The field work on which this study is based was carried out in Cirebon, a region in the north-coast of eastern West Java, during the period between December 1991 to February 1993. Cirebon, which is located about 250 kilometres east of Jakarta, deserves a special attention for a number of reasons. Geographically the region is strategically located on the north-coast of Java and on the border between West and Central Java. Consequently, not only is it the gateway into and out of the two provinces but it is also the melting pot for Sundanese and Javanese sub-cultures. It forms a synthesis between the two cultures which is distinct from both, but bears in it the elements, influence and characteristics of both. This new synthesis is evident in the language the people speak, in some specific foods they eat and the specific arts they perform. Bahasa Jawa Cerbon or Omong Cerbon (the Cirebonese dialect of Javanese) for example, is unique. Although some claim that the language is Omong Jawa (Javanese language), ordinary Javanese-speaking people living in Central and East Java would not understand it, at least not initially. But as these Javanese would pay more attention to the language, they would soon recognise that the language is really similar to their own, or at least, they could understand it and be able to catch the main idea of what Cirebonese people are saying.
Cirebon's location on the north-coast of Java entails some other implications. As one would expect, the sea has indeed provided a livelihood for the fishermen and sailors. Fish and other produces such as dried fish, petis (fish cream) and terasi (fish paste) are important trade goods. It is said that in ancient time terasi was also used as tribute. So many rebon or small shrimps were found in the area that according to literary tradition, this provided the name of the town and the region.[25] The nick name Kota Udang or Prawn Town is also used to refer to the city of Cirebon. In addition, the sea has certainly connected this region since long ago, not only with all corners of the archipelago but also with other nations and countries. Traders and other new comers from other parts of Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi as well as from China, India and other parts of Asia settled there.
Once, according to local literary traditions, the region was named Caruban, meaning the place where various people mixed and lived together and thus, the notion of melting pot takes on a wider spectrum.[26] The range of cultural elements it possibly accommodates becomes wider and goes beyond Javanese and Sundanese cultural boundaries, although these two cultural traditions are predominant.[27] In short, the geographic position has endowed the region with a richness of cultural traditions and access to continuous relations with other parts of the world. Currently, through the development efforts launched by the government and by the application of modern technology, especially in communications and transport, rural areas have been somewhat urbanised. Even the remote villages in the rural areas have now been linked with modern facilities. Paved streets, electricity, motor vehicles, radio, television and, to a much lesser extent, telephone, are within the reach of the common people; so are educational opportunities, at least at the primary level, and recently at junior secondary level. In some semi-urban dwelling areas, parabolic antenna to receive overseas T.V. broadcasts are used by well-to-do individuals. Urban-rural and coastal-inland differences in life-style and world-view therefore, have been narrowed but not been extinguished.
What is traditionally known as the Cirebon region was the former Dutch Residency (Karesidenan) of Cheribon which comprised the Kotamadya (Municipality) of Cirebon and the four Kabupaten (Regencies) of Indramayu, Majalengka, Kuningan and Cirebon. The region covers an area of about 5,642,569 square kilometres and in 1990 had a population of about 4.5 million inhabitants. Lying on the border between West and Central Java, the region is bounded on the east by the Tegal regency in Central Java, by the sea on the north and the north-east, by Subang and Sumedang regencies on the west, and by the Ciamis regency on the south. Mount Ciremai, located to southwest of the city, is an active volcano. It is the highest mountain in West Java (3076 m) and the second highest on Java next to Semeru (3676 m). On its slopes there are a number of sulphur and hot water springs. The biggest are at Sangkanhurip (20 km south of Cirebon city) and at Gempol (10 km west of the city).
Administratively, the region of Cirebon is part of West Java province. Following the nationwide administrative system, each kabupaten and kotamadya has equal status. Each is under the West Java governor. Under the kabupaten and kotamadya are kecamatan (districts), each of which is headed by a camat (district chief). Some kecamatan have kemantren, headed by a mantri, a camat's assistant. A kecamatan usually consists of about 10 to 12 desa (villages) or kelurahan, the lowest level of administrative units. Each desa or kelurahan is headed by a kades, which stands for kepala desa or lurah, formerly known as a kuwu (chief). Although a desa is the lowest level of administration, it is not the smallest unit. A desa is usually divided into a number of dusun (hamlet), formerly rukun warga (R.W.), led by a kadus, which stands for kepala dusun (hamlet chief), who coordinates rukun tetangga (R.T. or neighbourhoods). An R.T. consists of a number of households; the maximum number is 70. It is the R.T., headed by a ketua R.T. (R.T. chief), which constitutes the smallest unit within the desa.
