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Mataram is a district in south-central Java, bordered on the north by Mount Merapi and on the south by the Indian Ocean. It is a well-watered site with rich volcanic soils that can support heavy concentrations of population and has been the site of much of the imperial history of Java since pre-Islamic days. It is centred on the present-day city of Yogyakarta, located at approximately latitude S 7°47', longitude E 110°22'. The pre-Islamic kingdom of Mataram is notable for many fine Hindu and Buddhist temples built in the eighth and ninth centuries, the most famous o…

Suluk Gatholoco was an anti-Islamic work in Javanese evidently written in East Java in the 1870s in reaction to Islamic reform movements. In the 1870s, Islamic reform was making headway amongst Javanese, but it also precipitated adverse reactions. One was the emergence of a social category known as the abangan, or “nominal Muslims” who did not embrace—indeed, evidently even abandoned the former practice of—Islamic rituals and attenuated their sense of Islamic identity. Another reaction took the form of anti-Islamic writing that rejected Islam …

The Goddess of the Southern Ocean is regarded by many Muslim inhabitants of Java and Hindus of Bali as the most powerful of local spiritual forces. Islamic reformers have long regarded belief in her as one of the principal barriers to purification of the faith, but other Muslims have accommodated her into their belief systems. The origins of the myth of a powerful female spirit ruling Java and Bali’s Southern (Indian) Ocean are obscure. Pigeaud (4:211) suggested that the goddess was a local pre-Islamic deity, which offered a “prototype” for the ritu…

Carita Sultan Iskandar, Carita Nabi Yusuf, and Kitab Usulbiyah are three books credited with supernatural power, written at the Javanese court of Kartasura in 1729–30 at the behest of King Pakubuwana II’s pious Ṣūfī grandmother, Ratu Pakubuwana (b. c.1657). She was the wife of King Pakubuwana I (r. 1704–19), the mother of Amangkurat IV (r. 1719–26), and grandmother of Pakubuwana II (r. 1726–49), whose reign she aimed to turn into that of a model Ṣūfī king. She was a person of great influence at the cour…

The use of chronograms in Muslim Southeast Asia is most prominent in Javanese culture. In Modern Javanese, chronograms are called sangkala/sengkala (or candra sengkala), the word sangkala meaning “chronology” or “chronogram.” Pre-Islamic, Old Javanese works use the Sanskrit word śakakāla, referring to the Śaka era and meaning also “chronogram” (Zoetmulder and Robson, 2:1603). In Javanese, chronograms consist of four words, each word—rather than each letter of a word, as in the ḥisāb al-jummal and taʾrīkh systems—having its own numerical value. They are read from left …

Pieter Erbervelt (d. 1721) was accused of being the leader of a Muslim plot to slaughter the Christians of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1721 and was brutally executed for what was, in all probability, a trumped-up accusation. Erbervelt was born before 1671 to a European father—evidently German—and a Thai mother. He followed his father in his trade as a leather tanner in Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC. In the 1720s the VOC felt particularly under threat from its own disgruntled slaves and var…

Sunan Bonang is one of the legendary Nine Saints ( wali sanga) who were said to be responsible for the conversion of the Javanese to Islam in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries C.E. His life is obscure. Most legends agree that he was the son of Sunan Ngampel-Denta, another of the wali sanga of Java, and that he studied with his father and with the future wali Sunan Giri. According to these legends, Bonang and Giri set off together for Mecca but got no farther than Melaka, on the strait between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, where an Arab Muslim s…

Cirebon, in present-day West Java, was among the earliest of the Muslim states of Java. Our understanding of its early history has been muddled by the “discovery” in the 1970s of a chronicle called Purwaka Caruban Nagari (“The origins of the state of Caruban,” i.e. Cirebon), which was claimed to be of eighteenth-century origin but is generally considered by scholars to be a twentieth-century fake. Cirebon was apparently occupied by Muslims – probably Chinese - late in the fifteenth century C.E., but its florescence is associated with Sunan Gunungjati (d. c.1570), one of the Nine Saints (wa…

Sultan Hamengkubuwana I (r. 1749–92)—commonly known as Sultan Mangkubumi, after his princely name—was the first ruler of the kingdom of Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, and the greatest king of Java’s Mataram dynasty, after Sultan Agung (r. 1613–46). His year of birth is uncertain, with various sources giving dates ranging from 1709 to 1717, the latter year being more likely. In his younger years he was a prince about whom prophecies of future greatness were told, a collector of literature, a …

Balambangan lies at the extreme southeastern tip of Java, in the area of the present-day kabupaten (administrative district) of Banyuwangi. From the sixteenth century onwards, it was sandwiched between Muslim Javanese states to the west and Hindu Balinese states to the east. Legends about early Islam in Balambangan are unique among Javanese conversion tales in that they describe failure. According to the eighteenth-century chronicle Sejarah Banten (History of Banten), a foreign holy man named Molana Usalam landed in Balambangan, whose ruler had a very ill dau…

