Indic-Islamic encounters in Javanese and Malay mystical literatures

Conceptually, this special issue in Indonesia and the Malay World stems from two collaborative projects undertaken by Andrea Acri and Verena Meyer in the period from 2016 to 2019, focusing on the Suluk Lonthang. The projects investigated the enigmatic suluk with respect to the relation it portrays between sex, transgression – intended as the subversion of gender roles, norm breaking in sexual ethics, and sacrilegious mockery of scriptural religion – and spiritual prowess (as opposed to puritan legalism and scriptural authority) as key elements in the religious experience. Our analysis upheld a comparative perspective that considered the resonances between those ideas in both Sufism and Tantrism, in particular the concept that an advanced spirituality required the overcoming of all oppositions, including those relating to gender and social status (Zoetmulder 1994). Over time, the scope of these projects has broadened further so as to include a larger body of Javanese and Malay mystical literature composed in the period from the 16th to the 19th century, and a wider-ranging variety of ‘encounters’ between Indic and Islamic religious strands embedded in the textual and cultural fabrics of the Javanese and Malayspeaking societies of Nusantara. The idea of putting together this special issue arose from an intellectual need to not only stimulate the investigation of the little-studied bodies of mystical literature like suluk etc., but also to overcome a disciplinary compartmentalisation and parochialisation that has shaped, and is continuing to shape, the field of Javanese and Malay textual and cultural studies after World War II. This situation had resulted in a lack of engagement between researchers working in these fields, who have often been unwilling to go beyond the ‘localised’ micro-histories and philologies that have investigated religious dynamics in the Javanese and Malay-speaking cultural worlds as self-contained phenomena. From a chronological perspective, scholars of the ‘Hindu-Buddhist’ period have rarely, if ever, taken into account ‘Islamic’ material post-dating the 16th century, and vice-versa. Indeed, the major divide in the field would seem to be nowadays represented by scholars studying (Early) Modern Javanese and Malay religious phenomena uniquely from the prism of Islam on the one hand, and those focusing on Hinduism and Buddhism in Java, Sumatra, or the Malay Peninsula up to c.1500 CE on the other. This in spite of the fact that scholars are inevitably dealing with overlapping geographical contexts and temporalities, and phenomena that clearly present as many continuities as changes, or that are amenable to being studied from a comparative and trans-local perspective.