-
Foreword to the First Edition
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
FoREwoRD To THE FIRST EDITIon It is a great honour indeed for me to be requested both by Dr Mitsuo Nakamura, the author of this book, and Drs H.J. Koesoemanto, the Executive Director of Gadjah Mada University Press, to write a few lines as foreword to this book. This book, The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree, A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town, is originally a dissertation submitted to Cornell University, U.S.A. in 1976. The “town” is “Kotagede” in Yogyakarta. The study covers a period of approximately 70 years, from 1900 to 1970. His approach is historical and ethnological. Kotagede was chosen as his field of study due to various considerations. The development of Muhammadiyah in Kotagede presents a number of paradoxes in view of the various opinions so far presented by the Western students on the history of modern Islamic movement in Indonesia in general and of Muhammadiyah in particular. The first paradox is that Muhammadiyah, as an organized effort to cleanse Javanese Islam from admixtures of heterodox local customs and beliefs, gained strong support in the midst of a local community where these heterodox elements had long been deeply rooted in the form of the cult of royal glorification. Strong aspirations for orthodox Islamic reform emerged from among the population, which had been thoroughly imbued with extremely syncretic religious traditions. The second paradox is the existence of a number of rich Javanese traders and craftmen in Kotagede prior to 1900, whose wealth, entrepreneurial skills and business networks were very much impressive. It has been a common assumption among the students of modern Javanese society that, as a result of the Dutch encroachment in the field of international and domestic trade activities in Java since the day of the Dutch East Indian Company and its employment of the Chinese as middlemen between the indigenous sector and European sector of the economy, indigenous Javanese trade and industry were stifled or at least reduced to the level of petty peddling and casual handicraft (D.H. Burger, The Structural Changes in Javanese Society: The Supra-Village Sphere, Ithaca, 1956). It has further been assumed that a social class based upon trade and industry is something antithetical to the official social philosophy in Javanese society in which two classes — the rulers with the nobility and court xxxiii officials (priyayi) on the one hand and the peasantry on the other — have constituted the only legitimate positions in society, leaving no place in it for a commercial class (Lance Castles, Religion, Politics, and Economic Behavior in Java: The Kudus Cigarettes Industry, New Haven, 1967). Kotagede is located in the heartland of south Central Java where this presumably non-mercantile Javanese tradition has been pervasive. Yet the wealth, vigor and the tightness of the networks of these Kotagede traders and craftmen had been well-known in the region for a long time. These two paradoxes lead to a third one: Kotagede traders and craftmen are not santri, devout Muslims, prior to the Muhammadiyah. Most of them are abangan, nominal Muslims. This phenomenon is quite different to the observation of Western writer, like Clifford Geertz, (Islam observed: Religious development in Morocco and Indonesia, New Haven, 1968) who maintains the historical and functional connections between Islam and trade. Islam came to Indonesia through the route of trade and later on when trade was turned inward by the Dutch dominance along the costs, there was an elective effinity between the itinerant and small traders, who moved from one place to another along with their commercial commidities, and hostels for their temporary sojourn and prayer. So mosque and market have been a natural pair. As far as the traders and craftmen of Kotagede prior to the first decade of this century are concerned, they were abangan. If there existed any element of Islamic orthodoxy in Kotagede at that time, it was to be found among the group of local court officials (abdi dalem) who, as part of their official duties, were obliged to andhere to at least the outward ritual orthodoxy of Islam. In other world, as far as pre-Muhammadiyah Islam in Kotagede is concerned, Geertz’s thesis of the historical and functional connections between Islam and trade does not seem particularly apt. On the one hand it underrates the significance of Islamic elements (albeit in syncretic forms) in the traditional polity of the principality court and on the other it overlooks the fact that not all commercial elements were Islamically...