggested that the exhibits should not be extraordinary but normal, things that one uses every day. “And then,” she said, “we will use those normal things to tell Muhammadiyah’s story.” There is nothing special about a table or a school bench in and of itself. In their ordinariness, these objects depend on a particular kind of mediation to curate the timeless truths of Islam that Muhammadiyah, over time, has made manifest. The focus on these mundane, functional objects and the emphasis on technology that strips away the kuno aspects of relics of the organization’s history would at first glance seem to be an embrace of modern disenchantment at its most extreme. But closer observation shows that technology does not disenchant Muhammadiyah’s understanding of its past. The dangers associated with taqlid mean that no past moment of Islamic renewal or artifact of a previous instantiation of zaman Islam can have any normative value directly, but they do exercise authority when they are both said and unsaid at the same time by being put under erasure. Their authority is paradoxical in that it is self-undermining: The normative past authorizes the abandonment of the normativity of the past. Faithfulness to the example of Ahmad Dahlan requires the erasure of Ahmad Dahlan, an erasure that can be commemorated and preserved.

The timeless truths of Islam must be articulated in ways appropriate to the moment in which one lives. But because time is not arrested, what was new and timely begins to become antique almost immediately, and each articulation of Islam must almost immediately be erased for it to serve as a fitting sign of that which is beyond it. Contemporary art and technology enter here as the media through which to present a version of history that is normative in that it is self-undermining, just like the narratives of Dahlan. Thus curated, the old can be presented in such a way as to speak of the timeless, even though it itself requires constant updating. The crucial point, however, is that this constant updating through technology does not imply the disenchantment, desacralization, or interchangeability of things for Muhammadiyah, nor the separation of form and content or medium and message. It is precisely their lack of interchangeability that makes the re-presentation of zaman Islam in ever-new media necessary. It does not necessarily do away with the material or intellectual heritage of those who have gone before. It instead lets the past remain present by pointing beyond itself through its very erasure. It is the embrace of temporality and the constant change that goes along with it that allows for temporality’s transcendence.

As we recall, Ibu Wiwit voiced one other concern in relation to exhibiting old objects in the museum: the danger of what she called kultus, of fetishizing old objects as though they had a special significance or even power. While this fear of kultus cannot be neatly disambiguated from the desire to continually innovate, it shifts the focus of the debate from the temporal to the material. In the next chapter, we turn to this material dimension of memory, especially in relation to material objects that are notoriously divisive in Muslim communities, because both their physical presence and absence pose problems that are not only religious, but political: We turn to graves.

Four

Grave Matters

“have you heard of the grave that disappeared?” I was sitting in the office of the Council for Libraries and Information on the top floor of the old Muhammadiyah headquarters on Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan Road in downtown Yogyakarta. The comfortable office was one of my favorite places in Yogyakarta, with books and magazines stacked everywhere, on shelves, in boxes, and on the floor, and a large square table in the middle for people to work, chat, and drink tea. I spent many hours in that office, browsing the archives, waiting for another meeting in the building to start, or talking to whoever happened to be around, especially the office’s head secretary. It was he who had asked me about the disappeared grave. Yes, I said: Indeed, I had heard. Most conversations I held with Muhammadiyah members about the status of graves in the organization sooner or later turned to the affair of Ki Bagus Hadikusuma’s final resting place. Ki Bagus was one of Ahmad Dahlan’s first students and would later be the organization’s general chairperson (1944–53) during the turbulent years of the Japanese occupation, the war of independence against the Dutch, and the first years of the Republic. Because of Ki Bagus’s significant contributions to Indonesian independence, he was declared a “national hero” (I. pahlawan nasional) by the Joko “Jokowi” Widodo administration in 2015. But when the government tried to locate his grave to put up a sign and hold a ceremony to properly commemorate him, there was no grave to be found. The cemetery was known—it was Pakuncen, one of the largest cemeteries of the city, just northwest of Kauman. But where in the sprawling cemetery it was that Ki Bagus was buried upon his death in 1954, no one could or wanted to say.

The mysterious disappearance of Ki Bagus’s grave, and the reasons for its disappearance, became a hotly debated topic within Muhammadiyah in the aftermath of this affair. When I asked different members how they felt about the disappearance, they often seemed quite pleased that the grave’s location had come to be forgotten. After all, they opined, what was important about a person’s legacy was not their material remains. Building and visiting fancy graves was something done by traditionalist Muslims, from whom self-identified modernists often seek to distance themselves. Still, their contentment was often mixed with concern. The grave, and its value as a historical site, was irretrievably gone. These ambivalences reflect the tensions within Muhammadiyah between the values of innovation and organizational continuity, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Muhammadiyah’s historical trajectory of having reformed Indonesian Islam for more than one hundred years becomes manifest in remembering the organization’s first activists, including Ki Bagus and, even more importantly, Ahmad Dahlan. On the other hand, a continued commitment to reformism entails breaking with the past and being oriented toward the present and future. This tension, I argued, is productive in Muhammadiyah accounts where authoritative memories are often self-undermining, either on the level of the narrative itself or by how the narrative is interpreted or curated.

This chapter will build on these findings by situating them in the current political context, asking how Muhammadiyah’s characteristic engagement with its history is put to use when members construct a particular image of the organization as moderate. The subsequent chapter will show that similar processes are underway in NU. Since the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, the image and label of moderate Islam has become advantageous globally, including in Indonesia, where it is promoted by the government and where Muhammadiyah and NU have come to compete for the claim to be Indonesia’s moderate Muslims. The discussion will pivot on the physical site of graves—or, in Ki Bagus’s case, their absence—as a heuristic for understanding the construction of such normative identities. For the two organizations, as well as the history of Islam more broadly, graves have often been sites where normative practice and notions of identity and belonging were negotiated, claimed, and contested (see Halevi 2007; Ho 2006; Keane 2022). As such, graves have accumulated a significant degree of symbolic density and iconic value such that, to echo Karen Strassler’s words about similarly iconic images, lend themselves to serve as “the tangible terrain on which people contest the boundaries and character of their political”—and, I would add, religious—“communities” (2020, 13). In the case of Muhammadiyah, graves are the stage where the organization articulates its difference from what it understands as two extreme positions that are incompatible with a truly moderate attitude: traditionalism and Islamism. The construction and rejection of excessive attitudes toward graves, and the corresponding claim of its own attitude to be moderate, maps onto the productive tensions of self-undermining historical memories, where the physical remains of famous historical figures can only be significant when all significance is denied. Rather than a limitation, the ensuing tensions allow Muhammadiyah to construct a positionality whereby opposing virtues normally associated with other Islamic identities balance and legitimate each other through a paradoxical relationship where contestation and validation go hand in hand.

A Program of Purification

To learn more about the mysterious disappearance of Ki Bagus’s grave, I arranged a meeting with one of his descendants, Afnan Hadikusuma, himself an active Muhammadiyah member and public political figure. “Ki Bagus firmly believed that those who have died are gone, that they have no more effect on the world, and that there is no reason to make a big deal out of their graves,” Pak Afnan explained. Among the stories that were told in the family about Ki Bagus was that just before his death, he gathered his loved ones to give them instructions about how to deal with his resting place. If someone else in the community died whose descendants were unable to afford a grave, the person’s remains should be put in with his. That was his dying wish. And indeed, when a poor neighbor died some time after, his body joined Ki Bagus’s. In those days, they would only put a round rock on graves, no stone with inscriptions, and eventually the rock disappeared as well, so people just forgot where Ki Bagus’s grave was. This, according to Pak Afnan, was by design: “They didn’t want graves to become an object of cult [I. kultus].” Forgetting graves, making them less special or even absent, encapsulates some of Muhammadiyah’s core values: Not only are time and money better spent on the living, especially the poor, than the dead, but there is also emphatically nothing significant about graves. What was important about people’s lives cannot be mediated through their material remains.

With their skepticism of and even hostility toward the materiality of the spiritual, Muhammadiyah modernists are modern in a familiar sense, one characterized by self-conscious efforts to separate religion from matter. While this project is often associated with Western modernity, especially Protestantism, the separation of the material from the spiritual has always been fraught with contradictions and limitations, both in the Protestant West and in the colonized world. Nonetheless, the normative understanding of religion as immaterial appeared in the colonies with the promise of a uniquely privileged epistemic status and quintessentially modern quality (Keane 1996, 2007; see also Wiener 2007). Only backward societies continued to hold superstitions that attributed agency to dead matter and confused scientific rules of cause and effect with magic or witchcraft. Progress required human self-mastery and emancipation from such views. These ideals were naturalized by social scientific scholars such as the Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who posited an inverse relationship between a group’s level of civilization and the extent to which their notion of the transcendent relied on material form (Keane 2007, 93–97; Pels 2008; Houtman and Meyer 2012). Truthful propositions and sincerity of belief were the true locus of authenticity, whereas ritual activity or bodily disciplines were at best incidental or epiphenomenal and more likely distracting and harmful. Social scientific discourse discredited the recognition of spiritual presence in the material as a logical error, a moral vice (Engelke 2011), or an anachronism (Chakrabarty 2000). Consequently, Protestantism’s alleged fear of matter and its demand for immateriality became inseparable from both secular and religious narratives of modernity.

“So Ki Bagus’s grave is just gone?” I asked. Pak Afnan smiled. “That is God’s secret,” he said. “There are many such secrets about Ki Bagus.” Another mysterious thing happened during the War of Independence. Ki Bagus was traveling by train from Yogyakarta to Jakarta, where he was to attend a meeting about the future constitution of independent Indonesia. His train was attacked by Darul Islam,¹ Pak Afnan told me, but Ki Bagus somehow made it through the barrage of gunfire unharmed. In Jakarta he noticed that something in his bag smelled good. It was a bottle of fragrant oil that he had happened to carry with him and that had been broken as it intercepted the trajectory of a bullet headed for Ki Bagus. And another bullet was stuck in his cap. People thought he had magical powers (J. sekti), but Ki Bagus said it was just God’s doing. He was certain that material things had no spiritual or ritual efficacy, and that miraculous events were solely attributable to divine agency that is not wholly fathomable, let alone predictable, by humans. Whether the most pious like Ki Bagus are more likely to receive God’s miraculous protection is another one of God’s secrets.

The stories around Pak Afnan are linked to broader debates in the Islamic world that proceeded from the colonial project with its normative understandings of modernity. Beginning in the nineteenth century, both Western observers and Muslim reformers came to target traditional practices that recognized or performed material expressions of God’s power and presence, denouncing them as backward and incompatible with ideals of progress and the true teachings of Islam. In Egypt, the epicenter of the late-nineteenth-century modernist movement, reformers like Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā insisted that Islam was a rational religion that was relevant to contemporary times. For them, the antithesis to this modern Islam was popular Sufism, which allegedly coupled superstition with corrupt power structures, promoting ignorance and blind acquiescence that led to the excessive veneration of shaykhs and ultimately to the cult of graves (Van Bruinessen 2009; Hatina 2007; Sirriyeh 1999). The Islamic modernist critique of materiality was taken up by the first leaders of Muhammadiyah and gained further momentum with the beginnings of the Islamic revival in the 1970s, both globally and in Indonesia, where the revival was bolstered through its—albeit unstable—alignment with the New Order’s development enterprise. Over time, Muhammadiyah’s signature agenda came to be known as the purification (I. purifikasi, pemurnian) of Islam from practices deemed shirk, the veneration or kultus of objects or people as though they partook in divine power; or, in short, the fight against TBC: takhayyul (fantasy), bid’ah (innovation), and churafah (superstition). And yes, the pun is intended. Un-Islamic behavior is just as dangerous as tuberculosis, also often abbreviated as TBC in Indonesia.

Muhammadiyah’s language of purification brings to mind Bruno Latour, for whom purification was also a quintessential characteristic of modernity. In his conceptual vocabulary, purification is the ontological separation between humans who have agency and objects that do not (Latour 2002, 11). More than just an intellectual exercise, this ontological separation has a moral subtext for both Latour and many Muhammadiyah modernists, such that its accomplishment is, in Keane’s words, a matter of “moral redemption” (2007, 24). With stakes so high, the struggle for purification is regularized and institutionalized in the organization, where it is often coupled with social empowerment. Muhammadiyah’s modern hospitals, for instance, have long been a central site where this purification is continually cultivated, supplanting superstition with science and deference to traditional healers with easy access and transparency, thus facilitating the emancipation of the self from material and social dependencies.

Muhammadiyah schools have been another important site for the labor of cultivating purification.² To learn more about their curriculum, I met up with Ikhsan, a young teacher, and Erwin, a senior student at the prestigious Madrasah Mu’allimin for middle and high school boys in Yogyakarta, who told me about an annual activity mandatory for all first-year students designed to demonstrate that supernatural creatures are just a mental construct. Erwin, having undergone the exercise in his first year, had been so impressed by the experience that he got involved in its most recent iteration as an organizer. The activity entailed a nighttime trip to Pakuncen, the very cemetery where Ki Bagus’s grave had gotten lost. There, students would walk a marked path across the expansive graveyard, illuminated only by the light of the moon since all lamps had been turned off for the purpose of the exercise. They walked by themselves or, if they were really scared, in pairs. On their way, they would pass different stations where teachers or senior students would quiz them on central Islamic tenets, Muhammadiyah’s position on certain questions, or the history of their school. The questions weren’t that hard, Ikhsan said. The point was to train their mental strength, to make them focus on answering questions even if they were scared. “Perhaps you know,” Erwin told me, “that a lot of people in Indonesia still believe in ghosts.” Those who did were in for a rather unpleasant surprise: Erwin and his friend, dressed up in white shrouds, were designated as the tour’s spooks tasked with frightening approaching students by jumping out of the shadows and howling. The two chuckled. Some students ran away and a couple cried. “I feel bad for them,” Ikhsan said, his tone suddenly more somber, “but they are really shaped by this experience.” Besides, there was no shame in crying. There was even a team ready to talk to those who did, to show them that the ghost was just a senior student. Much like in an Indonesian horror movie where the spectators are asked, in Mary Steedly’s words, “to look, again and again—look more deeply, in shadowy corners . . . for the dreadful secrets of power” (2013, 284), it was demanded of the students to look, so when they encountered the next fake ghost in the cemetery, they already knew there was nothing to be afraid of. One less Indonesian who believes in ghosts. One more Indonesian redeemed. Graves, no matter how spooky, have no agency. Only senior students posing as ghosts do.

In the Middle

It was raining buckets one afternoon in February 2019 as I sat with a group of children from a Muhammadiyah elementary school in East Java in a semicircle around our tour guide on the serambi, the roofed verandah of Great Mosque of Kauman. The school had organized a trip to Yogyakarta that included sightseeing, shopping, and a tour with Muhammadiyah Heritage Trip. Run by Muhammadiyah’s young men’s branch (Pemuda Muhammadiyah), Muhammadiyah Heritage Trip is an operation that takes groups of all ages through the quarters of Yogyakarta where the historical sites and objects of Muhammadiyah’s early years can still be seen. Kauman, where Ahmad Dahlan lived and worked for most of his life, has been the most popular destination. We had been scheduled to depart several minutes ago but the rain was too heavy, and so our tour guide, Rizki, seized the opportunity to tell me more about Muhammadiyah Heritage Trip. In 2010, he explained, at the General Congress celebrating Muhammadiyah’s one-hundred-year anniversary in Yogyakarta, he and some of his friends were approached by the organization’s leadership and asked to put together a tourist package for their members. Why? “There was a need for a program that would allow people to know more,” he said. Besides, seeing the physical remnants of the organization’s history was sure to increase the motivation and organizational identification among members. Since 2012, the operation had become much more professional, boasting an Instagram page where interested groups can book a range of walking tour concepts that appeal to different demographics, including a Kauman Night Trail and Outdoor Games. The goal, in all of these, was to make accessible the history of the organization and the physical records of its most significant milestones.

Muhammadiyah Heritage Trip, with its positive attitude toward material remnants of historical significance, indicates that not all physical objects are equally problematic for Muhammadiyah modernists. These diverging understandings speak to the central insight that the very concept of material mediation is not stable or universal but situated in specific semiotic ideologies that determine what counts as material in the first place. In Muhammadiyah’s history, there have often been moments where indigenous forms of expression were considered “more material” (Rowlands 2005, 80) than Western ones, which were “modern” and “rational-scientific,” and thus somehow immaterial. At Dahlan’s time, the reform of the school curriculum entailed the introduction of new subjects like gramophone, harmonica, checkers, and model boats (Peacock 1978, 53). And Dahlan reportedly played the violin, displacing the Javanese gamelan orchestra. When an elderly resident of Kauman told me that Dahlan didn’t play the violin but the accordion, it occurred to me that in spite of the now legendary status of the violin, its replacement with another Western instrument is conceivable, whereas Dahlan could have never played the rebana or another “traditional” instrument.³ These inconsistencies seem to confirm Latour’s view that a complete purification is bound to fail because some sort of material mediation is indispensable in any kind of discourse or practice (2002). Yet the divergent appraisals of the material status of objects also suggest that while materiality in its familiar sense may be inescapable, it may not appear that way to those who are involved in it. Purification does not simply fail, but the conditions of its failure depend on the understandings of materiality underpinning any purificatory agenda.⁴ While such failures may point to the inherent limitations of modernist discourse, as Latour argued, their specific configurations are not just epiphenomenal. They may be doing productive work—especially at moments of transition, where conflicting understandings of materiality come into sharp focus.

It is just such a transition that has recently been underway in Muhammadiyah. The emergence of initiatives like Muhammadiyah Heritage Trip, with an agenda of educating constituents in the organization’s history, is a relatively novel phenomenon. During most of the New Order, stories about the past were scarce, except for occasional references to the negative situations that Muhammadiyah had come to remedy. Accounts of moral decay, ignorance, and “the smell of incense and the smoke of opium” (Hardjono 1969, as cited in Nakamura 2012, 13) performed a break with the past but said little else about Muhammadiyah’s own historical becoming. During the years surrounding the 1998 transition to the Reformation Era, this attitude of disinterest was gradually replaced by an openness to, and indeed a push for, increased historical awareness. Ahmad Syafii Maarif, Muhammadiyah’s chairperson during parts of this time of transition (1998–2005), was among the first to endorse historical knowledge in the organization. Knowledge of the past, he argued in a programmatic speech in 1997, provided people with a better understanding of the contemporary world. When properly exegeted or put under erasure (see chapters 2 and 3), the past contained valuable lessons on how to act in the present.⁵ In the subsequent years, Muhammadiyah’s official media outlets increasingly turned to central events in the organization’s history, especially the life of Ahmad Dahlan, to articulate their identity and central values. Concurrently, Muhammadiyah’s past also became a topic of broader public attention and admiration, culminating in the box office success of film producer Hanung Bramantyo’s biopic on Dahlan, Sang Pencerah (The Enlightener), in 2010. Pleased with the public interest but taking issue with the film’s historical inaccuracies, the organization’s history experts rode the wave of the film’s success to address the public with their own, corrected versions.

This shift toward greater historical awareness and pride in Muhammadiyah coincided with a parallel trend of increasing openness toward cultural and material forms of expression for spreading the message of Islam.⁶ At the 2000 General Congress in Jakarta, the organization’s Council for Legal Reasoning adopted the conceptual vocabulary of the Moroccan Muslim intellectual al-Jābirī to set forth a new epistemic framework integrating rational (burhānī) thought, esoteric (ʿirfānī) knowledge, and textual-historical (bayānī) legacies (Thoyibi et al. 2003, 3–5; see also Kersten 2015, 97–100). At the 2003 Mid-Term Congress in Makassar, the question of legitimate sources of knowledge was revisited and confirmed when a committee consisting of, among others, the future general chairperson Haedar Nashir, drafted a program titled “The Cultural Daʿwa of Muhammadiyah.” Emphasizing the permissibility of the cultural adaptation of daʿwa in the light of the Qur’an and the Prophetic example,⁷ the program extolled the potential benefits of art and local customs, as long as they had been properly purified, rationalized, and demythologized (Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah 2016, 39; see also Daniels 2009, 95–114). Although controversial initially, the program came to be accepted among the liberal segments of the organization, to the point that prominent spokespersons like Hilman Latief have called the contemporary era a “post-puritanism” that cares more about progress (I. kemajuan) than purification (I. purifikasi)—although simultaneously conceding that the latter continued to be central to the organization’s agenda (Latief 2017, 31).

These two parallel trends reinforced each other as the awakening of historical awareness was bolstered by a greater appreciation of the material and cultural manifestations of history. Around the time of the 2010 General Congress, they crystallized into increasingly concrete initiatives, including the Muhammadiyah Museum in Yogyakarta (discussed in the previous chapter) and the conception of an educational tourist package for visitors to Yogyakarta, which I got to experience that afternoon in February 2019.

The rain had let up, although the sky was still ominously gray. Rizki and the other guides invited the students to line up in front of the mosque and divided them into three smaller groups of a couple dozen that were assigned to a particular guide. Rizki was not assigned as a guide, so he and I joined one of the other groups. The tour began with a narration of the historical significance of the Great Mosque, the mosque of the sultan’s palace, built in 1773. After explaining the Sultanate’s ties with Kauman, the traditional living quarter of the Great Mosque’s officials, he led us to the nearby residence of the highest religious official of the Sultanate and head of the mosque (J. penghulu). As we walked, it began to drizzle again. By the time we had reached the penghulu’s house, rain was pouring down once more. The students were undeterred. Sharing umbrellas and raincoats, they followed their guides into the narrow alleys of Kauman while Rizki, a group of teachers from the school, and I stayed behind, huddling under the eaves of the gate that separated the square around the mosque from the residential part of Kauman. “Where are they going?” one of the teachers asked, nodding after the group of colorful umbrellas disappearing in the distance. Rizki explained their itinerary: They would go to the women’s prayer house, Mushollah Aysiyah, built in 1922; Langgar Kidul, where Dahlan lived and taught his students; the Kauman cemetery, where Siti Walidah, Dahlan’s first wife, was buried; and Muhammadiyah’s first elementary school, founded in 1923. “But,” Rizki added, “the original elementary school is no longer there. They tore it down because they needed more space.” He looked unhappy. “There was nothing we could do,” he said. “We are advocating for the maintenance of Kauman’s tangible heritage, but people just don’t listen.” The elementary school was one of three historical buildings that had already been compromised in their historical integrity. A second one was the original headquarters and library of the Council for Libraries, which was now in private ownership; and the third was a school and prayer house. “I understand that sometimes they need to update the facilities,” he said, “but people’s concern for culture is simply insufficient.”

The latent controversies around the historical buildings of Kauman bring to mind other more extreme cases of unease with material objects or, more broadly, “heritage failure” (Rico 2019), hostile or indifferent attitudes toward heritage preservation, around the Islamic world. High-profile cases like the destruction of Palmyra or the Timbuktu library, broadcast to the world as a tragic example of the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism, loom large in global memory.⁸ Perhaps this was also on Rizki’s mind when he complained about people’s insufficient concern for Kauman’s historical buildings. Not always focused on the lacking concern for historical structures, the invocation of an insufficiency among the membership was something I heard in many conversations with Muhammadiyah modernists. “People aren’t disciplined enough,” one said. “They don’t care as much as they used to,” another one lamented. In the past, they agreed, members of the organization had dedicated themselves more strongly to the cause. Their anxieties were not entirely unfounded. They reflect broader social shifts in post–New Order Indonesia that have led to a decline of Muhammadiyah’s formerly prominent status in the nation’s public life. The democratic reforms after May 1998 facilitated the liberalization of Indonesia’s religious landscape that afforded formerly marginalized religious groups the opportunity to emerge in the public sphere, propagate their beliefs, and recruit members. In this context, Indonesian Islam experienced what some have called a “conservative turn” (Van Bruinessen 2013) evidenced by the appearance of transnational Islamist groups promoting strict monotheism, the purification of Islam, and the cultivation of a pious subject.⁹ These groups, Muhammadiyah’s new competitors, covered a broad ideological spectrum, ranging from terrorist or vigilante groups like Jemaah Islamiyah or Front Pembela Islam¹⁰ to political parties, especially PKS, the Prosperous Justice Party.

Many of my Muhammadiyah interlocutors considered the latter to be their most serious competitor. Modeled after the Muslim Brotherhood, PKS has come to occupy a position of social acceptability by using the democratic process to advocate for the Islamization of state and government and the implementation of Islamic law. The party became notorious for infiltrating established organizations, including Muhammadiyah, causing serious damage and a significant loss of constituents.¹¹ Several of my interlocutors admitted that it was easy for the radical groups to poach members from Muhammadiyah because they did in fact share a great deal of ideological ground. With their common origins in the reform movements during colonial times, modernism and Islamism are similar in their concern for social activism and the focus on reviving Islam through a direct return to Qur’an and Sunna (Euben and Zaman 2009; Moaddel and Talattof 2016; Meijer 2009). The central leadership of Muhammadiyah responded to these recruitment efforts in 2006 by forbidding PKS infiltration in Muhammadiyah institutions,¹² but much harm had already been done. When PKS even began to compete with Muhammadiyah in the education sector, the traditional backbone of the organization (Fuad 2002), they took away opportunities for Muhammadiyah to socialize the youngest and also added insult to injury by threatening to outshine Muhammadiyah at what they had always done best.

Especially for the liberal wing of Muhammadiyah, this loss of constituents, vexing as it was, was only half the problem. Just as serious was the fact that some factions within the organization had themselves drifted to the right, threatening to blur meaningful distinctions between their modernist movement and Islamism. After the tenure of the liberal and progressive Ahmad Syafii Maarif as Muhammadiyah’s general chairperson (1998–2005), the elections of the 2005 General Congress were experienced by many as a conservative backlash. Din Syamsuddin, a candidate with links to Islamic right-wing organizations, was elected the general chairperson and would be reelected in 2010. Foreign observers called Din a radical and predicted that a significant shift to the right by the organization was imminent (Liddle 2007; A. Smith 2007). But reality turned out to be more complex, as the liberal wing of the organization was never fully muted. During Din’s tenure, Muhammadiyah implemented the 2006 resolution forbidding PKS infiltration at Muhammadiyah institutions and also began to take a more active interest in cultivating historical knowledge about the organization among their constituents (Burhani 2013a). As Robert Hefner (2019) wrote, there has been no uniform conservative turn in Indonesian Islam. Likewise in Muhammadiyah, liberal and conservative views coexist, even if their coexistence has not always been easy. According to Burhani, the “tug of war between two opposite groups, the conservatives and the liberals, is an indication that ideologically, the movement is unstable” (2013a, 136).

Numerous liberal Muhammadiyah members with whom I spoke resented the pressures from the right wing within and outside of the organization. Certain structural similarities notwithstanding, they felt that Muhammadiyah should be incompatible with right-wing Islam and insisted that they were a moderate organization. In this regard, the organization’s liberal wing is aligned with a global trend in the post-9/11 world, where moderate Islam has become a highly coveted label. Muslims around the world have come under increasing pressure to prove that they are moderates, that they are unlike those terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers (Mahmood 2006; Corbett 2017). In Indonesia, these pressures mounted after 2002, when a terror cell associated with Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda detonated three bombs at tourist establishments in Bali, killing 202 people. As Indonesia’s global reputation of being home to a moderate and tolerant Islam seemed under threat, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the then-president of Indonesia, yielded to Western governments’ demands that Indonesia prove its commitment to fighting terrorism (Sebastian 2003; A. Smith 2007). In this context, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs installed a Directorate of Information and Public Diplomacy tasked with the presentation and production of Indonesian Islam to an international audience as moderate and democratic. Muhammadiyah and NU, the country’s two largest Islamic mass organizations, were enlisted by the government as partners in this endeavor (Hoesterey 2018). To show that they truly were unlike their new competition, Muhammadiyah’s leadership has embarked on a campaign to bolster their profile as a moderate organization compatible with democracy and pluralism.

Against this background, it is no accident that Muhammadiyah’s growing interest in their history has coincided with the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia. Faced with the crisis of increasing pressures from the right at a time when it was so important to be moderate, the liberal elites of Muhammadiyah discovered that in their own organizational history, they could find evidence of their moderate identity, proving that, since their foundation, they had struggled against political oppression and promoted social empowerment. In so doing, they had strengthened the civil Islam within the Indonesian Republic instead of promoting an Islamic state.¹³ By remembering what they had been like in the past, they could show that they had been around since long before the nation’s independence, that Muhammadiyah had even been one of the engines that had created a democratic vision of Islam in Indonesia¹⁴ and that they were therefore completely unlike PKS and other organizations that had only appeared after 1998 and whose goal was to destroy Indonesian democracy.

By calling PKS and other organizations antidemocratic, my interlocutors vilified these movements using a conceptual and moral framework that accompanied these pressures to be moderate, and that originated in the West, but was globalized and vernacularized, even in Muslim societies (Bayraklı and Hafez 2019; Daghistani 2021). The category of Islamic fundamentalism, Roxanne Euben argued, has been constructed by social scientific discourses of modern rationalism, “the measure and substance of modernity itself” (1999, 21), as its irrational Other, “a negative mirror reflecting back on Western life that which it would leave behind” (44). As the mirror image on which modern Western anxieties are projected, Islamic fundamentalism has come to signify a resurgence of the antidemocratic, the antimodern, the violent, and, above all, the irrational. Like Euben’s Western yardstick of rationality, Muhammadiyah also necessitates its irrational, radical Other, an image of that which it is not.