Kabupaten and Kotamady Cirebon, in which the field work was conducted, lies between longitude 108° 40’ and 108° 50’ east meridian, and latitude 6° 30’ and 7° 00’ south of equator. It is an area of 984.15 square kilometres, or about 2.15 per cent of the West Java province. From west to east it extends for 54 kilometres and from north to south 39 kilometres. In 1991 the kabupaten had a population of 1.524.267 inhabitants whereas the city had 254.486. The proportion of male and female inhabitants in both areas was about 49 against 51 per cent. The population density in the Kabupaten was 1.549 per square kilometre, whereas in the Kotamadya it was 6.812. The Kabupsten had 21 kecamatan, 8 kemantren, and 424 desa; the city had only 5 kecamatan and 22 kelurahan.
The northern part of Kabupaten Cirebon is mostly a flat and marshy plain of less than 20 metres height above sea level. This plain areas constitutes about 80 per cent of the kabupaten, while the rest, at its southern part, is hilly. Most of the lands are agricultural land where 62.88 per cent of its total is wet rice terrace (sawah). Beside rice, peanuts, corn, cassava, vegetables and sugar-cane are also grown. Only 17 per cent of the land is used for settlement, 12 per cent for plantations to grow coffee, tobacco, rubber and tea. The rest is reserved forest (4 per cent) and other (5 per cent). As can be expected, most people (about 52 per cent) are engaged in agriculture. This sector is the largest contributor (32 per cent) to the local GDP.[28] Trade, which involves only 12 per cent of the population, contributes almost as much and is the second largest contributor to GDP next to agriculture.[29] The city of Cirebon is an important producer of cigarettes. The biggest factory is owned by the British American Tobacco (BAT) Company. Among the other produce of the Kabupaten and Kotamadya of Cirebon are machine tools, chemicals, textiles (including batik), cement, pottery, furniture, cane crafts, sugar, fish and crude oil. All these things make the people of Cirebon an urbanised and mobile society.
With anthropological training in mind, initially I was inclined to employ a holistic approach to a society in a particular locality. I chose a village in Plered, a small urban settlement about seven kilometres west of the city of Cirebon, to concentrate my research. I intended to work intensively and rigorously within the village milieu. I took residence at Pak Shofie's, a devout family living in a partly renovated old house with a small prayer house, in Desa Kalitengah, three kilometres north of Plered. I tried to get settled there and started working.[30]
As soon as I had started, I became dissatisfied. Neither in terms of socio-economic and political spheres nor in religion do the people of Plered belong to a self-contained society. They are dependent on, and affected by, many things that exist and occur in other places. For religious purposes, sometimes the people go many kilometres away from the village to kramat (shrines), at other times to the kraton (court). On one occasion they might go to a pesantren (a traditional boarding school), on another they might go across the village to attend a festival, a religious gathering or a pengajian (public speech). Still on another occasion they may invite a famous religious orator from in or outside Cirebon region to speak in the desa mosque. Considering the subject I would be dealing with, I felt it necessary to get a good understanding of what happened outside the village milieu in whatever the people of the village where I stayed were involved. Meanwhile it was impossible to find another village where all these things were available together at one place. In this situation, it was already clear that village traditions and religious life do not stand apart from other centres of tradition. What prevails in the village is confirmed in kramat or vice-versa; the roots of what occur both in the village and in kramat can be traced to pesantren and kraton; whereas, the sufistic nature and Islamic flavour of both the kraton and the pesantren is clearly evident in the village.
I was caught in a dilemma whether to concentrate on locality at the expense of losing sight of other relevant activities, or to study activities at the price of a probable insufficiency of a village-based ethnography. I decided to take the latter direction because I considered that relevance is more important than local detail. I initially wandered from one religious site to another throughout Cirebon, spending a couple of days or weeks at each place, leaving it for a couple of days or weeks and then coming again. All this was done to follow what was going on in the village, at kramat sites, in pesantren, tarekat, and at the kraton (Kanoman, Kesepuhan, Keceribonan and Kaprabonan). In the meantime I still kept my residence in Kalitengah as a base camp. At the same time I treated this village as a starting point to see an approximate model of the traditions of people's daily religious life. By so doing, and benefiting by being conversant in Javanese, Sundanese and the Cirebon vernacular (Omong Cerbon), I could establish good relationships and felt free to watch and get involved, as well as to observe and participate in many important activities as an outsider on some occasions, and as an insider on others.
According to the 1985 official statistics issued by the Department of Religious Affairs in Jakarta, there are at least 274 known pesantren throughout the region of Cirebon. They are scattered in various places, seven of which are in the Kotamadya (Municipality) and 91 in Kabupaten (Regency) of Cirebon. The rest are: 39 in Indramayu, 65 in Majalengka and 72 in Kuningan regencies. The latest figures for pesantren throughout the kabupaten and the city of Cirebon are also available at the local office of the Department of Religious Affairs. These show that there has been at least 30 per cent increase in pesantren in the last ten years; by 1992 the number of pesantren was 133.
