Rediscovering Islam in Javanese History

Abstract

The study of Javanese history offers significant examples of both legacies and new interpretations which have transformed how we see the past and present circumstances of the Javanese over the centuries of Islamisation and, consequently, how we might imagine their future. Not so very long ago, Islam tended to be viewed as marginal to 'mainstream' Javanese culture: that was the legacy. Now we see it as a topic of major significance in the history of the Javanese: that is the new interpretation. In this chapter, we will look at both the legacy and the new understanding, to see how we have been led to new views of Javanese history, society and culture and to a clearer understanding of how Islam is understood and lived in the real world. This examination of both the legacy and the new interpretations of Javanese history provides us with a fine example of how our views of the past are often shaped by our experience of the present. It also reminds us how beguiling, misleading and analytically dangerous stereotypes can be and how important it is actually to do research to test such ideas. These are hardly new observations, of course, but it is rather remarkable how hard it has been to arrive at them in the case of the history of the Javanese.