THE JAVANESE KIJAJI:
THE CHANGING ROLE OF A CULTURAL BROKER
Clifford Geertz
One of the. most serious problems facing the post-revolutionary Indonesian political elite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population. The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-based nationalist leadership more oriented to the international patterns of intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung countries. On the one hand, the activist white-collar nationalists of the large cities are attempting to construct an integrated Indonesian state along generally western parliamentary lines; on the other, the peasants of the Javanese, Sundanese, Achenese, Buginese, etc. culture areas cling to the patterns of local community organization and belief with which they are intimately familiar. Between the two levels of socio-cultural integration,1 the local community and the national state, ties are brittle. The result is, in extreme cases of maladjustment, separatism; in more moderate ones, a passive resistance to central government programs and policies by various regional populations.
The danger of a widening gulf between a metropolitan intelligentsia better able to understand members of similar groups in India, Mexico or the Gold Coast than their own villagers, and a peasantry to whom their own national leadership seems almost foreign is thus quite real. In such a situation, the individuals and groups who can communicate both with the urban elite and with the rural followers of a particular local tradition perform an altogether critical function. It is these groups and individuals who can "translate" the somewhat abstract ideologies of the "New Indonesia" into one or another of the concrete idioms of rural life and can, in return, make clear to the intelligentsia the nature of the peasantry's fears and aspirations. Analyses of the creation of viable nations in Asia and Africa which simply focus on the political elite, as those of political scientists have tended to do, or simply on the peasant village, as those of anthropologists have tended to do, are necessarily incomplete. What is needed, in addition, is an analysis of the links between the two - i.e., of regional leadership. A vigorous, imaginative regional leadership, able to playa cultural middleman role between peasant and metropolitan life, and so create an effective juncture between traditional cultural patterns and modem ones, is in many ways the most essential pre-requisite for the success, in democratic form, of the nationalist experiment both in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Recent theoretical work by anthropologists concerned with the study of complex civilizations has come to focus on just this problem of the integration between national and local community, between sophisticate culture and folk culture, and on the existence of a set of "specialists" specifically concerned with maintaining such integration. Robert Redfield, for example, has attempted to clarify the formal differences between village centered, locally or regionally based "little traditions," and urban centered, nationally based "great traditions" in the old, non-industrial civilizations of Asia and the New World.2 The concrete, syncretic little traditions which compose the cultural framework for peasant peoples in Central America, China, or India are contrasted with the more abstract and systematized great traditions which characterise the urban elite through all of these areas. In the interplay between these two sorts of traditions, the "parochialization" of widespread traits into local contexts and the "universalization" of local traits over the whole of the culture area,3 Redfield saw some of the central binding forces in civilization, and he saw, also, this interplay as mediated by a special set of social structures designed to relate the two sorts of tradition to one another.4
Redfield's argument was formulated with respect to the traditional patterns of culture in the non-industrial civilizations. But one of the major concomitants of the rise of nationalism in Asia and Africa has been the displacement of traditional leadership at the upper-most levels by western-educated intellectuals who are often no longer deeply involved in the classical great traditions of their countries. They are neither Brahmans, Confucians nor Ulema, but secularized politicians, businessmen, professionals, and free-lance intellectuals. Between them and the peasantry there has not yet been sufficient time for the stable sort of social structure of tradition Redfield describes to have grown up. Who the "teachers, reciters, and ritual leaders" of the New Indonesia, the men Eric Wolf has called cultural "brokers" because they "stand guard over the crucial junctures of synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole,"5 are to be is not wholly certain. But one of the most important candidates for such a broker role in the Javanese culture area, and thus for effective regional leadership, is the same man who mediated one of Indonesia's two classical great traditions: the local Moslem teacher, or kijaji.
In his classical role, the kijaji fits most exactly Redfield's specifications: he is a specialist in the communication of Islam to the mass of the peasantry. As an established religious scholar directing his own religious school, he has long occupied the focal position in the social structure of tradition through which the monotheistic, exclusivist Moslem creed has penetrated the tolerant, syncretistminded countryside. Insofar as Java has in fact been part of the great, Meccacentered international world of Islam - and it has been so only in part and to a degree - it has been the kijaji who has been the main connecting link, who has joined the local system to the larger whole. And it is upon his performance of this broker function that his enormous prestige and power in the countryside has rested.
But, over the past fifty years or so, his role has begun to change. Under the pressures of nationalism, Islamic modernism, and the whole complex of social transformations which have taken place in Indonesia in this century, he is becoming, or attempting to become, a new kind of broker for a different sort of society and a different sort of culture, that of the nationally centered, metropolitan-based, intelligensia-led "New Indonesia." And, as such, he has increasingly found himself occupying a new social role pregnant with possibilities both for securing and enhancing his social power and prestige, and for destroying the essential foundations of it: that of local party leader. In this effort of the kijaji to combine the role of traditional religious scholar with that of nationalist politican are mirrored many of the conflicts and contradictions which characterise the contemporary, rapidly changing Indonesian society in general.
I
Islam penetrated Indonesia, for the most part peacefully, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, carried eastward along the coasts of the Java sea by the expanding spice trade. But, especially on Java, it entered not a country of primitive pagans, but one where the civilizing influence of Hinduism had been felt from the time of Christ onward, and where the large-scale agrarian and maritime kingdom of Madjapahit (1294-1478) formed the culmination of ten centuries of complex political growth. In most parts of Java, both the upper classes and the peasantry were easily enough converted, especially after Madjapahit weakened and fell under the centrifugal forces the commercial florescence created. But, in most parts of Java, the conversion was for both classes purely formal. Under the Islamic veneer, the nobility remained Indonesian ksatrija, the peasantry remained feast-giving and spirit-worshipping animists. Only among certain members of the small trading class was even a partially recognizable orthodoxy to be found.
To a significant extent, this situation has slowly changed over the past three and one-half centuries. True, the Indonesian population, and particularly the Javanese, is far from uniformly orthodox even today. But among a large minority - judging from the 1955 election returns, perhaps nearly 40 % - Islam has become an important part of life and its requirements are to a reasonable degree understood and obeyed. That such a larger group now takes Islam more seriously and comprehends it more thoroughly is in great part due to the interaction during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of two social institutions: the pilgrimage to Mecca, or hadj; and the rural koranic school, or pesantren (sometimes, pondok). Together, these two institutions formed the social structure of the Islamic great tradition during the final hundred years of colonial rule in Indonesia, and permitted both Islamic orthodoxy to shape local practices and local practice to shape Islamic orthodoxy, producing what I have referred to elsewhere as a workable "halfway covenant" for village Java.6 The kijaji determined the form and content of this half-way covenant.
