An original and deeply researched work on a key period of Javanese history, by a world expert.

Java’s pilgrimage culture is a dense, batik-like pattern of contradictions: seriousness collides with laughter; curiosity with bewilderment; piety with scepticism; intense spirituality with, in some places, the joy of shopping. The pilgrimage culture on the island of Java in Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim country – is a rebuke to the conservative orthodoxy that has been gaining ground in Indonesia’s religious landscape since the 1980s. In the rhetoric of this orthodoxy the “real” Islam is pure and exclusive. Piety comes from obedience to religious authority and its rules. Local pilgrimage is anything but pure and exclusive or rigidly authoritarian. It is powerfully Islamic but it fuses Islam with local history, the ancient power of place and a pastiche of devotional practices with roots deep in the pre-Islamic past. Quietly but tenaciously – just outside the great echo chamber of public space – it is growing as fast as the higher profile neo-orthodoxy. Bandit Saints of Java delves deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities and stories in the weird world of local pilgrimage, where Middle Eastern Islam wrestles with the ancient power of Javanese civilisation. It paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it is practised today – largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists – by many of Java’s 130 million people.

In this book, Ward examines the Dutch East India Company's control of migration as an expression of imperial power.

It has been said that "a modern arrogance has blocked our access to the history of the Muslim calendar in Southeast Asia". Without at least the outlines of that history, we simply do not understand the basis of dates found in Malay sources. Also, without a history of Malay calendars we are denied an understanding of the context from which the Javanese Muslim calendar arose. This volume, the result of combining empirical evidence with a sound understanding of the structural requirements of calendar-making, and of the mechanisms through which these needs could be met, for the first time explains how these old octaval calendars actually worked. It traces the history of Muslim calendars in Southeast Asia, and attempts to put them into their historical and cultural context. Understanding the old calendars will at last throw light on a number of essential aspects of older Malay science and culture. An accompanying interactive CD-ROM presents the reader with a tool for converting Malay and Javanese dates, with access to the range of variant calendars.

Internationally respected scholar Professor Azyumardi Azra examines the transmission of Islamic reformism from the Middle East to Indonesia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In this fascinating study the lives and mores of women in one of the least understood but most densely populated areas of the world are unveiled through the eyes of generations of court poets. For more than a millennium, the poets of the Indic courts of Java and Bali composed epic kakawin poems in which they recreated the court environment where they and their royal patrons lived. Major themes in this poetry form include war, love, and marriage. It is a rich source for the cultural and social history of Indonesia. Still being produced in Bali today, kakawin remain of interest and relevance to Balinese cultural and religious identities. This book draws on the epic kakawin poetry tradition to examine the institutions of courtship and marriage in the Indic courts. Its primary purpose is to explore the experiences of women belonging to the kakawin world, although the texts by nature reveal more about the discourses concerning women, sexuality, and gender than of the historical experiences of individual women. For over a thousand years these royal courts were major patrons of the arts. The court-sponsored epic works that have survived provide an ongoing literary testimony to the cultural and social concerns of court society from its ealiest recorded history until its demise at the end of the nineteenth century. This study examines the idealized images of women and sexuality that have pervaded Javanese and Balinese culture and provides insights into a number of cultural practices such as sati or bela (self-immolation of widows).

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 12 is a complete history of the works on relations from 1700 to 1800 in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas. It contains descriptions, assessments and bibliographical details of these works.