The review of previous studies shows that there have been two streams of thought regarding the position of Islam in Javanese religious life: one emphasises the continuing importance of traditional values and religious ideas, while the other highlights the increasing importance of Islam. This review then shows how prejudiced was the notion of 'the ordinary village' that I had at the initial stage of my fieldwork. I did not consider the view of such scholars as Hefner and Pranowo, assuming that villagers' commitment to Islam would not be strong enough to lead them to build a masjid in their hamlet. [8] In spite of this shortcoming, however, the notion of 'the ordinary village' provides one of the keys to understand my orientation in doing field research, in that it reflects my dissatisfaction with some of the studies dealing with religion in Java. In reading the literature, I had an impression that some scholars avoid 'the burden of complexity' (Roff,1985:26) in the interest of 'a patterned understanding' (ibid.:8). They select and focus on a specific place or group where a certain religious orientation of the Javanese is manifested more clearly and, in doing so, neglect how people with different religious orientations interact and how they interpret and evaluate their own and others' religious ideas and practices. [9] These latter aspects of religious life should be taken into more serious account since those who are committed strongly to Islam and those who show less commitment to it do not live separate lives, but share the same living space and interact with one another.
My dissatisfaction with the approach which focuses on either the abangan or santri variants and which puts less emphasis on the complexity of religious life became stronger while I stayed in Yogyakarta city. During this time, I could easily observe two contrasting trends in the religious life of the Yogyanese. Each Friday, I could see the masjid full of people carrying out their religious duty. In a hotel where I stayed, the female receptionist wore a jilbab (female headgear that exposes face but not ears, neck, or hair), went from time to time to the inner part of the hotel to carry out daily prayers, did not sell alcohol and forbade the guests from bringing a local woman to their room. If there were complaints from the guests, she was kind enough to point out the hotels where the guests could do what they wanted freely. On the other hand, when I visited the alun-alun (city square) where a night market was open in commemoration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (Sekaten), the sound I could hear from loud speakers was not the recitation of Arabic prayers but popular music called dangdut. One of the most crowded places in the alun-alun was where several troupes opened stages for dangdut performance. There, female singers, wearing mini-skirts or short pants, swayed their body to the rhythm of music, mimicking the dancers in Western pop videos. It might not be a surprise if I had seen the dangdut performance in any other place. However, this was done in front of the Sultan's palace and to commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. My visit to one kebatinan group also impressed me a lot. There, I could see people exercising to strengthen their spiritual power. What interested me the most at that time was the diverse composition of its members. There were teenagers and men in their forties, while there were teachers, civil servants, and manual labourers, the composition implying that the popularity of the kebatinan group was not confined to a certain segment of the Javanese society.
These contrasting experiences in Yogyakarta gave me an impression that, if I wanted to find a place where villagers might show their strong attachment to Islam or 'Javanism', I could easily do so. This then prompted me to give up employing any criterion in selecting a research site. By doing so, I believed, however naively, I might be able to find 'the ordinary village' where I could see the diversity and complexity of religious life among people who had different degrees of commitment to Islam.
My emphasis on the study of the diversity and complexity of religious life was also influenced by a recent shift in studying Islam from a search for an ahistorical Islamic 'essence' to an examination of the multiplicity of Islamic expression, and historical, socio-political and cultural contexts in which a certain understanding of Islam is adopted, maintained and reproduced (Eickelman,1982; see also el-Zein,1977). [10] This approach opposes the assumption that Muslims' life is dominated by one interpretation of Islam and Islamic practices. Instead, it focuses on the pluralistic character of Muslim life where more than one competing frameworks coexist, ready to be appropriated by human actors. There are always ambiguities and contradictions which allow for various interpretations and which allow some of these to be accepted as more 'orthodox' than others or to be rejected as 'non-Islamic' at particular times and in particular contexts.