The Growth of the Peasantren Pattern
There have been pesantren-like institutions in Java since the Hindu-Buddhist period (i.e. from about the second to about the sixteenth centuries), and most likely even before, for the cluster of student disciples collected around a holy man is a pattern common throughout south and southeast Asia. Hindu-Buddhist monasteries composed of apprentice mystics, under the leadership of an adept monk or priest, seem to have been quite widespread in pre-Islamic times, and it is actually out of these structures, and out of the way of life characteristic of them, that the pesantren-kijaji pattern developed rather than out of the theological schools - the madrasa - of classical Islam.7 At this period, whole villages, the so-called Perdikan, or "free", villages, were assigned by the kings to individual temples, shrines, and monasteries under the control of priests or monks as sanctuaries and as fiscal supports for the religious life. Such cloisters served as centers of learning; as retreats where an ascetic, disciplined search for mystical enlightenment could be conducted; and as waystations where religious itinerants and pilgrims could linger. Almost two hundred separate monastery villages of this sort seem to have existed in Java during the Madjapahit period, evidently forming a fairly definite religious structure within the political kingdoms.8
When Islam came to the island the conversion of the kings was followed by a conversion of the monasteries - what had been Hindu-Buddhist now became Islamic, a new wine in a very old bottle. The florescence of a dynamic coastal (pasisir) commercial civilization brought a new element into Javanese culture in the form of an aggressive, mercantile, cosmopolitan ethic clothed in a somewhat Indianized version of the Islamic great tradition.9 This fluid, internationally oriented, somewhat Levantine culture slowly entered the inland areas, the monasteries, now become Koranic schools, forming the spearhead of its penetration. Wandering traders, peddlers, and money changers, more orthodox than aristocrat or peasant, began to move into the interior, and, like the itinerant monks before them, they used the religious schools as stopping places.10 Kijaji, a term originally meaning simply "old, respected man," or "charismatic religious teacher" of no definite sort,11 came more and more to mean specifically "Koranic teacher;" while santri, the term for a religious, pesantren-dwelling student, became closely associated with that for trader, pedagang, a word itself having "vagabond" as a secondary meaning.
In such a fashion, the pesantren became a major channel for the penetration of the coastal trading culture into village life. Large pesantrens, headed by kijajis famous all over the island, grew up in various villages, whence came, often travelling long distances from their homes, great numbers not only of traders' sons, but, as time passed, even greater numbers of peasants' sons, to study, meditate, and recite Arabic texts. Alongside the large, well-known institutions, smaller ones appeared, headed by less famous kijajis, schools which often failed to outlive their founder but which nevertheless served to spread Islam further among the masses of the peasantry. And in almost every village there appeared at least one pesantren-trainedman who could give chanting lessons and ritual instruction in his home to the village children whose parents wished it, he, too, often being honored, but only by his immediate neighbors, with the title of kijaji. The growing importance of the hadj in the nineteenth century simply put the final touch on this growth of an educational system at once both properly Moslem and locally rooted by providing a much more effective communication line between the pesantren and the international world of Mecca-centered Islam.12
After about 1850, then, the kijaji came increasingly to be a returned Meccan pilgrim - a hadji - and a teacher in his own pesantren. Not all men who called themselves kijaji had been to the Holy City, but most of the well-known ones had. Nor were all hadjis, by far, kijajis. The majority of the pilgrims were but wide-eyed provincial tourists in the Hedjaz, riding camels and collecting souvenirs, and they returned to their villages with no more scholarly knowledge than they had when they left, though with a good deal more prestige. But, as Snouck Hurgronje pointed out, there were, in addition to these fleeting Meccan visitors, Indonesians who remained in the city for years at a time, and became participants, as he put it, in the "Arabic-Muhammedan civilization."13 These latter, some of whom spent their whole adult life in Mecca, could transmit some oftheir greater feeling for and understanding ofIslam to the more serious of the visitors, who could in turn pass it to the more piously inclined elements in their village populations. The communication network was crude but gradually a more authentic Islam began to crystallize in many Indonesian villages as a result of its operation. By the end of the nineteenth century the Indonesian colony in Mecca was the largest and most active in the whole city, and Hurgronje, who was living there disguised as a pilgrim, could write: "Here lies the heart of the religious life of the East-Indian archipelago, and the numberless arteries pump thence fresh blood in every accelerating tempo to the entire body of the Moslem populace in Indonesia."14
At the other ends of the numberless arteries were the pesantrens. One or more villagers, relatively speaking both more pious and wealthier than their neighbors, would deed a few acres of house land to God according to the regulations of the Moslem law, and turn over this land to a local kijaji to manage as God's agent. Either the same men or others would then contribute materials and labor to erect buildings on the plot: a mosque, a bathing enclosure for purification before prayers, a house for the kijaji, and dormitories for the santri students. The students, a few dozen to several hundred young bachelors between the ages of eight and eighteen or twenty, would sleep in the dormitories (which, commonly, they had built themselves), cook their own food, and study each day with the kijaji in the mosque. For the most part, this "study" consisted of mere chant-and-echo reading of learned works in Arabic, annotated by the kijaji as best he could as he went along. The whole pattern was very informal, and to most students rather little of the more refined details of Islamic law and doctrine could have been communicated. But the basic ritual requirements of Islam, the general quality of its spirit, and the crucial concepts - monotheism, determinism, universalism - of its dogma were.
The
kijaji, located at the center of this pilgrimage-Islamic school complex, came to
be, therefore, one of the most important cultural brokers in pre-war Java. He
stood between those villagers who had come to think of themselves, under his
tutelage, as more pious and orthodox than the mass of their animistic neighbors
and the great international civilization of Islam, of which these villagers
wished to become a part. To his former students and their families he was
spiritual advisor, magical curer and social superior. Commonly, too, he was an
economic superior as well, for the pilgrimage was expensive, as was the
maintenance of a pesantren. For the villager for whom Islam had become, even
dimly, a living religion, the kijaji was both a powerful sacred figure and an
influential secular one, and he labored mightily to increase, in the face of an
infidel government and an indifferent peasantry, the number of such
"awakened" disciples. "He who has never been a student in a
pesantren," the Sundanese aristocrat Pangeran Aria Achmad Djajadiningrat
wrote in his autobiography, " ... can scarcely realize how great the moral
power of the scholar over the mass of the population is".15
The Nature of Peasantren Life
When a European first sees a traditional pesantren, it reminds him almost inevitably of a Catholic monastery. Usually located at the edge of a village, it is placed away from the road, concealed in a small grove of trees, around which a white-washed, chest-high stone wall runs. Within this grove, the most prominent building is the mosque, a white stone structure, totally bare inside and with a shining tile floor, in front of which hangs a wooden slit gong which is beaten five times a day to announce the obligatory prayers. The dormitories of the students, or santris, are grouped in an irregular semi-circle around the mosque, and each consists of a series of small, doorless, sparsely furnished cells, joined together by a continuous front porch open all along the outward side. Between the dormitories, the mosque, and the bathing enclosure next to the mosque there are raised stepping stones, so that the santri who has once bathed his feet may move in and out of the mosque without each time re-washing them. The kijaji's house is off to one side, its veranda commonly facing away from the main building cluster, and between it and the mosque there is a large open square, where various semi-secular activities - sports, holiday celebrations, and the like - take place. The quiet, ascetic restraint, the secluded quality of it all, is certainly monastic, and one is surprised when the silence is broken not by the ringing of an angelus bell but by the hollow thumping of the slit gong and the Arabic cry of the Muaddin.