Crucially, however, the irrational and violent Islamic fundamentalist is not the only negative mirror image threatening self-understandings in Muhammadiyah. When I interviewed a man I call Pak Idris, a Muhammadiyah activist from Kauman, he joined others in the organization by opining that Muhammadiyah’s greatest contemporary challenge was Islamist groups. They were different from Muhammadiyah because Muhammadiyah was progressive (I. berkemajuan), which he defined as an Islam with a “healthy mind” (I. akal sehat). The Islamists would grow long beards, break the fast with a date, and practice polygamy because the Prophet had done so. That was not what a healthy mind would do. But when I asked Pak Idris what exactly he meant by a healthy mind, he no longer explained it in contradistinction from the Islamists he had just mentioned. “The definition of a healthy mind,” he said, “is the synchronization of the logic of the heart with rational thought.” His reference to the heart invoked long-standing discussions in Muhammadiyah about how a faith that only relied on rationality was too “dry” or emotionally unsatisfying.¹⁵ Deploying another common trope, Pak Idris contended that the same unhealthy reliance on reason alone was responsible for the current spiritual crisis in Western countries (see Hamka 2015; Madjid 1988). Discussions around dryness in Muhammadiyah have often been organized around differences between the purified but dry practices of Muhammadiyah and the emotionally rich ritual practices of traditional Islam that were, however, always in danger of TBC and shirk (Howell 2001, 712–13; Nakamura 2012, 331). Pak Idris agreed: TBC in NU, he explained, was the result of a lack of logical reasoning. Either extreme—dryness or irrationality—was unhealthy. “It is like driving a car,” he said. The mind was the gas pedal and the heart was the brake. If you only use your mind, the gas pedal, you will have a wreck. If you only use your heart, the brake, you won’t get anywhere. Muhammadiyah, with its healthy mind, was using both gas pedal and brake as needed, thus moving safely and effectively.

If every idealizing attribution invokes its opposite, Pak Idris presented a complex picture of multiple mirror images reflecting back on Muhammadiyah’s modernism what is antithetical to their self-understanding as the perceived ideals and virtues of modern rationalism simultaneously become a virtue and a vice. If modern rationalism is the antithesis of the irrationality of both Islamism’s narrow-minded radicalism and the superstitions of traditionalism as its unequal opposites, it also invokes dryness and the ailments of Western secularism. The emotional richness of traditionalism is not only irrational, but also at odds with scripture—but relying too heavily on scripture is, again, irrational, something Islamists do. These mirror images, on which Muhammadiyah projects what it wants to leave behind, are in an uneasy relation with each other. The same is the case for Muhammadiyah’s fundamental anxieties, as is apparent in the ambivalences around graves and buildings. The agenda to purify Islam has often clashed with the desire to use the physical historical traces of the organization’s history as media of historical knowledge and pious inspiration. A forgotten grave may be the safest grave when it comes to fighting TBC and shirk, but the disappearance of Ki Bagus’s last resting place sits uneasily with those in the organization who have promoted historical knowledge. Haedar Nashir, Muhammadiyah’s general chairperson, commented at the time that graves should not be neglected to the point of being forgotten, that the memory of the organization’s important figures had to be kept alive (Makam Pahlawan Hilang 2015). Others felt the same way: “We have realized, much too late,” a Muhammadiyah activist and professor at one of Yogyakarta’s universities told me, “that the heritage of Indonesian Islam is under attack.” That was why history had become so important: It would strengthen Muhammadiyah’s identity and reinvigorate the consciousness of being a moderate Islamic movement. She added: “If you just look at Muhammadiyah’s liberal elite, everything seems to be just fine. But if you look at the umma, there is confusion. We have to bring our heritage back now or it will all be gone.” Gone, like the grave of Ki Bagus Hadikusuma; and gone, like the historical buildings of Kauman.

Dilemmas of Modernity and Moderate Islam

After the rain had once again subsided, Rizki took me and the teachers on an abbreviated tour of Kauman to show us the highlights of what we had missed. Our last stop was the cemetery immediately west of the Great Mosque, the grave of Siti Walidah, Ahmad Dahlan’s first wife, widely considered the mother of the organization’s branch for women, Aisyiyah. Whereas Dahlan was buried in Karangkajen, Siti Walidah, who outlived him by more than two decades and died in 1946, was buried in her home neighborhood Kauman. In the 1950s, the graveyard was closed for additional burials and its gates were locked. Visitors have been barred from entry ever since, even after Siti Walidah was declared a “national hero” in 1971 (Suratmin 1990). The tour guides of Muhammadiyah Heritage Trip, however, had special permission to take groups inside.

If the stakes are already high with Kauman’s historical buildings, the grave of a figure as beloved as Siti Walidah is a site where Muhammadiyah’s conflicting anxieties, apprehended through a gaze that understands purification as fundamentalism and preservation as superstition, come to an especially hard clash. The dead human body, scholars have noted, poses a challenge to our sense of order and conventional categories undergirding semiotic ideologies. This is especially the case for communities that emphasize the finality of death or even deny the possibility of the transcendent (Verdery 1999; Vitebsky 2017). Once it is stripped of life, the body becomes an object without agency, but it also used to be a person whose life is still valued and remembered. This cognitive dissonance can lead to “a potential opening, or rent, in the closed world structure” (Engelke 2015, 36). To manage this threat of the world structure’s rupture, discourses and practices around the dead body are carefully managed to ensure they cannot open the door to irrational beliefs or superstition. While the modernist Muslims in Muhammadiyah do believe in a transcendent reality and life after death, they separate this transcendent reality carefully from the material, phenomenal world of which dead bodies are a part. Modernists often cite a Hadith to confirm their view that the dead are beyond the reach of those who are still alive: “When a man dies, his acts come to an end, [except for] three[:] recurring charity, or knowledge (by which people) benefit, or a pious son, who prays for him (for the deceased)” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Muslim 1631). The souls of the dead may exist in another realm, but that realm is completely separate and inaccessible from the world of the living, and vice versa. What remains in this world, the dead bodies, is dead matter without any agency. And yet, dead bodies are powerful and dangerous, because the emotional ties one continues to have with them can result in confusion, in confusing dead matter with agentive subjects. This sense of danger is tangible at the Kauman graveyard.

Having been closed decades ago, the Kauman graveyard looked abandoned. Nature had taken over. The graves were overgrown by weeds. Many of the gravestones were so weatherworn that it was impossible to read the inscriptions. Several had entirely fallen over and some were broken. The largest graves of the complex, belonging to a minor wife of Sultan Hamengkabuwana I (d. 1792) and their son, was covered with a half-collapsed roofed structure built on top of the grave. In the corner of the graveyard, Siti Walidah’s grave was in a much tidier state than the others. It was clear that someone was regularly weeding the area around it. Just a few feet beyond, however, the grounds had been reclaimed by vegetation. One of the teachers, a middle-aged woman, was visibly shaken by the state of the cemetery in which the grave of Aisyiyah’s beloved figurehead was located. “Why isn’t it cared for better?” she asked as she knelt down at the side of the grave. At first, our tour guide explained that the caretaker of the cemetery was already old and that the maintenance of the graveyard was simply too much for him. Then he added, hesitantly: “I am not sure but there used to be people who came on pilgrimage and turned the graves into an object of cult [kultus]. Therefore the people of Kauman decided to put an end to it by closing the cemetery down.”

Rizki employed the language of the grave as an object of cult. Others in Muhammadiyah often invoked TBC and shirk. Western social scientific discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, on the other hand, adopted the comparable category of fetishism to describe confusions about ontological categories (Marx 1976, 163–77; Freud 1924–1950, 198–204). Victorian anthropologists and scholars of religious studies readily embraced the term, defining fetishism as an early stage in evolutionary taxonomies of religion.¹⁶ More recently, scholars have re-claimed the concept of the fetish as an analytic category describing a moment of a clash or “incommensurable difference” (Pietz 1985, 13) in understandings of materiality and its meaning. The category points to two interrelated dynamics. First, normally unproblematic notions of materiality or immateriality are challenged in the moment of clash, potentially resulting in uncertainty or ambivalence, or the realization that some objects are “more material” than others (Rowlands 2005, 80; see also Keane 2007, 21–22). And second, the accusation of fetishism is situated within particular power dynamics, whereby the accuser appeals to broader discursive formations, such as the disciplinary apparatus of the social sciences (Wiener 2007). My Muhammadiyah interlocutors’ language of kultus or shirk activated similar dynamics, invoking the discursive apparatus of a normative Islamic orthodoxy. Shirk, the act of accepting another entity at God’s side and thus violating the central Islamic tenet of the singularity and oneness of God (A. tawḥīd), also arises in moments of contact between different understandings of objects and their agency. In Islam, graves have often been a site of such contact.¹⁷

In spite of the uneasiness around graves among Muhammadiyah members, the practice of visiting graves or ziarah was never explicitly forbidden in the organization. In a fatwa issued by the Council for Legal Reasoning in 1971, the organization’s legal experts stated: “Go on ziarah to graves so that you will remember the Hereafter; and do not do any of the things there that were never permitted by Allah and His Prophet, such as: asking things from the bodies and making them an intermediary [I. perantaraan] with God” (Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadijah 1971, 236–37). Nonetheless, ziarah was never widely practiced until Muhammadiyah became interested in its organization’s history after the fall of the New Order. As graves became objects of interest, the question of what it meant to go on ziarah without accidentally doing one of the things that were never permitted by Allah and His Prophet, or to even just be tempted to do so, became increasingly urgent. Once it is agreed that a figure in Islamic history needs to be remembered because of their legacy, and that their grave is an important historic site, the grave, as a material object, is “in the end, there: something to be reckoned with” (Engelke 2011, 78)—and what its presence means is therefore available for multiple interpretations. Those with modernist sensibilities may know that graves have no agency, but they cannot stop others from knowing something else to be true (Keane 2022).

Globally, efforts to control this risk have often taken the form of rules and prohibitions around graves, including strict guidelines for what graves should look like or what kind of behaviors were acceptable there (Beránek and Ťupek 2018). At the Kauman cemetery, the anxiety of kultus was managed through the absence of certain markers that the grave might be special, including prayer books, flowers, or even maintenance and care. There is a “semiotic density” (Keane 2022, 414) in the small headstones and low stone slabs enclosing the graves of modernist cemeteries—no higher than a hand span, according to a fatwa by Muhammadiyah’s Council for Legal Reasoning and Renewal¹⁸—completely unlike the extravagant structures built on top of graves administered by traditionalists, which could easily open the gate to irrational practices and kultus. The tour groups find a space that has been “desacralized,” according to an article by a group of Muhammadiyah scholars (Triatmodjo et al. 2009, 4), who, in typical Muhammadiyah language, define desacralization as a denial of the site’s supernatural (I. supranatural) or sacred (I. keramat) powers, which amounts to the purification (I. pemurnian) of the Islamic understanding of tawḥīd (5–6): God alone has agency, and God’s agency is not mediated through objects.

During the time I was at the Kauman cemetery with the group of teachers, no one felt like this was a particularly good solution. Someone in the group commented how sad it made him to see the grave like this. “Yes,” our tour guide agreed, “whenever I bring visitors here they get sad. But what can we do?” The middle-aged woman who had been clearly shaken by the state of the graveyard and had knelt down next to the grave seemed to pay no attention and continued to kneel, as if to show Siti Walidah the respect she was denied in her material surroundings. As the only woman in the group, perhaps she felt that she was entitled or even expected to show a bit more emotion than her male companions.¹⁹ Rizki, as if to try to provide some solace, commented quietly that compared to the rest of the cemetery, Siti Walidah’s grave was relatively well cared for. Then his voice changed as he continued with his presentation, “I always tell the visitors to measure the height of the stone slabs enclosing the grave. It is less than a hand span. It is a properly Islamic grave.”

AMBIGUITY and the Construction of Identity

If Muhammadiyah’s modernist values and the ambivalences around them are performed at the graves of Ki Bagus Hadikusuma and Siti Walidah through disappearance and calculated neglect, Ahmad Dahlan’s grave presents yet another strategy. It is a small plot, enclosed by flat white stone slabs, no higher than a hand span, and marked by a simple headstone that is inscribed with only his name. It is located behind Masjid Jami’, the neighborhood mosque of Karangkajen, another historical Muhammadiyah quarter south of Kauman. A green sign indicates that like many other early Muhammadiyah activists, Dahlan was declared a national hero by the Indonesian government. The government, it is said in Muhammadiyah circles, would have liked to build a larger monument to commemorate Dahlan’s memory, but the community would not have it. It was not advisable to act as though his grave was a special place. All the graves in the Karangkajen graveyard look just like his. With its neat simplicity and strict conformity it is completely unlike most other Javanese graveyards, where gravestones of different sizes and in various stages of disrepair are arranged in no particular order. When Muhammadiyah modernists have described the cemetery to me, they often called it “clean,”²⁰ with some pride in its simplicity and uniformity. For them, the grave’s appearance proves that Muhammadiyah has other financial priorities, especially the social empowerment of the marginalized, and furthermore it discourages the veneration of the grave.

I have argued that graves in Muhammadiyah are dense nodes or sites of intersection between the organization’s conflicting anxieties and desires, expressed as their efforts to distance themselves from other Islamic orientations they find objectionable. This tension is grafted onto debates around the status of material objects and their purification. Dahlan’s grave is perhaps the site into which different factions in Muhammadiyah have invested the greatest amount of labor to negotiate questions of legitimate memory, materiality, and shirk. At the intersection of conflicting anxieties and desires, his grave is a site where purification fails spectacularly, as Latour (2002) put it. A carefully curated simplicity of low stone slabs and identical-looking graves—supposed to provide “an escape from materiality” (Keane 2001, 87) —is ultimately the material expressions of a detachment from materiality; an emphatic performance of a rejection. While this failure may be inevitable due to the inherent contradictions in the project of purification (Latour 2002; Keane 2007; Engelke 2011), I argue that this contradiction is not just a discursive limitation, but that it is constructive for Muhammadiyah, as it situates the organization in an unstable and ambiguous middle position that avoids association with either traditionalists or fundamentalists. Between the shifting mirror images of these immoderate extremes, the organization has staked out this middle position as the location of moderate Islam.

figure 6. The grave of Ahmad Dahlan in 2019. Photograph courtesy of Diah Puspita.

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The Karangkajen cemetery, with its iconic simplicity, emphatically performs not attributing special significance to graves. Yet ironically, much effort has gone into this display of denying the grave’s significance. As I learned from Muhammadiyah members who were residents of the area, the graveyard used to look a lot more like most others in Java. It was back in 2003 when the leadership of the mosque adjacent to the cemetery decided to turn the site into what they call a properly Islamic graveyard. An elderly Karangkajen resident whom I will call Pak Jazir, one of the drivers of the initiative at the time, explained to me that according to the Qur’an and the Sunna, it was wrong to have large structures or gravestones built on top of graves. Only a small headstone was allowed. Some people, he remembered, objected, but that was because they didn’t understand the relevant rulings. Once those rulings had been explained to them, they agreed. They put an announcement in Yogyakarta’s daily newspaper, Kedaulatan Rakyat, to inform people that the cemetery of Karangkajen would be renovated according to Islamic law. If people had not come by the end of the month to tidy up the graves of their deceased family members, the people of Karangkajen would do it for them. But most of them came, he said. By making all graves look the same, like Dahlan’s grave, they underlined that he is just like anyone else and that graves need to be simple, because money and energy should better be invested in the living than in the dead.

The renovation of the Karangkajen graveyard coincided with the transitions that Indonesia underwent in the years following the collapse of the New Order, the growth of radical Islam in Indonesia, and the ensuing pressures on Muhammadiyah. As discussed earlier, after 9/11 and the Bali bombing successive Indonesian governments sought collaboration with Muhammadiyah and NU to promote moderate Islam and to curate Indonesia to a global audience as pluralistic, democratic, and tolerant. Although both organizations are fragmented into different factions, including some that are very conservative (Arifianto 2017; Van Bruinessen 2013; Menchik 2019), the leaderships of both have eagerly embraced the opportunity to claim such a politically advantageous moderate identity, a strategy that has often worked, as became evident in their nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize (see introduction and Patria 2019). Some of my interlocutors in each organization perceived Muhammadiyah and NU to be partners in the struggle for moderate Islam. Other times, especially when the two organizations compete for government patronage, positions, and resources, it has been opportune for each organization to craft their own standards of what moderate Islam means (Hoesterey 2020) and to lay claim to the label of Indonesia’s true moderate Muslims at the expense of the other. At the time of my field research in 2019, during the presidential election, when many Muhammadiyah members were resentful that the incumbent candidate Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had chosen the senior NU cleric Ma’ruf Amin as a running mate, this competition was particularly acute. “It is difficult for us,” one disgruntled Muhammadiyah activist complained to me, “because NU members will just vote for whoever their kyai tells them to vote for.” As teachers and community leaders, the kyai have a powerful status in traditionalist communities (Dhofier 1999). Not entirely unreasonably, this Muhammadiyah activist assumed that all NU members would automatically vote for Jokowi because of Ma’ruf Amin.²¹ Others agreed with him. Compared to NU, I was often told, Muhammadiyah was a lot more democratic. People thought for themselves and didn’t just do as they were told. Indeed, Muhammadiyah’s purificatory agenda of breaking up such dependencies and hierarchies had empowered people to become democratic subjects and had therefore lent critical support to the historical becoming and maintenance of the Indonesian Republic.

This exclusion of traditionalism from such a democratic vision also has broader global traction. As Saba Mahmood showed in a seminal essay, global public discourses have defined moderate Muslims as those who share with the West their “approach to scriptural hermeneutics” that strive to “refashion Islam along the lines of the Protestant Reformation” (2006, 329). Crucially, Mahmood demonstrated a link connecting these globalized discourses around moderate Islam with long-standing debates about the role of materiality in religious communities and its relation to modernity. According to these views, only those who are able to abstract from the specific and contingent to the universal become aware of their religion’s fundamental truths, which are also compatible with other religions’ fundamental truths, as well as the truths of Western secular liberalism. This hermeneutic project produces a normative religious subject that is amenable to understandings of the material forms of religion in accordance with modern ontologies and epistemologies. Those who lack these critical faculties run risk of dangerous confusion. This is obviously the case with Islamists, who reject Western hermeneutic principles in their understanding of scripture; but it is also the case with traditionalists, whose ritual practice and deference to authority is antithetical to modern Western principles like critical thinking and independence (334). This makes them vulnerable to being manipulated by elites who want to harness their religious fervor for their own, illiberal goals (341)—like their support in elections, as many Muhammadiyah members argued in 2019.

When I asked people in the organization what being moderate meant to them, I often heard that it meant being neither too far to the left nor too far to the right. An Islam that is moderate is an Islam that does not veer too far from the middle. This metaphor of the middle path obliquely evokes political associations of resisting political extremes, but it is deliberately vague in not proposing a specific program or agenda, instead proposing a flexible agenda in which the avoidance of extremes is a virtue in and of itself. The language of Muhammadiyah occupying a position in the middle was popularized especially by Ahmad Syafii Maarif, Muhammadiyah’s erstwhile chairperson whom we encountered as one of the voices in the organization responsible for the historical turn in the early 2000s. Before his death in 2022, he could often be found in his office at the headquarters of Muhammadiyah’s journal, Suara Muhammadiyah. He had long retired, but he still held an advisory position at the journal. On one occasion, he explained to me that moderate Islam is mandated by the Qur’an: “We have made you [believers] into a just community,” or, in Arabic, into an ummatan wasaṭan, more literally a “middle community,” “so that you may bear witness [to the truth] before others and so that the Messenger may bear witness [to it] before you.”²² If Islam gets too extreme, it will decay. That was what had happened in the Middle East.²³ In Indonesia things were better, moderate Islam was still strong. While Syafii Maarif explicitly included NU as a partner in the struggle for moderate Islam, the image of the middle community proved just as productive for those who are more ambivalent about NU’s status. By claiming a position in the middle, Muhammadiyah has to rely discursively on the construction and rejection of negative extremes to walk the middle path promoted by Syafii Maarif.

The tensions around Dahlan’s grave and the Karangkajen graveyard, a space that has been so carefully renovated, open up a semiotic space that makes it possible to stride such a middle path—even as doing so has not always been free of conflict. Having cautiously adopted memory practices involving material objects like graves in the effort to distance themselves from Islamists, Muhammadiyah members are navigating opposing agendas and anxieties when dealing with the physical site where their famous historical figures were buried. Many of my interlocutors, especially the younger generation of Muhammadiyah activists who had been brought up in the organization in the years when the historical and cultural turn was already underway, found ziarah beneficial. Several had even participated in organized tours to the grave of Dahlan through their Muhammadiyah groups. They found that their visit had really made their organization’s history come to life. One of them referred to his tour, in English, as an “ideological charging.” They also told me that they had found the cemetery’s simplicity inspiring.²⁴ Dahlan’s grave sets an example of a devotionalism that prioritizes social engagement and personal initiative. But others I spoke with, especially people from the older generation of Muhammadiyah activists who had been socialized into the organization before these shifts, had reservations. They conceded that ziarah could conceivably circumvent shirk as long as the dead were not addressed in prayer—something that traditionalists supposedly do—and the ceremony was kept to a minimum. Still, they found ziarah to be a temptation that could lead to accidental acts of shirk, or they simply found it unnecessary. “After all,” one of them told me, “you can just pray at home.” Graves are places like any other. The dead are gone.

Because moderate Islam means the avoidance of extremes or dissociation from culturally generated images that are attributed negatively, and because the rejection of one always threatens to generate proximity to or affiliation with the other, Muhammadiyah’s position and self-representation are inherently contradictory and fragmented. Of course, there is nothing unique about this. As argued in chapter 1, traditionalists are also inhabiting different incommensurable worlds. According to Katherine Ewing (1990), a disintegrated and unstable subject may constantly shift frameworks of reference depending on the context, tolerating a significant amount of inconsistency. The illusory nature of wholeness and the disintegration of our self-representations is especially brought to light at times of stress or conflict, or when categories of the past no longer fit present situations (270–73), as Muhammadiyah is experiencing today. Yet even at times of conflict when incommensurable interpretations of a situation are juxtaposed, the fragmented subject often experiences and articulates their self as whole and coherent at any given moment. Likewise, contradictions were rarely made explicit among my interlocutors, even as they shifted between frameworks of reference and their associated language to distance themselves from traditionalists, Islamists, and the West. This ideological fragmentation also resonates with debates in the study of Islamic ethics, where scholars including Daniel Birchok (2019) and David Kloos (2018) have discussed how Muslims navigate conflicting, mutually exclusive religious or social concerns. Building on disagreements in the anthropology of Islam on how to conceptualize ethical formation in relation to the pious cultivation of the Islamic revival and everyday life,²⁵ they suggest taking seriously moments of incoherence and failure as productive and meaningful moments in a person’s formation and self-understanding. Incoherence and failure may, for example, lead to insights about the intimate entanglements of worldly and religious concerns; the particularities of a person’s context in relation to Islamic norms and values; or the sense of the longer trajectory of life, encompassing different moments and phases. While Muhammadiyah’s ambivalences play out on an organizational rather than personal level, the dynamics are similar, where conflicting positions and instability are used to articulate what a single coherent discourse could not accomplish.

When Muhammadiyah activists today talk about Dahlan’s grave and the beginnings of its commemoration, they often emphasize that after his death in 1923, his grave was forgotten like Ki Bagus’s, and no one knew where it was until decades later. The story of the grave’s rediscovery was related to me by Pak Syukrianto, a prominent Muhammadiyah member and producer of the organization’s historical films. He, in turn, had heard it years ago from his grandfather and erstwhile general chairperson of Muhammadiyah, A. R. Fakhruddin,²⁶ who had been involved in its rediscovery. In 1955, Indonesia hosted the Asia-Africa conference and welcomed foreign representatives, including Islamic scholars from North Africa. Those ulama, Pak Syukri recounted, were amazed when they saw the schools, hospitals, and universities that had been built by Muhammadiyah. They wanted to know where the founder was buried to visit his grave and to pay their respects. But it turned out that no one knew where Dahlan was buried. The Indonesian government asked Muhammadiyah for help. Someone who had attended the funeral in 1923 was found, and he identified the spot. The grave had not been taken care of for decades and had to be made somewhat presentable—but apparently not presentable enough, because when the African ulama finally came, they were appalled. Why, they asked, is his grave so modest? Don’t you respect your founder? Yes, we do, Pak Syukri explained to me. But Dahlan himself would not have wanted a fancy grave. He would have said, if you have money, build schools or hospitals, not graves.

And for some, even the simple grave and the sign put up by the Indonesian government to mark the final resting place of a national hero is too much. Stories of the sign disappearing have wide currency in Yogyakarta Muhammadiyah circles. No one really knows who did it, or when, or how often; but this mysterious theft is the topic of lively speculation. Many of my interlocutors were sympathetic to the unknown thief. “In Muhammadiyah we don’t like such signs,” a young teacher told me, echoing a common sentiment. He mused that such a message could send a wrong sign, marking the location as though it was special. According to the Qur’an and the Sunna, such a sign was unnecessary, and indeed it was better if there was no such sign at all. At the same time, most agreed that it was a good thing that the stolen sign was replaced by a new one. After all, it served an important function in safeguarding critical historical evidence of Dahlan’s life.

At first glance, Muhammadiyah’s two fundamental impulses, purification and commemoration, are in tension, if not fundamental opposition. But they also depend on each other as Muhammadiyah works out what it means for them to memorialize without fetishizing their past, a balancing act that is simultaneously folded into the construction of their organization’s identity as moderate, or in the middle, avoiding the undemocratic excesses of Islamism and traditionalism. It is because people in their own midst contest the significance of their founder’s grave by carefully curating its not-specialness and removing the grave marker that Muhammadiyah paradoxically derives the permission and legitimacy to keep the memory around the grave alive. Often, the labor of performing these two opposing impulses is organized around generational lines; older members are reticent whereas the younger ones are more open. In other cases, like with the teachers at the Kauman cemetery, a division may occur along gendered lines, where women are seen to struggle against the male expectation of sobriety and reason—a role that brings its own vulnerabilities.²⁷ It is in their interplay, however, that these different positions produce a broader picture. In Islamic societies, visiting graves, Engseng Ho wrote, “is a common legal and ritual site” where “standard accusations and standard rebuttals” are deployed to construct boundaries between traditionalists (who visit graves) and fundamentalists (who reject and even destroy them) (Ho 2006, 10–11). In these scripted exchanges, Muhammadiyah’s path, which avoids association or identification with either side, is less discursively charted. As they map out their own distinct positionality between those two extremes and their well-established discourses, we see no coherent narrative but a strategy where rebuttals of two undesired options, idolatry and forgetting, seemingly work against each other, giving rise to tensions that are productive and, as a whole, facilitate the construction of Muhammadiyah’s identity.

A Purified Umma

In explaining their position in relation to graves and how to deal with them, many of my interlocutors would reference an ambiguity in the normative sources of legal debate, namely a Hadith according to which the Prophet Muhammad himself seems to have been ambivalent about the practice of ziarah: “I prohibited you from visiting graves, but (now) you may visit them” (Saḥīḥ al-Muslim 977a; see also 1977a). Because the Hadith provides no information as to why ziarah was originally prohibited and later allowed, the meaning of this tension and its consequences for the advisability of visiting graves has to be provided by the interpreters. While opponents of ziarah would focus on the original prohibition and relativize the subsequent permission as only relevant in very specific situations, proponents would often contextualize the Prophet Muhammad’s change of mind historically as the consequence of the changing religious landscape. “In the early Meccan years of Islam it was forbidden by the Prophet,” a proponent of grave visitation explained to me, “because people still believed that those who have died would become spirits and could be asked to do things for you.” It had been too dangerous, she reasoned, to allow people to go to graves when their monotheism had not yet been firmly established. “But later in Medina, the Prophet made accommodations and allowed the visitation of graves because Islam had already become strong.”

It is useful to compare these explanations with similar, well-documented discussion about the permissibility of visual media to represent certain figures in the organization as they mark a historically parallel shift in the organization. According to popular memory, up until the mid-1990s, images of Muhammadiyah’s historical leaders were never displayed in the organization’s public spaces like schools, universities, or community buildings. Only in the last years of the century did they gradually begin to appear. Today, they are quite commonplace. This shift did not emerge out of nowhere, but was preceded by a gradual transition in argumentation among Muhammadiyah’s Council for Legal Reasoning. Their fatwas on this issue offer us insight into the organization’s changing attitudes toward the danger of fetishization and the permissibility of a material mediation of the past.

The first ruling I could find on the permissibility of images and other visual media was published as part of a collection of fatwas from 1964, in which Muhammadiyah’s legal scholars differentiated between legitimate and illegitimate uses of displaying images. Displaying images for the purpose of veneration was forbidden (ḥarām), whereas using them for educational aims was permissible (mubāḥ).²⁸ Using images for decoration was more complicated. If the image could cause no temptation (fitna), it was permissible. If it could cause the temptation for disobedience (masʿīya) or idolatry (shirk), it was forbidden. The fatwa then explicitly took up the question of Ahmad Dahlan: “And because there is concern that images of Kiyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan, the founder of Muhammadiyah, could cause the temptation for idolatrous veneration, the Council for Legal Reasoning has decided that his pictures are haram to be displayed as decoration” (Majelis Tarjih Muhammadiyah 1998 [1967]; bold in original). Only four years later, the issue of Dahlan’s pictures was revisited at the Congress of the Majelis Tarjih in Sidoarjo, and the decision that displaying pictures of Dahlan specifically was forbidden was annulled without further comment (313). Whatever the reasons may have been, the annulment of the original decision had little impact on the practice of displaying images. Although putting up pictures was now technically allowed, few people took the permission as encouragement. According to popular memory, over the next few decades, such images remained a rarity.

Decades later, at the 18th General Congress of the Council for Legal Reasoning in Banda Aceh in 1995, the question was revisited as the organization’s jurists ruled again that pictures were allowed as long as no corrupting influence was expected.²⁹ According to popular memory, it was around this time, or shortly thereafter, that pictures of Ahmad Dahlan and Siti Walidah gradually began to appear in the organization’s buildings. Perhaps in response to these shifts, in 2006 the Council for Legal Reasoning and Renewal issued the most detailed fatwa on the matter, confirming the decision from 1995 and offering a comprehensive rationale for it. The 2006 fatwa focused on the ʿilla or ratio legis of the prohibition of images in the Qur’an and the Sunna. Muhammadiyah’s ulama reiterated that it was not the use of images per se that needed to be forbidden, but rather the idolatry that is associated with all images that represent God or one of God’s aspects. As we saw one of my interlocutors do in relation to graves, the legal experts argued that the problem needed to be situated and evaluated historically: Muhammad’s prohibition of images had to be seen in its own context, his struggle to establish pure monotheism and the concern that images could rekindle attitudes that would damage the integrity of his teachings. If this concern is no longer applicable, the prohibition also no longer applies. In the modern era, images are not worshipped and are therefore no longer a threat. Hence, Muhammadiyah’s legal experts concluded, they can be used and even should be when they are beneficial, for example, for the purposes of learning or the transmission of historical events (Pimpinan Pusat dan Tim Majelis Tarjih dan Tajdid Muhammadiyah 2006, 218–28).