I visited thirty pesantren before I decided to concentrate attention on only two. I stayed in both pesantren, first in Buntet, the biggest pesantren in Cirebon for quite a long time and only a couple of weeks in Tarbiyatul Banin. This is a newly established pesantren led by Ki Kuwu Nasir, who is a kuwu, a healer, a businessman and a kyai at the same time.[31] This pesantren specialises in educating pre-school and school age children.[32] When I stayed in Buntet I benefited in knowing about Tarekat Syatariah and Tarekat Tijaniyah, two important Sufi orders in Cirebon. In this work I only present a description of Pesantren Buntet and the Sufi orders operating within this pesantren precinct. It was readily apparent that pesantren and Sufi orders, through ngaji pasaran (public lectures) and tarekat gatherings, are major sources for the diffusion of Islamic orthodoxy among the mass populace of villagers.
Islamic learning in Cirebon may neither be as old nor have reached a comparable degree as in Acch. But there is enough grounds to assume that traditions of Islamic learning in Cirebon are not something new. Ignoring the Babad, which tells us about Shekh Datu Kahfi who started a formal pesantren at Gunung Jati, and without taking into account the pesantren within the court circle, traditions of Islamic learning could have been in existence since the sixteenth century. The oldest pesantren in Cirebon are Pesantren Pusaka in the Lemahabang District and Nurul Huda in Cilimus, each of which claims to have been established in the second half of the seventeenth century. Currently the largest pesantren in Cirebon, Pesantren Buntet, claims to have been first established in 1750. It is difficult to check these claims historically. But Hoadley (1975) may be right in maintaining that the one element contributing to the high esteem enjoyed by Cirebon was its reputation as the region's most revered centre of Islamic piety and learning, a reputation dating from the era of Java's conversion to Islam.[33] In addition, Cirebon as a coastal city may accord with John's assertion that coastal city states had the potential to become “centres for the diffusion of Islamic ideas to the peasant interior.”[34]
Pijper describes Cirebon as a place where there are a large number of kramat.[35] According to the local authority at the local office of the Department of Education and Culture, the number of revered places known as kramat is more than 300. They are dispersed in many locations. I visited around forty of them but stayed a fairly long period at only some of them. Those places, mostly tombs of revered figures of various standing, attract many visitors. One which is the most prominent is the Astana Gunung Jati grave complex, where Sunan Gunung Jati is buried. Visitors to this place come with various purposes and from various strata, ranging from ignorant laymen to famous scholars including ulama like Buya Hamka, from poor peasants to very rich Chinese businessman like Mas Agung, and from jobless individuals to famous politicians like former President Sukarno.[36] Until now, there are around one thousand people coming and going to visit this place every day. This number increases to five thousand or more on an ordinary Thursday evening (Malam Jum'at), twenty thousand or more on Thursday evening Kliwon (Malam Jum'at Kliwon), and hundreds of thousand at the time of festivals.
The second biggest kramat after Astana Gunung Jati, in terms of the number of visitors, is Kramat Mbah Buyut Trusmi at Trusmi. Next to Trusmi are Lemah Tamba at Lemah Tamba, Nyi Mas Gandasari at Panguragan, Kramat Talun at Cirebon Girang, and Syekh Magelung at Karangkendal, to mention only a few. After the Astana, it was to these places that I made my most frequent and longest visits. Unlike the Astana grave complex which stands under the direct control of the Cirebon Kraton, many other kramat stand more or less independently. Nevertheless, most of them in one way or another, still claim to be under the wewengkon (auspices) of either the Kesepuhan or Kanoman court, two of four kraton which still draw attraction to Cirebon.
Siddique has excelled herself in her study of the Cirebon kraton. By employing Berger and Luckman's sociological theories she has produced an interesting sociological analysis of the role of kraton in relation to the overall fabric of the Cirebonese social system.[37] My primary concern with the kraton was to explore whether there are traditions within the kraton circle which have some relation to village life. I found that some kraton traditions of ceremonies and feasts are in fact exemplary models for various feasts, including many forms of slametan, adopted by the people in the villages. In addition, through Babad and other literary traditions, the kraton are the major source of people's perception or knowledge about history and myths as well as ideal ethics and customs. In addition to this, kraton-pesantren differences can only be identified in terms of institutional and political orientation, not in basic Islamic orthodoxy.
While being sceptical about a syncretic argument on Javanese Islam, I am also rather sceptical about considering Islam in Arabia, Egypt or elsewhere as the sole standard by which to judge certain religious practices and traditions as Islamic or non-Islamic. I am convinced that it is necessary to consider a certain practice as Islamic if it is dominated by Islamic norms or spirit, regardless of its origin. Take for example, the use of the bedug (large drum) and kentong (a hollowed log with slit hole in its centre) at the mosques and prayer houses in the villages, kraton and pesantren. They are Islamic in nature because they are used to inform people that the prayer time has come although their origin may be of the Hindu, Buddhist or some other tradition. Both of the objects and the sounds have become symbols of local Islamic identity.[38] This example can be expanded to many other objects and practices, including the slametan, Geertz's core abangan ritual which to him is indicative of animistic-Hindu-Buddhist syncretism.[39]