But the immediate impression is misleading. A pesantren is only superficially like a monastery, for the santris are not monks; they have made no vows. They come to the pesantren when they wish, and they leave it when they wish. While there they are expected to lead at least a reasonable facsimile of the holy life, but they are not expected to dedicate themselves to it permanently. They are not men of extraordinarily powerful religious needs who have decided to cut themselves off forever from secular existence and to devote themselves to the service and adoration of God. They are, rather, ordinary young men who have come away from the ordinary village life to get a certain amount of elementary religious training and experience, and when they have this they will return home. Or, more accurately, they will go home when the prospect of inheriting a share of rice land becomes immediate and they consequently begin to think of marriage.
A santri's stay in a pesantren is thus but a part of the general process of his becoming a pious Moslem. When he is five or six his mother will tell him Islamic stories from the Koran. When he is seven or eight his father will take him to mosque and teach him to pray. At nine or ten he may spend his evenings with a group of children learning to chant the Koran at the home of a pesantrentrained peasant, perhaps sleeping there. And at twelve or fifteen he will go, often some distance, to a pesantren himself. He may stay a month, or ten years. He may study for a few months, come home for a few months, and return to study for a few more. Or he may move from one school to another, in search, as the Javanese say, of "experience." At eighteen or twenty, the restlessness ceases, and the student returns home to settle down among his fellow peasants, the majority of whom are much less concerned with Islam than he; men who don't go to mosque, who don't perform the prayers, and who have never set foot inside a pesantren. Unless he changes his beliefs, he will all his life be known to them as a santri, they to him as abangans.16
For the adolescent boy, the pesantren plays, consequently, something of the same role in his life that youth fraternities - whether they be bachelors' huts, age-sets or street-corner gangs - do in many other societies. And life in a pesantren has some of the characteristic marks of life in such fraternities: an emphasis on physical strength and courage as outward signs of an inward manhood; a deep veneration for certain kinds of adult leaders; and sharply intensified feelings of brotherhood among the members. The day-to-day functioning of the pesantren is actually managed almost wholly by the students themselves. The kijaji remains aloof, a court of last resort, looking away from the students' everyday life as his house looks away from their dormitories. He holds chanting sessions several hours a day in the mosque, cures the sick and advises the perplexed, and, in some cases, gives instruction in mysticism. But otherwise he stands apart, immediately obeyed in all matters, but not to be disturbed with ordinary rivialities. The students elect their own officers, set up spartan rules and regulations to govern their own conduct, and distribute the necessary domestic tasks among themselves. As such, the pesantren forms for the santri a bridge not simply to Islam, but to the world outside the family, to adult life in general. "Life in a pesantren differs greatly from that in a usual native household," Djajadiningrat writes, "unlimited obedience to the kijaji, a regulated life, equality and brotherhood among the pupils are laws that are maintained unchanged by the kijajis."17
The
self-sufficiency of the santri community in all but religious things is almost
complete. Santris cook their own food and, rather haphazardly, do their own
housework. They may bring food with them or have it sent from hem; the typical
pattern today. Or they may get it by work in the fields belonging to the kijaji,
or to one or another of the wealthy supporters of the peasantren, or even,
sometimes to the peasantren itself, i.e., fields deeded to God as part of the
religious foundation the pesantren represents. Or they may become laborers in
handicraft industries - cigarette or brick making, indigo manufacturing, sugar
milling, textile dyeing etc. - run by the kijaji or school supporters; in the
past, perhaps the majority ofpesantrens had small industries of one sort or
another connected with them. This work-your-way pattern is now fairly rare, but
up to the second and third decades of this century it seems to have been nearly
universal, and to have provided a cheap, hardworking, and disciplined labor
force for the better-off Moslems
in the community.18
Often, too, santris worked independently as blacksmiths, twine-makers, carpenters, etc., or apprenticed themselves to such specialists for training. One informant estimated that over half the students in a large West Java pesantren he attended in the years immediately before the war owned sewing machines and worked, often very long hours, as tailors, making both their own clothes and those of the surrounding peasantry. And, lastly, the santris sometimes went around the village or the market begging their food, as Buddhist monks do today in Siam, Burma and elsewhere. Djajadiningrat records his astonishment at himself, the son of an aristocratic civil servant, going like all the other santris in near rags to beg about the market for a bowl of rice and a few pieces of fish.19 In short, pesantren life was marked by an aggressive, self-reliant, "free enterprise" type of economic ethic, to the extent that even today pesantren graduates make up a disproportionate percentage of the Indonesian small business class.20
Within this ascetic, egalitarian, economically minded, adolescent and pre-adolescent society there grew up a distinctive sort of culture based in roughly equal parts on Arabic art forms, compulsive masculinity, and a common hatred for the infidel colonial government. Arabic music, poetry, drama, and dance were performed, in self-conscious contrast to the Hindu-influenced arts of the upper classes. Native wrestling - the so-called pentjak, a sort of jiu-jitsu21 was the main sport, in contrast to the Western-introduced soccer, badminton, and one-o-cat, which the kijajis saw as dangerously secularizing influences. Various sorts of tests of strength - walking on glass, through fire, and over thorns; or having great weights placed on one's back or chest - were common either on religious holiday celebrations or in connection with mysticism, as were extended fasting and wakefulness. Some santris had wide reputations for such feats of endurance. As for hatred of the Dutch government, and especially of the status-conscious Javanese civil-servant aristocrats who served it, poor Djajadiningrat, the District Officer's son, again felt it keenly. He tells of almost constant mockery by the santris of the mannerisms, attitudes, and affectations of the local civil servants; and he relates how the older santris would shout at him when he mispronounced an Arabic sound: "You will never learn, for you have your belly over-full of rice bought with unclean money", that is, with his father's government salary.22
Over against this tightly knit, hair-shirt, often pederastic society of young men - a typical sort of intense, restless, pre-adult peer-group - stands the kijaji, as the adult figure to which this group looks for a model and a guide. The santris address him as "father", he them as "children". In most pesantrens, the kijaji spends several hours each day in the mosque chanting the Koran, or, more commonly, learned commentaries on the Koran and the Hadith, with his students. Advanced students come to him singly, less advanced ones in groups. The basic effort is to teach the students the correct "tune", the proper rhythm, pitch, and pronunciation in which to chant the Arabic phrases; and a kijaji's renown as often rests on his talents along these more aesthetic lines as upon his scholarship. Yet, as best he can, the kijaji does attempt to expound both the content of Islamic law and ritual and the doctrinal rationale for it, which the santris duly note in the margins of their texts. He offers them, not only in his explication of texts, but in his moral instruction and counsel, both a general view of the world and a set of values to guide behavior in such a world.