Fatahillah is remembered in Indonesia as a sixteenth-century Muslim hero who ejected the Portuguese from the port of Sunda Kalapa, in Java, and renamed it Jayakarta (or a similar name), thus becoming the founder of what is now the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta. The Portuguese came to the area in 1522, when the still-Hindu state of Banten (a major pepper port) was under threat from the Muslim state of Demak, farther east on the north coast of Java. The Portuguese agreed to build a fortified position on Banten’s eastern frontiers, at a…

Babad Kedhiri was one of three anti-Islamic tracts in Javanese evidently written in East Java in the 1870s in reaction to Islamic reform movements. Islamic reform made progress in Java from about the 1850s but also produced negative reactions. One was the emergence of a social group known as the abangan, who attenuated their commitment to Islam and its rituals, coming to be regarded as merely nominal Muslims. By the late nineteenth century probably the majority of Javanese fell into this category. Another negative reaction to the reform movemen…

Sunan Ampel (fifteenth century C.E.), also known as Sunan Ngampel or Sunan Ngampel-Denta, was one of the earliest and most prominent of the legendary nine walis, the saints credited with bringing Islam to Java. He is buried within the boundaries of the present-day city of Surabaya, but his life history is known only through later Javanese legends of uncertain veracity. According to some legends, his personal name was Rahmat, and he bore the title of Raden, later used for lower ranks of Javanese aristocracy. He is said t…

Sunan Bayat is a legendary figure said to have spread Islam in south-central Java in the fifteenth century C.E. His life is known only from Javanese legends. He was traditionally considered the last Hindu king of Majapahit, who was defeated by Muslim armies in 1478 C.E. (though Majapahit, or a remnant of it, in fact survived until c. 1527). He became lord (bupati) of Semarang, with the name Ki Gedhe Pandhan Arang. Miraculous stories treat his conversion to Islam and instruction in secret doctrines by Sunan Kalijaga, one of the wali sanga (Nine Saints) of Java. According to these legends, P…

Gresik is a port city in East Java, to the north of Surabaya, which played a prominent role in the history of Islam in Java from early times. The gravestone of one Malik Ibrahim, dated 822/1419, is found there. He was apparently not Javanese; local tradition regards him as one of the original nine bringers of Islam (the wali sanga), but Central Javanese court traditions do not include him in that group. Gresik was evidently founded by Chinese in the fourteenth century C.E. and is described in the fifteenth-century account of the archipelago by the Chinese Muslim Ma …

Serat Centhini (“The book of Centhini”) is an encyclopaedic Javanese work describing romantic adventures, social life, and religious ideas in Islamic Java, known in a text written in 1815 on behalf of the crown prince of Surakarta, who was to become Susuhunan Pakubuwana V (r. 1820–3). The work consists of 722 cantos, comprising something over 200,000 lines of Javanese verse. Portions of the larger text are found in manuscripts with varying titles (such as Suluk Tambangraras) but the conventional title, Centhini, derives from the name of one of the minor characters in it, th…

Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia (LDII, the Indonesian Islamic Proselytisation Institute) is a controversial and, in the eyes of its opponents, an extremist and deviant Islamic organisation. It has changed its name several times after being banned under previous names and was known serially as Darul Hadis, Islam Jamaah, Yayasan Karyawan Islam (YAKARI), and Lembaga Karyawan Islam (LEMKARI) before adopting the name Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia in 1990. After living for ten years in Mecca, H. Nurhasan Ubaidah Lubis (d. 1982), the founder of this organisation, retu…

Evidence of Islamisation in Java first appears in the fourteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, Islam was the majority faith of Javanese. 1. The early stages of Islamisation in Java The earliest surviving evidence of Islam amongst the Javanese is in the form of gravestones at Trawulan and Tralaya, in East Java, near the site of the Hindu-Javanese court of Majapahit (late thirteenth-early sixteenth centuries). They are Muslim gravestones, since Hindus were cremated. The stones have quotations from the Qurʾān and piou…

Sultan Agung (r. 1613–46), was the greatest of the kings of the Mataram dynasty of Java and a major reconciler of Javanese and Islamic identities. Sultan Agung (“great Sultan”) was an appellation used only after the ruler’s death. Earlier in his reign he held a series of Javanese titles: Pangeran (“prince, lord”), and Panembahan and Susunan (both meaning “honoured lord”), acquiring the title of “sultan” only in 1641. He is nevertheless referred to as “Sultan Agung” throughout Javanese sources and in the historical literature. Before Agung came to the throne, his predecessors Se…

The Sĕrat (book) Anbiya (from the Arabic anbiyāʾ, “prophets“; sing. nabī) or Ambiya , sometimes also called Sĕrat Tapĕl Adam (“The formation of Adam”), is the title of Javanese works of literature recounting the lives of the prophets of Islam. There is a considerable variety of such works in both prose and verse, in most cases using Arabic rather than Javanese script. An Arabic book entitled ʿUmdat al-ansāb—a work written in Aceh but based on a sixteenth-century Persian text concerning the genealogy of the prophet Muḥammad—is sometimes mentioned as the authority upon which Sĕrat Anbiya r…