ISLAMICATE CIVILIZATION AND NATIONAL ISLAMS: ISLAM NUSANTARA, WEST JAVA AND SUNDANESE CULTURE

Relationships between Islam and local cultures, post-coloniality, the construction of National Islams and nationalisms are extraordinarily complex. They pose complex academic, theological and political problems. This paper considers examples from the province of West Java in postcolonial Indonesia. It will be concerned with the ways in which elements of local West Javanese/Sundanese culture are rejected by Islamist nationalists but at the same time incorporated into a regional variant of the culture friendly Islam Nusantara formulated by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in 2015. See Chamami (2015) and Woodward (2018). It also suggests that what Philosopher of Science Karl Popper termed the “situational logic” of Islam Nusantara is based on principles that have driven the construction of what Historian Marshal Hodgson (1974) termed Islamicate Civilizations since they emerged in the sixth century. Thorough consideration of these questions requires an overarching analytic and theoretical framework. Without one, we can produce disconnected, fragmentary analyses with limited practical applications. This paper is an attempt to establish such a framework. Building on Berger’s constructivist approach to the Sociology of Religion, it draws on seemingly divergent


Nationalisms: Post-colonialism, Institutions and the Imagined Communities
Islam Nusantara emerged in the context of continuing debates about religion and nationalism that began in the late colonial era. There is a basic contrast between theories of nationalism by scholars including Gellner who stressed the centrality of institutions and institution building and others, of whom Anderson is the most influential, who emphasize the imagination of collective identities through the construction and manipulation of myths, rituals and symbols. (Anderson, 1983;Gellner, 1983) Both were opposed to the primordialist view that the nationalisms and derivative national identities are very nearly immutable and that their origins are lost in the depths of time. (Smith & Woodward, 2016). Gellner was a constructivist, only to a limited extent. Anderson was much more of one and stressed the importance of nationalist ideologies and identities. In Imagined Communities, he observed that the nation is an imagined community in at least two ways: …. because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (Anderson, 1983) Anderson took the position that nations are at once social and imagined realities. They are social realities to the extent they exercise relatively uniform control of a bounded space and the population inhabiting it. They are imagined communities to the extent that culturally and/or religiously salient symbols and narratives are manipulated in ways that lead very different people to believe that they share a common heritage that makes them sisters and brothers in a well-defined and bounded cultural community the borders of which are co-terminus with those of the geographic space of the nation state. This is what distinguishes nations form empires, which define themselves as political and economic, but not cultural realties. The emergence of nations within empires gave rise to post-colonial nationalisms.
Colonial and post-colonial nationalist narratives are often triumphalist and seek to imagine the possibility of a brighter future by retrieving the greatness and the cultural and/or religious distinctiveness of the past that was temporarily overshadowed by colonialism. This often takes the form of idealizing a semi-mythological past and ignoring oppressive social realities of precolonial states. The remembered/imagined grandeur of the past is often larger than life or history. (Vickers & Fisher, 1999) It may be the case that this re-imagination of history plays a central role the imagination of post-colonial states because it distances leaders and ordinary citizens from Western ideologies while retaining technological and administrative infrastructures inherited from them.
Tambiah has shown that in Southeast Asia the new nations that emerged after the Second World War often discarded or at least subverted European ideologies in favor of traditional religious concepts and narratives in attempts to establish the cultural authenticity of the social realities of new states. (Tambiah, 1997) Chatterjee describes this process as follows: The spiritual, on the other hand, is an "inner" domain bearing the "essential" marks of cultural identity. The greater ones success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, therefore, the greater one's need to preserve the distinctness of one's spiritual culture. (Chatterjee, 1986) Revolutions, including the Indonesian Revolution of 1945, lend force to Anderson's statement that people are often willing to die for imaged communities. The West Java based Darul Islam movement is an example of how this principle operates in a revolution within a INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS LITERATURE AND HERITAGE | 153 revolution. Kartosuwirjo proclaimed the movement in 1949 because he felt the revolutionary government of the Republic of Indonesia had betrayed its ideas and values by negotiating with the Dutch and withdrawing its forces from West Java. At one time, it controlled at least a third of West Java and large territories in Aceh and South Sulawesi. Darul Islam persist as Negara Islam Indonesia. Some members and former members still feel this "betrayal." (Formichi, 2013;Soebardi, 1983) For them, it has become a key symbol in an alternative nationalism. Each initiate swears an oath of allegiance and waits for orders. I learned of one man who is still waiting after being out of contact with the movement for more than thirty years. All of these examples pale before European cases, especially the First World War, in which the members of imaged communities founded on principles of inequality died by the hundreds of thousands to defend them. 1 Anderson was a keen student of post-colonialism before the term was popular. He was a comparativist in a theoretical sense but was also explicitly concerned with the variety of ways in which Indonesia has been imagined from the late colonial period, to the post 1998 Reformation era. As is well known he supported revolutionary ideologies and social transformation of social and economic relations along Marxist lines. He looked on the Indonesian military and totalitarian tranquillity of Suharto's New Order with fear and loathing.
He tended to see many of the positive, negative and indeed contradictory elements of modern Indonesian history as reflections of the interaction of elements of Javanese culture and Dutch colonialism.
His views of Javanese culture were shaped by his experience in Central Java --especially Surakarta. He did not write extensively about West Java or Sundanese culture. (Anderson, 1983) The imagination of Indonesia, and of nations in general, is an ongoing process that is almost always contested and never finished.
One of the critical junctures in the imagination of Indonesia was the October 28, 1928 Pemuda Indonesia (Young Indonesia) conference at which young leaders from diverse regional and ethnic backgrounds swore an oath to support the concepts of one people, one country and one language. (Foulcher, 2000) The question that was unanswered is: "Does this mean the obliteration of cultural differences or the emergence of a new shared culture that is an umbrella?" Nearly nine decades of historical experience tells us that it was the umbrella that emerged from the process. A case can be made that Suharto tried to subvert this process through his attempts to establish Central Javanese culture as politically hegemonic. (Sarsito, 2006;Woodward, 2011) Many Acehnese describe the New Order as "Javanese Imperialism." One of the tasks facing Indonesia today is to repair the tears in the umbrella. From the 1960s and into the 1980s there were debates about the reality of what Hildred Geertz called the "Indonesian metropolitan super-culture" rooted in consistent use of the Indonesian language, modern education, popular culture and contemporary Indonesian historiography or whether the concept of Indonesia was a thin veneer incapable of forestalling ethno-religious conflict. (H. Geertz, 1963) History has shown that Geertz was correct about the emergence of a new umbrella culture. It is equally clear that this did not prevent ethnoreligious conflict. It is, however, possible that in the absence of these cultural developments Indonesia could have gone to way of Yugoslavia and spiralled downward into ethno-religious war and national disintegration. 2