The essentials of this world view and value system are, in schematic form, relatively simple. God is all-powerful, and determines all things. But, through the agency of the prophet He has provided an absolute guide for right conduct, and those who, as true believers, accept this guide and follow it faithfully will be rewarded with eternal salvation. This guide is contained in the divine commands of the Koran and the Hadith, and in the four law books which have been built upon them.23 The kijaji arrives at an understanding of its meaning and intention through an extensive study of the writings of the classical medieval scholars and through continual discussion and debate wih other kijajis. It is the kijajis as a group of independent religious scholars who, to a great extent, determine the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of local practices in terms of the Koranic Law, and who adjust this rather inflexible ideal system to Javanese realities. And the kijajis, together with those who accept their leadership and who attempt to follow the Law as they interpret it, form a solidary religious body: ummat Islam, the Islamic community.
Over the centuries, the interaction between this abstract, universalistic, systematic great tradition and the local little traditions of rural Java, through the agency of the kijaji-broker, has led ,in practice, to the emergence ofa general religious outlook neither simply Islamic nor simply Javanese, but characteristic of the members of the pesantren-trained ummat as such. Members of the urban intelligentsia somewhat derisively describe it as "grave-and-gift" religion (kuburan dan gandjaran), for it is primarily conerned with life after death and with the gaining of blessings from God. Those who believe in God, work hard, and follow His Law will be rewarded with good health, riches, and happiness in this life, and with eternal salvation in the next. A man who orders bricks from a brickmaker and pays for them but never gets them resigns himself by saying that it is God's Will, and that anyway later he, the swindled, will get the "gift" that was intended for the brickmaker. This patient-Iabor-in-thevineyards philosophy infuriates the more aggressive, progress-minded, urban intellectuals.
What infuriates them even more is the tendency for the kijaji to emerge as a sort of priest, a role not found in orthodox Islam. The grave-and-gift pattern, in combination with the kijaji's central legitimizing role, tends almost inevitably to lead to his being regarded not merely as a mediator oflaw and doctrine, but of holy power itself. As curer, as provider of magical amulets, as diviner of the future, and even, at times, as sorcerer, the local kijaji comes to playa role not strictly Islamic, but one fused with the broader and quite heterodox status of dukun, the Javanese "folk magician". If a boy falls from a tree, the kijaji is called to wrestle with the evil spirit who is conceived to have pushed him. If a santri is going on a journey, the kijaji writes a Koranic phrase upon a piece of paper and spits upon it to produce an effective talisman. If a marriage is planned, he is asked to predict the possibilities of its success. And if someone has been injuring one of his wards by sorcery, he can turn the sorcerer's evil back upon the attacker and so destroy him. The kijaji thus brings together the general moral doctrines of Islam and the specific animistic notions of local tradition, the fragmented, barely conceptualised, practical religion of the ordinary peasant, the two playing into one another in such a way that his competence in the first guarantees his effectiveness in the second.24
In addition to being an Islamised version of the indigenous folk-magician, or dukun, the kijaji quite commonly fills another more general Javanese role as well: that of mystical teacher, or guru. Mysticism has been, of course, an essential part of orthodox Islam since the time of al-Ghazali's synthesis of sufism with sunnite theology in the twelfth century. But in Java its importance was further strengthened, and its character strongly colored, by the fact that Islam came to Indonesia by way of India, rather than directly from the Middle East; and by the fact that before its arrival, a fusion of Hinduism and Buddhism was the dominant creed on the island for over ten centuries. Sufic mysticism thus found a fertile soil in Indonesia, and it was the kijaji who, once again, as the local version of the mid-eastern shaikh, acted as broker for it to the peasant mass.
Many sufic brotherhoods were formed outside the pesantrens by local old men gathered together under the leadership of a kijaji once or twice a week, to count beads, murmur the Confession of Faith, and wait for death. But most of the mystical practice took place within them, accompanied often by the extended fasting, prolonged wakefulness, and hyper-intensive meditation typical of Javanese mysticism generally, on the part of both the santris and the kijaji. Not all kijajis were experts in mysticism (the central aim of many Meccan pilgrims was to spend at least some time studying with a truly powerful Arab shaikh), but those who were increased their hold over their followers tremendously, sometimes leading them into a sudden, hopeless frenzy of armed revolt against the Dutch. The colonial government's fear of pesantren mysticism was, consequently, constant and their efforts to suppress it unremitting.25 As a result of this, and of the coolness, and even open hostility towards mysticism of the intellectualist, activist reform group, the importance of mysticism within the pesantrens has today much lessened. But it remains an essential part of the tradition there as another bulwark of the conservative kijaji's power. Alongside his scholarly knowledge, and his magical powers, his ability to perceive within himself the essence of God sustains his essentially charismatic quality in the eyes of his disciples, both while they are in his school and after they have left it.
II
The
intense fear and suspicion of the kijajis by the Dutch, who saw them as
representing a "reactionary" and "troublemaking" element in
village society, did little to undermine their position; the more they were
attacked from this source the stronger they grew. But with the rise of
nationalism in the first decades ofthe twentieth century there came an attack
from a new quarter, from the metropolitan intelligentsia which was moving to
take over political leadership. "Islam means progress," Ir. Sukarno
wrote in his now famous Islamic Letters from Endeh, "it means
'up-to-dateness'."26 Is it possrble, he asks, for a society to
have a spirit, to become alive, if it is founded only on the criminal lawbook
and on the civil lawbook, on article this and article that? "A society of
this kind will soon be dead, a corpse, a society - not even a society. If the
Islamic world is half-dead now it is because it is altogether sunk in the
middle of the Islamic law books."27 Our kijajis, he says, have
no feeling at all for history For them science is heterodox; radio and
electricity are heterodox; everything up-to-date is heterodox. They want to ride
a camel and eat without a spoon just as in the times of the Prophets and the
Caliphates. But why copy the Caliphates? This is 1936, not 700, or 800, or 900.
Why, in general, he asks, are the intellectuals in Indonesia not satisfied with Islam? For the most part, he says, because the people who propagandize Islam are ignorant. "Islamic science is not only knowledge of the Koran and Hadith, but this plus general knowledge. How can a man understand the commands of God truly ... if he doesn't understand biology, the electron, positive and negative, action and reaction?"28 Islam, he repeats, is progress; it means new things, new things that are simpler, that are higher in level than the old things. Progress means new products, new creations, not repeating old things, not copying the past.
