Iḥsān b. Muḥammad Daḥlān (1901–52), also known as Kyai Iḥsān Jampes, was a prominent Javanese Muslim scholar ( kyai) and a prolific writer, recognised especially for his Arabic writings on Ṣūfism. He was born in Jampes, Kediri, East Java. His father was also a Muslim scholar and the founder of the Jampes pesantren (Islamic boarding school). Iḥsān Daḥlān grew up in the pesantren milieu and began his education under the tutelage of his father. He then went on to study with a number of prominent Muslim scholars in different pesantrens in Java, including his uncle, Kyai Khazin of Pesant…

Muhammadiyah (or Muhammadijah, from Ar. Muḥammadiyya) is the largest Muslim modernist movement in Indonesia. Founded by Ahmad Dahlan (d. 1923) in Yogyakarta in 1912, it has, as of 2017, more than twenty million members and sympathisers and is second in membership only to the traditionalist movement Nahdlatul Ulama (Bush). The modernist character of Muhammadiyah is reflected in its systems of education and medical treatment and in its organisational management and leadership. It emphasises egalit…

The Hāshimīs (Hashemites) were a dynasty of Ḥasanī descendants of the prophet Muḥammad (sharīfs) who ruled Mecca as amīrs almost without interruption from the fourth/tenth century until 1924. After the First World War, the dynasty provided kings for Syria and Iraq, which later became republics, and gave its name to the territory that became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The dynasty was named after Hāshim b. ʿAbd Manāf, the paternal great-grandfather of the prophet Muḥammad. The majority of the Shīʿa recognised as their Imāms descendants of ʿAlī’s younger son al-Ḥusa…

Muḥammad Nawawī b. ʿUmar al-Jāwī al-Bantanī (1813–97), known in present-day Indonesia as Nawawi Banten, was born in Tanara, in the province of Banten in West Java, into a religious family. He received his early religious education from his father, who was the penghulu (head) of the local mosque, and continued his education with other Javanese Muslim teachers. In 1828 he went to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage and continue his studies. Three years later he paid a short visit to his home country but soon returned to Mecca, where he spent …

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…