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS LITERATURE AND HERITAGE | 155
Fisher-Omar, Liu and Woodward have attempted to resolve the differences between these theories of nationalism with a model describing the interaction of three components of nation states. (Liu et al., 2014) They require some modifications to capture the complexities of large, ethnically and religiously diverse nations such as Indonesia.
The three components of the model are: • Symbology-systems of symbolic meaning attached to and promoted by the state.
• Identity space-the groups and group identities that vie for legitimacy and control of state apparatuses.

Islam and Sundanese Culture
Relationships between Islam and Sundanese culture are similar to those in neighbouring Javanese culture, but have been less thoroughly studied. Muslim saints (wali) and kings were instrumental in the establishment and spread of Islam in the 16 th century. (Guillot et al., 1990) Sundanese culture retains mythic, literary and ritual forms derived from Hindu and indigenous traditions. One example is the popular poetic tradition known as pantun. Some pantun describe the days of Pajajaran as a golden age in which famine and debt were unknown. It would, however, be mistaken to think of this tradition as a fossilized version of the pre-Islamic past. It also brings elements of  (Weintraub, 1994) Smith and Woodward have shown that elements of the divine feminine rooted in indigenous and Hindu traditions survived the transition to Islam in both myth and ritual throughout Java and many other parts of Indonesia. (Smith & Woodward, 2016) Pohaci is the Sundanese rice "goddess" and resembles the Javanese Dewi Sri in many respects. (Hidding, 1929;Robert Wessing, 1988) She is the village modality of the feminine divine and is symbolically linked to water and snakes. She is a source of agricultural abundance and wealth derived from the earth in a more general sense. She plays a major role in Sundanese creation myths that survived the transition to Islam in the 15 th-16th century. According to these legends Pohaci was originally a beautiful widadrai (nymph) and Bhatara Guru's (Siva, the king of the gods) step daughter. The other gods poisoned her to prevent his sexual attraction to her from leading to incest. Because of her virtue and chastity rice emerged from her navel and other agricultural plants including the coconut tree and spices and those used for construction materials (bamboo and teak trees) from other parts of her body. There are rituals honoring her and asking for her blessing throughout the agricultural cycle. (Iskandar & Iskandar, 2017) Some myths state that Nyai Ratu Kidul, the queen of the Southern Ocean is her sister. Ratu Kidul is the royal modality of the divine feminine. She is associated with mineral wealth in the form of exchange value (gold and silver), military and magical power. She is said to have married Panembahan Senopati, the founder of the central Javanese Maram dynasty and his descendants in Yogyakarta and Surakarta. Rituals honoring and seeking her aid and protection are held along the south coasts of East, Central and West Java. (Jordaan, 1997;Woodward, 1989)