Modernity, the fatwa seems to suggest, is no longer an aspiration, as may have been the case at the time of Dahlan. Due to his and his organization’s efforts, modernity is now a reality. The spirit of modernity is so strong among Muhammadiyah’s constituents that they can be trusted to deal with images in a fashion that is appropriate for modern people, which is to say, to benefit from their educational potential while recognizing that they do not have any power of their own.³⁰ The practice of ziarah is embedded in a similar rationale. Like the display of images, it is the privilege of those who run no risk of giving in to the temptations these material forms entail.

This privilege, however, can never be taken for granted. The fact of modernity’s reality needs to be constantly asserted and performed to remain real. The pervasive ambivalence around graves in Muhammadiyah is one key strategy in the safeguarding of modernity’s realization. Any enthusiasm about ziarah needs to be measured, or counterbalanced with calls for caution. Providing this kind of counterbalance is the task of those who are vocal about their reticence toward memory practices of graves. They are the ones who, ironically, make it possible for other Muhammadiyah members to promote tangible heritage. Their skepticism and insistence that graves do not matter produce an environment in which the organization can feel secure that purification has been accomplished, that graves are no longer dangerous. The Muhammadiyah student groups that go to Karangkajen to see for themselves and to be inspired by Dahlan’s grave are unlike traditionalists because others assert for them that graves do not matter.

Conclusion

Since its beginnings with Ahmad Dahlan, Muhammadiyah has differentiated itself from traditionalist Islam through its commitment to purifying the faith from shirk, which includes the cult of famous pious predecessors. However, over the last few decades, Muhammadiyah activists have increasingly expressed the need to cultivate memory and attachment to the people and places that have shaped its historical trajectory and contributed to the Indonesian nation and civil society in order to distinguish themselves from the Islamist groups they reject.

Muhammadiyah’s two fundamental impulses, purifying the faith from TBC and shirk to be distinct from traditionalists, and commemorating the organization’s past to distance themselves from Islamists, are in tension, if not fundamental opposition. But they also depend on each other when Muhammadiyah works out what it means for them to memorialize without fetishizing their past. The grave is indeed a place like any other and you could in fact just pray at home. Making clear that what happens at the grave could happen anywhere is experienced as an authorization to do something special in this place, allowing people to connect their piety to a particular organizational history, and the history of Indonesia’s moderate Islam. Performances and memories of doubt, disagreement, and disinterest produce the privilege for Muhammadiyah to remember, to push back against the totalizing tendencies of purification while at the same time paradoxically depending on them.

One final story around the rediscovery of the grave. According to some, it is uncertain whether the marked spot actually corresponds to where Dahlan was buried a century ago. Pak Jazir, the Karangkajen resident who had overseen the cemetery’s renovation, told me that many years ago, he was standing at Dahlan’s grave behind a group of Muhammadiyah’s most senior members, overhearing their conversation. One of them, he said, pointed at the grave and asked, “Is it true that this is where he was buried?” And one of the others responded, “If you were to ask me, I would say that he is buried in that corner,” pointing one way, “and if you were to ask one of the others, he would say that he was buried over there,” pointing to a different corner. Neither of the two indicated spots corresponded to the place where the grave is marked today. Why, he asked, would the most senior members of Muhammadiyah say that they don’t know where the grave is? In his opinion, it was because they didn’t want his grave to be venerated, which would amount to shirk. “When people come to do ziarah, they actually go to the wrong spot.” He found that thought quite amusing.

Those familiar with Islamic discourse in contemporary Indonesia will recognize in Pak Jazir’s amusement a common strategy of dealing with profound anxieties through humor (Hoesterey 2021). The image of people praying at the wrong spot suggests the hilarious absurdity of those praying at graves. And yet, this potential absurdity no longer deters people from coming. Dahlan’s grave is visited and yet it is a place like any other because graves have no special power associated with them. As extra insurance against unwitting sin, his body may not even be in his grave. Pak Jazir and others make use of the paradoxical tension between the two conflicting values of keeping the memory alive and avoiding fetishism in order to position the organization in a middle or moderate position where either excess is avoided. The visits of Muhammadiyah groups or other members to Dahlan’s grave are safe in an environment where purification has been accomplished and continues to be staged through a carefully crafted image of not attributing special significance to it. The Karangkajen graveyard is a site in the middle, where Muhammadiyah shows that they do not care about graves, where they remember that the identification of their founder’s grave and visits to it weren’t even their idea in the first place and that many don’t approve of it until today, that memory is possible: It cannot be mistaken for the kind of thing that is done by traditionalists, something that is conducive to TBC and shirk. Likewise, the mosque’s enforcement of purifying renovations, and stories of the unknown thief’s removing the sign, would perhaps look like something Islamists do if not for the impact it makes on those who perform memory by telling the story of the grave and their visit to it. This may look like an anticlimactic failure to promote a coherent culture of memory because of modernity’s inevitable contradictions arising at the intersection of different semiotic ideologies. Yet, if in premodern and traditionalist Islam paradox and ambiguity are the only ways to speak about an incomprehensible reality that reveals itself through the Qur’an, modernist Muslims deploy similar strategies. Coherent identities and easily comprehensible ways of living are insufficient for understanding and acting on a multifaceted revelation in a complicated world, and that what is meaningful and acceptable must be negotiated through paradoxes in discourse or practice within the Muslim community. What might seem like a contradictory engagement with the materiality of Dahlan’s grave might in fact be a successful performance of the mutual dependence of these two impulses. By themselves, either of these practices would run danger of tipping Muhammadiyah’s delicate balance between the mirror images of traditionalism and Islamism. Together, through the tension they produce, they stabilize Muhammadiyah in its position in the middle.

Five

Good Muslims Remember, or The Politics of Coherence

one evening during my field research, I was sitting with a group of about a dozen santri in a circle on the floor at one of the dormitories. All of them were young women who boarded and studied at Krapyak while also taking courses at one of Yogyakarta’s universities. I had heard that santri sometimes visit Ahmad Dahlan’s grave and was intrigued to learn why. It seemed quite contradictory to me that traditionalists would visit the grave of the person who founded a rivaling organization and who—according to most of my Muhammadiyah interlocutors—prohibited ziarah. My research assistant had found some people who had gone to Dahlan’s grave and had arranged for us to meet so they could tell me about their experiences of and motives for their visit. What had it been like? Visibly nervous, one of them told us how weird it had been for her to go to Dahlan’s grave because it is located in Karangkajen, a Muhammadiyah neighborhood. According to Muhammadiyah, she explained, praying at graves is bid’ah, a heretical innovation. At that point she was interrupted by another participant, a spunky young woman who appeared to have been designated the group’s spokesperson. She asked me, “Is it safe for us to talk to you about this?”

Ziarah to Dahlan’s grave is a very tight knot where different threads of Islamic identity are held together in tension. For traditionalists, it is a site where the range of meanings assigned to Islamic traditionalism come into sharp focus. This is because traditionalist ziarah to the grave of Dahlan appears so implausible at first sight that it generates a variety of discourses and practices that show what NU’s traditionalism means and how it relates to him and his legacy. “It’s vital,” Foucault said in a 1974 interview on memory and resistance, “to have possession of . . . memory, to control it, to administer it, tell it what it must contain” (1996, 124). Scholars of religion and heritage, employing his genealogical approach, have demonstrated how broader ideological contexts produce new versions of specific memories, how memory is called upon in the service of causes that may widely diverge from each other. Through these discourses and practices, my traditionalist interlocutors produce a counter-memory of Dahlan, assigning a different significance to his life and resisting modernist control over his grave and his narrative.

It is tempting to read this traditionalist counter-memory¹ to a modernist version of history as a kind of resistance against official knowledge and the hegemonic powers of modern epistemologies. Anthropologists working on memory, however, have critiqued such facile binaries between official histories and their subversion (Steedly 2019, 42), showing how remembering takes place in impermanent spaces situated somewhere between resistance and deference (McGranahan 2010, 5), or that the analytic frames these binaries present may foreclose much more complicated processes (French 2009; Stoler and Strassler 2000, 8). Similarly, I have argued that worldviews are not coherent but transected by often contradictory and incommensurable ideological lines that can embrace a multitude of seemingly incommensurable memories. Chapter 1 showed that the traditionalist identity of my interlocutors at Krapyak, constructed through their memories of Mbah Munawwir, is not a consistent or static resistance to modernism, but appropriates modernist thought and language as needed. The same was the case as my interlocutors navigated the seeming contradiction of a traditionalist ziarah to Dahlan’s grave. Because memories do not neatly line up with any ideological agenda, there is no coherent or bounded counter-memory. Like memories, counter-memories are not static but are linked to larger power-knowledge formations, operating within and appropriating them.

In the previous chapter, we saw that Muhammadiyah’s engagements with graves are fundamentally shaped by the desire to align with the power-knowledge formation of moderate Islam and the political advantages afforded by identifications with it. NU has done the same, but they have embedded this claim, and their story of Dahlan’s life and grave, in the broader narrative of Islam Nusantara, fashioned as moderate or the peaceful Islam of the Indonesian archipelago. Focusing on these dynamics, this chapter provides a historical snapshot of NU’s counter-memory of the life of Muhammadiyah’s founder during the time of the 2019 election to examine the complex interplay between power and resistance in NU’s version of history. More than a moment of resistance to modernist ideologies, this counter-memory makes manifest what Judith Butler called the “intersecting circulation” of the “geopolitical dimensions” of power (1993, xxvi). Memories may oppose certain hegemonic concepts, but in doing so they have to align themselves with other vectors of power to be legible at all. For this reason, we cannot expect unofficial stories to grant access to a truth “outside of ideology,”² as Mary Steedly put it—sometimes because the very claim to be “outside” may precisely be a device to generate authority and legitimacy. Building on these insights, I show that coherence and paradox, often an index of a traditionalist identity, likewise emerge as significant—yet unstable—ideological markers of moderate Islam.

At the same time, however, it would be reductive to assume that the alliance between such different vectors of power and NU’s memories is merely a matter of co-optation. While never outside of power, religious communities and their practices often manifest an excess of meanings as they point beyond any self-conscious political maneuvering and present a dynamic interplay among different motifs that are neither subordinated to a hegemonic authorizing voice (Ewing 1990, 1997) nor made commensurate with one another in a coherent narrative (Povinelli 2001; Fox 2018). Remembering among my NU interlocutors may be situated within and make use of a particular power-knowledge formation, but specific memories may nonetheless belie reductionistic analytic models.

In this and the following chapter, I explore these dynamics in relation to NU’s program of Islam Nusantara, where even counter-memory is not outside of power and yet somehow exceeds it. As traditionalists honor Dahlan as part of their tradition, some may even see themselves as being more truly his heirs than Muhammadiyah. In fact, for many of my interlocutors, Muhammadiyah’s identity as a moderate organization was far from certain. The reticence of the anxious students at Krapyak to tell me about their experience of visiting Dahlan’s grave is rooted in this uncertainty: According to the global formation of power and knowledge, those who are not moderate may be dangerous.

Pilgrimage and Politics

In 1633, Sultan Agung (d. 1645), who is remembered as the most powerful king of the Mataram dynasty and who greatly expanded the realm and Islam with it, found himself politically weakened. He was recovering from a military debacle against the Dutch East India Company in Batavia and faced multiple rebellions in Central Javanese villages. With his rule threatened by these political setbacks, he undertook a royal pilgrimage to the holy grave of Sunan Bayat located in Tembayat, where people had been rebelling against him. By going on ziarah in a moment of political uncertainty, he did as many others had done who sought to gain, solidify, or maintain their power: place themselves in relation to the individual whose grave they were visiting, whether a wali, pious sultan of yore, or famous scholar. Grave visitations already constituted an important node between political and religious power before the arrival of Islam on the island, but they became firmly integrated into an Islamic framework of thought during the early years of the Mataram Sultanate. Through appeals to the memory of the dead in their graves, visitors could generate ties linking themselves to significant events of normative value in Java’s past, such as the Islamization of the island or the overcoming of political adversaries.

This deployment of a specifically religious memory as a sociopolitical force resonates with insights from Religious Studies scholars working on historical memory, showing how commemorative practices in religious traditions naturalize continuities with a normative past, narrativize theological difference, and negotiate relations with other groups (Bigelow 2010; Castelli 2004; Haider 2014). Here, a normative past is harnessed to authorize contemporary agendas. Similarly, grave visitations are historical events where pilgrims perform their allegiance to a particular history and, in turn, seek legitimacy from it. Against this background, Sultan Agung’s pilgrimage to Tembayat can be seen as an endeavor to claim the powers and virtues of a figure known for both his piety and his political might.³ Because the next chapter discusses these processes in more detail, it will suffice to say here that access to these powers and virtues is sometimes conceptualized as a blessing or reward from God (berkah, from A. baraka) channeled by the virtues of the pious dead.

Today, Sultan Agung’s life and reign are an important memory in their own right, and his grave at Imogiri has become a destination for those seeking to obtain knowledge and power through his blessings (Van Doorn-Harder and De Jong 2006, 496–97). Because of memory’s malleability, his story is enlisted for a wide variety of political agendas and campaigns, and not necessarily only by traditionalists. My interlocutors have jokingly recalled that the only presidential candidate in the history of postcolonial Indonesia who did not go to Imogiri before an election was Amien Rais, known in traditionalist circles as a Muhammadiyah hard-liner on the organization’s right fringe, who ran and lost in 2004. As we saw in the previous chapter, things have changed in Muhammadiyah since Rais’s campaign. On March 22, 2019, Sandiago Uno, the running mate of the presidential candidate Prabowo, visited the grave of Ahmad Dahlan in Karangkajen. His visit was witnessed by some of Dahlan’s descendants and hundreds of local residents, most of whom were socialized into a Muhammadiyah milieu and were waiting outside to snap a picture of the famous politician. When Prabowo was defeated in the election by his rival Joko “Jokowi” Widodo a few weeks later, it was not on account of the people of Karangkajen, a large majority of whom had voted for Prabowo.

Ziarah is not only politically significant if it is carried out by established politicians or kings. John Pemberton showed that in the early 1970s, the New Order regime undertook renovations of certain graves like Tembayat and Imogiri, giving rise to a significant increase in pilgrimages. These state-sponsored campaigns were part of the government’s broader objective to produce and harness both Islam and a normative Javanese “tradition,” whereby appeals to “traditional values” or “ritual events” enframed the New Order’s political power as a program of stability, continuity, and harmony (Pemberton 1994, 8–13). Within this discursive space, ziarah was set up as a ritual performance of hierarchy and deference.

Over the last few decades, ziarah in Java has experienced another boom, with increases in the number of pilgrims and also in how far pilgrims are willing to travel to visit certain graves.⁴ There are various reasons for this trend. Facilitated by the emergence of a middle class with money to spare and the leisure to take a few days off to visit more distant graves, the increase in grave visitations is also inseparable from the significant development of infrastructure, especially roads, by the state (Quinn 2019, 384–87). Not only do graves get more visitors than they did several decades ago, but new graves also keep emerging as destinations of ziarah. Some of them are located on tourist routes, like the recently discovered graves of the seven saints (wali pitu) of Bali.⁵ The most famous new grave is that of Gus Dur, Indonesia’s fourth president and key figure for NU. After his death in 2009, he gained a reputation as Java’s tenth saint. Since then, the number of visitors to his grave has steadily increased (Quinn 2018; Sri Mulyani and Daryono 2016).

Like pilgrimages during the New Order, this contemporary boom in the ziarah industry is embedded within a broader ideological context. Whereas the New Order was promoting “tradition,” Reformasi-era political thought, especially among traditionalist political elites starting with Gus Dur, emphasized an agenda of pribumisasi, the indigenization of Islam (see Burhani 2012; Kersten 2015). NU’s adoption of Islam Nusantara as an official program in 2015 was another manifestation in this campaign’s longer trajectory. Graves, and pilgrimages to them, are a central component in the aesthetic and conceptual production of Islam Nusantara.

The historian Nile Green has proposed that shrines invest a geography with meaning as narratives of belonging and power become imprinted on a particular territory (2012a, 17–18). Likewise, the burial sites of the agents of Islam in Java have imprinted the land with the sacred history of its Islamization and a particular set of religious values. If Islam Nusantara can be conceptualized as the “impressions” (I. kesan) left behind by the ulama in the history of Nusantara as a normative example for the present, as it is put in a recent NU publication (Muhajir 2015, 68), contemporary Muslims who visit graves can become agents in the reproduction of this narrative through their mere presence and participation, even if it is not their conscious motive to do so.

According to the narrative of Islam Nusantara, by invoking a normative past through ziarah, pilgrims establish continuities between the Islam of the wali and ulama of the past and their own historical context, thus activating the blessings the dead mediated in their own time. These blessings can become palpable in a variety of ways, including material ones. The Indonesian government, especially the tourism ministry, quickly realized the economic potential of pilgrimage and has responded by promoting it through large-scale infrastructural projects (Wisata Ziarah 2015). Religious tourism is an important source of revenue for many and is readily integrated in broader narratives about the blessings of pilgrimage (Jamhari 2001, 96–97; Alatas 2021b, 39–40). Through offerings at the grave, by shopping for souvenirs like prayer beads or bottles of water from nearby water sources charged with blessings, or even just by buying drinks and snacks from kiosks set up around the cemetery, visitors contribute to the welfare of local communities (Quinn 2007, 68–74). Even the spiritual benefits of ziarah are imagined as a social good, not just a personal one. One bus driver who regularly takes groups on pilgrimage tours told me that as the person who facilitates the journey, he also participates in the ritual. And another said that the reward (I. pahala) the bus driver gets from God for facilitating the pilgrims’ journey is the same as it is for the pilgrims, even if the driver doesn’t come to the grave to pray but stays in the bus and rests instead for an hour or two to be ready for the next leg of the journey. He and his colleagues all had stories of miracles that happened as they were driving groups from grave to grave: A road that should have had heavy traffic was empty. Provisions that were taken along never spoiled as they normally would, and they sustained the pilgrims for the entire duration of the journey. Some pilgrims explicitly understand their ziarah as a transaction between the living and the dead, as well as the visitors and their tour guides, vendors, and bus drivers, that ultimately benefits everyone (Quinn 2007, 74–77). Through God’s grace, Islam Nusantara and its ritual articulation through ziarah make society flourish.

Good Muslims Go on Ziarah, or Orthodoxy and Its Radical Others

One evening in 2013, a small group of men invaded a Yogyakarta grave on Jalan Kusumanegara in the city’s east that had become a destination of ziarah. It was the grave of Ndoro Purbo, a grandson of former Yogyakarta Sultan Hamengkabuwana IV (1855–77). The men drove everybody out and then descended on the grave to demolish and deface it and the complex it was in. Some news outlets that reported on the event showed an image of the dark tiles covering the complex’s floor defaced by white scrawls, spelling the words syirik (from A. shirk) and haram (Pelaku Perusakan Makam 2013). If, for traditionalists, graves and their visitors signify the actualization of Islam Nusantara through memory, as “meaningful semiotic complexes that can set in motion powerful and expansive dynamics of signification” (Ho 2006, 26), they set in motion a different system of signification for others. Not everyone goes on ziarah in Java, and some emphatically do not. In traditionalist discourse, the groups involved in such attacks on graves are often associated with foreignness, especially Arabness. Another image disseminated in news reports after the incident at Ndoro Purbo’s grave depicted a group of people demonstrating against such acts of destruction, some of whom were dressed in traditional Javanese attire like the blangkon and lurik. One of the demonstrators holds a sign with the words: “Do not bring Arab culture to the land of Mataram” (Sawabi 2013). Mataram, the first Islamic kingdom of Java, is often narratively linked to the mission of the nine saints that, as discussed in chapter 1, was supposedly exceptionally peaceful and tolerant. In marking the political beginnings of Islam Nusantara, Mataram also shapes the future trajectory of Islam in the region.

In everyday discourse, this Arab intruder is also sometimes referenced as “Wahhabi.” Of course, not all Indonesians who oppose ziarah are Wahhabis—or, for that matter, Arabs—in a meaningful sense. Neither would they necessarily identify as such.⁶ In the NU milieu, however, the term “Wahhabi” maps onto the historical memory of how the organization was founded in reaction to the Wahhabis’ second conquest of Mecca in 1924 and their subsequent demolition of much of the Holy City’s tangible heritage. Contemporary organizations like ISIS may not map onto Wahhabism in ideological terms, but they do share the Wahhabis’ hostility toward historical monuments. They therefore activate the same narratives of violence and destruction. The role of the hostile and radical Arab or Wahhabi in this traditionalist worldview is made explicit in many NU-sponsored media. For example, in an article published on Bayt ar-Rahman, an NU-affiliated website, “authoritarian-friendly models of Islam” with their inclinations toward “extreme violence” in the Arab world (as well as Iran and Turkey) are contrasted with NU’s prodemocratic and tolerant stance (Nahdlatul Ulama Challenges 2022). The perhaps highest-profile media production promoting this worldview was a 2015 film by NU’s central board titled The Divine Blessing of Islam Nusantara (Oceans of Revelation: Islam as a Blessing for All Creation). The film sets up a binary between a peaceful Indonesian Islam on the one hand, and a violent Arab/Wahhabi/ISIS Islam on the other, through alternating scenes of Javanese Muslims going to and praying at the graves of the wali sanga and footage showing ISIS fighters destroying mosques or shrines or brutally killing people deemed infidels.⁷ It is always partly in contradistinction to Islam Nusantara’s radical Other that traditionalists define themselves discursively: Whereas Islam Nusantara is peaceful, the Other is violent; whereas Islam Nusantara is accepting of local culture, the Other wants to do away with all of it. This also means that Islam Nusantara is the authentic Islam of the Indonesian archipelago, and the Other is Arab and foreign.

This kind of Othering is facilitated by a discursive formation that transcends the NU context. Islam Nusantara, or more broadly the pribumisasi discourse from which it emerged, points to a globalized body of knowledge inherited from colonial Orientalist scholarship and reframed during the Cold War, and posits a binary between the “good” or moderate, Westernized Muslim, and the “bad” or radical Muslim. In the course of this chapter we see that this binary is not static but flexible and has been used in different and sometimes contradictory ways (Mamdani 2004; Mahmood 2006; Hicks 2011). In one of its iterations, this binary is geographically mapped onto “Indic” and “Arab” Islam and ideologically associated with the “Sufi” as opposed to the “Wahhabi.”⁸ The Sufi, in these discourses, is a politically moderate promoter of tradition and “pre-Islamic” culture or universal, perennial virtues. The Wahhabi, by contrast, is invested in a politicized Islam that reproduces the first Muslim community in Medina and expurgates everything extra-Islamic along the way. It thus represents fanaticism and political radicalism. This old binary in scholarly and public discourse gained significant momentum in the aftermath of 9/11, the War on Terror, and surging public interest in global Islam (Knysh 2004; Corbett 2017). Indeed, NU’s representations of Islam Nusantara seem to be created with precisely this interested international audience in mind. The Divine Blessing of Islam Nusantara was professionally subtitled in Arabic and English to make known Indonesia’s peaceful Muslims to a global public eager to categorize Muslims as good or bad. And indeed, the world was watching and eager to be convinced of the goodness of Javanese Muslims. In 2015, a New York Times article called the movie a “relentless, religious repudiation of the Islamic State” while describing NU as “one of the most progressive Islamic movements in the world” (Cochrane 2015; see also Cochrane 2017; Hoesterey 2018, 411).

One of the underlying fears inherent in the global discursive formation of Islam, also inherited from colonial times, is the fear of “political Islam.”⁹ Yet, as NU’s example shows, the disavowal of political Islam is in no way incompatible with de facto involvement in politics on different levels.¹⁰ Indeed, the central leadership of NU quickly recognized the potential of the threat of the Arab or Wahhabi not just as an ideological counterpart, but also as a powerful political motivator, and leveraged the concept of Islam Nusantara to increase its influence on the Jokowi administration. This strategy proved successful. Jokowi himself adopted the language of Islam Nusantara as early as 2015, and his administration participated in the promotion of the concept through events and publications.¹¹

During the time of my field research, the fear of the radical Other provided fuel in the 2019 presidential election, when Jokowi as the incumbent candidate chose Ma’ruf Amin, NU’s General Leader (Rais ‘Aam) from 2015 to 2018, as his running mate.¹² On March 28, 2019, just a few weeks before the election, Amin visited a few of the pesantren complexes in the vicinity of Yogyakarta, including Mlangi to the city’s east, “not to campaign, just to pay a visit of friendship,” as he emphasized. This event was attended by thousands of people, some arriving on buses rented for that occasion. Before Amin appeared on stage, one of the organizers, a kyai on his campaign team, opened the event with some serious warnings. “I just want to remind all of you that ISIS exists,” he said gravely. “What is the first thing they do when they establish themselves somewhere? They destroy local history and culture.” By destroying the sites or monuments that foster the memories that nurture Islam Nusantara, the Wahhabi Other in its contemporary manifestations can easily take possession of the country. “And why does this country exist in the first place?” the speaker asked, answering: “Because of the struggles of ulama and kyai like Hasyim Asy’ari.” Amin’s fight for the country was thus connected to a lineage of kyai who had done the same. By preserving a culture of memory of these kyai, the prospective vice president would keep their mission alive. “The santri stand behind Kyai Haji Ma’ruf Amin,” he said. “Are you ready?” Excitedly, the thousands of people gathered around the stage shouted “ya!” This speech was followed by a formal declaration of the kyai of Mlangi that they supported Jokowi and his running mate, and a speech by Ma’ruf Amin himself, who continued to remind the audience of the dangers of radical Islam for the Indonesian nation and the role of the adherents of Islam Nusantara in protecting its integrity. Jokowi would promote Islam Nusantara because he loves the santri. “And how do we know this?” he asked. “Because he chose me as his running mate.” And indeed, Amin, the santri who had been summoned to run in the election and to defend Indonesia from the threat of radical Islam, became vice president. On April 17, 2019, Jokowi beat his second-time challenger Prabowo Subianto, whose alliance with radical Muslim groups was constantly invoked during the campaign by NU members, by more than 10 percent. While this victory was not solely attributable to Jokowi’s alliance with Islam Nusantara, it did play a significant role. Neither is Prabowo’s victory in the 2024 presidential election only the result of his reemergence as Gemoy “Cute Grandpa” Nusantara,¹³ who “often” visits the graves of Hasyim Asy’ari and Gus Dur in Jombang and did so in the company of the kyai of Pesantren Tebu Ireng in the lead-up to the election (Maulana 2023). It did, however, contribute to his securing the crucial support within NU that he needed to win.

Against this ideological background of Islam Nusantara and the radical Other, ziarah is not incidental to NU identity, but it is one of the central distinguishing characteristics that sets NU’s traditionalism apart from what they consider less moderate currents. “We are NU so we go on ziarah,” I often heard when I asked people what ziarah meant for them. Through ziarah, the pious dead are uplifted as their vision of a peaceful, tolerant Islam is actualized and made real. By contrast, the Wahhabi is portrayed as destroying history and culture, and therefore also memory, cutting off the present from the blessings of the past.

For some traditionalists, this practice of differentiation from the Wahhabi and activism through ziarah takes on an explicit, even combative, tone. These include the so-called sarkub (short for sarjana kuburan or “grave scholars”), a loose network of people, many of whom were socialized in the NU milieu but have different degrees of involvement in NU and the pesantren world. They primarily use social media platforms to position themselves and to connect with others. Some of them also maintain a website with information on the movement’s goals and initiatives. Here we read that sarkub was founded in 2010 in response to what was perceived as a growing threat of radical Islam. In their mission statement, the first item listed is the fight against the “virus of Wahhabis, the Shia, and other aberrant movements,” immediately followed by the defense of the Pancasila from the “disease” of terrorist organizations, like Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia.¹⁴ While none of my interlocutors who identified as sarkub followed the website closely, many of them shared its central message: Ziarah, along with its performance and maintenance of continuities, is a bastion of Islam Nusantara and a way to defend its traditional and tolerant Islam from radical groups. “The more people go on ziarah,” one such grave scholar told me, “the more tradition is revived; and the more tradition is revived, the smaller Wahhabi movements become.”

Where, then, is Muhammadiyah located in this traditionalist ideological differentiation and self-identification? As outlined in chapters 3 and 4, Muhammadiyah has over the last decade become more open to memory practices, including ziarah, and the idea that the past’s virtues needed to be preserved. What is more, the leadership of both Muhammadiyah and NU have often tended to emphasize their ideological proximity, understanding themselves as partners in the struggle for moderate Islam. Yet, for many of my traditionalist interlocutors, it was almost inconceivable that Muhammadiyah members would go on ziarah to honor the memory of Ahmad Dahlan. Many imagined the difference between Muhammadiyah’s and NU’s attitudes toward graves as a total one: According to Muhammadiyah, going on ziarah is bid’ah, I was told over and over, and the young women I introduced in the beginning of this chapter were no exception. For them, the different attitudes toward rituals like ziarah constituted the main difference between themselves and the modernists, another Other. “Is it safe for us to talk to you about this?” one of the young women asked me that night. She did not want anybody in Muhammadiyah to know what she had said about them, or about Dahlan and his grave. In my interview that evening, these santri performed this kind of Othering of the modernist. The santri’s fear that they might be targeted by Muhammadiyah hostilities if their identities became known through my research, however unlikely it may seem, made clear that, for her, Muhammadiyah modernists were extremists, not moderates. If in these discourses ziarah is a benchmark, not only of traditionalist identity, but also of one’s participation in a peaceful or moderate Islam, Muhammadiyah modernists’ claim to being part of this trajectory is called into question. Traditionalist ziarah to Dahlan’s grave is a performative assertion that Dahlan himself is included in Indonesia’s peaceful Islam, whereas his contemporary followers are portrayed as potentially violent enemies of ziarah, such that the santri considered their visit to Dahlan’s grave—or public knowledge of it—a real risk.