Sukarno's position was too secularist even for many of the new intelligentsia (when Pemandangan, the Islamic-nationalist newspaper questioned his faith, he retorted, "God decides who is a Moslem and who is not"),29 but most of them felt there was need for a thorough renovation of kijaji Islam. For the more pious of the urban businessmen, teachers, and clerks, the modernist doctrines of the Egyptian (alim Muhammad (Abduh formed the framework for a criticism of the whole pesantren complex.30 There arose in the larger cities a series of reformist Islamic movements, the most important of which was the Muhammadijah, which launched a direct attack on the power and prestige of the kijajis and the sort of religious education they were providing the masses.
The reformers had, essentially, three main programs. First, they urged a stripping away of all the trappings of medieval scholasticism, a playing down of secondary commentaries and of the law books, in order to bring about a return to a reliance on, as they phrased it, "the spirit of the Koran and the Hadith." Second, they stressed a heightened social consciousness. Stimulated by the rise of nationalism they wanted Islam to become more socially engaged, to become more relevant to the social, economic, and political problems of a changing society. Third, and most important of all, the modernists attacked the pesantren system of education itself, and proposed to replace it with a graded school system on the Western model. A wholly sacred education was less than useless, it needed to be supplemented by a secular one, in which history, geography, science, mathematics, etc., would be taught alongside of religion. They proposed, in short, to replace the kijaji as the leader of the Moslem community with the western-educated school.
In response to this attack, the kijajis, too, began to organize. To this point they had been wholly independent of one another. Each kijaji had run his own pesantren in his own way, and had competed with other kijajis for reputation as a learned scholar, powerful curer, or adept mystic. But the vigorous modernist offensive drove them, despite mutual suspicions, into organizations of their own, the most important of these being Nahdatul Ulama. A bitter struggle between the two groups ensued. The modernists were better organized and much more articulate, but they tended to be confined to the cities and the towns; in the countryside the kijajis remained in control and their following was enormous. The intense opposition between the two factions continued up until the time of the Japanese occupation, but it more and more weakened as they grew closer together. The modernists, increasingly cognizant of their inability to reach the peasantry, relaxed the stringency of their critique; the kijajis, drawn more and more into nationalist political life, began to see the need for better organization, a less rigidly scholastic approach to life, and even for secular education.
Graduated religious schools began to appear in the countryside next to, sometimes even within, the peasantrens, in which at least the essentials of primary school education were offered; and the argument shifted from whether there ought to be any secular education in Moslem schools at all, to whether such schools ought to be eighty or only twenty per cent secular. Religiously conservative, but pedagogically modem middle schools began to appear, and there were even some interesting and at least partially successful attempts to fuse western school and Javanese peasantren into a single novel institution, as in the famous pesantren at Gontor, a small secluded village near Ponorogo, in South Central Java, where courses in science, history, mathematics, and foreign languages were given in a regularized, graded classroom setting by paid, well-qualified teachers, side by side with the conduct by the kijajis of the more customary sort of chant-and-echo religious education in the mosque. Nahdatul Ulama began to attract some of the intelligentsia to its own ranks, and to conceive of its role as being one of securing the kijaji's power in a changing society, rather than resisting social change altogether.
The result was far from the complete renovation Sukarno, or even the modernists had first envisaged, for the hold of the older patterns remained, and remains, very strong. But the kijajis, or some of them, at least came a short distance toward relating themselves effectively to the new intelligentsia. When the Revolution the latter had led drew to a successful conclusion around 1950, the inappropriateness of the traditional suspicion and hostility to the govern-ment was perceived by many, though not all, of the conservative scholars, and they demanded to be given an active role within it. The kijaji came to stand not so much between the pious villager and Mecca, as between the pious villager and Djakarta.
His position there is, however, an uneasy, unfamiliar and, as yet, an illdefined one. For many, perhaps most, of the members of the intelligentsia, the kijaji still seems the representative of a backward, illiterate traditionalism, of a dead society. For the kijaji, many, perhaps most, of the members of the intelligentsia seem dangerously secularist, completely insensitive to the spirit of Islam. The kijaji's hold over the more pious peasants remains very strong. But such a hold rests on a continued, everyday intimacy with them as teacher, advisor, and protector, and on status as a truly religious, other-worldly man. Consequently, increased participation in the affairs of a secular state threatens to erode the basis of his power. At the very heart of his broker role the kijaji now comes up against an internal contradiction, and finds it difficult to decide whether it is more dangerous for him to stand stock still or to move.
The Emergence of the Kijaji as a Local Politician
The changed role of the contemporary kijaji is perhaps most clearly reflected in his altered attitude toward the national state. Almost everywhere the problem of the proper relation between "Church" and "State" has been a particularly knotty issue for Islam. With its emphasis on the religious community - the ummat - as the primary, undifferentiated, social organism, it has tended to look upon political structures as necessary evils, and rulers and administrators as more or less inevitably corrupt and oppressive. As von Grunebaum has pointed out, Muslim law does not start from the definition of the state, but from the definition of the leadership of the religious community. The concept of the state is actually alien to Muslim political theory, and it is believed that government inevitably involves transgression of the law.31
This sort of fatalistic hostility to government as such is, as von Grunebaum indicates, intensified by colonial rule, where the state is not only somewhat worldly but actually infidel. The characteristic disinclination to have anything whatsoever to do with government, to see it, its agents, and its acts as inherently impure, and to oppose vigorously, sometimes even violently, its penetration into village life, have already been pointed out to be important features of peasantren culture. And these features were only strengthened by the pilgrimage, for in the Holy City the exchange of opinions on this matter among the different nationality groups was simply mutually confirming. "Almost every feature which I might add to my 'Description' of the Europeans by the Jawah (i.e. the Indonesians) in Mekka would sketch some new shadowside of Dutch living in the East Indies in more or less exaggerated colors," Snouck Hurgronje wrote at the conclusion of several pages of bitter quotation from pilgrims of various countries concerning European rule, adding ironically - "We (Hollanders) can console ourselves with the thought that the pictures of the French, English, and Russian drawn by the Moslems they rule over are not more flattering than those of the Dutch drawn by the Jawah."32
The gulf between the kijaji and the state was thus always a wide one in colonial Java; and the scholar worked continually to inculcate his deep-going suspicions of governmental acts in the minds of his santri disciples. Further, as the government was almost wholly urban-based, was manned on the lower levels by indigenous aristocrats, and was directly associated with European influence, this was at the same time a suspicion of the big city, the upper classes, and the Western world: vaccination, radios, puppet shows, boy-scouts, ballroom dancing, gamelan music, and neckties all have come in for kijaji condemnation at one time or another. Despite the international aspects of the pilgrimage, the pesantren pattern remained a largely village-centered one. Outside of a vague pan-Islamism, which served more as a general support to the kijaji's prestige than as an actual political weapon or ideology, the main focus of santri interest remained in the countryside. The kijaji connected the villagers with an international culture, but the connection was almost wholly symbolic rather than political, and his main concern was to maintain his control over his immediate surroundings, his own, local, self-contained village ummat.
