Albertus Bagus Laksana. Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java

Abstract

Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java Albertus Bagus Laksana Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, xiii+252p.Albertus Bagus Laksana's Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java is a rich, intricately textured comparative ethnography of Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage traditions in south central Java. The empirical data-derived from participant observation, direct-interview, discourse analysis, and archival research-is organized into two balanced sections, while a concluding analysis discusses the culturally-specific aspects that condition religious pluralism in Java. What is most interesting is that Laksana confronts the reality of this pluralism through a methodology of "double visiting," moving "back and forth between my own tradition of Catholic Christianity and the tradition I visit, Islam" (p. 191). In tackling multiple sites of investigation, Laksana's work demonstrates a remarkable kind of empirical cavalier not commonly seen in a single piece of indepth ethnographic work.There would still be many in the social sciences who would harbor some misgivings about this multi-sited methodology, which carries with it the inherent risk of compromising ethnographic depth, attenuating the empirical potency of fieldwork, and undervaluing the voices of the subaltern. Laksana's rationale for comparison, however, is not analytic breadth per se, but his own theological formation in which multi-sited research is "a real religious pilgrimage to God and His saints where on various levels I learn more about God, my own self, and my religious tradition, from the richness of the Muslim tradition . . ." (p. 191). This work is a deliberate and explicit deployment of the new comparative theology, promulgated by Francis X. Clooney (2010), in which the close exposure to and study of the religious other is coterminous with the pursuit of personal theological edification. In this way, the multi-sidedness of Laksana's empirical purview cannot be evaluated solely by the standards set in the social science academy.The main argument of this book resonates strongly with its author's personal theological journey: that "complex religious identity" in Java is characterized by an intimate embrace of religious alterity, one that occurs through the medium of indigenous, sub-religious concepts. The persuasiveness of this argument is contingent upon the acceptance of two assumptions: firstly, that there is a largely unproblematic fluidity between culture and religion, and secondly, that there exists an autochthonous, inclusive Javanese religio-cultural sensibility that remains as the basis of intersubjective Javanese humanness, regardless of centuries of religious formation. Each of the two main sections that frame the analysis explore the theological and empirical elasticity of this central theme.Part I, which comprises of three chapters, draws momentum from an examination of how Javano-Muslim "sacred history" is animated by the Arabic concept of ziarah, which denotes the pious visits to the tombs of the nine Holy men (wali songo) who facilitated the Islamization of Java. In this vein, Laksana provides details of the pilgrimage to the shrines of Tembayat, Gunungpring, and Mawlana Maghribi. In Chapter 2, Laksana focuses on one such saint, Sunan Kalijaga, the quintessential Javanese Muslim saint in the late fifteenth century. Like the other Javanese "religiocultural brokers," Kalijaga stuck a thoughtful and workable balance between Islam and Javaneseness, the latter with its own history of incorporating a legacy of Indic inheritances. For Laksana, what is crucial is not Kalijaga's hybridity, but rather his personification of a complex religio-cultural identity in which inclusivity was achieved without forsaking one's theological commitments as an "authentic" Muslim.These kinds of complex religio-cultural identities are buttressed by a conducive political infrastructure in the form of the support and patronage of the sultanates of Yogyakarta and Solo. …