I discussed with the group what we could do so they would feel safe to talk to me. I wasn’t recording our conversation that night, and I had already walked them through my regular confidentiality procedures. After the one santri’s comment we agreed that I would not write down any of their names, or even at which of Krapyak’s complexes they were boarding, in case my notebook got lost or stolen. In my published work, I would only refer to them by generic terms. Once that was settled, they were willing to share more stories with me on what it had been like to go to Dahlan’s grave. As it turned out, none of them had visited it on their own initiative. Their respective kyai had told them to go. Two of them remembered how their teacher had said, Dahlan is an important figure and his own people do not visit him, you should go, and so they went. They didn’t feel comfortable there, and besides it was almost raining, so they just prayed as fast as they could and then left. “We felt like foreigners there,” one of them said, and added: “We were afraid of being attacked.” Stories of pilgrims treated with hostility by the Muhammadiyah community of Karangkajen have wide currency in Krapyak circles. While no one I talked to had ever experienced such a thing, someone had always heard from someone else that their friend went on ziarah to Karangkajen and people said nasty things, or threw rocks and sand, or turned off the lights at the cemetery, leaving the visitors in pitch darkness.

In the shifting and unstable global discursive formation separating the “good” Muslim from the “bad,” modernists have historically fallen on either side.¹⁵ The discourses I described above tap into one particular iteration of this binary, mapping it onto the moderate, Indic, and cultural Muslim on the one hand, and the radical, Middle Eastern, and militant Muslim on the other. Ideologically related to Salafism, Islamic modernism seeks to rearticulate religious truths in terms that are relevant for contemporary times, whereby the impulse to return to Qur’an and Sunna imposes limits on this program of rearticulation. The “modernist” and the “purist” Salafi, as Lauzière (2016, 4) has called them, may be distinct strands of Muslim thought, but in practice they are not clearly separated but constitute a spectrum of voices that can fall on either side of this particular good-bad Muslim binary. Rather than a difference in their broad understanding of the role of scripture in contemporary times or other consistent criteria, the boundary between the “modernist” and “purist” Salafi is not stable but is constantly redrawn as contexts shift, new arguments are made, and new alliances forged. This conceptual indeterminacy of the modernist, and the modernist’s proximity to the “bad” Salafi, renders this Othering meaningful, when Muhammadiyah is constructed as Islam Nusantara’s opponent. Standing in the way of ziarah, modernists impede the actualization and realization of traditionalism’s tolerant and peaceful Islam.

Through its participation in this global discursive formation, Islam Nusantara and its Others do not merely articulate a specific form of knowledge but also exercise social control as a configuration of knowledge in Foucault’s sense. In Islamic Studies, the theoretical framework of the Foucaultian discursive formation has been taken up in Talal Asad’s seminal essay “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” in which he defines orthodoxy as a “relationship of power and truth,” as the domain of “the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones” (1986, 22)—in short, the power to define and police the boundaries of what is normal and authentically Islamic. Seen from this conceptual vantage point, the global discursive formation that sets up the opposition between the moderate good Muslim and the radical bad Muslim maps orthodoxy onto moderation while providing specific parameters of what it means to be moderate. In NU discourse, the boundaries of orthodoxy or moderate Islam are fixed structurally as corresponding to the boundaries of Islam Nusantara and its associated narratives and practices. Scholars have often associated ziarah to local graves as a practice indicating the presence of heterodox, vernacular, or popular Islam in Indonesia (Van Doorn-Harder and De Jong 2001; Fox 1991; Quinn 2019). Even works suggesting that grave visitations can be compatible with orthodox Islam still understand orthodoxy as substantive rather than a relationship of power (Guillot and Chambert-Loir 1996; Chambert-Loir 2002). Yet, in Asad’s sense, traditionalist ziarah constitutes orthodoxy because it is a fundamental building block of Islam Nusantara, a vision of the past that preserves orthodoxy.

Islam Nusantara’s moderate orthodoxy is under threat by the same forces that have affected Muhammadiyah’s moderate identity. The radical Other is not restricted to a particular organization or movement but recruits in the environment of established organizations, using their organizational infrastructures as well as novel channels of socialization, like social media, which provide new paths to Islamic authority (Hui 2010; Slama and Jones 2017; Weng 2018). Like Muhammadiyah, NU has been vulnerable to this competition. But whereas in Muhammadiyah the primary anxiety was the loss of constituents, my NU interlocutors were more worried that radical Islam could infect the thought of traditionalists, even within the inner circles of NU. What all was included in immoderate thought and activity was not necessarily agreed on, but the anxiety of its presence was widespread. For example, a young teacher at a pesantren lamented to me that it had now become acceptable within NU to suggest that Banser, the organization’s paramilitary unit, need not protect churches during Christmas and Easter services, something they had often done in response to attacks of radical groups on churches during holidays.¹⁶ She attributed the social acceptability of such suggestions to the contagious force of a right-wing discourse that increasingly pervaded NU. Gus Solah, the younger brother of Gus Dur, was always rumored to support PKS, the Islamist political party. Until his death in 2020, Gus Solah was the kyai of the prestigious pesantren Tebu Ireng, the very pesantren where NU was founded in 1926 and has continued to be a center of the organization until today. His sympathies brought right-wing Islam squarely into NU’s fold. And perhaps most notoriously, there was NU Garis Lurus (NU Straight Path), a faction within the organization with close ties to Islamist groups that claimed to be the true stewards of the legacy of NU’s founder KH Hasyim Asy’ari. According to NU Garis Lurus, Islam Nusantara is a liberal invention. Islam is the same everywhere and must not be localized. Those voices within NU are challenging the culture of memory associated with Islam Nusantara and, with it, the discursive divide that differentiates NU from right-wing groups.¹⁷

The identification with a normative “moderate Islam” requires the repudiation of the radical Other. But this specific Other is not content to remain an Other: It does not respect but undercuts NU’s organizational integrity, threatening the epistemic framework to which the organization’s identity and institutional boundaries are connected. To maintain firm boundaries and confirm NU’s claim to representing a good and moderate Islam, such radical elements or right-wing factions within the organization have to be undermined, downplayed, or ejected. Some of my NU interlocutors simply denied the reality, or at least the magnitude, of the problem. “NU Garis Lurus is very small,” I was told many times by my traditionalist interlocutors.¹⁸ Other traditionalists I spoke with understood NU Garis Lurus to have forfeited their participation in NU, to be located beyond the pale of what NU stands for. The radical element within NU must be excluded and declared impossible. It does not and cannot exist, or only to an insignificant extent, because it lies outside the institutional parameters of NU and the ethos of Islam Nusantara. Through this exclusion, the ideological identity of Islam Nusantara is consolidated.

While denying the reality or significance of NU Garis Lurus or other right-wing currents within the organization, NU traditionalists deployed a different kind of boundary-setting in relation to Muhammadiyah. Many of my interlocutors voiced concerns about pervasive radical influences within Muhammadiyah.¹⁹ Instead of recognizing a similarity in the challenges the two organizations face in relation to radical Islam, many traditionalists I spoke with denied this uncomfortable similarity and instead projected their own anxieties onto the other organization. They therefore had gloomy views about Muhammadiyah in general, even as they had Muhammadiyah friends who, they realized, were nothing like their notions of the organization in general, but rather reasonable people, even if they didn’t often go to graves. These generalized discourses of the Muhammadiyah modernist wildly opposed to ziarah and trying to eradicate memory in general are doing important work in the constitution of NU identity. Against the background of the conceptual indeterminacy of the boundary between the modernist and the purist Salafi, they identify modernist Islam as rigid and illiberal, only different in degree rather than in kind from radical Islam, and connected with the latter on a slippery slope down which the modernist is always suspected to slide. Unlike the radical element within NU’s own midst, which threatens to undo NU’s moderate identity, this radical Other is reassuring, confined within the organizational boundaries of Muhammadiyah and hence by definition distinct from NU. While Garis Lurus is denied, Muhammadiyah is objectified as NU’s potentially radical Other.

Ahmad Dahlan, however, does not appear to be included in this Othering of the radical modernist, at least not according to the traditionalists who visit his grave, with whom this chapter began. In the remainder of the chapter, I present a range of explanations for why traditionalists would visit Dahlan, paying special attention to the discursive registers and presuppositions my interlocutors use. I specifically focus on the political meanings inherent in traditionalist identity formations as they explained to me why it wasn’t so strange for them to visit Dahlan’s grave. Analyzing their responses, I show how navigating the tensions that emerge when traditionalists go on ziarah to Karangkajen becomes a means to both discursively construct a normative vision of Islam—a moderate Islam—and to forge ties of ideological belonging to this Islam.

Belonging, Power, and Coherence

“So why would you, as traditionalists, visit the grave of Ahmad Dahlan?” I asked the group of santri that night. They responded, unanimously: “Because Ahmad Dahlan was very NU,” echoing a common idea among my NU interlocutors. He was part of the same networks of transmission and education that constitute NU’s traditionalism. They claimed that Dahlan and Hasyim Asy’ari, the founder of NU, both boarded and learned from the same famous kyai, including Kyai Haji Sholeh Darat from Semarang and Seh Kholil Bangkalan from Madura.²⁰ They also studied together in the Hijaz. Dahlan was a traditionalist at heart because he practiced all the traditionalist rituals, including ziarah, qunut, and tahlil.²¹ Because he visited graves and prayed there, he put himself in relation to the ulama of Nusantara and actualized their power and knowledge in his own present. In so doing, he inserted himself into the traditionalist lineages that connected his present, and his struggle, with the normative past and future of Islam Nusantara.²² Muhammadiyah members are of course aware of Dahlan’s traditionalist beginnings. The fact that these historical changes have such different meanings for them and for traditionalists brings into sharp focus how memory constitutes identity for the two groups in widely diverging ways.

Traditionalists may not have to explain the ritual differences between themselves and Dahlan, but their memory and pilgrimage to his grave raise questions of their own—at least they did for me. As argued in chapter 1, obedience is a central virtue in traditionalist Islam. Irrespective of its proximate results or the positive content of the command, obedience to those whose knowledge for and love of God exceeds one’s own is a virtue in itself. This absolute obedience produces, and is an indication of, a bond between the kyai and the santri and is instrumental for the santri’s formation and cultivation of piety (Dhofier 1999, 28). Obedience, like the novice’s pledge of allegiance (A. bayʿa) to the master in Sufi ṭarīqa, produces the continuity and authenticity of a lineage across generations and formalizes or legalizes that relationship (Green 2012b, 83–84; Alatas 2021b, 135–60). But Dahlan, according to my Muhammadiyah interlocutors, forbade his followers to go to his grave. This means that when traditionalists go to Dahlan’s grave, they disobey the order of a great Islamic scholar. “If it were true that Ahmad Dahlan didn’t want people to go on ziarah to his grave after his death,” I asked the santri at Krapyak that night, “would it make a difference for you? Would you still go?” They, like most other traditionalist pilgrims to Dahlan’s grave of whom I asked this question, at first reacted with skepticism. Surely he would not have said such an absurd thing. After all he was a great scholar of Islam, even a saint according to some. And as long as there was no proof that he really had said that, it was better to go on ziarah to his grave, just in case. “But what if there were a proof of some sort that he said so,” I insisted, “would you go?” They were silent for a moment. And then, like every other self-identified traditionalist I asked, they agreed that yes, even if there were an irrefutable proof, they would still go.

As I analyze their reasons, I will be attuned not only to the arguments traditionalists made when justifying their claim of Dahlan, but also to the subtle markers of identity they used in their conceptual vocabularies and types of reasoning. The conceptual vocabularies and types of reasoning I encountered in the various responses were clearly part of the same discursive formation, yet they were far from uniform. In Foucault’s work, the variability among different strands in a discursive formation is conceptualized as a dispersion (1982, 64–70), whereby different discursive strands, “instead of constituting a mere defect of coherence . . . form an alternative” (65), making up the range of possible options. While they are mutually exclusive, their appearance side by side makes up the discursive constellation to which they all belong, and within which they have a relation of complementarity, analogy, or even opposition to each other. The various ways of justifying the memory of Dahlan as a traditionalist are strands that align Islam Nusantara with the global discursive formation defining the good Muslim. While these different strands do not make up a coherent whole, they are held together by some kind of “regularity” between objects, concepts, or thematic choices (Foucault 1982, 38; see also Bowen 1993, 25). They could not be and are not directly juxtaposed without contradiction, yet they are all called in the service of supporting the same implicit agreement on the nature and scope of Islam Nusantara and its embeddedness in the global politics of knowledge of moderate Islam. Foucault calls this regularity in a discursive formation the “historical a priori” (1982, 127; his italics).

I brought my question to Kyai Usman, whom we encountered in chapter 1, when he told me that at the traditionalist pesantren obedience was not negotiable or optional but a question of life or death. Because of his strong opinion about obedience, I thought he might find it problematic to disobey someone by going to his grave. But when I told him that traditionalists conducting ziarah to honor Dahlan seemed somewhat disobedient to me, he dismissed my question. In part, the cause for his indifference was that for him, this question was a theoretical problem with no practical import, since he did not believe that Dahlan had in fact forbidden his followers to visit his grave. Hopefully no kyai would say such a thing, he said to me. But he humored me and talked me through my problem to present a solution. This was not a paradox, he said. After all, obedience needed to be compromised if it was in conflict with Islamic law.²³ And he explained that, as was the case with all legal questions, the question of the legal status of ziarah was determined first by reference to the Qur’an and the Sunna, and only if there was no answer to be found in scripture, the reasoning or consensus of the great legal scholars was to be taken into consideration.²⁴ True, Dahlan was a great scholar, and so his opinion was legally significant, but not as significant as scripture, which indirectly endorses and even mandates ziarah because of the injunction to cultivate filial piety (A. birr al-wālidayn).²⁵ If there was a contradiction between Dahlan’s opinion and the Prophet, Dahlan’s opinion needed to be discarded. In this case, the kyai concluded, honoring Dahlan meant not following Dahlan’s own wishes. It meant obeying the legal consensus of the ulama of Nusantara of which Dahlan was a part due to his own ritual practice and his intellectual lineages. After all, he learned with the great traditionalist kyai of his generation and was trained in the Shāfiʿī school of law. Like everyone else who was part of Islam Nusantara, Dahlan was subject to the ulama’s consensus. There was nothing paradoxical about this.

In Kyai Usman’s answer, we see the deployment of legal arguments based on certain information regarding Dahlan’s biography in support of the traditionalist position. In its basic contours, the legal argument Kyai Usman made was uncontroversial, as few Muslims would disagree that Qur’an and Sunna are more foundational legal sources than a single jurist’s opinions. Underlying Kyai Usman’s legal reasoning, however, are two presuppositions that are fundamental for understanding the scope of Islam Nusantara and those participating in it. First, Dahlan’s participation in Islam Nusantara is not a matter of choice or belief but is contingent on his educational genealogy, his intellectual ties to the great traditionalist kyai of nineteenth-century Java, as well as his ritual practice. There are other facts about Dahlan’s biography that were omitted here, and Kyai Usman’s selective reading was in part strategic, in the sense that he only attached significance to the facts that are in favor of the traditionalist position. In the following chapter, we will see that the kyai’s reasoning also points to a different understanding of traditionalist belonging that is, to echo Anand Taneja, more of “an ethical inheritance and not a religious identity” (Taneja 2018, 10). The second presupposition is that through his participation in Islam Nusantara, Dahlan is subordinated under the consensus of the ulama of the Shāfiʿī madhhab of which he was a part. Because Dahlan’s participation in the ritual practice and educational networks of Islam Nusantara become his primary marker of belonging, his own opinions and choices are only of secondary significance. Whatever his reasons may have been for asking his followers not to visit his grave, his opinion diverges from the legal consensus, and so his teachers and his successors would provide the correction.

When I brought the same question to the group of santri I interviewed that night, one of them gave an answer similar to Kyai Usman’s, though it differed in instructive ways. She told me a story that she had heard from one of her kyai, a story about a scholar of the Shāfiʿī madhhab named Seh Izzudin bin Abdu Salam.²⁶ Before he died, she said, he instructed his students not to pray for him after his death because the prayers would no longer reach him. After his death his students obeyed at first, but in time one of them received a message from the deceased master through a dream. In this dream, Seh Izzudin asked this student to please pray for him after all because now he knew that prayers would in fact reach him. In explanation, the santri elaborated that there were two different dimensions of obedience: external (I. lahir, from A. ẓāhir) and internal (I. batin, from A. bāṭin). The great scholar of the Shāfiʿī madhhab had demonstrably been wrong when he asked his students not to pray for him after his death. Like Kyai Usman, the santri suggested that even the wisest and most learned of scholars may give orders that are misguided and that one ought to disobey to be obedient on a more profound level. But instead of activating a line of legal argumentation, she made use of a conceptual framework familiar in traditionalist Islam and especially Sufi discourse that differentiates between the external and the internal. Whereas the external is concerned with knowledge accessible to the senses and reason, the internal is focused on a deeper understanding that may transcend the discursive.²⁷ There is often an implicit hierarchy between the two modes, where the external realm is devalued as superficial or less significant than the internal, which is reserved for those who truly understand.

Like Seh Izzudin, Dahlan may have a documented record of saying things during his life that seem to prohibit certain acts. But whatever he said may not necessarily be his last word on the matter, even if, unlike Seh Izzudin, he may not have had the occasion to correct his followers’ memories in a dream. An external kind of obedience would miss what is really essential. As the contingencies of Dahlan’s life and teachings are relegated to the realm of the external, they are discursively devalued. The internal dimension of obedience, by contrast, is based on the knowledge and truth that is inherent in the intellectual lineages of Islam Nusantara and the rituals that actualize it. They are presupposed in the santri’s interpretation. Through these, a student can come to a fuller understanding of the teacher’s insight, which may be at odds with the surface content of what the person said during their life. This santri’s explanation belonged to a different discursive strand than Kyai Usman’s: Where the former used Sufi language, the latter employed a rational legal discourse. Yet although their reasoning followed different routes, the starting and ending points were what Foucault called the same historical a priori, in this case the historical a priori of Islam Nusantara.

Yahya, a college-aged santri and the son of a kyai from East Java with an extensive pesantren education, gave me an answer similar to the santri’s when I asked him about this contradiction, but he elaborated further. He explained to me that ziarah and other rituals of paying respect to the dead, like the haul, were primarily a question of adab, ethics or good behavior, the kind of behavior children owe to their parents or teachers. Just as children are utterly dependent on their parents and caretakers, Muslims who are alive today are sustained by their pious ancestors. “Do you know durian?” he asked me. “Yes,” I said, confused. Durian, a tropical fruit with a pungent odor, is a famously divisive topic: You either love or hate it. But it was not my culinary views he wanted to discuss. Durian trees, he explained, take a long time to grow and bear fruit. If someone harvests durian, it is because a grandparent planted the tree. “And therefore,” he concluded, praying for those who have planted the trees is a matter of adab.” But, he added, adab was not a straightforward matter. It was by definition irreducible to coherent rational thought and even the processes of ijtihad, transcending rational discourse. “Al-adab fauq al-ʿilm,” he cited to me in Arabic, and “al-adab awwal min al-imtithāl.”²⁸ Adab is above knowledge, and adab is more important than obedience. The second sentence applied to ziarah, Yahya explained: If someone like a prophet or a wali were to say, I don’t want to be treated differently from anyone else, then following adab is more important than obeying their order. This contradiction between the demands of adab and obedience, according to Yahya, was not something that could simply be ignored or rationalized: It was a paradox.

He gave me another example of a conflict between adab and obedience, a famous contradiction, the interpretation of which divides Muhammadiyah and NU. The question is whether it is legitimate to use the honorific sayyidinā for the Prophet Muhammad in prayer. There are conflicting Hadith on this matter. According to one, the usage of the title is haram, but according to another one it is sunna.²⁹ Of course, Yahya conceded, there was a rational way to explain why the Prophet prohibited the use in one Hadith: He did not want to be deified or fetishized, like the Prophet ʿIsā was deified by Christians. But those who resolve the contradiction rationally were missing something important: They are not looking past the facts, beyond the surface level of the text and its rational implications. Adab is more important than obedience, and not showing respect toward the Prophet Muhammad through an honorific is against adab, so the Hadith could not be understood as actually prohibiting the use of sayyidinā. And then there was the second Hadith, which permitted and even recommended the use of the honorific, thus contradicting the first Hadith. The contradiction between them was an epistemic opening to what they were concealing; and the meaning of adab could only be understood if this something else was explored: Al-adab fauq al-ʿilm, meaning adab is above discursive knowledge. It was there in the text, yes, but hidden such that it could not be derived directly. The appropriate manner of paying respect that achieves a maximum of adab while eschewing shirk had to be realized by each person through the paradox.

With his deployment of paradox to gesture at a truth that transcends all discourse, Yahya participated in a well-established tradition in Java and beyond (see chapter 1), making use of a Sufi discourse with resonances in the Islamic literary traditions of Java and the wider Islamic world. According to Shahab Ahmed, Muslims have always made meaning by means of symbols and contradiction, signs that point beyond themselves and transcend their surface meaning without necessarily negating it, and without resolving the tension through which meaning-making was first made possible (2016, 391–94). This discursive configuration is also widely present in the Sufi literature of Southeast Asia (Florida 1995, 276; Meyer 2019, 2021). In addition to being theologically productive, the use of paradox also allowed Yahya to situate traditionalists vis-à-vis modernists. He explained that people in the pesantren knew how to look for that which is concealed in the texts. But people he called textualists could not understand this. If somewhere in the text there was a prohibition, they would just take it literally, would not do whatever they were prohibited from doing. Only those who understood the meaning of the paradox could fully grasp the import of the prohibition. I asked, who do you mean when you say textualists? His answer: Muhammadiyah modernists.

According to Yahya, traditionalists are different from modernists because they are not stuck with the surface-level meaning of scripture. Traditionalists are comfortable with paradox and an engagement with the text that allows for a more flexible interpretation of prohibition. Although Yahya did not specifically refer to Islam Nusantara, his use of the concept of adab points to an essential virtue of Islam Nusantara, that is, remembering respectfully the pious ancestors and keeping their legacy alive, gratefully tending to the durian tree they have planted. His deployment of paradox is thus situated—conceptually but also politically—in the framework of Islam Nusantara.

It is true that Sufi orientations of Islam are well known for their deployment of paradox, for pointing to the unimaginable and resisting dominant outlooks. But this is not all. Traditionalist Islam may have a capacity for holding together contradictory propositions discursively, because ultimate truth transcends all of them. It may well be possible for Yahya to invoke that which is concealed in the text to evade a prohibition while deriding Muhammadiyah modernists for being stuck on the surface level of the text. Likewise, it may be possible for a prominent voice in NU like Gus Baha³⁰ to embrace the paradox that some great Sufis loved music even though music, legally, is haram, a paradox for which Sufism has come to be quite well known (Ahmed 2016, 424–30). Yet while the paradox of the love of music is unproblematic for many, we have seen that it would be quite unthinkable to explore the paradox of allowing and defending radical Islam within the framework of Islam Nusantara, the epistemic and institutional boundary of moderate Islam. The reason is that paradox as a discursive vehicle, like the discursive formations within which it is embedded and which it transcends by pointing to deeper truths, is still governed by a politics of knowledge that determine what is normative, orthodox, and moderate. The common theme of a Sufi embracing such paradoxes to cultivate a spirituality that transcends the letter of the law has become legible—and popular—in Western discourse as a “resistance” against an Islam that is rigid, unmodern, intolerant, and insufficiently compatible with Western lifestyles and liberal politics. In the same vein, when the New York Times article mentioned earlier called the memory of the wali of Nusantara a “challenge” or “counternarrative” (Cochrane 2015) to the demands of uniformity made by ISIS, it may invoke a counter-memory of Islamic history, but it is a counter-memory that remains within a contemporary power-knowledge formation (Foucault 1996, 96). This narrative of Islam Nusantara resisting an unpopular force creates its own orthodoxy, understood in Talal Asad’s sense as a relation of power and truth (Asad 1986, 22), an orthodoxy that is coterminous with the idea of a moderate Islam.

In the last examples, the santri’s narration of the dream story of Seh Izzudin and the differentiation between external and internal dimensions of obedience, as well as Yahya’s demand to look beyond the surface-level meaning of scripture, are all characteristic of Sufi discourse. As argued above, the binary between the Sufi traditionalist and the radical Muslim or Wahhabi is one component of the global power-knowledge formation that differentiates the good from the bad Muslim. But there are other markers of moderate identity that do not fully map onto this understanding, indicating the fragmentary and often contradictory nature of all discursive formations, including the most hegemonic ones. When I asked another kyai at Krapyak, whom I call Faisal here, about Ahmad Dahlan’s supposed prohibition, he replied, much like my interlocutors in the previous examples, that if it were true that Dahlan prohibited ziarah to his grave, it was impossible that he meant it in a literal sense—after all, he was a Shāfiʿī by intellectual genealogy and training. His words could not be understood in a straightforward manner. So what could he really have meant to say? But instead of drawing on Sufi discourse, he speculated that Dahlan might have said this to an audience of people who were not real Muslims but kejawen, people who would pray to the spirits in the graves. In this respect, NU’s official position is identical to Muhammadiyah’s: Praying to anybody other than God is shirk and needs to be forbidden.³¹ Here, the tension between Dahlan’s imputed prohibition of ziarah to his grave and the practice of traditionalist Islam is made sense of with the assumption that Dahlan’s position was both reasonable when comprehended correctly and internally consistent with the primary framework of reference with which he is identified, his Shāfiʿī lineage. Against this background, Dahlan’s words need to be exegeted by taking into consideration their historical context, the occasion of his utterance. They had to be understood as a strategy to curb kejawen, not as a prohibition directed at those who were already within the fold of Islam Nusantara. The latter could just safely ignore it.

Like Kyai Faisal, Nurul and Fauzi, two college-aged santri, also emphasized the significance of contextual interpretation. Nurul speculated that perhaps Dahlan did not want people to go on ziarah to his grave because he was afraid it might be too much of a burden on people’s time. But, she explained, this meant that if it was not a burden, if we went on ziarah because we really, truly desired to, we can go. Her friend Fauzi agreed with her and added that understanding such words in context was very much like the exegesis of the Qur’an or the Hadith. “There is always more than just the text,” Fauzi said, and gave an example: When Fāṭima died, she did not want the public to attend her funeral or to know the location of her grave, so she was buried clandestinely in the middle of the night. But, he explained, this was not because she was opposed to ziarah; she simply wanted to avoid her grave becoming too crowded.³² Prohibitions needed to be understood in context to ascertain whether the reason for the prohibition even applied to contemporary cases.

While sharing—explicitly or implicitly—the same presupposition of Dahlan’s participation in a shared intellectual and legal Islamic tradition as the hermeneutic benchmark within which his words can be interpreted, the reasoning employed here is different from the two previous examples. The two santri defended their traditionalist ways by employing an interpretive process and likening it to a particular Qur’anic hermeneutic that we encountered in chapters 2 and 3 as characteristic of modernist engagements with scripture and, by extension, of the sacred moments of Indonesian history. This hermeneutic of scripture is often associated with Fazlur Rahman, whose exegetical aim was to provide a method through which rules and norms in the spirit of scripture could be established in contemporary Islamic societies. In his Islam and Modernity, he saw the Qur’an as embedded in a particular historical context and therefore suggested a hermeneutic practice consisting of a “double movement, from the present to Qur’anic times, then back to the present” (Rahman 1982, 5), a process he called ijtihad. Like Rahman, who differentiated between the ideal, timeless content of the Qur’an and its historical packaging that needed to be separated, Fauzi and Nurul distinguished the historical Ahmad Dahlan, whose decisions were limited by the conditions in which he found himself, from the ahistorical truths of his life, the “ideal” Ahmad Dahlan who is prima facie understood as a Shāfiʿī traditionalist. Muhammadiyah modernists would have disagreed with the conclusions of the two santri, but the demand that the words of Dahlan need to be interpreted is remarkably similar to Muhammadiyah’s language of doing an exegesis of Dahlan’s life that we encountered in chapter 3. The historical reasons for this similarity can at least in part be traced back to two of Rahman’s Indonesian doctoral students, Nurcholish Madjid and Ahmad Syafii Maarif, who popularized this agenda of scriptural and historical exegesis in Indonesia. Whereas the latter became Muhammadiyah’s chairperson (1998–2005) and significantly influenced the liberal wing of the organization, Nurcholish Madjid was a public intellectual with a considerable platform and influence, reaching wide segments of Indonesia’s Muslim community, including NU traditionalists.

Significantly, the transmission of this hermeneutic program from US academia to the Indonesian public sphere was not merely a question of theological and epistemic resonance, but also of political interests, which speak directly to the construction of a “good Muslim” in global political terms as a flexible interpretant. Both Rahman and his doctoral students were funded by US foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, that sought to promote an Islamic discourse that was open toward Western understandings of innovation and modernization. Pouring billions of dollars into the development of area studies, these foundations aimed to better situate the United States to pursue its Cold War interests.

The language used by Kyai Faizal, Nurul, and Fauzi may not demonstrate a single direct line from US politics to traditionalist claims to Dahlan, and neither can the projects of Maarif and Madjid be reduced to these sponsors and their political agendas (Meyer 2020; Abbas 2021). What is significant, however, is that in their rationalizations, the kind of coherence is enforced that traditionalists sometimes make fun of, when it is modernists who are using it—as Yahya did, who said that modernists with their rationalizations were unable to understand the deeper truths opened by paradox. Yet here we see that good Muslims may be coherent—if what they say is associated with the right political programs. If modernists are always suspected to slide on the slippery slope—the spectrum on which they are related to purist Salafis—traditionalists can use modernist language without such fears of being grouped in with the wrong side, the bad Muslims, because of other markers of ideological belonging, especially the pre-given understanding of Islam Nusantara as inherently moderate and peaceful.

