Eclectic Devotion Against Absolutism

Growing Up Indonesian Abangan Muslim

The Muslim world is a place increasingly characterized by homogenizing and absolutistic political, social, cultural trends. So much contemporary Muslim discourse emphasizes a singular conception of what Islam is and is not. Incredibly, this is not just a feature of Islamists.

Many progressive Muslims, too, insist on a simplistic notion of a “true Islam” versus whatever part of Islam or the Muslim community they are embarrassed to talk about in the face of criticism and personal feelings of shame and self-loathing. The sad irony of this status quo is that Islamic practices and norms have varied greatly throughout the Ummah historically. Even in the Middle East, where Islam began, various folk and adat (customary) traditions withstood attempts at scripturalist impositions that typically used the development of Sharia as a way to homogenize Islamic standards.

Even by other folk standards, however, the type of folk Islam found in the Indonesian archipelago, especially on Java, is exceptionally eccentric and eclectic. This set of traditions, known popularly as Abangan, is what I was raised in and which I will share elements of in this article. I say “elements” because there is no single, unified constitution of what it means to be Abangan. What it meant for my upbringing and myself may be quite different for someone else who identifies as Abangan.

Even the word and identity are historically and socially generated and worth qualifying first. Per various primary source records, the first mentions of the word Abangan appear in the mid-nineteenth century, with many of the references coming from the personal journals and correspondences of Dutch missionaries when Indonesia was still the Dutch East Indies. These missionaries, wanting to be successful in their own task, studied local Javanese Islam diligently so as to devise a winning formula for Christian conversion efforts.

Most of their references to Javanese Islam recognized an ever-present dialectic: Pesantren-educated Santri (Islamic boarding school scripturalists), who considered themselves to be the purist representatives of Islam, challenging the practices and norms of unaffiliated folk Muslims, who they derisively referred to as Abangan. The word has two possible etymologies. The Javanese root of the word means “red” and that would stand in contrast to the Santri who also call themselves Putihan (white, as in purity).

However, there is also the Arabic word Aba’an, which means “confused” or “inconsistent.” This word has a voiced pharyngeal fricative in the middle that is hard for non-Semitic peoples to pronounce and, thus, it may have morphed into being pronounced as Abangan. Both etymologies may have concurrently and conveniently converged as well. In any case, the word was eventually appropriated by folk Muslims content with being different from the Santri.

The Republic of Indonesia, with the island of Java located in the southwest.

The history and geography of the Indonesian archipelago is critical to understanding the divide between Santri and Abangan. As an archipelago, all things, including religion, were brought to local people through trade rather than through conquest and imposed political dominion. This has made the adoption and implementation of religion in the archipelago a gradual, selective, and syncretically negotiated process through history.

Before the arrival of Islam, this also applied to Hindu and Buddhist traditions that were also modified to stand alongside native animist traditions and a pervasive cultural permissiveness. Thus, Abangan lived norms involve a simultaneous maintenance of a Muslim primary identity with Hindu, Buddhist, and animist cultural influences in the background. The nature of trade and thalassocratic hegemony has meant that Santri have traditionally dominated coastal areas, whereas Abangan have dominated the interior.

Turning to the personal side of the matter, my own ethnic background, though not Javanese, is heavily influenced by Javanese Abangan norms. My maternal grandmother was an ethnic Madurese (Madura island being adjacent to Java) and my maternal grandfather was a Batavian, which is a creolized ethnicity formed in Batavia-cum-Jakarta. Their eclectic practices and mindset directly influenced my mother who, in turn, influenced me. Growing up, my religion, or Agama in Indonesian, was unequivocally Islam and this stood in contrast to and alongside culture, or Budaya, which consisted of many aspects of pre-Islamic Indonesian history.

Like any other Muslim, I was raised understanding and affirming the Five Pillars of Islam and other important aspects of Islamic belief including angels, jinn, prophets, and heaven and hell. My understanding and acceptance of aspects of Islam, however, stemmed from an amorphous balance of understanding what was thought of as Arab versus what was Pribumi (native). Hudud punishments, veiling, and Sharia governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance were things that were broadly thought of in my family as Arab as opposed to Pribumi or adat, and therefore not belonging to what it meant to be Indonesian.

The ethnolinguistic divisions of Java and adjacent islands.