The shift from viewing the national government as foreign and imposed to viewing it as genuinely representative of the interests of the Indonesian people was, for this reason, perhaps even more difficult for the kijajis and their followers than for most other Javanese. After the Revolution there had to be a whole redefinition of the significance of the political state and, particularly, of its relationship to the Islamic religious community, the ummat. For some, especially in Western Java, the transition could evidently not be made, and a kijaji-Ied revolt broke out against the new Republic with the expressed purpose of setting up an Islamic theocracy - Dar Ul-Islam.33 Those kijajis who decided to go along with the new state - the great majority - were consequently faced with the necessity of providing an ideological grounding for their decision and for their changed attitude toward the national government. This they have done by adopting a political platform calling for the establishment of an "Islamic State" (Negara Islam) in place of the secular Republic; by officially declaring the government a sub-part, an instrument, of the ummat, the intellectual tension between religious belief and political ideology can, it is hoped, be lessened.34 This "Islamic State", the concrete character of which remains perhaps purposefully - unclear, is to be established, however, by parliamentary rather than military means. This implies, in turn, the organization of political parties and the involvement of the kijajis in the factional politics of a republican state; a marked departure from their traditionally anti-political stance.
Islamic political parties have actually existed since well before the Revolution.
With the founding of Sarekat Islam in 1912, the first really large-scale nationalist organization, religiously based political activity became a key element in the whole anti-colonial movement. Through the pre-revolutionary period factions, splinter groups, and new parties formed, amalgamated, and dissolved with bewildering rapidity in a complex pattern of struggle for leadership between modernists and conservatives.35 During the Japanese period both groups were forcibly united into a single Moslem party, but at the close of the Revolution the split appeared again, and there emerged two major Islamic political parties:
Masjumi and Nahdatul Ulama. Though it is an over-simplification to call Masjumi the modernist party and Nahdatul Ulama the kijaji party, this at least tends to be the case. Particularly in Java, most conservative kijajis have aligned themselves with Nahdatul Ulama, and most modernists - M uhammadijah members and others - with Masjumi. Like all Indonesian political parties, NU is formally organized in such a way as to parallel the central government bureaucratic hierarchy.36 There is a paramount governing board, located in the national capital at Djakarta, provincial governing boards situated in each provincial capital, and so on down through the residencies, regencies, and districts to the sub-district level, the lowest point to which the strictly formal organization apparatus reaches. As in the bureaucracy itself, therefore, it is the link between this lowest subdistrict capital level (commonly a small town from ten to twenty thousand in population) and the ten to twenty or so villages - perhaps 75,000 people - included in the subdistrict which is the most crucial tie in the whole organization. As the great mass of the population is composed of village-dwelling peasants, and the great majority of the political leaders are urban, the party which can best bridge this gap is best able to sustain popular support. For NU, it is the kijaji who has come to provide such a bridge; its power as the third largest party in the country rests almost entirely on its ability to attract the allegiance of the thousands of small, politically unsophisticated, but locally powerful pesantrenrunning religious scholars scattered over the greater part of Eastern and Central Java.
In most sub-district capitals the membership of the party governing board commonly consists of two sorts of men: four or five younger school teachers or civil servants (the latter mostly in the local offices of the Ministry of Religion) who form the intelligentsia leadership; and four or five aged traders, storekeepers, or town-based landlords who form the popular leadership. The governing board plans the local activities of the party, under the guidance of directives from higher levels of the party organization trying to adjust them to local needs and prejudices. It is upward toward these higher levels - ultimately toward Djakarta - that the intelligentsia looks, downward toward the kijajis and their followers that the popular leaders (one or two of whom may themselves be kijajis) look. The job of the first group is to chart the party's course in the local political struggle, to give it some semblance of effective organization, and to transmit orders from the central leadership ; the job of the second group is to communicate both with the rank and file, and with the countryside kijajis who are their spiritual preceptors, and to convince them that the party has not fallen into sinful hands. The first group provides (or tries to provide) the organizational, ideological, and technical skills requisite to managing a modern, mass-based political party; the second secures its mass support. The essential job, both groups assert, is to "wake up the sleeping kijajis." The town-based governing board communicates with the various village ummats mainly in two ways, first, through periodic mass meetings held most commonly on Islamic holidays either in the towns or in one or another of the villages, often at a pesantren, and second, through providing speakers for the weekly "prayer meetings" which are held in almost every village where there is a significant number ofpious,pesantren-trained Moslems.37 The mass meetings often draw several thousand people, both men and women, who come on foot from miles around and squat quietly in a great crowd in the yard facing the mosque. Generally, such a meeting will be chaired by one of the local governing board members from the older, "conservative" group whom almost everyone in the area knows, at least by reputation, and there will be three or four other speakers. After an opening Koranic chant by a young pesantren student and a singing of the Indonesian national anthem, the head of the board will give a short speech on the local chapter of NU and its plans for the immediate future. Sometimes he will be followed by the local leader of the women's auxilliary of the party, who speaks on the need for women to improve their understanding of Islam and to support NU. The main speakers come next, usually first a famous, large-pesantren kijaji, brought in for the occasion from some other area and next a professional politician from the higher levels of the party apparatus, sometimes even from Djakarta. The kijaji gives mainly a religious talk of the "grave-and-gift" sort - urging morality, stricter adherence of Islamic doctrine and ritual, and celebrating the beneficence of God toward those who obey His commands. But in addition he stresses the fact that Moslems also need, now that Indonesia is free, to become politically "aware" and "active", and that the proper vehicle for that awareness and activity is Nahdatul Ulama. The political leader gives a simplified discussion of NU's recent stands on national policy questions and of the rationale for them, attacks the secularist parties (particularly the Communists, for whom, on the local level, both the conservative and modernist Moslems have an abiding hatred), and urges the creation of a more active, better organized party to realise the central political aim of all NU followers: Negara Islam, the Islaxnic State.
The prayer meetings are even more effective in getting the party's message to the people. Though they lack the holiday air and the excitement of the huge mass rallies, they have an intimacy and a directness which the large meetings cannot achieve. The pious men of the village come together at the home of one of them, there is a more or less extended chanting of the Koran, and three or four local men, more knowledgeable than the others, speak on religious subjects. Usually at least cakes and coffee are served and the meeting place rotates from house to house among the thirty or so participants. Sometimes women attend, concealed behind a curtain; more often they have separate meetings, to which individual men are deputized to lecture. The prayer meeting is thus primarily a religious rather than a political institution; it is for the most part an attempt by former pesantren students to continue their Islamic education.