According to Foucault, “Each discourse contains the power to say something other than what it actually says, and thus to embrace a plurality of meanings” (1982, 118). In one sense, it doesn’t seem to matter much which discursive strand is deployed to make sense of Dahlan’s alleged prohibition, because the significance of all of them is prima facie determined by the historical a priori of Islam Nusantara. The choice of discursive strand is inconsequential for the conclusion, but this does not mean that this choice of register is neutral. They are all embedded in the same global formation of power and knowledge with all of its contradictions and incommensurabilities. Sufi devaluations of the external and a modern hermeneutic of scripture based on discursive reasoning may seem incompatible, but their politics can nonetheless be the same. A good Muslim is one who has the hermeneutic capacity for flexible interpretation, not merely in relation to questions of grave visitation, but also regarding the norms and values of Western liberalism.

Conclusion

Memory studies scholars have demonstrated the disciplinary potential of memory when it is curated at the hands of powerful institutions; and in the same way, it has the capacity to provide a counternarrative to the one that represents dominant or official views, thus fueling alternative ideological agendas. Ahmad Dahlan’s memory certainly is contested, with the competing narratives being firmly rooted in the ideological and organizational paradigms of traditionalist and modernist discourse. Because of its mobilizing potential, Foucault highlighted, memory simultaneously is a powerful tool in domination and in resistance. However, as I have shown throughout this chapter, the paradigms of memory and “counter-memory” or of domination and resistance seem to fall short of the complex relations between these groups and their memories, how they construct their identities and norms, and through what systems of discipline these norms are asserted and enforced. We have already seen in chapter 1 that the relationship of traditionalism to modernity and modernist discourse is irreducible to resistance or compliance: Identities are based on memories that are not just constituted out of reactions to one hegemonic master narrative. Building on this insight, this chapter has shown that traditionalism’s entanglement in global power-knowledge formations as well as national politics complicates the question of whose story is the dominant one and who is resisting; whose version represents the interests of those in power and who subverts it; and whose claim to orthodox Islam, understood in Talal Asad’s sense as a relation of power and truth (Asad 1986, 22), is more effective. The parties wishing to construct a certain normative past are themselves partly constructed by the same global power and knowledge formations as the Other that is antithetical to them. The notion of resistance is also inadequate because NU’s memory practices are geared toward more than contesting modernism. What is contested is not only something outside of NU, but the potential presence of radical countercurrents within NU that need to be opposed by constructing and asserting an ideological and organizational integrity through the understanding of Islam Nusantara.

Six

The Power of the Chain

pak jazir, the muhammadiyah figure we encountered in chapter 4, once told me with some pride that one of the effects of having had the Karangkajen cemetery cleaned up was that being there did not feel the least bit scary. “Even the youngest children in the neighborhood aren’t afraid to play there after dark,” he once told me. But the group of santri at Krapyak, the protagonists of the last chapter who had reluctantly gone to pray at Ahmad Dahlan’s grave, begged to differ. When remembering their ziarah to Karangkajen, they recalled not merely being afraid of being antagonized by militant Muhammadiyah members, a fear that, as we saw, did important political work. They also emphasized how profoundly uncomfortable the graveyard had been for them. “Creepy” (I. seram, J. serem), they called it, with a bit of a shudder. And they described to me how the whole cemetery was quiet (I./J. sepi),¹ much too quiet, quiet in a way that was unnatural for a graveyard. Other santri I spoke with shared the sentiment that a quiet cemetery was not a good thing; cemeteries should not be quiet. They often contrasted Dahlan’s grave with Mbah Munawwir’s, located in a cemetery that is not at all quiet, and that they find quite comfortable.

This and the previous chapter each answer the question of why it makes sense for traditionalists to visit Dahlan’s grave. Yet the two chapters sit alongside each other uneasily. The previous chapter conceptualized traditionalist memories embedded in the broader narrative of Islam Nusantara as a discursive formation and an orthodoxy in the sense of Michel Foucault and Talal Asad. As such, these memories are firmly embedded in worldly institutions and global formations of power and knowledge that have a stake in producing the past in a particular way, for example, for self-conscious political calculation. During my field research, it became clear to me that traditionalists deploy narratives of the past to gain political advantages, whereby the past, and the relation of the living to it, becomes a medium for claiming the politically lucrative label of the moderate Muslim. Yet it became likewise clear to me that our understanding of their engagements with the dead through ziarah “cannot rest with power,” as Michael Lambek (2000, 312) wrote. I learned that memory ultimately transcends discursive and cognitive processes of transmission and, with them, the political interests of the day. Phenomena like grave visitations are irreducibly complex. Even if religious forces are always somehow co-opted to serve political agendas while power and discourse fundamentally shape religious practice and understandings, there may also be an excess of meaning, an orientation toward that which transcends all such interests. These different perspectives cannot always be made fully commensurate in our analyses. When totality fails, as Richard Fox (2018, 169) put it, our efforts to synchronize and reconcile different interpretations of what is ostensibly the same object would gloss over the tensions that are felt on the ground (101). By juxtaposing these two chapters, I propose that sometimes we need to be comfortable with sitting with the tensions and incommensurabilities that arise among different conceptualizations that are all more or less valid. As scholars, we also need to cultivate a tolerance of ambiguity to understand the complexity of the phenomena we seek to understand.

As we saw, for traditionalists the grave is a site where moderate identities are claimed. This chapter’s task is to show that the grave, for traditionalists, is also an interface between the past and the present, a point of access to the imaginal realm where those who remember forge ties of identity and belonging that are irreducible to the organizational boundaries of Muhammadiyah and NU and force us to look beyond the distinctions as they have been framed by modern identity politics. I focus on two interrelated aspects. The first pertains to Javanese understandings of temporality, and the relation between the past and present in memory. Expanding on the relation between the meaning of historical writing in traditional Javanese literature and my interlocutors’ experiences at graves, I draw on Nancy Florida’s (1995) research to show how the past, when remembered, loses its pastness and comes alive and operative as a blessing (A. baraka) in the present and a prophetic script for the future. Memory transcends discursive formations of power and knowledge because it is irreducible to discourse. Constituting the imaginal infrastructure through which the past becomes operative in the present, memory has a force of its own that ontologically exceeds cognitive or emotive processes.

What, then, is it that makes this agency of memory operative? Building on Foucault’s late work (1988, 1990b), Asad and others have shown how embodied practices facilitate the cultivation of a pious subject that draws increasingly close to God (Asad 1997, 48; see also Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Deeb 2006). This process of self-cultivation is an ethical project. Yet my interlocutors’ ethical aspirations transcend the focus on one’s own formation by insisting that virtue entails establishing links between the past and the present. Drawing on the classical Islamic sources my interlocutors have used when explaining their ties with the dead to me, I show how traditionalist memory entails the cultivation of virtuous relationships based on an ethic of reciprocity between those in the grave and those who come to visit them. The ethics governing these connections mirror certain relationships among the living—like between kyai and santri, or murshid and murīd. These ties, and the temporal and ethical relations they produce, redefine lineages of ideological belonging and the meaning of a traditionalist identity. In conversation with anthropologists of Islam, including Amira Mittermaier (2011, 2019) and Anand Taneja (2017), I show how memory in ziarah challenges binary perspectives that separate the past from the present, or the dead from the living, and posit a morally and ontologically autonomous subject. The genealogical links established through ziarah restructure religious identities, which are therefore irreducible to individual choice. Indeed, these links can reinterpret or even override the choices of an individual, even the choices of an esteemed teacher such as Ahmad Dahlan.

Temporality: The Future of the Dead in the Present of the Living

To begin answering the question of what it means for traditionalists to remember, I turn to a grave that is much more typical for traditionalists than Ahmad Dahlan’s: the grave of Mbah Munawwir, Krapyak’s founder, located in Dongkelan, a neighborhood in the vicinity of Krapyak, just across the small river Winogo. In spite of their geographic proximity, the two cemeteries seem to be worlds apart. The Dongkelan graveyard is not sepi or quiet. Neither is it anywhere near as tidy as the one in Karangkajen. Chickens roam between the gravestones, some of which have fallen over while others are overgrown with moss. The grave of Mbah Munawwir and those of his family members have larger headstones than most others, are shrouded in green cloth, and are usually covered in fresh flowers. Whereas the Karangkajen cemetery emphasizes the equality of all the dead through the uniformity of their graves, this cemetery singles out and celebrates its famous residents. Next to the final resting place of Mbah Munawwir and his family, there is a roofed tiled platform where pilgrims can sit comfortably to pray, sheltered from the heat of the sun or the rain. They can help themselves to dog-eared prayer books that are sitting on a bent bookshelf. And here, visiting the dead isn’t a furtive or rushed matter, as it reportedly is in Karangkajen, but a regular and lively affair. This is especially the case in the month of Ruwah, the Javanese name for the month of Shaʿbān in the Islamic calendar, the month right before Ramadan, when the Javanese are especially likely to go on ziarah. The Dongkelan graveyard, like the tombs of other great ulama of Java, is teeming with pilgrims. Chartered buses park in the narrow streets around Mbah Munawwir’s grave as people spill out of the doors. Many of the pilgrims are part of long-standing prayer groups in their hometowns, majelis tahlil or majelis dhikr, who routinely visit several graves each Ruwah, selecting a different route each year.² They may be from towns a few hours away from Yogyakarta, and they often look quite tired—many groups are on the road for several days and sleep on the bus, if they manage to sleep at all. Those who come to Yogyakarta normally visit Mbah Munawwir along with the grave of Mbah Nur Iman in Mlangi, and perhaps Gunung Pring in neighboring Muntilan, or Seh Maulana Maghribi, whose grave is perched on a cliff at Parangtritis on Java’s southern coast. Sometimes they may also get an hour to go shopping on Malioboro Road or to visit the beach. Upon arriving, the pilgrims walk in a single file across the cemetery to the platform next to Mbah Munawwir’s grave, sit down, and one designated person leads them in prayer (fig. 7). On a busy day in Ruwah, two or three groups may be waiting for their turn as another group is praying.

figure 7. A group praying at the grave of Mbah Munawwir. Photo by the author.

[picture]

Ziarah to graves has been practiced since the beginnings of Islam. Yet, as discussed in the last chapter, the contemporary ziarah boom in Java is unprecedented and correlates with NU’s adoption of Islam Nusantara as the organization’s official label in 2015. As we recall, Islam Nusantara is the peaceful Islam that has been practiced in the area since the mission of the wali sanga, who brought Islam to the area by skillfully using local custom and knowledge as a vehicle to convert people. Since its beginnings in 1926, NU has defended the body of scholars or ulama, past and present, as indispensable in transmitting Islamic teachings. Through their adaptation of the language of Islam Nusantara and the stories of the nine saints, NU has been provided with a narrative model to project their traditionalist lineages back to the moment when Islam first came to the area. As a kyai once explained to me, the 1926 foundation of NU was just a way of formalizing something that had existed in Java since the mission of the nine saints. As a ritual articulation of Islam Nusantara, ziarah commemorates these lineages that connect today’s pilgrims with their pious ancestors while claiming them as a part of the legacy of Islam Nusantara.

As people waited to pray at Mbah Munawwir’s grave, or after they were done and spent a few minutes sitting in the mosque to rest before getting back on the bus to continue their journey, I would strike up a conversation with them. Why had they come to Mbah Munawwir’s grave? Their answers were fairly uniform: They had come because he was one of Java’s great ulama, or a wali, one of the pillars of Javanese Islam, and therefore deserving of the respect and prayers of today’s Muslims. What did they know about Mbah Munawwir’s life? They shrugged. Not very much; and neither did they find that remarkable, let alone embarrassing. They were not an exception: Most people I spoke with who came on ziarah to his or other graves knew little or nothing about the stories around the person whose grave they were visiting. The pilgrims had come to pray for the dead or to receive blessings. What did it matter what specifically it was the person had done?

As became evident in the previous chapter, memory plays a significant role in consolidating normative religious identities by claiming stewardship over a normative past. But what does it actually mean to remember? The relative indifference about the details of Mbah Munawwir’s life points to a dimension of this shared culture of memory that is less concerned with the narrativization of historical continuities than with the creation of community with the pious dead. This dimension of memory is socially relevant and powerful, even if it exceeds the transmission of news and facts. It may be true that at the busiest graves, vendors often sell little booklets describing the life of the person in the grave, along with other souvenirs. Such booklets are popular as keepsakes, and they are treasured and held onto; but it seemed to me that they were rarely read. The purchase and ownership of such a booklet is not significant for its informational benefits but for being a portable relic, a medium of a memory that activates the spiritual excellence of the dead, becoming manifest through blessings like miraculous interventions.

A young woman I call Naila, a college-aged santri at Krapyak, had had a firsthand experience of this miraculous power that is released when the dead are remembered. I did not talk to Naila myself. Her story was related to me by another santri who knew her and who emphasized to me that Naila’s story was common. Naila had been a victim of black magic. She was sitting on a bus when she was approached by a stranger, a man who asked where she was going. She did not want to talk to him, she said, but she also didn’t want to be rude. The man was apparently less concerned with manners than she was, because he told her that his wife was not satisfying him sexually, something no respectable man would share with a young woman on a bus, or really anywhere. He gave her a piece of paper with his phone number on it, which she accepted out of politeness, not knowing that he had cast a spell on it that would force her to keep in touch with him. Their contact continued until Naila went to Mbah Munawwir’s grave to pray. Because of the power of the spell, she did not even know what specifically she needed help with, but as she got up after having completed her prayers, the bewitched piece of paper fell out of her bag and the spell was broken. Mbah Munawwir had saved her.

The agency of the dead that is activated by those who remember them at their graves points to a dimension of memory that scholars have brought into focus in recent decades and that highlights material and embodied forms of remembering rather than narrative or cognitive ones. Here, memory is more about a presence inscribed in objects or places that is experienced ontologically (Runia 2006), or about the material products of the past that permeate the present and shape futures (Stoler 2008). We also find understandings of remembering as an activation of the past in the present in studies on both Islam and Indonesia, for example, Charles Hirschkind’s (2020) descriptions of “affective recollections” that bring Medieval Iberia back to life; Anand Taneja’s concept of the past as a temporal “Elsewhen,” which constitutes a “field of potential . . . which destabilizes the inevitability of the present state of affairs” (2018, 60); or Patricia Spyer’s research in Eastern Indonesia where the past, when it is invoked correctly, is endowed with a decisive force and agency that can be deployed to achieve immediate goals (2000, 76). More broadly, Muslim and Indonesian conceptualizations of the real may invite us to think beyond the visible and rational as they point to a metaphysical Elsewhere that can “act upon” (Mittermaier 2011, 163) the one who is visiting the dead.

To understand how remembering at graves can activate these realities and temporalities, I once again enlist the help of Walter Benjamin, who was centrally concerned with the question of what it means to have a knowledge of history that is irreducible to facts about the past. Adopting the terminology of Marcel Proust, Benjamin differentiated between two sorts of memory that broadly correspond to two ways of relating to the past. Voluntary recollection organizes discrete information in a way that is factually accurate and comprehensible but that cannot be assimilated into personal recollections of the past (Benjamin 1969, 158). Contrasted with this ordinary kind of remembering is “involuntary recollection,” the matter of what Benjamin calls tradition: a knowledge of the past that cannot be articulated but makes individual experiences meaningful and that is transmitted not so much in the great works of civilization as through the human and material infrastructure that makes them possible.³ It is a knowledge that is partially accessed and partially constructed by the flaneur in the city who interprets the web of relations among the masses (Benjamin 1999), and also the pilgrim, whose prayers at different graves access and ritually articulate the lineages that make up Islam Nusantara. Such involuntary memory has a transformative power without being reducible to any individual’s conscious knowledge or agenda. It remains the case that grave visitation at this large scale has only been made possible by—and, in turn, has the potential to reinforce—the discursive formation of Islam Nusantara, with all the political and ideological motifs it entails. But grave visitation is not reducible to these motifs, because what the pilgrim finds at the grave turns out to be connected ontologically, narratively, and ritually to an incomprehensibly large and complex web of realities.

Although Benjamin’s account is embedded in a philosophical tradition that is quite unlike the contemporary Javanese context, his theoretical approach resonates not merely with my interlocutors’ understandings, but also with theorizations of memory in traditional Javanese literary narratives. Nancy Florida has shown that historical accounts in traditional Java were consciously and explicitly written with the intent to touch the readers’ presents and futures. More than a record of the past, Javanese historians understood the inscription of history itself as a historical event in the unfolding present. By self-consciously deploying the past’s prophetic potential, they asked the reader to imagine and bring about its extension into the future, to practice a form of “active memory” (Florida 2019, 103). Here, history does not aspire to a disembodied objectivity, as is often the case in Western historical writing, but is explicitly dialogical, the writer’s and readers’ joint effort of rewriting the past in(to) the future (Florida 1995, 52–53).

Florida discusses this future-oriented historical perspective in accounts of the past by reference to the semantic range of the Javanese word mengěti, which can mean to remember, or to document historical events as a repository of facts about the past. But it can also signify “to commemorate” or “celebrate” history, whereby past-as-memory is actualized. And finally, it also means “to predict” or “to prophesy,” “a prescient present’s writing about a past which opens to a desired future” (Florida 1995, 395–97). By remembering and through the desire to commemorate a particular past, the virtues and possibilities of the past are made operative: “The past event that the poet writes is finally realized, historically, by being read and reregistered, prophetically, in the presents and futures of its readers” (Florida 1995, 398). With Benjamin and Florida, we can thus think of the graves of the foundational figures of Javanese traditionalist Islam as the sites where the relations are established that make such involuntary recollection or prophetic memory possible. Like a literary text that links writer and reader in a relation that actualizes the text’s meaning anew, graves are more than historical monuments that convey information or spark inspiration. The locus of the grave, in conjunction with those going there to pray or to perform memory, is ontologically distinct from other places, because it is a site where new possibilities are opened up, such as the possibility of a life that is no longer under a spell of black magic, as was the case with Naila.

Such a project can also have clear political implications. In traditional Javanese literature, perhaps the most famous and most consequential story of a grave visitation is about Sultan Agung, already mentioned in the previous chapter. As we recall, in spite of his unparalleled royal power, at the time of his pilgrimage in 1633 Sultan Agung was politically weakened. A few years before, he had suffered a devastating military loss against the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and was now facing rebellions from different villages in his kingdom. With his authority uncertain, Sultan Agung undertook a pilgrimage to the graveyard of Tembayat, the resting place of Sunan Bayat. His choice of destination was practical, as this was an area where people were especially rebellious and, from Agung’s point of view, in need of royal consolidation. But the political significance of his visit transcended the contemporary situation of his own reign. According to some traditional accounts, Sunan Bayat was the last king of Majapahit, Java’s great medieval Hindu-Buddhist kingdom (1293–ca. 1500).⁴ The fall of Majapahit is linked in Javanese chronicles to the rise of Islam and the mission of the nine saints in the sixteenth century. It is said that Sunan Bayat was driven from his court by Muslim conquerors, but that he then converted to Islam when he encountered Sunan Kalijaga. The latter recognized Sunan Bayat’s spiritual powers and even admitted Sunan Bayat to the ranks of the nine saints. Sunan Bayat thus embodies the lineages, and the spiritual powers, of both pre-Islamic and Islamic Java.

One account of Sultan Agung’s visit to the grave at Tembayat is given in a Javanese narrative tradition, a so-called Babad Nitik, which belongs to the genre of a chronicle focusing on the personal and spiritual affairs of the king (Pigeaud 1967, 160–62). I focus on a version written in macapat that was inscribed at the court of the Yogyakarta Sultanate, one of Mataram’s heirs, in the late nineteenth century, and that is now kept in the special collections of the Leiden University Libraries (LOr 6476).⁵ The text’s narration of Sultan Agung’s ziarah illustrates how remembering at graves is imagined in these literary contexts. In this account, Sultan Agung’s political crisis is conceptualized as a spiritual crisis. To resolve his difficulties, the king had to deepen his spirituality, but he is stuck, unable to do so. At the grave, lost in meditation, he is called upon by a mysterious figure who suddenly appears before him.

Dhandhanggula⁶ (Canto II)

His face was handsome, he was
middle aged, his garments
magnificent and exquisite.
He was shining like the full moon
Whose brightness is obscured
by neither mist nor rainclouds.
(LOr 6476 II:26)

Sultan Agung is unsure what to make of this apparition, who is not only quite extraordinary and magnificent in appearance, but who also seems to know all about Sultan Agung and his spiritual crisis. Sultan Agung asks him to reveal his name and origin. But the apparition won’t tell him—not yet. Instead,

Evading the question, his words were sweet:
“Oh Sultan, you shall receive
the love of the Lord who rules the world,
for indeed, I have
already been granted permission to teach knowledge
to you, king.”
In an instant, the Sultan
was taught secret knowledge.
Hence the king became exceedingly brave in his heart
and far-reaching in his mind.
(LOr 6476 II:32)

The mysterious figure then asks if Sultan Agung has received his knowledge. Only after the king confirms does the mysterious figure disclose his identity. “Truly, I am the Sunan who resides at Bayat” (LOr 6476 III:4).

The knowledge of Sunan Bayat, Java’s last pre-Islamic king who became a Muslim saint knowing the secret knowledge of Islam, represents an Islamization of Java’s pre-Islamic history; and Sultan Agung’s remembering, the Javanese mengěti that activated this knowledge for himself, also made it operative for posterity: Sultan Agung marked his own transformative experience by changing the Javanese measurement of time. Up until then, the Javanese courts had been using the lunisolar Indian-derived Śaka calendar. Sultan Agung now introduced a hybrid calendrical system, the so-called Javanese calendar, where the Śaka numerical sequence was kept but continued with lunar years (Ricklefs 2006, 42). By converting the calendar, Sultan Agung projected the knowledge he learned at the grave of Tembayat into Java’s future.

Today’s Muslims continue to access the spiritual resources of the past through concrete objects like the calendar. I once attended a meeting of one of Krapyak’s teachers with people from the community who came to ask for solutions to their troubles: One man was afraid of losing his job; another had problems with his son. The teacher gave a bottle of water he had breathed on to one, and then got up to take off his shirt and put on another, handing the worn shirt to the second. “It’s charged with blessings,” my research assistant whispered in my ear. When the people had left, the teacher turned to me and said, unprompted by any question: “I have never been to school, miss. Everything I know I learned at the grave.” It was rumored in Krapyak that in his youth he had spent several years living in Mbah Munawwir’s cemetery. While there, by remembering Mbah Munawwir’s knowledge and virtues, the teacher was transformed by a force that transcended his consciousness and that disrupted or reinterpreted his experience of the present. He continued, “The most important thing is to keep learning and to show kindness to all.” Learning at graves turned him, and his breath and shirt, into agents of a living past that could be passed on to others as a blessing.

When Sultan Agung asked Sunan Bayat for his name, the latter declined to answer at first; his name was not as important as his knowledge. Today’s pilgrims, who don’t know any biographical data of the dead they are visiting, also want to access a pious predecessor’s power and knowledge in the present and to interpret and transform the present and the future. The story of Sultan Agung’s visit to Tembayat to consolidate his power shows us the political force of remembering the dead at graves, but this kind of memory can also serve to challenge existing power structures, for example, when a marginalized subject writes a history that centers the margins of the past (Florida 1995), or when a poet during high colonialism invokes similarly troubled historical times and the prophetic light to illuminate Java’s future (Florida 2019). The kind of memory my traditionalist interlocutors practice at graves is also irreducible to cognitive and social processes and ontologically distinct from the media through which it is transmitted. It is capable of engendering results that are coming from somewhere outside of the person doing the remembering. Those who do ziarah expect to find their interpretation of their world transformed as unforeseen possibilities are opened up by this knowledge, possibilities that are not even possible to envision because of a malicious spell, as was the case with Naila; or a knowledge that can harness the power of Java’s pre-Islamic past in its Islamic future, like the one Sultan Agung found at Tembayat. The pilgrims may only have partial access to the knowledge of Java’s history and their pious ancestors, but the power of these past subjectivities permeates time through objects like graves, or the calendar and the teacher’s shirt, just as the whole involuntary memory of the city of Paris permeates the scenes witnessed by Benjamin’s flaneur.

Ethics: The Power of the Chain

“The most important thing is to keep learning and to show kindness to all,” the teacher had said, pointing to the ethical dimension of memory, the ethics governing the relationship between the living and the dead. One of the stories I heard from a different kyai was about Mbah Munawwir’s last student, Rifa’i. When Rifa’i joined Krapyak in the early 1940s, Mbah Munawwir knew he was going to pass soon, and so he encouraged the student to memorize the Qur’an very quickly so he could examine him before his death to bestow on him his license (A. ijāza) and his intellectual genealogy (A./I. sanad). The student managed to memorize the whole Qur’an just before Mbah Munawwir’s death in 1942, but, having been rushed, his memorization was imperfect. After the war and Indonesian independence in 1945, Rifa’i became a civil servant, had little time for his study of the Qur’an, and started to forget what he had learned. Then, one night, Mbah Munawwir came to him in a dream and admonished him to preserve his memorization. Rifa’i obeyed. He quit his job—something that likely entailed significant financial hardship in the difficult postwar years—and dedicated himself fully to memorizing the Qur’an, repeating it over and over until he had become an expert. At that point, Mbah Munawwir returned to him in a dream and confirmed that Rifa’i’s command of the Qur’an, which had not been the best, was now extraordinary. “And this,” the teacher concluded his story to me, “means that Mbah Munawwir is still present and continues to care for his students and his student’s students.”

The knowledge and power of remembered figures, I have shown, remain present among those who remember them. The memory of the pious dead like Mbah Munawwir actualizes God’s grace through their presence and thereby facilitates the emergence of a desired future. Rifa’i’s story shows that the dead continue to be responsible for their living successors and their spiritual well-being and that indeed their intervention is expected or at least hoped for. At the same time, however, this responsibility also entitles the pious dead to respectful treatment from the living, such that they can make demands on their successors and expect obedience, even if it comes at a significant cost, as it likely did for Rifa’i.⁷ In the conceptual vocabulary of traditional Islamic ethics based on a Hadith recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Muslim (2162b), Muslims have a right (A. ḥaqq) over other Muslims in specific moral matters, like returning greetings and carrying their bier after death. These rights, and their corresponding duties (A. wājib), undergird an ethic that is constituted by relationships, where moral agency is interpersonal and shared.⁸

This reciprocal relation between the living and the dead becomes manifest in two common prayers at the grave, tawassul and tahlil. By considering these two prayers in relation to each other, I argue that the agentive capacity of memory to bring about a desired future is contingent on an ethic of reciprocity, that memory is agentive when this reciprocal relationship is intact and virtuous. Respectful remembrance is thus an ethical project, an embodied practice that cultivates the right attitude that can open up the possibility of entering into communion with other subjectivities and the divine (see Mauss 1973, 87; Asad 1997, 48). While this cultivation is pursued by individuals, the dynamic of the reciprocal relation transcends the individual as an ethical agent. The reciprocal exchange of favors and commitment establishes social relations in which, as Mauss put it, “lives are mingled together” (1990, 20), although “lives” do not merely include the living but may also count those who have lived and are now dead. As a result, reciprocal relations form communities not merely horizontally, among members of the same generation, but also vertically, among different generations (14).

Tawassul and tahlil are both supplicatory prayers uttered in Arabic, where the naming of an addressee is followed by the recitation of a Qur’anic sura, which is offered for the benefit of the named person or persons. Whereas tawassul is not limited to prayers at the grave but can be performed in a wide range of different situations,⁹ tahlil in contemporary Southeast Asia is specifically known as a prayer for the dead.¹⁰ The two are often considered inseparable components of ritual prayer at the grave that complement each other, as tawassul entails that the one praying asks the dead to intercede on their behalf, while the opposite is the case for tahlil, where the one praying intercedes on behalf of the dead.

Some have noted that there is a transactional element to the prayer, whereby the dead are offered the merit (I./J. pahala) accrued through the recitation in exchange for blessings (Millie 2008, 111). In this context, the merit of religious devotion becomes operative for the dead on the day of judgment, while the living receive baraka, the kind of blessing they can still enjoy in this life: finding a marriage partner, success in an examination, the end of social conflicts, the electoral victory of one’s preferred presidential candidate (Jamhari 2001, 112–17). Many of my interlocutors, however, have resisted such transactional understandings of tawassul and tahlil. For one, the two prayers are not strictly symmetrical. Only those who are remembered as outstanding examples of Muslim piety and knowledge are normally considered suitable to address as an intermediary in tawassul. Tahlil can and, indeed, should be prayed for anybody who has passed away. Instead of drawing on transactional understandings, my interlocutors usually conceptualized the two prayers as a means for deepening their relationship and expressing their love for each other as well as the deceased, which is a virtue in itself. The blessings that are gained in these relationships are hoped to lead to a deeper engagement in religious devotion, which is an end in itself, even as it will result in the accrual of more merit.¹¹ The transactional and self-interested present a path for overcoming these very concerns. The most advanced, a kyai explained to me, no longer expect any blessings or merit. They simply perform their prayers out of love. Similarly, Amira Mittermaier argued in her analysis of almsgiving in Islam that, in the religious context, Mauss’s dyad becomes a triad, since it binds people not only to each other, but also to God (Mittermaier 2019, 8). The love for the pious dead both nurtures a virtuous relation with them and also ultimately leads to a deeper loving relation with the divine.

