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84 Polarising Javanese Society 84 4 The Birth of the Abangan From about the middle of the nineteenth century, there emerged in Javanese society a category of people who were defined by their failure — in the eyes of the more pious — to behave as proper Muslims. These were the abangan, the nominal or non-practising Muslims. This term derives from the “Low Javanese” (ngoko) word abang, meaning the colour red or brown. At the time, the usual terms were bangsa abangan (the red/ brown sort) or wong abangan (the red/brown people). In “High Javanese” (krama) the word was abrit and these people were thus also called tiyang abritan, tiyang being the krama equivalent of wong (people, person). As we shall see below, abangan originated as a term of derision employed by the pious putihan, the “white ones”.1 1 There is a folk etymology which claims that abangan derived from the name of one of the semi-legendary walis of Javanese Islam, Seh Lěmah Abang, who was martyred for disclosing secret doctrines to the uninitiated. But there is no evidence to support this. However unorthodox his methods, as a saint of Islam Lěmah Abang would certainly have been regarded as one of the putihan. To confirm the irrelevance of this etymology, we may note that in krama Javanese his name is given as Seh Siti Jěnar, yet the abangan were never called jěnaran in krama, but rather abritan. More recently, an Islamised etymology has been suggested. This posits that abangan derives from aba‘an, derived from the Arabic verb aba (to reject, refuse). This etymology is unacceptable on 3 grounds: (1) It is grammatically unsound. (2) At the time the term emerged, contemporary sources describe it as meaning “red”, not “rejectors, refusers”. (3) Again, in krama Javanese the term is abritan, whereas if it were from the Arabic, then we would expect the Arabic word to be used in both ngoko and krama. The Birth of the Abangan 85 It is important to emphasise that no evidence has come to light of a group known as the abangan in Java before the mid-nineteenth century. It is always risky to argue on the basis of something that is not seen in the historical evidence, for there is a chance that the phenomenon in question existed but went unrecorded, or that the evidence is limited and has not been noticed by historians. In this case, however, we may proceed with some confidence. Pre-nineteenth century Javanese history is recorded in many thousands of pages of (mainly) Javanese- and Dutch-language literary works and archives. During the past century, these sources have been subjected to scrutiny by philologists and historians, although only a few of the latter. I have been studying these sources myself for 40 years and have read large volumes of both Dutch and Javanese sources over that time. As is true of anyone who began the study of Java, or Indonesia more generally, in the 1960s, I was much impressed by Clifford Geertz’s book The religion of Java.2 Geertz divided Javanese society into three variants, the santri (those who in this book are called the putihan), the abangan and the priyayi. When Geertz and his colleagues did their fieldwork and The religion of Java was published, these categories were thought of as an abiding way of classifying Javanese society with roots deep in the ancient past. So I set off on my study of Javanese history expecting to see the abangan everywhere and curious to learn what could be known of them in earlier times. But they never appeared. Not until my research touched sources from the mid-nineteenth century did I encounter any sign of the abangan existing as a social category. The term used for the opposite category, the putihan, was well attested in earlier sources as a collective term for the professionally religious, also known as the kaum. But there was no sign of the abangan in earlier sources. The first edition of the standard Javanese-Dutch dictionary by J.F.C. Gericke and T. Roorda, published in 1847, does not contain a definition for a social group called abangan or abritan. It has an entry for abang (red), with subentries for abang tuwa/abrit sěpuh (crimson) and ngabangake/ngabritakěn (make red, paint red), but no entry for a social group.3 By the time of the final edition of 1901, however, we find what had become...

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