Once
a month or so, however, a member of the town governing board will be invited to
speak on the party's activities and on national political issues, and he will
commonly be accompanied by one of the more established kijajis of the area. On
such an evening the turnout will be much larger than usual, for most kijajis are
very effective speakers, particularly in such more intimate settings. They
present a kind of religious vaudeville: they tell jokes, mimic the pretensions
of the civil servants, relate little tales with a moral point, exhort their
audience to improved behavior and religious observance, all in a concrete,
lively, very rhetorical style. A popular kijaji may find himself giving two or
three of these sermons a week all over the subdistrict, sometimes even
journeying to other areas if he
is an especially good speaker. Similarly, a governing board member, well-known
in the area and proficient at explaining NU's programs and policies in a simple,
interesting form will spend a great deal of time in such activities. In this
way, there is built up a local NU following focused around the Islamic
politician on the one hand and the religious scholar on the other, and mediated
through the prayer meeting. The kijaji role is set now not only in the wholly
religious (or economic and religious) institution of the pesantren, as a broker
for Islamic civilization, but also in the political and religious institution of
the prayer meeting, as a broker for the recently emerged national government.
His relation to his ummat is now both more complex and more secular; in addition
to being scholar, curer, and mystic teacher, he is now a politician.
Religion, Politics, and Educational Reform
But in most cases the kijaji is only an amateur politician; his grasp of national and international policy problems is naturally very weak. In such a situation two dangers are implicit. On the one hand the kijaji's provincialism, religious conservatism, and jealous protection of the traditional roots of his own power in the countryside may make the effective operation of Nahdatul Ulama as a political party difficult. The organization of a set of locally powerful, resolutely independent, and narrowly scholastic holy men into a technically efficient party apparatus is not an easy task, and the tendency toward a disintegration of NU into a complex of local parties with little coordination among them is a strong one. On the other hand, there is a danger that the kijaji's naivete vis-a.-vis national politics will lead to his being used by professional politicians as a mere charismatic magnet for votes.
These two dangers - the failure to integrate the separate kijajis firmly into the centralised structure of the party, and the capture of that structure by essentially secularist politicians - may seem to be opposed; but in actuality they tend to support one another. The rural kijaji's general suspicion and ignorance of governmental processes, indeed of social life in general, above the village level leads him to trade the popular support he can deliver to the party not for a role in its policy-making processes but for a guarantee by the party of a continuation of the village status quo and of his own pre-eminence within it. This is what the mass rally and prayer meeting pattern tends to represent. The kijaji provides the legitimization in local eyes of the political leader's ill-understood secular program, sanctifies it as orthodox for his ummat; but, unable to recognize his own, his ummat's, or even his religion's proper interests in terms of national policies, he exercises very little critical control over the content of that program, which comes down pre-fabricated from the higher governing boards. At the same time, however, the pattern further strengthens the kijaji's local hand, for the peasant ummat now looks to him for direction in the new, unfamiliar world of popular democracy - campaigning and voting - as well as the old, familiar one of Islamic orthodoxy.
Insofar as these tendencies predominate (as they have, for the most part, in the decade since independence), the result will almost certainly ultimately be the sort of sprawling, uncoordinated, ill-defined party so often characteristic of the parliamentary states of the Middle East: corrupt, wealthy, irresponsible, essentially secularist (but religiously hypocritical) leadership at the top, supported, in a diffuse and uncritical way, by a conservative, backward, provincialised "grave-and-gift" piety at the bottom, and thus the mobilization of Islam's hold over a large percentage of the peasant masses to politically regressive, and religiously self-defeating ends. This amounts, in fact, to a simple repetition in a republican context of the traditional Islamic pattern of the relation between religion and politics which we have seen to have been characteristic of the colonial period: "Growing indifference to the legality and the moral level of the particular government or particular governmental act, provided it remains possible for the believer to carry on his life under the law, and provided the government protects the main concerns of the legal schools and popular piety. "38
The possibility of avoiding such an outcome in Indonesia rests on the possibility of carrying to completion the process of renovation of the kijaji's role that is already under way. As we have seen, there are two essential elements in this process of renovation as it has - most hesitantly - taken place in this century: the partial transformation ofthe traditional pesantren-type educational system into a more westernized school-type system; and the increasing projection of the kijaji into the secular context of modern political party life at the local level. The kijaji has been progressively pushed, for the most part against his better judgement, into abandoning the role of the world-travelled folk priest, the key broker role within the Islamic great tradition, for that of the politicised school teacher, the key broker role within modern nationalism. It is upon his ability to fuse these two that the future of Islam in Indonesia as a political and and social force rests.
The contemporary kijaji faces an immediate and crucial decision with relation to his conceptualization and realization of his role. He can passively cling to his established position as a representative of a totally comprehensive, unchanging, narrowly orthodox Islam, willing to leave any government to its own devices so long as religious matters are not directly interfered with. Or he may attempt to seize the tentatively emerging model of his role as a local schoolteacherpolitician in a more active manner, so making of himself a man able to comprehend both the village and the city, and continuing to play, consequently, a major role in the mediation between the great and little traditions in Indonesia. But the choice of this second alternative implies both a reformation of Java's oldest scholarly tradition even more profound than it experienced in changing from a Hindu-Buddhist monastery to a Moslem pesantren, i.e. the creation of a truly modern rural religious school, and a whole transformation in the Moslem attitude toward politics and in particular concerning the proper relations between church and state. Only through the creation of a school at once as religiously satisfying to the villager as the pesantren, and as instrumentally functional to the growth of the "new Indonesia" as the state-run secular schools can the kijaji, as the teacher of such a school, become a man once more competent to stand guard "over the crucial junctures of synapses of relationships which connect the local system with the larger whole", and only through a changed attitude toward national politics on the local level, one demanding a role for the kijaji in forming party policy rather than merely attracting party votes, can he actually secure such a position for himself. Failing this the kijaji's days as a dominant force in pious Javanese villages are numbered, and the role of Islam in shaping the directions of political evolution in Indonesia is likely to be marginal at best.
Whether or not the men actually filling the kijaji role at present in Indonesia are up to a task of socio-cultural creativity of this magnitude remains to be seen - though neither the performance of NU, now usually freely translated in the Western press as the Moslem Schoolmen's Party, over the last few years, nor the slowing down of the modernist religious reform movements since 1945, gives much cause for optimism. But in any case, focussing on the connection between the local and national levels of socio-cultural integration, rather than exclusively on the one or the other, can bring out more clearly what the process of nation-building in the new countries of Asia and Africa involves. In Indonesia a study of village chiefs, local civil servants, petty traders and businessmen, political party leaders, small town professionals, and many other sorts or roles from this point of view could go far toward estimating the possibilities for effective national integration in that still incompletely unified country, and perhaps even offer clues as to the shape that integration will finally take. The consideration of the kijaji in this light, in terms of the "changing role of the cultural broker", is intended as an example of this sort of analysis, a case history of the sort of process which is occurring in the almost desperate attempt to build up an effective communication network between leaders and led in such a socially and culturally heterogeneous country as Indonesia.