Tawassul, often translated as prayer of intercession, is a prayer to God through a wasīla or intermediary, someone whom the one praying considers to be closer to God than herself. According to NU’s founder, Hasyim Asy’ari, “The understanding of using a wasīla is that a servant of God asks God for help by way of people who are certain to have rank and stature at God’s side, like the prophets and the wali.” But, Asy’ari clarified, “we only invoke Allah and we only pray to Him. Because when we are certain that someone has a high rank, we do not actually make them the focus of our belief. They are only servants who have a close relationship with Allah, someone who can ask Allah on our behalf for whatever it is that we have requested” (Asy’ari 2005, 132–33). Asy’ari’s fatwa corresponds to how most of my traditionalist interlocutors have conceptualized tawassul to me. They often referenced the Qur’anic origin of the practice, citing Sūrat al-Māʾida 35, “You who believe, be mindful of God, seek a wasīla to Him and be mindful for His cause, so you may prosper”; and Sūrat al-Isrāʾ 57, “Those [angels] they pray to are themselves seeking a wasīla to their Lord, even those who are closest to Him.”¹² They further refer to a Hadith, according to which ʿUmar, at times of drought, turned to the Prophet’s uncle to ask for rain: “‘O Allah! We used to ask our Prophet to invoke [A. natawassul] You for rain, and now we ask his uncle to invoke You for rain. O Allah! Bless us with rain!’ And so it would rain” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1010).

Because the person who is invoked as an intermediary is considered to have special status in God’s eyes, using them as an intermediary makes prayers more effective and overcomes distance (Millie 2009, 104). When the kyai or santri at Krapyak explained the mediatory function of the wasīla to me, they would often employ different analogies: If you wanted to talk to the Indonesian president, you would feel too shy (I. malu) to approach the president directly, but you might ask an assistant, or someone otherwise close to the president, to make an introduction and facilitate a meeting.¹³ One kyai who had not responded for months to my text messages in which I asked to meet him explained that he had never responded to my direct queries but had only agreed to a meeting when I had sent my research assistant, herself a santri at Krapyak. In the same way, he said, tawassul is a more effective way to reach God. Another kyai compared tawassul to a person traveling from Yogyakarta to the capital Jakarta by way of all the other cities on the route. Rather than just passing through, tawassul meant getting out, perhaps sampling the local specialty foods, taking a look around. That way, he explained, one would have a much more enjoyable trip and the experiences gained on the road would help facilitate a better understanding of Jakarta.

The point in all of these analogies is that no one is entirely self-sufficient in their religious knowledge and devotion; they depend on others. A teacher at Krapyak whom I call Kyai Abdullah told me that tawassul was a commemoration of this dependence, especially in relation to those on whom one is especially dependent, such as, for example, their school’s founder. What today’s Muslims know, what they intellectually grasp and what they have realized through their spiritual practice, was transmitted to them by many generations of scholars who preceded them. “I did not study with Mbah Munawwir,” Kyai Abdullah elaborated, “but I studied with Mbah Najib, whose sanad goes through Mbah Munawwir.” By addressing Mbah Munawwir as a wasīla, he commemorated his own intellectual and spiritual dependence on Mbah Munawwir as well as others. At schools like Krapyak, scripts for addressing their founder as a wasīla are often made available, printed in Arabic in cheap booklets for easy distribution. In practice such scripts do not need to be strictly followed, and people may modify them by perhaps adding other teachers as well.¹⁴ The following excerpt from a prayer book titled Al-Munawwiriyyah, which is sold at the Krapyak bookstore, can serve as an example of tawassul in practice:

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

To the presence of the Prophet, the Chosen, our Master and Lord, Muhammad, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, and to his family, his wives, his descendants, and his associates, for them, al-Fātiḥa . . .

Also, to the presence of all the prophets, the messengers, the companions, the followers, the saints, the martyrs, the righteous, and the scholars,

especially to the founder of this institution, our Shaykh Simbah Kyai Muhammad Munawwir bin ʿAbd Allah Rashād,

and his wives, their ancestors, lineages, and descendants, those under their protection, the wives of their sons, the community of Muslims and believers, those who are alive and those who are dead, for them, al-Fātiḥa . . . (Sekretariat, Pondok Pesantren Krapyak Yogyakarta 2015, 86–87)

We see in this script that Mbah Munawwir as an intermediary is not considered in isolation, but rather in the company of all those who had to do with him, whether directly or indirectly. As such, the network is always shifting and growing. At the very beginning of the lineage is the Prophet Muhammad, with whom all knowledge became manifest in history and began to be transmitted. “It’s a whole package,” said Yahya, the santri and kyai in the making whom we already encountered in the previous chapter. He explained to me that when he addressed Mbah Munawwir as a wasīla, he would automatically add his whole network and address those who preceded him, like the prophets and saints, Java’s scholars from whom he learned, as well as those who depended on him like his wives, descendants, and students, and everyone else who had to do with him. There were two reasons for this. The first reason was just practical and commonsensical: the more people were addressed as a wasīlah, the better tawassul would work. And second, adding Mbah Munawwir’s whole network was a way to make visible the lineages of spiritual dependence. As Yahya pointed out to me, the order in which the addressees are named is arranged hierarchically. The Prophet Muhammad is on top, because all who are named afterward depend on him in their faith and knowledge; and for the same reason Mbah Munawwir is named before his wives, descendants, and dependents. Remembering these dependences, Yahya explained, meant that the bond between those praying and the wasīla is maintained and the sanad as a channel of knowledge is reversed as the student’s reverential memory of the teacher. Through a cultivation of such a respectful relationship with the pious ancestors, the person praying tawassul is acted on by a transtemporal force, Taneja’s (2018, 60) Elsewhen where the past “exists as a field of potential,” that their memory activates.

Yahya’s understanding of the spiritual genealogies as channels that transport knowledge and power from a moment in the past to the present resonates with anthropological studies on the role of genealogies in Islam,¹⁵ especially the work of Engseng Ho, who discussed the complex role of genealogy in the theology and self-understanding of the Ḥaḍramī, especially the Bā ʿAlawī, who claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad and have a long history of migration, transplanting themselves and their genealogies to places around the Indian Ocean. In some of their foundational texts, lineages of biological descent or transmission of knowledge that can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad are understood to transport the Muhammadan Light through history.¹⁶ In the conceptual vocabulary of Ibn al- ʿArabī, the historical journey of the Muhammadan Light is located in an ontological realm between wujūd, pure existence, and the phenomenal world, where things partake and derive their relative existence from wujūd. If the realm of wujūd and the phenomenal world are the two poles of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ontology, intermediate degrees are known as the imaginal world: ʿālam al-khayāl or ʿālam al-takhayyul, which can be opened up by the epistemic faculty of imagination.¹⁷ Those in the chain are therefore not merely mediators in prayer, serving as genealogical intermediaries that constitute links in the sanad or silsila linking the one who is praying with the Prophet Muhammad. They are also ontological and epistemological intermediaries that transport the Muhammadan Light, agents through whom the knowledge that was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad becomes manifest in the here and now. The traditionalist Javanese scholar Zamakhsyari Dhofier has called this imaginal infrastructure “the spiritual power of the chain” (1999, 58) that facilitates the connection between student and teacher, or between the pious dead and contemporary Muslims.

In their conceptualization of tawassul at graves, my interlocutors participated in the same kind of discourse, although specific references to Ibn al-ʿArabī were rare. Crucially, in my conversations it became clear that these lineages are not just documentary or means of authenticating authority, but conceptual and material infrastructures that can establish durable communities as well as relationships to be explored and cultivated. My interlocutors stressed that the maintenance of this chain, and the power that it sustains, constitute an ethical requirement for those who are alive today. Yahya especially emphasized the significance of honoring the dead, something he called a question of adab or propriety or practical ethics.¹⁸ According to Dhofier, pesantren cultivate a strong sense of these practical ethics in their students through the understanding that this chain must not be cut. “Students’ respect for their teachers is absolute and everlasting, and must be expressed in all aspects of life. It is contrary to their religious values for a student to forget his tie to his teacher,” writes Dhofier (1999, 61). When a student does forget, Dhofier explains, the student loses the teacher’s blessings. As a result, the student’s knowledge may not completely disappear, but it will no longer be the living knowledge of the pious dead that can act on the present. It will become ineffective.¹⁹ Dhofier references a standard textbook that is frequently read at traditionalist schools titled Instruction of the Student (A. Taʿlīm al-Mutaʿallim) by Burhān al-Dīn Zarnūjī,²⁰ in which students are exhorted to honor their teacher: “Know that in the study of science one holds in esteem knowledge and those who possess it. One [must also] glorify and venerate the teacher. It is said: He who attains knowledge does not do so except through respect, while he who fails [in this goal] does so by ceasing to respect and venerate learning and its bearers” (1947, 32). As we saw in the previous chapter, this respectful remembrance is mandated even when the teacher seems to forbid it. Yahya emphasized that a respectful engagement with the dead was more important than obedience, that therefore visiting Ahmad Dahlan’s grave was mandatory even if he had prohibited people from doing so. Zarnūjī agrees, as he continues: “[In addition] it is stated: Respect is preferable to obedience, for do you not perceive that man does not become an unbeliever through rebellion [against divine law] but rather by making light [of his rebellion] and by discarding reverence? One aspect of glorifying knowledge consists in holding the teacher in esteem” (1947, 32). Tawassul facilitates this reverence that protects the student from becoming an unbeliever, holding him accountable to this chain while simultaneously channeling its power, the power of those who came before on which everyone depends, whether they realize it or not.

At first glance, the imperative of the student to remember their chain of dependence looks like the opposite of involuntary recollection, as the memorization and categorization of particular individuals, their relations with each other and to oneself, in a way that is factually accurate and comprehensible. Yet information is not what is at stake here. Remembering their dependence on a whole lineage of people who came before them by visiting graves is one of the means by which people can bring about a space where discrete objects or moments give access to a whole tradition. The one praying chooses an appropriate link in the chain, one with whom they have a direct relationship. But the activation of a single link activates the lineage of spiritual dependence in the Islamic universe, a constantly shifting “web of their numberless interconnecting relationships” (Benjamin 1968, 165) that is much larger than any individual can conceive.

When viewed from the transactional viewpoint that is typical of the novices among those who remember, tawassul is supposed to benefit the one praying by activating the chain, whereas tahlil in the Malay-Indonesian world is a prayer of paying respect and returning the favor to the dead in a spirit of gratefulness for their contributions. The living are responsible for the dead, for although they are no longer part of the phenomenal world, the dead are still present: “I used to live across from the Krapyak graveyard,” Kyai Abdullah once told me, “and every Saturday night I would see people arriving on their motorbikes, young couples, and they would get off and walk into the graveyard.” It turns out that cemeteries are also a destination for young Javanese lovers; they are often one of the few places where they can find some privacy under the cover of darkness to do the things for which some privacy is needed. “I went to the neighborhood warden and told him that we had to do something to stop this,” he told me. But the neighborhood warden declined to get involved. After all it was none of his business what people were doing with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Telling me about this affair had made Kyai Abdullah visibly upset. “Of course it is none of our business,” he groaned, “but this is a graveyard! The people there still exist, even if their way of existing is different from ours.”

To explain the significance of tahlil, my interlocutors at Krapyak often drew on a book by the medieval Islamic theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350) titled The Book of the Spirit (A. Kitāb al-Rūh.).²¹ The reference to Ibn al-Qayyim by traditionalists may be surprising at first glance. In the twentieth century in Indonesia and beyond, many modernist voices, especially those critical of institutional Sufism, claimed Ibn al-Qayyim as one of their vanguards, associating him with his teacher Ibn Taymiyyah and their program of purification and even a kind of proto-Salafism (see Krawietz 2003; Kokoschka and Krawietz 2013; Hoover 2016). While such claims may do little justice to the historical Ibn al-Qayyim, they have become naturalized as a fact in much public discourse. In some of my conversations with members of Muhammadiyah, Ibn al-Qayyim was actually claimed as one of their predecessors. At Krapyak, however, his Book of the Spirit was widely read and its contents were echoed in conversations with me, with or without explicit reference to the book as source, and there was no particular concern about him being on the wrong side. While it is not quite the same to draw on a premodern figure as to reclaim the progenitor of modernist Indonesian Islam as a traditionalist, the embrace of Ibn al-Qayyim shows that contestations over historical figures transcend the case of Ahmad Dahlan.

In The Book of the Spirit Ibn al-Qayyim discussed the relation of the rūḥ, the soul or spirit,²² to the body and the material, phenomenal world after a person has died. He explained that the spirit is a “self-standing entity” (Ibn al-Qayyim 2010, 108) that is independent from the body and becomes severed from it upon a person’s death. It then continues to have a conscious liminal existence until the Day of Judgment in the realm of barzakh, an intermediate realm between this world and the next that plays a similar role in Ibn al-Qayyim’s work as the imaginal world (A. ʿālam al-khayāl) does for Ibn al-ʿArabī’s.²³ But the spirit’s severance from the body is not absolute. Instead, it “rises and descends; joins and disconnects; departs, comes, and goes; moves and is still” (Ibn al-Qayyim 2010, 108). While no longer fixed to the body and mobile, the spirit continues to return to the body in the grave and is therefore still connected to the earth, where the body is present. There, its presence is still most perceptible. Like Kyai Abdullah, who worried about the young couples causing affront to the dead by making out in the cemetery, Ibn al-Qayyim was likewise aware that the dead are still aware of their environment. In The Book of the Spirit, he assembled examples from numerous Hadith collections as evidence that the Prophet Muhammad addressed the dead, that he insisted that the dead could hear even if they could not answer.²⁴ Indeed, the Prophet made a habit of greeting the dead respectfully and of asking God to forgive them when he passed the graveyard.²⁵

According to Ibn al-Qayyim, the dead in the grave, or their spirits in this intermediate realm, receive the dues for the actions they have committed during their lives; the pious are rewarded, and the wicked are punished (2010, 110–11). Ibn al-Qayyim calls these states ʿadhāb al-qabr, the punishment of the grave, and niʿmat al-qabr, the bliss of the grave. The more serious the sin that a person has committed during their life, or the greater their devotion and merit, the more intense their punishment or bliss will be.²⁶ Ibn al-Qayyim differentiated between two types of punishment of the grave: The first type is the punishment for unbelievers or those who have committed serious sins during their lives. Their torment continues uninterrupted until the Day of Rising, at which point they will undergo God’s final judgment. The second type is for those who are punished for their more insignificant wrongdoings (Ibn al-Qayyim 2010, 279–83), for even the most pious may have lapsed and committed sins at one point or another. This second type of torment, according to Ibn al-Qayyim, can be relieved by those who are still alive. “His punishment is suspended through prayer [A. duʿāʾ] or charity [A. ṣadaqa], by asking for forgiveness, or through the merit of the hajj, or Qur’anic recitation from his relatives or others that reaches him” (270). Although the prerogative to ease the punishment is God’s, not the intercessor’s (271), it is a moral obligation for the living to make supplications on behalf of the dead, whose window of opportunity to practice good deeds and to attend to their status in the afterlife has closed for good.

Tahlil is understood as a means by which those who are alive appeal to God to have mercy on those who have passed away. There are other traditions that are practiced alongside tahlil to lessen the punishment of the dead. Pilgrims praying at the grave often arrive equipped with small plastic bags of the yellow flower petals of the cananga tree that may be mixed with jasmine or roses, available for a few thousand rupiah at local markets. They spread these flower petals on top of the graves of those for whom they are praying. According to a Hadith, the Prophet Muhammad himself placed fresh leaves of the date-palm tree on graves in hopes that the punishment of the dead would be paused until the leaves had dried up (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1361). Flower petals, with their characteristic sweet scent, also unlock involuntary memories of the dead and their virtues, as the deceased bodies of especially pious people are said to emanate a wonderful fragrance. Mbah Munawwir’s grave is often covered in fresh flowers. Once wilted, they have lost their efficacy and are quickly removed by diligent caretakers. Doing so is an especially embodied way of caring for the dead. I often saw people, most often women, fussing over graves, lovingly picking off the tiniest dry leaves or blades of grass after their prayer was finished. Through such practices, many of my interlocutors have experienced a special closeness with their beloved dead. In a survey my research assistant and I carried out among current and former santri at Krapyak, many reported feeling the presence of those whom they were praying for, for example, in the form of a fragrant smell or even a vision where the dead were smiling at them. While almost all noted that praying tahlil made them happy to have helped the dead in their graves, a majority also described feeling peaceful and more steadfast in their faith as a result. Several noted that praying for the dead and easing their suffering made them feel less afraid of their own death. As a prayer of intercession for the dead, tahlil ultimately also provides spiritual benefits for the one praying, even when it is not explicitly linked to tawassul. The living and the dead depend on each other for their salvation. One would be lost without the other.

“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one,” Benjamin wrote in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. “Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim” (1969, 254; his italics). Benjamin’s language of the past’s explicit claim on the present resonates with the concept of ḥaqq in Islamic ethics discussed above, according to which others have inherent rights over us that we have the duty (A. wājib) to fulfill (Kamali 1993, 343). For my traditionalist interlocutors, the system of reciprocal claim and duty does not end with death. The dead have a claim on the living, the right that the living treat them with utmost respect and to pray for their salvation, allowing them to be a part of the present and thus bringing them into the living future. Like Java’s poets who not only remembered but also actualized the past, through their ziarah, the pilgrims “effectively activate . . . a relay across time in order, thereby, more effectively to touch both those who preceded [them] and those who will come after” (Florida 2019, 103). But, as Benjamin wrote, in this “secret agreement,” the “image of happiness” of the living “is indissolubly bound up” with the redemption of the past (1969, 254). In the same vein, for memory to become an agent of the knowledge and power of the dead and, with it, God’s grace and blessings, it has to be rooted in a virtuous relationship with other subjectivities and temporalities. If tahlil redeems the dead in their graves from punishment, tawassul makes use of the power of the lineage to activate a normative past by acknowledging their contributions to one’s own happiness, the possibility of a deep and loving relationship with the pious of the past and, along with them, the divine.

Identity and the Power of Memory

The previous chapter began with my attempt to understand why traditionalist Muslims affiliated with NU would go to the grave of Ahmad Dahlan. As we recall, their ziarah to Dahlan’s grave seems paradoxical for two reasons. First, Dahlan himself reportedly declared that visiting graves, including presumably his own, is un-Islamic. And second, NU traditionalists often have strong reservations about Muhammadiyah, the organization Dahlan founded. Because of these reservations, going to the Karangkajen graveyard feels like going to hostile territory, scary and potentially unsafe. While these views are shaped by particular identity politics where Muhammadiyah’s identity as a moderate organization is called into question, in the beginning of this chapter we also encountered a different kind of dislike of Dahlan’s burial place, where my interlocutors have shuddered about how creepy the cemetery feels. In spite of all of these misgivings, my interlocutors, like other NU traditionalists, have visited Dahlan’s grave and prayed tawassul and tahlil because, for them, Dahlan was a traditionalist. As such, he was accountable to the consensus of the traditionalist ulama, their agreement that visiting the graves of today’s Muslims’ pious predecessors was a much-needed virtue. Therefore, he needed to be visited no matter what his opinion on the matter was.

Dahlan may have founded an organization that would criticize traditionalist values, but before any of that happened, he had already placed himself into the ritual and intellectual lineages of Islam Nusantara. He went on ziarah and prayed tahlil. Moreover, my interlocutors often reminded me that in his youth he was educated by the great ulama of nineteenth-century Java, who likewise educated famous figures who are more conventionally understood as NU traditionalists, like NU’s founder Hasyim Asy’ari and, of course, Mbah Munawwir. In the genealogical imagination of Islam Nusantara, these ulama were the successors of the nine saints who imprinted Islam Nusantara on the Javanese geography and temporality. Ahmad Dahlan is a traditionalist because of his lineages of learning and his own ritual practice, through which he placed himself into the network of Nusantara’s traditionalist ulama. What is more, it was commonly accepted among my interlocutors that Dahlan and Asy’ari were like-minded activist who shared the same agenda and goals. Some even explained that the two were friends, that they never criticized each other and made all decisions through negotiation and agreement (I. musyawarah, from A. mushāwara).²⁷ They worked together and complemented each other, dividing up the work of deepening the Islam of the Javanese by focusing on different parts of the population. Dahlan was responsible for the cities with their traders and professionals, whereas Asy’ari would work in the rural areas among the farmers.²⁸ Therefore, naturally their approaches differed, as was the case with the nine saints who similarly shared the task, both geographically and in terms of the kind of daʿwa they were doing.²⁹ Ahmad Dahlan was a traditionalist because he was part of the Islam Nusantara, the Islam of Java that was projected into the future by the nine saints. Activating their knowledge, he and Hasyim Asy’ari made their Islamizing mission operative again.

In the previous chapter, I described the kinds of answers I received when I asked about Dahlan’s alleged rejection and prohibition of grave visitations. Why did he reject grave visitations if he was a traditionalist? Some thought that perhaps he was simply mistaken about this matter, something that was not all that remarkable since even the wisest of ulama can, on occasion, make a mistake. Others surmised that it had been a strategic move of some sort, that perhaps he wanted to discourage illicit kejawen practices, and that his words had to be interpreted against this background. Different explanations could be found, but, ultimately, the reason for his strange behavior was not especially relevant for any of the people I asked. According to Yahya, adab or ethical behavior is more important than following someone’s orders, a sentiment he shares with many other santri who have also been educated through textbooks such as Zarnūjī’s, who likewise maintained that respect for the teacher was different from and more important than obedience (Zarnūjī 1947, 32). Even if, later in his life, Dahlan may have changed his mind and rejected grave visitations, he was still part of the intellectual and ritual lineages of Islamic traditionalism that facilitate involuntary recollection when every link is honored for their contribution.

In the seventeenth century, Sultan Agung had activated the knowledge of Sunan Bayat, one of the founding figures of Islam Nusantara through his conversion that incorporated the pre-Islamic spiritual powers into the fold of Islam. And today’s traditionalists at Dahlan’s grave similarly activate the knowledge of Muhammadiyah’s founder, which reactivates the knowledge of the nine saints in a new era. In Benjamin’s understanding, memory practices of a certain sort can rescue the past that is lost or submerged in capitalist temporality. Traditionalist Javanese Muslims likewise recover a past that would be lost when the understanding of history is premised on a secular, modernist temporality that assumes the “absolute alterity of a positively dead past” (Florida 1995, 52). The spiritual knowledge and power of pre-Islamic Java is rescued and claimed for the future when Sunan Bayat’s conversion is remembered and inscribed narratively in the chronicles and ritually in the calendar and in ziarah. In the same way, Dahlan is not lost to Islam Nusantara despite his strange modernist ideas and his followers’ unfortunate interpretations, because he can be reincorporated or rediscovered through the activation of the lineages of which he was a part through tawassul and tahlil, or through narratives of his friendship, even partnership, with NU’s founder. By claiming Dahlan’s continued presence, my traditionalist interlocutors integrated Dahlan into the fold of NU’s tradition not only discursively or narratively, but also ontologically, by calling into question Muhammadiyah’s rejection of an accessible imaginal realm. Dahlan, the founder of the organization that would deny the power of this imaginal chain, is nonetheless a part of it.

And so traditionalists go to Karangkajen, although they greatly dislike the cemetery, which they don’t think of as clean, as modernists do, but as creepy, with a frightening aura. When I asked the santri with whom I talked that night at Krapyak what this creepiness was all about, they explained that it was because so few people pray at this cemetery. If no one prays for the dead, their graves become creepy, as this lack of care embodies and enacts a temporality where the past is locked away as past, but whose spectral presence cannot be fully contained. It becomes a site where the dead are being punished in their graves, and where one can feel the agony of those not prayed for. And one of those people not prayed for is Dahlan. “Just imagine,” one of the santri said. “He is being punished without cease.” She added regretfully that she would have liked to put flowers on his grave to ease his suffering, but they would have just been removed by the cemetery’s caretaker and the effort would have been in vain. Angrily she added that Muhammadiyah modernists treated their dead founder like an animal. But another santri remembered, “When I came to the Karangkajen cemetery, I was scared at first. It was so quiet. But when I came to Ahmad Dahlan’s grave, I wasn’t scared anymore because I felt, I knew, that there was one of Java’s great ulama watching out over the place.” The notion of Dahlan being tortured because of his followers’ negligence, and his protecting traditionalists paying their respects to him, incorporates the founder of Muhammadiyah into a traditionalist ontology based on an ethic of reciprocity that facilitates an involuntary recollection whereby the dead redeem the living and vice versa. Tawassul and tahlil activate the spiritual power of the chain of transmission as memory destabilizes the binary between past and present for those who have come to the graves to learn from the past, through an imaginal infrastructure that aligns Java’s history with the future.

Memory, for my traditionalist interlocutors, has a weak Messianic power, as it did for Benjamin and some of the Javanese poets. They remind us that human beings have access to more knowledge and agency than our conventional ideologies allow us to think they do. Contemporary traditionalist ziarah points us to a possibility similar to what Benjamin found in the storyteller, whose counsel derives from the embodied life of a community, and for whom the right sort of telling of their histories can reclaim the power and knowledge of people who have been cut off from the living. But whereas the latter remembered the past to fight capitalism and colonialism, knowing full well that the power of memory’s redemption was no match against the apparatuses of knowledge and power of their mighty opponents, the power dynamics in Java are not quite as clear-cut. While Michael Lambek admonished us not to rest with power, this discussion of the imaginal has brought us back to power, but in a way that does not fully match the landscape of religious politics in Javanese and Indonesian history. Sultan Agung, an already powerful ruler, made use of these very forces to subdue rebellious subjects who were discontented with his leadership, and perhaps they had every reason to be; and as I showed in the previous chapter, today’s proponents of Islam Nusantara are hardly marginal figures in Indonesia, but proponents of a mainstream political project. We have to acknowledge that their project includes its own forms of exclusion and violence, even if we may agree with their political agenda of protecting Indonesian democracy from radical Islam. We should thus be careful not to let the imaginal overwrite the political, or vice versa, but sit with the incommensurabilities that emerge between these two interpretive frameworks. Around the grave of Dahlan, traditionalists have constructed an understanding of traditionalism as a shared ethical inheritance (Taneja 2017, 10) that establishes a lineage between those who remembered in the past and those who remember today. While both Taneja and Hirschkind (2020) have demonstrated the decolonial and liberatory potential of this kind of memory, my last two chapters have provided a more complex picture. The project of Islam Nusantara, and its historical vision with all its ontological underpinnings, may well call into question conventional understandings of who constitutes a political actor, challenging objectivist understandings of history and constituting a form of critique in its own right. No doubt, the project is implicit in, and can even be articulated as, a majoritarian political program. Yet, at the same time, the lineages that are activated through this memory are irreducible to self-conscious and purposeful political posturing because they transcend individual choice and include even those who seem to disagree, like Dahlan, because the power of the chain is stronger than they are.

Epilogue

Theologies of Remembering

dian, one of my interlocutors, was originally from an NU family in East Java but had moved to Yogyakarta when she married a local man who was active in Muhammadiyah. In the course of my research, I became quite close to Dian and often discussed with her and her husband how they perceived the differences between Muhammadiyah and NU in their marriage. Both of them would emphasize that the two organizations were exactly “the same” in their thought and practice, but then proceeded to tell me about all those things they did in Dian’s family in East Java—praying at graves, for instance—that were simply “not allowed” in their local Muhammadiyah community. In the course of my research, I learned to recognize these statements as situationally contingent performances of particular identities that could be more or less specific, depending on what point was made. But while I initially wondered how it could be that my interlocutors did not catch this seemingly obvious contradiction in their own accounts, in time I came to realize that it was me who had failed to understand how productive these ambiguities were in my interlocutors’ everyday lives. I learned that traditionalists’ and modernists’ ways of making sense of themselves, their communities, and the beyond are often riddled with such ambiguities and paradoxes, for example, when tradition claims the memory of the modernist reformer, or when the always progressive reform movement painstakingly cultivates a tradition to break from—or when, like in Dian’s case, notions of religious sameness and difference in a marriage are refracted by all sorts of considerations an outsider cannot even begin to fathom.

In this book, I have explored these ambiguities by using memory and corresponding understandings of temporality as a lens to critically examine the distinction between tradition and modernity, which has pervaded identity politics throughout the Muslim world for the last century. In academic works, this binary has often been implicitly mapped onto what the Islamic Studies scholar Thomas Bauer (2021) has called tolerance of ambiguity, a framework in which traditional Islam is characterized by a high tolerance of ambiguity, which was, however, eradicated through colonial and neocolonial enforcements of Western norms of rational coherence. Bauer’s view is not exceptional, but simply makes explicit what many scholars in the field have often tacitly accepted. Theologies of Remembering has cautioned against such schematic understandings of Islamic modernities, suggesting that even self-identified modernists are tolerant and make use of ambiguity, even if they do not conceptualize this ambiguity in traditional ways. A focus on historical memory makes this evident. As constructions of the past are called into the service of different, highly contextual demands, historical visions fail to produce coherent self-representations—and the ensuing tensions among incommensurable memories are generative for the articulation of elusive theological insights and complex positionalities among both traditionalists and modernists. Indeed, if we understand the tolerance of ambiguity as the capacity to seek out and deploy situations of novelty, complexity, and insolubility (Bauer 2021, 17), it turns out that my modernist interlocutors do not merely tolerate ambiguity. They are themselves experts in bringing ambiguity into play, for example, through simultaneous acceptance and rejection of commemorative practices and lineages of transmission and learning—or of both being and not being the same as NU folk who claim such commemorative practices more directly. These strategies enable them to play with multiple truths at the same time while still keeping up the airs of distancing themselves from traditionalism, including its famed tolerance for ambiguity.