The absolutistic tendencies of Abrahamic traditions, including Islam, were tempered by my cultural rearing in Hindu, Buddhist, and animist traditions that tended to be more relativistic. The irony is that these things were never actually labeled as “Hindu” or “Buddhist” but simply as Budaya, so only when I grew older did I realize that my “culture” was also, in fact, someone else’s “religion.” Although I certainly fasted for Ramadan, I was also taught non-Islamic fasts and the importance of meditation, things that go beyond what Orthodox and Salafi Muslims would consider acceptable.

Moreover, since I was little, I happily sunk myself into the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, but I would do so through the particularly Javanese storytelling method of wayang kulit (shadow puppetry). Not only does this consist of a unique aesthetic, but Javanese storytelling also includes the Punakawan (four clown servants). This unique set of characters is not in the original Hindu stories and serves as both a comic relief and a source of socio-political commentary on the events of the story. The principal figure among the Punakawan, Semar, is the personification of the Javanese deity Sang Hyang Ismaya, who, along with his three adopted sons, manifests in human avatar to serve the characters of the story.

Whereas in Abrahamic traditions there tends to be a clear line between good and evil, righteous and wrong, pure and profane, the amalgamated Budaya of the Abangan shows that the roles of hero and villain are often manifested in the same entities and sets of events. For example, the heroes of the Mahabharata are the Pandawa brothers, who are fighting against their cunning and demon-allied Kurawa cousins. The Kurawa are the villains, but the twist here is that they did not assume control of the disputed Kuru Kingdom by force. Instead, the oldest Pandawa brother, Yudistira, an otherwise thoughtful and righteous man, has a weakness for gambling and loses the Kingdom in a game of dice. This precipitates the devastating Kurukshetra War, which is the main subject of the Mahabharata.

The Pandawa, as depicted in Javanese Wayang Kulit. L to R: Bima, Arjuna, Yudistira, Nakula, and Sadewa.

The Punakawan: Semar on the right, with adopted sons Gareng, Bagong, and Petruk.

This sense of relativity and the distinctive discourse of Arab versus Pribumi are what make Abangan naturally skeptical and rejecting of absolutistic notions, as typically put forth by Santri and other religious puritans. The Abangan mentality is also informed by the limiting nature of living on an island and in an archipelago. The best kinds of archipelagic communities and countries have social norms that encourage flexibility and conviviality, because too frequent conflict on limited and isolated tracts of land can be profoundly devastating. In turn, that means encouraging and reinforcing societal norms that focus on understanding rather than condemnation, generating a syncretic foundation of culture that avoids intentionally atomizing societal groupings.

This syncretism and cultural permissiveness meant that even as young child, I was raised to be reflective and accepting of things that most Muslim children, and even most American children then, were still unaware or rejecting of. For example, I was raised fully understanding and recognizing what it meant to be transgender, especially if a person was born anatomically a man but whose gender and lived identity was female. I understood this issue of gender identity before I even understood what being gay and lesbian meant as sexual identities.

This is because the Javanese Abangan mindset, informed by the Hindu concept of the hijra, recognizes a third gender that is considered close to the Divine because it possesses both male and female traits. Waria, as hijra are called contemporarily in Indonesia, have historically served as important spiritual and political advisers to kings and sultans throughout the archipelago. Even outside of Java today, among the predominantly Muslim, ethnic Bugis of southern Sulawesi, there is recognition of five genders, with bissu (transgendered shamans) serving as important community figures that officiate weddings and other important events.

Bugis Bissu leading a traditional prayer ceremony.

Although this article certainly highlights the positive aspects of Abangan and Pribumi culture in Indonesia, it is not intended as an idealization. A truly negative aspect of the Abangan mindset is extreme superstition among some corners of the society. With that comes at times an apathy or unwillingness to engage in rational forms of learning and understanding reality beyond amorphous internal inclinations. Some aspects of native culture also help to justify and reinforce unequal, vertical cultural hierarchies that are an obstacle to meaningful socio-economic progress as well.

That said, the chauvinistic Islamization that is occurring in Indonesia and throughout the Muslim Ummah will continue to be the most significant threat today to progress, societal stability, and pluralistic cultures. I highlight both the history of the Abangan and my own upbringing in this tradition as an ode to a better disposition toward religion and culture broadly speaking. It is a disposition that produced a cultural society that was and, in some corners, still is exceptionally open-minded and convivial in a Muslim world increasingly defined by absolutistic and oppressive impositions.