One of the main objectives of this study is to look at the Islam understood, interpreted and practised by villagers in Kolojonggo which has been influenced by the surge of reformist Islam for the last two decades. The foci of my discussion are on Muslim villagers' construction, with the help of the reformist paradigm, of the image of the 'good Muslim' and 'Muslim-ness', on their efforts to incorporate a (reformist) Islamic framework to question taken-for-granted practices and ideas, on the position of traditional practices and ideas and their relation to reformist Islam, and on the interplay of villagers who show a strong commitment to reformist Islam with those who do not. Another topic which will be dealt with at length is the interaction between Muslim and non-Muslim villagers. Although the co-existence of Muslims and a substantial number of Christians in Kolojonggo is a peculiar phenomenon, it provides an opportunity to understand the dynamics of Islam. The presence of Christians has had an impact on the process by which Muslims define themselves, their neighbours, their religion and their religious community.
The organisation of this thesis parallels the ways I designed and carried out my research. For the first half year of my research, I focused on the socio-economic developments in Kolojonggo. This was essential, although not directly related to my main research topic, since the last three decades have witnessed the introduction of the so-called green revolution and the transformation of the national economy from an agriculture-based to a non-agriculture-based one, both of which have had enormous impacts on the socio-economic structure of rural Java. By looking at these developments, it is expected that the socio-economic circumstances of villagers in Kolojonggo will be clarified.
The aim of Chapter three is to examine the development of reformist Islam in Kolojonggo. We will see the process whereby a group of reformist villagers has been formed and its impact on the religious life of Muslim villagers. The formation of this group precipitated a differentiation of Muslim villagers in terms of their religious outlook and of their participation in religious activities, and has accelerated the diversification of the meaning of 'Muslim-ness'. In Chapter four, the notion of 'Muslim-ness', or of 'being a Muslim' held by the reformist villagers will be examined. In this discussion, the religious activities of Muslim villagers, their understandings of the most important normative duties in Islam, namely, the daily prayer and the fast, and their efforts to adopt an Islamic perspective with which to re-interpret their everyday life will be highlighted. In the last section of this chapter, the attitude of Muslim villagers who show a strong commitment to reformist Islam toward those who do not will be discussed in order to see the basis of interactions between these two groups of villagers.
After examining the development of reformist Islam and its characteristics as understood and practised by Muslim villagers, my discussion proceeds to look at several changes which have taken place as Islamic development has accelerated. In Chapter five, the focus will be placed on traditional rituals. By looking at how traditional rituals are interpreted by Muslim villagers, we will see the complicated process by which an Islamic tradition emerges from a syncretic background. This process is not simply one of imposing a certain criterion on traditional practices and ending them, but of questioning their relevance, abandoning what cannot be accommodated, reinterpreting what can be made harmonious with reformist Islam and recontextualising them in Islamic terms. In Chapter six, traditional belief in supernatural beings, supernatural power, and related practices will be examined. We will see the efforts of the reformist villagers to impose their own paradigm on interpretation of traditional belief in supernatural beings and the achievement and limitation of these efforts. In the last section of this chapter, emerging new paradigms through which to look at the supernatural world and their impact on the process of 'religious rationalisation' will be discussed.
Chapters seven and eight deal with a peculiar situation in which the Muslim community in Kolojonggo is located. In Chapter seven, the development of Christianity in Java, Yogyakarta and Kolojonggo, and the impact of the Christian presence on Muslims' conceptualisation of their own community, will be discussed. In Chapter eight, the focus will be placed on the interactions between Muslims and Christians in Kolojonggo and the ways Muslims conceive Christians, Christianity and Christianisation.
As I emphasised earlier, this portrait of reformist Islam and reformist Muslims in Kolojonggo cannot be generalised to show the dynamics of Islam in Yogyakarta and in Java. Rather, this portrait may be just one possible manifestation of Islam and of Muslim religious life that may be deployed in Java. In this respect, I would like to consider this thesis as a response to the appeal of Hefner who, after examining Islamic development at the eastern edge of Java, wrote 'the Pasuruan example awaits ethnographic comparison with other areas of rural Java' (1987:551).