According to Bauer’s conceptual vocabulary, ambiguity is distinct from ambivalence, with the latter being a psychological state of discomfort or feeling “not all right in oneself” (2021, 18). We also know the concept of ambivalence from anti-Asadian anthropologies of Islam, including from Samuli Schielke, who understands ambivalence as a break with a normative social order and the ideal of pious self-cultivation (2010, 2015). Perhaps it might be argued that modernist ambiguities are ultimately no more than ambivalences, failures to fully conform to a self-imposed worldview. But how can we really differentiate between one and the other? We certainly need to acknowledge the epistemic violence of postcolonial power-knowledge complexes and recognize that the West’s intolerance of ambiguity, and its ambition to universalize its epistemes among non-Western cultures more tolerant of ambiguity, have at times resulted in “contradictions” that have no prospect of being resolved (Bauer 2021, 184). And yet, we should also ask ourselves why only some contradictions are legible to us as generative ambiguities while others represent discursive limitations and dead ends. Discounting these processes as the confused ambivalence of postcolonial subjects may have more to do with the pervasive prejudice in Islamic Studies that considers modernist Islam as inauthentic and theologically shallow while celebrating traditionalism, especially Sufism, as the true locus of Islamic authenticity (for a critique, see Osella and Osella 2008). Ultimately, the preceding discussions raise the question of whether it is really meaningful to talk about if—or until when—Islam has tolerated ambiguity. Instead, I share Bauer’s call for “a more differentiated perception of the Islamic world” (2021, 149). But this differentiated perception has to extend to modern times and modernist Muslims as well, as their complex positionalities likewise deserve our attention. Their ways of constructing, conceptualizing, and dealing with ambiguity in different, shifting, and sometimes seemingly contradictory ways invite us to rethink the distinction between traditionalism and modernism in its familiar form. While my discussion was focused on Java, and more broadly Indonesia—home to the highest number of Muslims of any country—comparable dynamics emerge across the Islamic world. I thus hope that my findings can provide useful paradigms for future discussions about ambiguity, paradox, and Muslim modernities.

In focusing on memory, I have built on philosophy, critical theory, and anthropological research as well as scholarship that makes use of the conceptual frameworks of history, heritage, and genealogy. These works have helped me to understand how memory is open-ended, fragmented, and partially foreclosed, crisscrossed by conflicting desires and anxieties that are sometimes held in tension and sometimes displace each other. While my interlocutors carve out spaces for telling their organizational histories in politically opportune ways, remembering also becomes a vehicle for cultivating self-consciously pious communities and for making God’s power and knowledge manifest in the present. A political critique of their memories—while indispensable—thus cannot stand by itself but must be juxtaposed with a rigorous study of the theological dimensions of Muslims’ memories, including the scholars they cite and the understandings they invoke in their everyday theologizing about the relation between different temporalities. In conversation between these different theoretical frameworks, we can understand memory as a process facilitating explorations of transcendence while forging communities and lineages of participation and belonging that are pervaded by but irreducible to dominant understandings of ideological identities. This attention to both political power and its transcendence pervades the entire book, but I engage it especially closely in chapters 5 and 6, where I present two fundamentally different interpretations of memory among self-identified traditionalists, one employing a Foucaultian lens attuned to formations of power and knowledge, and one using the theological resources my interlocutors have employed. Because the juxtaposition of these approaches cannot be made commensurate or integrated into a coherent whole, I believe this incommensurability requires us scholars to cultivate the capacity to sit with the tensions that arise when we take seriously both the operations of power in the formation of religious traditions, and the ways in which these traditions understand themselves as utterly transcending mundane powers.

In this vein, my hope is also that we not only cultivate a capacity for recognizing ambiguity, but productively employ the paradoxes that result from the various lenses with which we approach whatever we study. Whatever our commitments and desired outcomes, we are tasked with articulating what communities and texts have shown about themselves to a heterogeneous public whose engagement with these traditions will be partially formed by this articulation. If many of our disciplinary ancestors called for a strict separation of the secular study of religious communities according to dominant paradigms of public rationality, and a “theology” that accepted the reality of beliefs not accessible to that rationality as a matter of faith, discontent with this split is almost as old. For some time, a phenomenological “bracketing” was taken as a solution: Laying aside the question of whether gods and spirits exist, the researcher could discover an inner consistency of logic to the ways that people who believe they exist experience the world. But the anthropology of God has urged us not to bracket but to centrally focus on what lies beyond the human horizon (Mittermaier 2021) or to risk missing the point, and the ontological turn has suggested that perhaps there is not a different experience of reality but there are different realities that are constructed and mediated, even as postcolonial studies of hybridity break down an easy demarcation of our life worlds. Then again, I also know that I must never forget that the allocation of power and resources in the postcolonial world makes itself felt in my privileged position as a foreign researcher, and that my privilege also undergirds my understandings and experiences. I am neither Javanese nor Muslim, but Javanese Muslims move in something like my world all the time, and I move in something like theirs. We are and are not inhabiting a single world.

When Dian, the traditionalist woman with the Muhammadiyah husband, finally asked me near the end of my research if I was ready was convert to Islam, I struggled to explain why the answer was no even though I loved and respected her tradition. But perhaps my “no” was never quite as absolute as I claimed and believed in that moment. Whenever I have received an interview for a job or a grant, I have sent my research assistant to Mbah Munawwir’s grave to intercede on my behalf. I am not a traditionalist Muslim, but I have been a beneficiary of tawassul. Neither am I an initiate in any sanad, but perhaps they have a claim on me, even as I analyze identity politics and political positioning. At the very least, as researcher, I am implicated as my interlocutors’ partner in navigating the challenges of our shared ethical obligations to our human and nonhuman forbears. We ourselves, and the stories we tell, will be a past to some future which shall owe a debt to us and every other past.

notes

Introduction: Two Sons of Kauman

1. While Gus Dur is often associated with the promotion of the integrated curriculum, he did not come up with it. In fact, the integrated curriculum is much older. In 1905, the Solonese sultan Pakubuwana X founded a modern madrasa called Mamba’ul Ulum that taught both secular and religious subjects (see Florida 2023). In Nahdlatul Ulama, Gus Dur’s father, Wahid Hasyim, experimented with the integration of secular subjects at a school at Tebu Ireng as early as 1934 (Dhofier 1999, 84–85).

2. The Shaykh al-Islām was the highest religious authority under Ottoman jurisdiction.

3. We do not know why he adopted the name Ahmad Dahlan, how much agency he had in the matter, or if it really was out of appreciation for the late Shāfiʿī mufti. Changing one’s name during the hajj was a common practice among Indonesian Muslims at the time (Laffan 2002, 63). For more on Aḥmad ibn Zaynī Daḥlān, see Kaptein 2020.

4. In fact, Siti Walidah’s actual historical role in the foundation of Aisyiyah may not have been as central as it is made out to be in dominant accounts, and there is a minority of voices in the organization that seeks to relativize her influence and to center the contribution of other women. While Siti Walidah was probably involved in some form in Aisyiyah’s foundation and early activities, she did not have any leadership role when the organization was first founded (Ro’fah 2016, 40n1). Some contemporary members told me that she did not learn to read and write in the Latin script until late in life, and they speculated that she may thus have been considered unsuitable for a leadership role.

5. For more on Dahlan’s campaign to correct the qibla, especially in relation to its historical background and ideological context, see Meyer 2023.

6. As Laffan (2002, 111–13) pointed out, Aḥmad Khātib’s reform program differed significantly from Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s, and Dahlan’s reform cannot be said to be a direct continuation of either of these two reformers’ agendas. See also Ali (2016, 38) on differences between Dahlan and ʿAbduh.

7. The emergence of Muhammadiyah as an explicitly modernist organization only occurred after Dahlan’s death. This shift is especially associated with the tenure of general chairpersons Kyai Haji Ibrahim (1923–34), Kyai Haji Hisyam (1934–37), and Mas Mansur (1937–42).

8. Boedi Oetomo, the first organization with distinct modern structures founded by Indonesians, was created in May 1908 by medical students. Boedi Oetomo was not Islamic but derived inspiration from Java’s Hindu-Buddhist roots. The fact that Ahmad Dahlan was still able to participate in such a group shows that the religious boundaries between these movements—impenetrable in the following decades—were still porous at the time (Ricklefs 2007, 237). For more on Boedi Oetomo, their role in the Indonesian National Awakening, and their relation to other groups, see Shiraishi 1990.

9. The first significant branch outside of Java was established in Minangkabau, soon followed by other regions in Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi. To be recognized by the central leadership, a branch had to run permanent operations, like a school or an orphanage (Noer 1973, 76–78).

10. Today, the kraton’s presence in Krapyak is still marked by the Panggung Krapyak, a large whitewashed structure in the shape of a truncated pyramid that lies on a cosmological axis linking the Merapi, an active volcano looming over the city, with Parangtritis, Yogyakarta’s southern shore, by way of the kraton and a northern and southern outpost.

11. Nyai Rum was Ahmad Dahlan’s third wife. His second wife was Nyai Abdullah, a princess from the kraton. His fourth wife was Nyai Aisyah from West Java. In many Muhammadiyah publications, Dahlan’s polygamy is justified as a strategic way to improve his leverage among different groups to spread his message (see, for instance, Nur Khozin and Isnudi 2017, 188–89).

12. Early critics of Maurice Halbwachs included his contemporaries Marc Bloch (2011, 150–55) and Charles Blondel (2011, 156), both of whom questioned Halbwachs’s movement from an individual, psychological process to a social or collective one without much discussion of why or how it is possible to do so. During the so-called memory boom in the 1990s, scholars had to address this problem again (see Fentress and Wickham 1992). Collective memory, in Halbwachs’s work, can refer either to socially framed and articulated individual memories or to collective commemorative traditions. Halbwachs never disambiguated these two dimensions or discussed their methodological differences, despite the fact that they are undergirded by radically different understandings of what it means for memory to be “collective”—the former aggregative, the latter discursive in a Foucaultian sense (Olick and Robbins 1998, 336–37).

1. An Epistemic Opening

1. Not all institutions that call themselves pesantren are traditionalist. Over the last decades, a growing number of modernist and Islamist pesantren have appeared in Java (see Arifin 2015, 33–34, 46–48). For a more general overview of the history and educational practice of the pesantren, see Hefner 2009.

2. Despite tensions between royal and spiritual authorities since the early seventeenth century (Kartodirdjo 1966), Florida (1995, 14–15) showed that their relation was not always adversarial. Courts often depended on the pesantren culturally and intellectually for the education of their literati, and it was in part due to the courts’ subsumption under high colonial power that relations with the pesantren soured (Florida 1995, 347–48).

3. This standardization of the curriculum in Southeast Asia (see Alatas 2021b, 59–83; Laffan 2011, 25–39; Feener 2013, 59–92) was a global trend in the Islamic world (Hefner 2020, 110–18).

4. See Dhofier (1999, xxi) for a (somewhat dated) map with Java and Madura’s major (and some minor) pesantren. Major pesantren, like Krapyak, are large institutions teaching even the most advanced santri. Minor pesantren, which are typically smaller and only offer an elementary education, are often led by kyai educated at a major pesantren, thus maintaining ties of intellectual dependence on those great centers of learning.

5. In addition to Ali Maksum’s role in NU, he was also active in national politics, expanding Krapyak’s public profile. During his tenure, he undertook wide-ranging educational reforms at Krapyak, introducing mixed curricula and public schools alongside the classical pesantren model.

6. The historical veracity of these figures is a contested point and identity marker among some Indonesian Muslims. While traditionalist historians like Agus Sunyoto (2016) claim that the wali sanga were historical figures, modernist scholars tend to be skeptical about the historical veracity of these stories and, at a minimum, have considered the accounts of their miracles to be legendary (see, for instance, Simuh 1995, 30). More recently, some Islamist figures have intensified the modernist skepticism, claiming that the wali sanga never existed at all.

7. Majapahit was a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom based in eastern Java that was founded in 1293 by Raden Wijaya and that reached the height of its grandeur in the fourteenth century. By the time the wali sanga are said to have Islamized Java, Majapahit was already in its last days.

8. This telling of the story of the nine saints as uniquely peaceful is, of course, a retrospective projection. Not all stories of these wali are about peaceful coexistence, as we see especially in the narrative traditions around Seh Siti Jenar, who was killed by the nine saints for his heterodox utterances. Moreover, some of the wali, like Sunan Kudus and Sunan Giri, were known to be less flexible and culturally adaptable than others. See Rinkes 1912, and Ricci 2011, 200–6. This essentializing narrative of a peaceful teleology of Islam in Java was largely a colonial invention (Alatas 2021b, 9–11; Meyer 2024b).

9. For more on this, see chapter 5.

10. Sunan Kalijaga’s prominence also extends to Western scholarship, where he was popularized by Clifford Geertz, who famously called Kalijaga “a symbol that connects Indic Java with Muslim Java” (1968, 35). This interpretation would not likely be shared by contemporary traditionalists, who understand him as authentically Muslim rather than syncretic figure.

11. In the first volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur subdivided the mimetic process of making narratives into three phases. This preunderstanding constitutes the first phase or mimesis1 (Ricoeur 1984, 64).

12. See Becker 1995, 12. While not all of the representations of Sunan Kalijaga are texts told lingually, I primarily focus on lingual accounts, thus making Becker’s concept useful for my purposes.

13. Seh is a Javanized version of the Arabic shaykh. Mlaya/malaya, to run or roam/wander, is sometimes interpreted as referencing his youth as a wandering highwayman, although Agus Sunyoto (2016, 263) claims that he received the name Mlaya from his father.

14. The Sěrat Dewa Ruci was likely written in the late eighteenth century by the famous Surakarta court poet Yasadipura I (d. 1803). For more on the Sěrat Dewa Ruci, see Arps 2000.

15. Modern Javanese poetry is composed according to rules of the sounds of utterance determining the number of lines per stanza, the number of syllables per line, and the vowel of the final syllable (Arps 1992, 4–7). The fifteen or so most popular meters during the height of traditional Javanese literature came to be grouped under the name těmbang macapat.

16. For an in-depth discussion of the Seh Mlaya in RP 333, including its theological genealogies and other stories it comprises, see Meyer 2021, 2023.

17. RP 333, 217–87. See Florida (2012, 240–45) for a description of the manuscript as a whole.

18. Sunan Kalijaga as “panutup” echoes Muhammad’s title “Seal of the Prophets” (Khāṭam/Khāṭim al-Nabīyīn, Q 33:40), which, at least since Ibn Isḥāq’s (d. 767) biography of the Prophet Muhammad, has been understood to mean that Muhammad was the last prophet and that his message was final (see Newby 1989). In traditional Javanese literature, the term “panutup” is used for different figures and, while signaling a high level of authority, cannot be taken as reflecting a claim of absolute finality.

19. The melody in which Asmaradana is sung conveys a mood of longing or passionate love. The metric structure is 8i 8a 8e/o 8a 7a 8u 8a (Arps 1992, 58).

20. This is in reference to the preceding canto, where Seh Mlaya tries to run away after the failed robbery but is intercepted by Sunan Benang (RP 333, 220).

21. Having voiced his intention to become Sunan Benang’s student, Seh Mlaya is ordered to guard his staff, the weapon with which he was defeated by Sunan Benang (RP 333, 221–22). It is implied, and explicitly stated in other versions of this story, that the staff then turned into a banyan tree.

22. The tapa ngidang, which here involves living in the forest, eating grass, and moving on all fours, is one of several ascetic traditions that have likely been practiced in Java since pre-Islamic times. Other such practices include the tapa ngalong (asceticism of acting like a bat, which may include eating only fruit or hanging upside down from a tree), or kungkum, being submerged in water (Arps 2016, 519; see also Kawruh Sawatawis 1937).

23. The melody of the Durma conveys a passionate, even violent, mood. It is appropriate for telling stories of challenges. The metric structure is 12a 7i 6a 7a 8i 5a 7i (Arps 1992, 58).

24. The title “Sang Makbudingrat” references Nabi Kilir. Poerbatjaraka (1940, 32) showed that this title is derived from the Old Javanese “Pa(ra)mabudeng Rat” or “the highest Buddha in the world.” This originally Buddhist epithet was thus retained in the Islamic text, connoting a more general honorific.

25. According to Arps (2011, 11), the reference to worldly things like food and clothing is part of an extended metaphor that references “that which is worshipped” (RP 333, 233/III:30).

26. See RP 333, 446–71. I am grateful to Nancy Florida for sharing her transcript of this passage with me.

27. Elsewhere, Ghazālī even goes so far as to say that following a wrong direction of the teacher is more beneficial than doing the right thing on one’s own (Gramlich 1984, 3).

28. Ghazālī 2010, 152. See also Gramlich 1984, 284–86. For a discussion of Ghazālī’s notion of asceticism, see Gramlich.

29. There is, however, no clear distinction in Ghazālī’s thought between epistemology and ontology (Moosa 2005, 105, 176–78). This is especially the case at the highest level of knowing, which is a phenomenological rather than cognitive process.

30. An episteme, in Foucault’s sense, is the unquestionable and unquestioned foundation in which all further knowledge is grounded. In the case of memory, the episteme determines the methodology and the limits of historical knowledge (Foucault 1973, xxii).

31. The Dipanegara War (1825–30) was the last stand of Javanese royal power against Dutch colonialism. The Dutch victory marked the beginning of high colonialism in Java.

32. By comparison, santri at Krapyak who spent a lot of time with the Qur’an before starting their memorization typically take at least one year.

33. Karāma is not a Qur’anic term, but it came to be used to reference the favor bestowed by God that allows those who have been granted the favor to bring about marvelous deeds that break the natural order of things. Karāma is the privilege of the wali and is ontologically distinct from muʿjiza, the kind of miracle performed by prophets as a sign of their message’s veracity (Gardet 2012).

34. She used the Arabic term fitna, which has a wide semantic range and is somewhat elusive, with possible translations including temptation, slander, or discord. On the term’s unstable semantic range in Arabic, see Pandolfo 1997, 89–93, 156–62.

35. The palace (J. kraton) is known as the center of high Javanese culture. The term abangan, which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, references nominal Muslims who do not fully observe the five pillars (Ricklefs 2012). In Western scholarship, the term was popularized by Geertz, who understood the religion of the abangan as a “syncretic South Asian polytheism” (1960, 234).

36. See also Dhofier 1999, 61. For more on the significance of this bond, see chapter 6.

37. See Ghazālī 2015, xlv. I am using Griffel’s (2009, 48) translation of these two types of knowledge.

38. Ghazālī and many of his contemporary interpreters did not think of the two epistemic modes as opposed. Instead, they considered them to be related and mutually reinforcing in those with a healthy spirituality (Pandolfo 2018, 258–60).

39. For a survey of studies on the text, see Buchman’s introduction in Ghazālī (1998, xxvii–xxxii). See also Griffel (2002) for a critique of Buchman’s interpretation and translation.

40. I borrow the language of “crack” or “opening” from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s fatḥ, the opening or unveiling of wujūd (realization of God’s being) and knowledge (Chittick 1989, 168).

2. Modernity’s History

1. Tahlīl, literally the recitation of the phrase “lā illāha illā-llāh,” has been vernacularized, as tahlil signifies a prayer for the dead in the Malay-Indonesian world. For more on tahlil, see chapter 6. Qunut (from A. qunūt, which means obedience to God), is the name of a supplication added to each fajr prayer by traditionalists.

2. I do not seek to intervene in the debate of how Muhammadiyah fits into the broader landscape of activism and reform in early-twentieth-century Indonesia—questions that have already been addressed by others (see Ali 2016; Laffan 2002; Shiraishi 1990). It is, however, clear that Dahlan’s own religious socialization had been traditional and that he maintained many traditional views and practices throughout his life, even as he was innovative and radical in other questions. In this regard, Muhammadiyah was no different from reform movements in many other parts of the Islamic world, such as South Asia, where modernist reform initiatives often remained embedded in the traditionalist milieu of the time (Zaman 2018, 23).

3. See Azra 2004, 150. It should be noted that Azra’s understanding of zaman Islam as a timeless present facilitated through transmission of truth is somewhat idiosyncratic. In Islamic thought, zamān Islām is more often understood chronologically, as the opposite of the time of ignorance (jāhiliyya) preceding the coming of Islam. For an overview of further discussions around zamān in Islamic intellectual history, see Mallet 2012.

4. Note that in Indonesia, silsila often refers to a person’s biological descent or bloodline, a somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term in global perspective. Elsewhere in the Islamic world, a silsila is the chain of transmission linking generations of masters and students in Sufi lineages (A. ṭarīqa).

5. It is interesting to note that the Pakistani Islamist organization Jamaat-e-Islami makes a similar argument about their founder and modernist reformist Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (d. 1979), reportedly the descendant of a Chishti saint (see Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, “Taʿāruf-e Bānī-e Jamāʿat: Sayyid Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī,” https://www.jamaat.org/founder). I am grateful to Teren Sevea for pointing this out to me.

6. For traditionalist Muslims, intellectual, spiritual, and biological genealogies constitute interpretative links and channels of revelation between the present generation and the timeless truths of zaman Islam. While chains of transmission must not be cut, each generation has to engage these links to implement these truths anew (Dhofier 1999, 160). For more on these genealogies, see chapter 6.

7. See Wael Hallaq’s landmark article that demonstrated that “the gate of ijtihad was not closed in theory nor in practice” (Hallaq 1984, 4). Although it had indeed become the expectation after the thirteenth century that the majority of legal scholars would adhere to taqlid, jurists had always practiced some degree of ijtihad to respond to changing circumstances for which no prior ruling existed. See also Gesink 2003. For a Southeast Asian example, see Feener 2007b, 25.

8. The nomenclature of the kaum tua and kaum muda emerged in the Malay-Indonesian world in the first decades of the twentieth century to differentiate the innovatory faction of the reformists from the official religious hierarchy, including the traditional social elite as well as the rural ulama (Feener 2007b, 1–23; Roff 1967, 56–90).

9. That said, these trends around the concept of ijtihad were not uniform over time and among different reformist groups. See, for instance, Zaman (2012, 75–107), which historicizes and contextualizes nuances of understandings among communities between South Asia and the Middle East.

10. This ideological rejection of taqlid was especially propagated in different ways by the Egyptian reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) and Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) (Haj 2009; Halevi 2019). In Indonesia, a prominent voice articulating a similar negative view of taqlid was Hamka (d. 1981), a Muhammadiyah figure from West Sumatra.

11. Yet, even while opposing the authority and infallibility of traditional elites, neither Shāh Walī Allāh nor Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb rejected or criticized taqlid wholesale or for the same reasons later reformers did. Shāh Walī Allāh even explicitly permitted the performance of taqlid by non-specialists (Dallal 1993, 348–50).

12. For anthropological work discussing a similar problematic, see Brenner 2012; Keane 2007; Meyer 1999.

13. We may be seeing a different kind of erasure in the history of Ahmad Dahlan’s change of name from Muhammad Darwisy to the name of the famous Mufti of the Shāfiʿī madhhab in Mecca, Shaykh Aḥmad b. Zaynī Daḥlān (1826–86), with whom Ahmad Dahlan himself did not study, but whose influence was still strong when Dahlan came to Mecca in 1890 (see Laffan 2002, 168). Muhammadiyah publications invariably report the name change but never mention who their organization’s founder’s namesake was. The rejection of a historical connection with the Shāfiʿī madhhab, which appears to have been important to Dahlan himself, only exists as a trace, but one that is not exhibited as such.

14. Indeed, the significance of print media for the movements that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has long been established, both in relation to political (Anderson 2006; Shiraishi 1990) and specifically Islamic (Feener 2007a; Gelvin and Green 2014; Laffan 2002) activism.

15. See Hadjid 2013, 3; Laffan 2002, 168. In the course of the twentieth century, other media in addition to print magazines have facilitated the formation of reform isnād. One of them is the Western university, which likewise transformed the understanding of lineages of transmission and intellectual genealogies. Indonesian graduates of Western universities were often committed to an eclectic fusionism that integrated academic methodologies and the work of Western scholars into their own work about Islam, thus articulating a single truth in their specific context and contributing to the reform of Islam in the ever-changing world (see Abbas 2021). In the twenty-first century, the rise of the internet and social media has facilitated another shift in Muslim understandings of networks and the circulation of knowledge (see Alatas 2021a; Slama and Jones 2017).

16. Suara Muhammadiyah was not unique in its embrace of Malay and the Roman script. Already in the 1910s, the Roman script was on the rise whereas the Javanese script as well as Jawi and Pegon were gradually declining. The use of the Roman script facilitated a wider readership in the Indies. Because the Roman script was used by groups and parties whose constituents were largely part of the emergent professional class of Western-educated elites, it increasingly became the medium of both Islamic reformism and nationalism (Laffan 2002, 178–80).

17. This light metaphor was also popular in modernist movements that were not specifically Islamic. Raden Ajeng Kartini, a Javanese girl from a noble family who is remembered as a champion of education, described in her letters (published posthumously under the Dutch title Door Duisternis tot Licht) learning as a movement from darkness to light. See Kartini and Abendanon 1911, e.g., 103–4. See also Anderson 1991, 243; Mrázek 2002, 85–128; and Strassler 2010, 11.

18. For examples, see Cheema 2019 and White and Siddiqui 2018.

19. The term jāhiliyya appears four times in the Qur’an (3:154, 5:50, 33:33, 48:26). For a brief overview of prevalent understandings of the term and its use among different theologians over time, see Bearman at al. 2012 and Shepard 2013.

20. Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4291. Famous Muslims in history who were given the title of the mujaddid by their contemporaries or successors included the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II (d. 720) and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). Mawdūdī also mentions these two figures, along with several others, in his Short History of Islamic Revival (Maududi 1998, 40–42; 54–64). In some traditions, the concept of the mujaddid was folded into millennial or eschatological beliefs of the renewer as the herald of an axial age or the end of time (Van Donzel 2012).

21. It should be noted, however, that, in practice, the rejection of taqlid by Mawdūdī and others was not as absolute as they framed it in some of their written works. He and other reformers did collaborate with ulama practicing taqlid if it was necessary or useful.

22. See Khan 2001, 213. To give another example, the South Asian reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan invoked in his 1884 Lahore lecture a new ʿilm al-kalām, the science of theological argumentation, to deal with the challenges of modernity. The model for this new science was Islamic theological reasoning during Abbasid times, when Islamic scholars had to defend their beliefs from the doubts and objections raised by the Greek philosophical works that had been translated into Arabic (Khan 2002, 291–303). Again, a particular reading of Islamic history provides a normative model.

23. Mawdūdī understands the renewer to be distinct from a prophet in so far as prophets are appointed by God whereas one becomes a renewer through one’s own initiative. Nonetheless, the qualities and virtues characterizing prophets and renewers are the same, even if prophets possess them on a much higher level (Maududi 1998, 36–37).

24. For Levinas, it is “the profile of the ‘He,’” the third person that is absolutely transcendent, hence called “illeité” by Levinas, a play on the French word for “he,” il, roughly translating as “He-ness” (Levinas 2006, 41).

25. For an authoritative political biography of Muhammad Natsir, see Kahin 2012.

26. Natsir was, for example, quite well versed and often saw value in different strands of thought he understood to be Western. For more on Natsir’s intellectual fusionism, see Abbas 2025. For the boundaries of his admiration of Western modernity, see Kahin 2012, 188–89.

27. This was Natsir’s argument in his well-known work “Islam as Ideology” (1950).

28. See also Mahendra (1996, 63–74) on continuities and differences between Natsir and Mawdūdī. Notably, Mahendra calls Mawdūdī a fundamentalist, whereas he considers Natsir a modernist.

29. That said, the modernist bloc was itself no monolith. For more on the divides within Masyumi’s modernist faction, see Kahin 2012, 70.

30. Amien Rais founded a political party, the National Mandate Party (PAN), was the chairperson of the People’s Consultative Assembly from 1999 to 2004, and ran—unsuccessfully—for president in 2004.

31. For more on Amien Rais’s political career, see Hefner 2000, 178–80, 199–200; Kersten 2015, 21–27; and Van Bruinessen 2002. For Rais’s own account of his role in Soeharto’s resignation, see Künkler and Stepan 2013.

32. The Iranian revolutionary theologian Ali Shariati was also a formative influence for Amien Rais, albeit a difficult one due to his Shi’i identity.

33. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known as Ahok, was the governor of Jakarta from 2014 to 2017. During his reelection campaign, Islamist groups, which became known in this context as the 212 movement, seized the opportunity when he made a comment about the Qur’an and pushed for his conviction for blasphemy. While Haedar Nashir, the general chairperson of Muhammadiyah, declared the organization’s neutrality on the matter, Amien Rais rallied for Ahok’s conviction, moving many in the organization to do the same. Ahok was sentenced to two years in prison and abandoned his political career after his release in 2019.

34. Terenjit Sevea (2007) made a similar argument about the thought of Mawdūdī and Iqbal, who have often been appropriated into other kinds of metanarratives that disregard the similarity of their critique.

35. Another of Fazlur Rahman’s students was Nurcholish Madjid (d. 2005), a public intellectual who was not active in any leadership roles in Muhammadiyah, but whose work and thought were influential for a whole generation of educated, liberal Indonesian Muslims, including many Muhammadiyah members.

36. See Burhani 2013b, 32. The accommodation of local arts and culture is known as “Dakwah Kultural,” which I discuss in greater detail in chapter 4.

37. See Habermas 1983, 76–81. This is, of course, a simplistic representation of Habermas’s argument, which is complex and also changed over time. But while Habermas has distanced himself from the notion of an ideal speech situation, it nonetheless has significant traction in Muhammadiyah.

38. Despite the fact that the organization officially stayed neutral, some prominent Muhammadiyah members became active in campaigns, especially for Prabowo, likely recruiting others to cast their vote for him. For more on Muhammadiyah in the 2019 elections, see Nashir et al. 2019.

39. Madrassah Mu’allimin Muhammadiyah, originally called Qismul Arqa, was founded in 1919 by Ahmad Dahlan as a teachers college (Mu’arif 2012, 88–93). Since its beginnings, the school has adopted a mixed curriculum, integrating a religious and secular education. In 1924, an equivalent school for girls, Madrasah Mu’allimaat Muhammadiyah, was established.

3. A Museum Without a Past

1. See Mrázek 2002, 127. Margaret Wiener similarly suggested that eyeglasses and photography were central in Dutch “technologies of truth production” (2015, 8) since the early modern age and the beginnings of colonialism, crucially shaping encounters with the colonized.

2. See Sugianto 2020. The Javanese preposition kanggo is ambiguous here, as it could either be translated as work for the organization, or as work on the organization itself, implying that Muhammadiyah is also approached as something to be worked on or reformed as needed.