CLIFFORD GEERTZ , University of California, Berkeley
1 For the concept of levels of socio-cultural integration, see J. Steward, Theory of Culture Change (University of lllinois Press, Urbana, 1955), chap. 3.
2 See R. Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1956), esp. chap. 3.
3 These concepts were first set forth in McKim Marriott, "Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization", pp. 171-222, in McKim Marriott, (ed.), Village India, Memoir No. 83, The American Anthropological Association, June, 1955.
4 Redfield, op. cit., pp. 101-2.
5 Eric Wolf, "Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society", American Anthropologist, Vol. 88, No.6 (Dec. 1956), pp. 1065-1078.
6 C. Geertz, "Religious Belief and Economic Behavior in a Central Javanese Town; Some Preliminary Considerations", Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. IV, no. 2, (Jan. 1956), pp. 134-159.
7 W. F. Stutterheim, Het Hinduisme in den Archipel (Wolters, Groningen, 1932), pp. 126 fr.
8 W. Fruin-Mees, Geschiedenis van Java, 2 vols. (Weltevreden, 1922), p. 86.
9 For pasisir culture, see T. Pigeaud, Javaanse Volksvertoningen (Batavia, 1938).
10 Ibid., and D. H. Burger, "Structural Changes in Javanese Society: the Supra-Village Sphere", authorized translation by Leslie H. Palmier, Modern Indonesia Project (Cornell University, Ithaca, 1956), pp. 30-31.
11 The term "kijaji" is also still used to refer to heirlooms - spears, krisses, etc. - which are considered to possess magical power.
12 Although "we already hear in the oldest legends concerning the penetration of Islam into the East Indies omething of Mecca as a center-point of the Mohammedan world and of the hadjis as industrious preachers of the Prophet's message." (C. Snouck Hurgronje, "De Hadji-Politiek der Indische Regeering," in his Verspreide Geschriften, deel IV, Schroeder, Bonn and Leipzig, 1924, pp. 173-199), it was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that the difficulties of the long sea voyage were reduced enough so that rapidly increasing numbers of individuals dared the journey.
13 By 1852-58 about 2000 a year were going; by about 1900,7300 (ibid.).
14 Ibid., p. 291.
15 Pangeran Aria Achmad Djajadiningrat, Herinneringen van Pangeran Aria Achmed Djajadiningrat, (G. Kolff, Amsterdam and Batavia, 1936), p. 155. For a similar, but more sympathetic, discussion, for Sumatra, see Ajah Ku Hamka, Widjaja (Djakarta, 1950).
16 Santri in addition to referring to a peasantren student, is used of any very pious Moslem, as opposed to abangan, which refers to any "lax", less puristic individual. For a further discussion of these terms and the differences in religious belief and practice associated with them, see Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java, in press (Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.).
17 Djajadiningrat, op. cit., p. 21.
18 Snouck Hurgronje remarks that in the commercial coffee areas at the end of the nineteenth century, great numbers of santris were at work in the gardens, to such a degree, in fact, "that they sometimes pay less attention to their studies than they do to the coffee." C. Snouck Hurgronje, "Brieven van cen Wedono-pensioen," in Verspreide Geschriften, deel IV, p. 178.
19 Djajadiningrat, op. cit., p. 22.
20 "It was brought to my attention recently that although only 30 % of trading and manufacturing enterprises are in Indonesian hands (the rest being in Chinese or European hands), most of these Indonesians are products of a pesantren education, because formerly the religious schools (unlike the Dutch-founded government schools) did not train clerks in the schoolroom." M. Arifin, The Renovation of Elementary Education in Indonesia (Djakarta, 1953), unpublished manuscript, by the head of the education section of the Indonesian Ministery of Religion.
21 Pentjak can also be performed as a fighting dance; thus an art form rather than genuine combat.
22 Op. cit., p. 21.
23 Javanese Moslems all follow the Shafi'i school of legal interpretation.
24 C. Hurgronje as quoted in R. A. Kern, De Islam in Indonesie (Van Hoeve, 's-Gravenhage, 1947), p. 92.
25 C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century (transl. J. H. Monahan) (Brill, Leyden, 1931), p. 243
26 See, in this connection, G. W. J. Drewes, Drie Javaansche Goeroes, Hun Leven, Onderricht en Messiasprediking (Leiden, 1925);cf. Sukamo, Surat Islam Dari Endeh (Persatoean Islam, Bandoeng, 1937). These letters, written by Sukarno from a Dutch prison camp in which he was at the time incarcerated, to T. A. Hasan, a leader of the modernist Islamic Union (Persatoean Islam) in Bandung, provide perhaps the clearest, most succint statement of the intelligentsia criticism of kijaji Islam.
27 Ibid. (Drewes 1925)
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 For Abduh, see H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1947). Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 2, No.2 (Jan., 1960), pp. 228-249.
31 G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam, Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, Memoir no. 81, The American Anthropological Association, 1955, p. 132.
32 C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, p. 248.
33 For the Dar Ul Islam movement, see C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze, "The Dar UI Islam Movement in Western Java," Pacific Affairs, 1950, 23, 169-83. Also, George McT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1952), pp. 327 ff. The Dar Ul Islam movement continues operative, and has since spread to south Celebes and, sporadically, to Aceh in North Sumatra.
34 For a general review of the intellectual background of the Negara Islam idea, see Z. A. Ahmad, Konsepsi Negara Islam (N. V. Alma'arif, Dandung, 2nd ed., 1952). For a more general discussion by an important Moslem politician, see M. Isa Anshary, Falsafah Perdjuangan Islam (Saiful, Medan, 1951), pp. 196-260, and especially the essay in the same volume by Moh. Natsir, "Agama dan Negara," pp. 261-285, although this latter is a rather modernist analysis.
35 See Kahin, op. cit., for a history of the pre-war nationalist movement, pp. 64-100. For an example of a political split over the role of the kijajis, see p. 94.
36 The following description of party structure and functioning is based on a field study carried out during 1953-54, in a town-village complex in Eastern Java, but in its major outlines it should hold for most of the island. The study - the so-called "Modjokuto Study" was carried out by six anthropologists and a sociologist under the auspices of the center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A summary report is in the process of preparation.
37 A third way by means of which the urban leadership reaches the peasant rank-and-file is through mosque sermons given on Friday noon. In theory, political comment within the mosque is banned, but many mosques, particularly those in pesantrens, are in NU hands, and politics and religion are mixed in much the same way as they are in the mass rallies and prayer meetings.
38 See above, note 31.
THE JAVANESE KIJAJI: THE CHANGING ROLE OF A CULTURAL BROKER, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jan., 1960), 228-249.
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