3. See Maarif 2020. Here, no Javanese original text but only an Indonesian gloss is provided.

4. See Nashir 2016. This article also only provides an Indonesian gloss of Dahlan’s originally Javanese writings.

5. See Solichin 1963, 53. That said, a few different interpretations of this statement are in circulation. According to Widiyastuti, a fourth-generation descendant of Dahlan who published memories passed down within the family, Dahlan, at the time of his death, gathered his wife, children, and grandchildren and told them that he was not leaving them any money because he had given all of it to Muhammadiyah, and that instead of money, he bequeathed the organization to them (Widiyastuti 2010, 12).

6. Widiyastuti, the public face of the planning team, is not anonymized here, whereas all other members of the planning team are given pseudonyms.

7. For the historical background of this proliferation of initiatives, see chapter 4.

8. See Majelis Tarjih dan Tajdid (2010), which declared it obligatory for Muslims to resist the temptation of smoking and for those who already smoked to do their utmost to quit.

9. Rahman’s program of Qur’anic exegesis was taken up by scholars who applied his hermeneutic to demonstrate the fundamental compatibility of Islam with various causes all over the world. These especially include various liberal programs to advance Islamic denunciations of patriarchy (Wadud 1999), racism (Esack 1997), and homophobia (Kugle 2010).

10. What Pak Munir was referencing and endorsing here was a previous program Muhammadiyah had adopted and which he considered superior to Fikih al-Maun, namely Gerakan Jamaah dan Dakwah Jamaah (Social Activism and Proselytization), which was coined at the 1968 General Congress in Yogyakarta but did not gain momentum until the late 1970s and 1980s. In a publication of the Central Leadership of Muhammadiyah from 1977, the basic principle of the movement was described as follows: “Small groups of Muhammadiyah members that promote the prosperity of their environment do not act in the name of the organization, but in their own names as Muslims who carry out the teachings of their religion, who carry out acts of religious devotion [ibadah]” (Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah 1977, 13).

11. Pak A. R. Syukrianto is also the grandson of A. R. Fakhruddin, the general chairperson of Muhammadiyah (1968–90) during the New Order.

12. Pak Syukrianto has produced these films on the institutional platform of Muhammadiyah’s Board for Art, Culture, and Sports (Lembaga Seni, Budaya, dan Olahraga). These films include one about Pak A. R. Fakhruddin, Pak Syukrianto’s grandfather (Meniti 20 Hari); one about the first women activists in Muhammadiyah and the foundation of Aisyiyah (Sembilan Putri Sejati); and one about the lives of and encounters between Dahlan and NU’s founder, Hasyim Asy’ari (Dua Ulama).

13. The museum was originally founded in 1778 by the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Schreiner 1997, 100). It was only in 1962, thirteen years after the Dutch concession of Indonesian independence, that the museum was handed over to the Indonesian government and renamed Museum Pusat. In 1979, it was renamed Museum Nasional, a name it has retained until today (McGregor 2004, 18).

14. Indeed, most Javanese think of Javanese literature as completely inaccessible for all but the most educated. As Florida has demonstrated, this notion of inaccessibility was produced by New Order cultural and educational politics (1995, 33–37).

15. Examples of studies illuminating different aspects of the relation between religion and technology abound. For surveys of the literature, see De Vries 2001; Stolow 2013; and Alexander 2020. For a more general discussion of interactions between technology and social formations, see Jasanoff 2015. In sum, echoing Abreu’s analysis of devotional movements in Christian Brazil, we could say that not only is “the supernatural compatible with technology but actually unthinkable without the technological” (Abreu 2008, 62), and vice versa.

16. This is despite the fact that self-identified traditionalists have also embraced Western technological innovations, sometimes allowing them to coexist alongside more typically traditionalist understandings of knowing and engaging with the transcendent (Bubandt 2019; Alatas 2021a).

17. It is worth noting, if just in passing, that for Pramoedya, like for Muhammadiyah, historiography is about more than recovering facts but has a spiritual or religious dimension. Where Muhammadiyah seeks to recover zaman Islam, Pramoedya retold key episodes in the history of Indonesia to actualize the spiritual truth of history in the present (Cheah 2003, 260; see also Meyer 2023).

18. See Moon 2020. For more on the Islamic revival in Indonesia, see Ricklefs 2012, 162–254. On Soeharto’s development agenda and the industrialization of Indonesia, see Amir 2012.

19. This was especially the case for the members of ICMI, an Islamic organization of intellectuals founded in 1990, a time when Soeharto increasingly sought to enlist the support of Muslim authorities as his relationship with the military, the long-standing buttress of his regime, soured. For more on ICMI and the New Order’s relationship to Islam, see Hefner 1993; 2000, 128–63. Not coincidentally, ICMI’s leader was Vice President Habibie, an airplane engineer, who brought along administrative staff from the Agency of the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) (Hefner 1993, 17–18). This blend of Islam and technology was thus also formalized on ICMI’s administrative level.

4. Grave Matters

Parts of this chapter were previously published in Meyer (2024a).

1. Darul Islam, active during the Indonesian National Revolution in West Java, was an armed movement with the purpose of fighting the Dutch in the War of Independence and of establishing an Islamic state in Indonesia (see Formichi 2012). For more on Ki Bagus Hadikusuma and his involvement in Indonesian independence, see Elson 2009, 109–12.

2. On this purificatory agenda, see Steenbrink 1994 and Mu’arif 2012. Muhammadiyah schools are, however, not reducible to this project of purification (see C. Hefner 2019).

3. Similarly, Rashīd Riḍā ruled in a 1911 fatwa that whereas gramophones were permissible for playing Qur’anic recitation, the drums or bedug used at Javanese mosques were haram (Halevi 2019, 150–54).

4. Controversies around the materiality of contemporary Islamic middle class socialities, where accusations of materialism are embedded in gender and class stereotypes (Jones 2010; Slama 2021), provide a productive comparative perspective, as they point to power structures undergirding notions of materiality.

5. Maarif 2005a. Maarif made similar points in subsequent publications, especially Maarif 2018. See also Latief 2017, 152.

6. For a more comprehensive overview of this cultural turn, see Burhani (2016); Latief (2017).

7. See Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah (2016, 6, 29). The Qur’anic passage cited in support is 14:4: “We have never sent a messenger who did not use his own people’s language to make things clear for them.”

8. While these extreme cases have distorted public perceptions of Islam and preservation (Rico and Lababidi 2017), Islamic beliefs and Western, secular ideals of preservation often coexist uneasily. For more on these tensions and some of the diverse responses in the Islamic world, see, for instance, Lababidi and Ravaioli 2017; Rico 2019, 2020; Zerkgoo and Barkeshli 2005.

9. The rise of Islamic conservatism and radicalism in post-Soeharto Indonesia has been discussed by many, including Sidel 2006; Smith-Hefner 2007; Hasan 2006; Mietzner and Burhanuddin 2018; Menchik 2019.

10. Jemaah Islamiyah, a group with ties to al-Qaeda, was dominant in the early 2000s. When they lost their organizational momentum after legal crackdowns, Front Pembela Islam rose to prominence, but it was dissolved in 2019. For more on these organizations, see A. Smith 2007 and Hasan 2018.

11. Scattered qualitative studies seem to corroborate a membership decline in Muhammadiyah. For example, a study conducted in 2014 by the Asia Foundation and the Indonesia Survey Institute showed that only 7.9 percent of a population sample from Yogyakarta, Muhammadiyah’s traditional heartland, and East Java, professed affiliation with Muhammadiyah (Bush 2014).

12. For more on this prohibition, see Munir Mulkhan 2006; Stephens 2007.

13. Of course, this retrospective reading of history is shaped by the organization’s contemporary viewpoint. According to historical studies, at the time of Indonesian independence both NU and Muhammadiyah promoted a stronger integration of Islam into the Pancasila (see Nur Ichwan and Slama 2022, 460–61).

14. For some examples of members of the Muhammadiyah leadership advancing this narrative, see Ilham 2021 and Nashir 2020a.

15. See, for instance, Hamka (2015, 27) and other figures who were widely read in Muhammadiyah (Madjid 1985; Munawar-Rahman 2006, 2188).

16. For more on understandings of fetishism and the term’s role in religious taxonomies, see Masuzawa 2000 and Pietz 1985. The fetish was more primitive than idolatry because of its inescapable material essence with no transcendent meaning.

17. Critics of the practice of grave visitations, often scholars of the Ḥanbalī school of law, understood the practice to negate the oneness of God. Particularly vocal critics included Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792). See Haj 2009, 57–59; Hoover 2020, 36–39; 68–70.

18. This fatwa substantiates the maximum height of a hand span based on a Hadith transmitted by Bukhārī, according to which the Prophet’s grave was “humped” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1976, 5:168; see also Majelis Tarjih dan Tajdid 2020). For more on the very different legal reasoning within NU and the endorsement of bigger structures on graves, see Kurniawan 2018.

19. Especially in relation to grieving the dead, scholars have noticed a clear gendered difference in expressions of emotion, whereby women are expected to grieve and men are supposed to accept the loss as God-given. See Samuels (2019, 80–110) on similar dynamics and their complications in post-tsunami Aceh.

20. The language of cleanliness is situated in a broader semiotic field that dates back to colonial times and was appropriated during the New Order, where cleanliness signals virtue (Stoler and Strassler 2000, 32–33). See also Hoesterey (2019) on public figures constructing religious virtue by performing the literal act of cleaning.

21. Indeed, when Jokowi won the election in April 2019, it was in part due to the strong support he received from NU members, especially in the densely populated areas of Central and East Java. For more on NU in these elections, see Aspinall and Mietzner 2019 and chapter 5.

22. Q. 2:143. The deployment of this verse to conceptualize moderate Islam is quite common in contemporary Islamic discourse. For other examples, see Afsaruddin 2009; Burhani 2012.

23. A slightly different interpretation of the middle path can be found in Maarif (2019), where he expressed similar views as in my interview with him, but framed Islam’s moderate position as a middle way between Judaism, which was secular and materialistic, and Christianity, which was spiritualistic. This again shows that being in the middle is a value in itself.

24. In Muhammadiyah discourse, simplicity is an essential virtue. A quintessential modern hero, Dahlan is held up as an example for living a life of industriousness and frugality. These virtues are a witness of his worldly asceticism in Max Weber’s (2001) understanding, promoting hard work as a systematic life style.

25. This disagreement developed between Asadian anthropologists like Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind on the one hand, and an anti-Asadian camp, whose primary protagonist was Samuli Schielke. Schielke argued that the Asadian anthropologists overemphasized Islam as the primary framework of reference in the life of Muslims, whereas most Muslims were much more ambivalent regarding pious practice, often prioritizing “everyday” concerns instead (2010, 2015). See also Fadil and Fernando 2015.

26. A. R. Fakhruddin (d. 1995), a Yogyakarta native, headed Muhammadiyah from 1968 to 1990.

27. As Carla Jones similarly noted in relation to the visibility of female beauty, “femininity both demands spectacularity and shuns those who seek it” (2023, 167). A woman who fulfills the labor of resisting forgetting and indifference likewise runs risk of being criticized for lacking reason or self-restraint.

28. These categories of the legal status of particular acts were standardized by al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820) and have been commonly used since then. They range from the obligatory (wājib) via the recommended (mandūb), the permissible (mubāḥ), and the repugnant (makrūh) to the prohibited (ḥarām) (Hallaq 1997, 40).

29. This congress also marked the beginnings of the cultural turn described above. For a summary of the decisions made at the congress, see Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah 1995.

30. The Egyptian modernist Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā made a similar argument about modern society’s invulnerability to the temptations of images, also concluding that they were allowed (see Halevi 2019, 179).

5. Good Muslims Remember, or The Politics of Coherence

1. The term “counter-memory” is often ascribed to Foucault as a concept of memories challenging hegemonic orders (Olick et al. 2011, 249). That said, Foucault never presented his understanding of memory in a coherent manner and only used the term in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1977) in a broad sense as a genealogical approach to history.

2. See Steedly 2019, 42. Likewise, Foucault wrote that “there is no absolute outside” where power is concerned, such that even resistance, produced as an “outside,” somehow remains “‘inside’ power” (1990a, 95).

3. For a historical contextualization of Sultan Agung’s ziarah to Tembayat, see Ricklefs 2006, 39–40. His pilgrimage appeased the region only temporarily, as the area around Tembayat remained a center of political activism in opposition to royal centers until the early nineteenth century (Florida 1995, 341). For more about the myths surrounding Sultan Agung’s visit, see Van Doorn-Harder and De Jong 2006, 491–93.

4. See George Quinn’s study, which concludes, based on sources like guest books at pilgrimage sites, local government reports on tourism, and media reports, that indeed ziarah in Java has increased across the board (2019, 384–87).

5. For more on the wali pitu, and Javanese pilgrimage to their graves, see Zuhri 2022, 2024. Another destination of ziarah that has only recently emerged is the grave of Mbah Priok in Jakarta, which became a pilgrimage site in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Quinn 2019, 193–95). In Yogyakarta, the grave of the eighteenth-century saint Mbah Nur Iman in Mlangi has also emerged relatively recently as destination of ziarah; his 34th haul was celebrated in 2023.

6. The conceptual scope of the “Wahhabi,” in much of contemporary colloquial usage, goes well beyond the actual followers of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. As outlined by Antúnez and Tellidis (2013), the contemporary conventional understanding of Wahhabism, the doctrine that has been promoted by the Saudi government and exported to the Islamic world since the 1970s, should be more appropriately called “Neo-Wahhabism,” as it absorbed and appropriated the language of Salafism in the 1970s. In Western popular discourse, Wahhabism and Salafism have become almost interchangeable.

7. For more detailed analyses of the film, see Woodward 2017 and Schmidt 2021, 243–48. For an analysis of the production of Islam Nusantara in social media, see Slama 2020.

8. See Florida (1997) and Masuzawa (2005, 179–206) for such colonial narratives, and Burhani (2012) for the relation between those and the pribumisasi discourse. Clifford Geertz activated similar tropes in his seminal Islam Observed, where he found that Moroccan Islam was characterized by “uncompromising rigorism” and “[a]ggressive fundamentalism,” while Javanese Islam was “adaptive, absorbent, pragmatic, and gradualistic, a matter of partial compromises, half-way covenants, and outright evasions” (1968, 16).

9. Since colonial times, colonial administrations and powers of the Global North have feared Islamically motivated resistance to their power and hegemony. For more on these dynamics in colonial Indonesia, see Laffan 2002, esp. 44–61.

10. See Burhani (2013b, 44) on the disavowal of political Islam among prominent voices of the so-called Islamic mainstream in Indonesia. According to Burhani, not being political means refraining from projecting Islam as a political ideology and thus rebelling against the established Indonesian nation state and the Pancasila.

11. See Hoesterey 2018, 410. In 2018 a branch of the Ministry of Religion published an Encyclopedia of Islam Nusantara. Kamaruddin Amin, the general director of Islamic education and an active NU member, wrote in the book’s preface that the peaceful Islam of the wali sanga is a model for contemporary Indonesia (Tim Direktorat 2018, iii).

12. For more on these elections, and Ma’ruf Amin’s role in it, see Aspinall and Mietzner 2019. In addition to his leadership in NU, Amin was a familiar person in national politics. He had served as the general chairman of the MUI (Indonesian Assembly of Ulama) from 2015 to 2019 and on the Presidential Advisory Committee from 2007 to 2014.

13. Gemoy Nusantara is the name of a music group that produced a music video titled “Doa untuk Pemimpin Negeri” (Prayers for the Leader of the Country) that went viral shortly after the election. See also Yilmaz et al. (2024) for a more detailed analysis of Prabowo’s victory.

14. The sarjana kuburan website can be found at https://www.sarkub.com. For an analysis of the website and its contents, see Rijal 2023, 50–52. The website is cross-linked to many other traditionalist online media. The notion that ziarah promotes tolerance and a harmonious coexistence is not confined to sarkub discourse but has wider social traction; see the Wisata Ziarah 2015 aktual.com newspaper article cited above.

15. See Mahmood (2006) and Brown (2015, 120–21) for examples of modernists falling on the side of the rational, progressive, and “good” Muslim, as opposed to the traditionalist Muslim ensnared by hierarchies, literalist hermeneutics, and inflexible norms.

16. For more on those attacks, see Fealy 2019; for an official NU statement, see Husni 2019.

17. NU Garis Lurus emerged in 2015 in response to the proclamation of Islam Nusantara. For more on NU Garis Lurus, see Arifianto (2017) and Iqbal (2020), who show that the threat this faction has posed to the organization is considerable since several young ulama with a significant following affiliated themselves with NU Garis Lurus.

18. See also Arifianto (2017, 3), who notes that the leadership of NU has followed the strategy of dismissing NU Garis Lurus as insignificant.

19. Jeremy Menchik (2016), on the other hand, has relativized this difference between Muhammadiyah and NU by showing that the two organizations share a concept of religious tolerance that is distinct from the liberal model and that differences between the two organizations are of degree rather than of kind.

20. Although it is often said that Dahlan studied with these traditionalist teachers, there is no historical proof that he actually did. It is more likely that Dahlan stayed closer to home for his education before departing for Mecca.

21. Qunut (from A. qunūt, which means obedience to God) is a prayer of supplication that is part of the fajr prayer among traditionalists. In contemporary Muhammadiyah, the daily observance of qunut is rejected. Tahlil, a prayer for the dead, will be discussed in detail in the following chapter.

22. See Millie (2009, 101–9) on similar processes where genealogies are constructed through ritual.

23. This is a standard view not merely in Islamic legal discourse but also in the so-called Sufism of sobriety. Al-Ghazālī, for example, who considered obedience to a master a necessary precondition for the novice’s spiritual development, explicitly noted that this rule would not be applicable if obedience demanded breaking Islamic law (Gramlich 1984, 3). For the significance of this rule in the pesantren milieu, see Dhofier 1999, 63.

24. The kyai was referencing the standard Shāfiʿī teachings on the authoritative bases of positive law (Khadduri 2003, 289–94; see also Hallaq 1997, 22–26).

25. The textual basis for filial piety can be found in Q. 17:23, which includes the injunction to be kind and respectful, especially to one’s older parents; and in the Sunna, where the expression birr al-wālidayn appears, for example, in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2782 and 3004, and where it is considered superior to jihad.

26. ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Sulamī (d. 1262) was an Ashʿarī theologian and a leading authority of the Shāfiʿī madhhab of his generation. His juridical work, especially his renowned Al-Qawāʿid al-Kubrā, was influenced by Sufi thought and practice (Chaumont 2012).

27. The relation between the inner and the outer dimension of knowledge can sometimes be conflictual, as is the case in antinomian Sufi traditions. Antinomian behavior resulting from an especially deep understanding of and love for God has existed throughout the history of Sufism (see, for instance, Ernst 1985; Karamustafa 1994). The quintessential Javanese antinomian Sufi is Seh Siti Jenar (Rinkes 1996). Antinomian behavior is rejected by the so-called sober Sufis, including Qushayrī (d. 1074) and Ghazālī, who understood the internal as a deeper exploration of the law, thus precluding antinomianism. This understanding is also echoed in early modern and modern Sufis associated with reform movements (see Azra 2004; Howell 2010).

28. Yahya did not give me a source for these citations, but we find similar comments about the supremacy of adab in the work of many ulama, as listed in a book by a Yemeni scholar I was given by a kyai when I asked about this citation. Ulama listed in this book include al-Shāfiʿī, Ibn al-Qayyim, and al-Biṣṭāmī (see Zayn al-Dīn 2007, 68–69).

29. There are multiple Hadith where Muhammad calls himself the sayyid of Adam’s children (see, for instance, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Muslim 2278). The other Hadith referenced by Yahya that is supposedly used by Muhammadiyah modernists, according to which the Prophet said, “Do not call me sayyid in your prayer,” is considered weak by both traditionalists and modernists and is not usually drawn on in Muhammadiyah members’ reasoning. Instead, they argue that the words and movements of ritual prayer were determined by the Prophet and that nothing else can be added.

30. Gus Baha is a traditionalist YouTube celebrity who is not only immensely popular among the masses, but is also highly respected among the NU elite due to his knowledge and his prestigious biological and intellectual genealogies. For one of his videos discussing music, see Santri Gayeng, “Musik: yang Dihalalkan Sufi, dan yang Ditentang Fikih, Gus Baha,” posted September 9, 2020, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP4_rpipWp0.

31. See Hasyim Asy’ari (2005, 132–33), who clearly articulated that it was only permissible to pray to God. For a more contemporary fatwa from an NU cleric reiterating the same opinion, see Nuril Huda 2007. For more on NU’s understandings of prayers at graves, see chapter 6.

32. Fāṭima’s death occurred in the midst of the disputed succession of Muhammad and Abū Bakr’s triumph over ʿAlī, Fāṭima’s husband. In some accounts, her clandestine burial is explained as a strategy to avoid Abū Bakr’s presence at the funeral, although this explanation is disputed in some Sunni historical writing; perhaps this is why the santri attributed Fāṭima’s wish to a more general dislike of crowds at graves. For more information on the historical incident and its treatment in classical Islamic historiography, see Madelung 1997, 52.

6. The Power of the Chain

Parts of this chapter were previously published in Meyer 2025.

1. Sepi, also translated as “lonely” or “deserted,” is often connoted negatively.

2. For more on these groups, see Zamhari (2010), according to whom such groups can be understood as local Sufi communities that operate outside of the ṭarīqa networks. Zamhari emphasizes their rootedness in and commitment to Islamic law.

3. See Benjamin 1969, 158–60; 202–3. The discourse of tradition, transmitted through a web of relations, far exceeds not only the understanding and intentions of any human speaker, but even participates in a discourse that includes all natural entities, not just human beings. Benjamin understands human language as but one species of language “as such,” a communication of all entities that human language, by virtue of naming, translates to a higher level (1986, 316–17).

4. See Ricklefs (2006, 39), who, in turn, references Rinkes (1912, 439–77; 1996, 72–98), who obtained this version of Sunan Bayat’s provenance from the keeper of the cemetery grounds (I./J. juru kunci) when he visited Bayat in the early twentieth century. According to other versions, Sunan Bayat was a regent of the city of Semarang and had no specific connection to Majapahit. These ambiguities around his identity speak to the point that the past, in these accounts, is not primarily a series of facts to be recalled.

5. The manuscript was written by Raden Wadana Sasra Winata of Yogyakarta in 1876. On this specific manuscript, see Pigeaud 1968, 381. For more on the literary traditions around Sultan Agung, see Bogaerts 2021. On macapat, see chapter 1.

6. The Dhandhanggula is sung to different tunes. Its metric structure is 10i 10a 8e 7u 9i 7a 6u 8a 12i 7a (Arps 1992, 58).

7. While the kyai did not foreground this aspect in his narration of the story, we see reverberations of a common trope in Sufi hagiographical writing, in which obedience to the teacher entails economic hardship for the disciple and their family. See Alatas 2021b, 123–24. For classical examples, as well as the role of gender in these dynamics, see also Salamah-Qudsi 2021.

8. This view is different from familiar post-Kantian views, where the moral agent is a self-contained subject. For examples of this understanding in the Islamic world, see Samuels 2019, 102; Kamali 1993, 349.

9. These contexts include manakiban, a ritual reading of God’s favors upon a wali, or pengajian (gatherings where a particular religious topic is discussed), but tawassul can also be performed in private, often taking more flexible forms (Millie 2008, 107–8; see also Millie 2009, 101–8). Tawassul may be addressed to intermediaries who are not Muslim (in a narrow sense). A friend told me about an acquaintance of his who learned to play guitar by addressing Bob Marley in tawassul. This acquaintance is reportedly a YouTube celebrity now, so the intercession was successful.

10. The Arabic term tahlīl means to recite the words “lā illāha illā-llāh,” although these words are only one component of the prayer as it is practiced in Java today: Tahlil consists of a set sequence of Qur’anic passages and prayers recited in a set order. For an example listing the different components of tahlil, see Kurniawan 2016. The practice of tahlil as a prayer for the dead can be found across the Malay-Indonesian world. The practice is often attributed to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jailānī, which has led Reid to conclude that it might have been brought to Southeast Asia by the Qādiriyya Sufi lineage (Reid 1984, 18). Although it is common across Islamic Southeast Asia, there are some regional differences. In some parts of the Indonesian archipelago, tahlil is understood more narrowly as a prayer for the benefit of a person who has just recently passed away (Millie 2008, 110n9). Outside of Southeast Asia, tahlil does not seem to appear in this form as a prayer for the dead but is recommended for a variety of contexts and occasions (Padwick 1961, 129–36).

11. A Maussian understanding of giving can help us here acknowledge the transactional without resorting to reductive conclusions, as he refutes the logics of liberal exchange by showing that the altruistic or communal and the self-interested and individual are, in fact, co-constitutive (Mauss 1990, 70).

12. While I leave wasīla untranslated, the translation is M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s (2010), who renders wasīla as “way” in both cases. In the Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, which is widely used in Javanese pesantren, including Krapyak, it is rendered as “the kind of obedience that brings you close to Him” (al-Maḥallī and al-Suyūṭī 2002, 122) and as seeking “nearness through obedience” (Maḥallī and Suyūṭī 2002, 297). Hasyim Asy’ari, in his above-cited fatwa on tawassul, agreed with the gloss in the Tafsīr al-Jalālayn but noted that it could also have a more specific meaning of addressing God by way of people of great righteousness, as is apparent in the above cited passage (Asy’ari 2005, 131).

13. This kind of reasoning is not unique to Java. See, for instance, Ewing (1997, 133–36) on Pakistani pīr describing themselves using the analogy of the “lawyer” interceding with God, the judge, on behalf of other people.

14. The capacity of tawassul to accommodate the requirements of a variety of situations was also noted by Millie (2008, 108), who attributed the popularity of tawassul to this adaptability.

15. For a range of different approaches to genealogies in the anthropology of Islam, see Shryock 1997; Birchok 2015; Wellman 2017; and Alatas 2021b.

16. See Ho 2006, 117–30. Ho looks at two seventeenth-century texts: Taʿrīkh al-nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir authored by ʿAbd al-Qādir al-ʿAydarūs, and Al-mashraʿ al-rawī fī manāqib al-sāda al-kirām by Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Shillī.

17. See Chittick 1989, 12–16, and Ho 2006, 127–30. In Ibn al-ʿArabī’s conceptual vocabulary, another related but not equivalent term is ʿālam al-mithāl, the world of images.

18. For more on the semantic range of adab, especially in relation to akhlāq, see Ali 2019 and Ebrahimi and Yusoff 2017.

19. These concerns about forgetting can also be found in traditional Javanese literature, especially in the work of the nineteenth-century poet Ranggasasmita studied by Nancy Florida. In Ranggasasmita’s work, those who fail to remember the dead find themselves “lost in ignorance and insanity” (Florida 2019, 101). These parallels point to continuities between traditional Javanese literature and contemporary traditionalist Islam.

20. Zarnūjī was a twelfth-/thirteenth-century Muslim scholar from Khurasan. His treatise on Islamic education, Taʿlīm al-Mutaʿallim, has been widely influential in the curriculum of Southeast Asian institutions of Islamic learning (Van Bruinessen 1990, 257).

21. For a comprehensive overview over of the structure and content of this text, see Langermann 2013. Despite the text’s wide circulation in the Islamic world (Krawietz 2006, 34) and the extent that Ibn al-Qayyim’s views in Kitāb al-Rūh. have become dominant in Sunni Islam (Macdonald 1932; Langermann 2013, 126–27), there is no complete English translation of the book.

22. While some Islamic scholars, including, for example, al-Tirmidhī (d. 824), have differentiated between the spirit (rūḥ) and the soul (nafs) as two distinct subtle faculties representing spiritual and material orientations, others, like al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), have treated the two more or less interchangeably. My discussion follows the latter convention, treating the two terms as synonymous (see also Gobillot 2010).

23. In Ibn al-ʿArabī’s work, the realm of barzakh comprises the whole intermediate realm between the spiritual and corporeal world. See Chittick 1989, 14, and Ibn al-Qayyim 2010, 111.

24. See Ibn al-Qayyim (2010, 7) referencing Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (1370), in which the Prophet Muhammad spoke to the dead after the battle of Badr.

25. See Ibn al-Qayyim (2010, 8) referencing Ṣaḥīḥ al-Muslim (249), in which the Prophet Muhammad greets the dead as brothers, and Ṣaḥīḥ al-Muslim (974), where he asks God to grant forgiveness to the dead of Baqīʿ al-Gharqad.

26. For example, whereas the pharaohs will be subjected to torment from morning to evening, the souls of the martyrs take the form of birds who nest at the throne of God. See Ibn al-Qayyim 2010, 111–13. The corresponding Hadith can be found in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Muslim (1887).

27. While the ideological differentiation between traditionalism and modernism only developed gradually, in Java and elsewhere (see Laffan 2002, 112), and there have always been ties of friendship and even marriage among their early leadership—Dahlan was even married to Mbah Munawwir’s sister for a short period of time—there is no evidence for such a deliberate cooperation between the two scholars. Nonetheless, such narratives are popular in Indonesia today, especially among traditionalists but also—albeit to a much lesser extent—among modernists.

28. The paradigm of the rural and the urban as two distinct spheres and populations with fundamentally different needs is prominent in Javanese literature, with its strong distinctions between court and countryside (Florida 1995, 305–8). Similar notions exist elsewhere in the Islamic world, where normative Muslim culture is urban because of collaborations between the ulama and the mercantile class, whereas Islam in the countryside is characterized by superstition, syncretism, and lawlessness. This only changed in the late nineteenth century, when ulama brought orthodox Islam to the countryside (Levtzion and Voll 1987, 2). Despite the fact that the historical veracity of this binary has been disproven, the paradigm has taken on a life of its own among some Muslims, as my interlocutors’ comments show.

29. This is a popular view in contemporary traditionalist narratives about the wali sanga. See, for instance, Sunyoto 2016, xi.

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