Nyai Pohaci Sanghyang Asri
The invocation of Allah, Muhammad and other Muslim prophets makes is clear that this pantun is simultaneously Sufi poetry and a literary device for bringing an element of Sundanese culture into an emerging Islamicate Civilization. The fact that pantun is a village based oral performance tradition indicates that it not only a mode of Sundanese Sufi literature, but as a media for dakwah (propagation of Islam) at the village level. (Millie, 2009;Rohmana, 2012) The 15 4 According to some accounts that may be revisionist histories designed to push the Muslim history of West Java further into the past that can be justified on the basis of existing sources, Prabu Siliwangi converted to Islam.

Pantun as Dakwah
His grave in Cirebon is a popular pilgrimage site. For most pilgrims, especially those on organized Wali Songo tours, it simply one of a large number of sites at which barakah (blessing) can be obtained. But, as McKinley and Woodward have noted saints and their graves define territories and social communities, ranging from villages to kingdoms. (Woodward, 2014) In the case of the Wali Songo and other founding saints they also define symbologies. In Java, and elsewhere in Indonesia, pre-Islamic divinities and traditions are transformed in ways that make them compatible with Islam and incorporated into these symbologies. This is what Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) called the pribumisasi (indigenization) of Islam.
There are many other similar cases elsewhere in West Java and throughout Indonesia in which the pre-Islamic past is not regarded as something to be cast aside, but rather as a cultural inheritance (warisan kebudayaan) that must be treated with respect. Especially with the introduction of a religion, such as Islam, that defines a global identity Indonesia's state symbology to promote violence against Syiah and Ahmadiyah Muslims and other minorities. (Woodward, 2014) Managing groups promoting this sort of alternative symbology is an enormous, long-term challenge. Islam Nusantra, properly understood, affirms local wisdom, and at the same time locates it within a universal value system rooted in Muslim concepts of justice and mercy.

Islamicate Civilizations
The history of Islam and its incorporation into and transformation of local cultures is a complex field of study in which there have been contentious debates both among academic scholars and Muslim scholars (ulama). This has often been a highly polemical theological and political discourse. Some, including colonial scholars such as Landon, Raffles and Van Leur and others who followed in their footsteps including Geertz and Beatty have argued that in Indonesia Islam is a "thin veneer" resting on the surface of more deeply rooted animistic or Hindu-Buddhist civilizations. (Beatty, 1999;C. Geertz, 1960;Landon, 1949;Raffles, 1817 Civilization." (Florida, 1995;Woodward, 1989) Indonesian and other Southeast Asian Muslim traditionalists including Wahid, Muhaimin and Alatas express similar views. (Alatas, 1997;Muhaimin, 2006) Hodgson used the term Islamicate Civilization to refer primarily to "high" or elite cultural productsliterature, science, philosophy, monumental architecture and to institutions including Shari'ah courts and Sufi orders developed in societies in which Islam is the primary religion and frame other aspects of cultural development. As an Anthropologist, I have more egalitarian view and consider "popular" ritual, historical and performance traditions, including veneration of the Prophet, saints and religious teachers and local historical texts to be elements of these same civilizations. In Indonesia, the religious and political elites Hodgson references were also devotees and participants in these traditions. High traditions, especially chronicles and state ceremonies have also influenced the development of village and increasingly urban level tradition and Muslim practice. (Woodward, 2011) Again, speaking as an Anthropologist, it is essential to maintain a clear distinction between academic and confenssional perspectives. It has long been common practice for Salafis, including those associated with Persatuan Islam that is especially influential in West Java, to describe traditional Muslim devotional traditions such as pilgrimage to the tombs of saints (ziyarah), as bid'ah (innovation in religious matters) and shirk (polytheism). Similarly, traditional Muslim scholars argue that they are Islamic and that their Salafi opponents are simply wrong. 8 The narrative structures and semantics of these competing symbologies and the emergence of social formations including political parties and other mass organizations are academic and political topics of enormous importance. Weighing in on them in normative ways is a different sort of intellectual exercise. The first religious discourse, the second discourse about religion. 9 Hodgson focused this attention on Arabic, Persian and Turkish Islamicate Civilization. He is highly critical of Geertz's tripartite abangan-priyayi-santri (Animist-Hindu-Islamic) typology, observing that many of the religious beliefs and practices Geertz describes as Animist or Hindu-Buddhist are actually Islamicate traditions, many of which are shared across a wide range of Muslim cultures. The specification of civilizational boundaries is a difficult task for a number of reasons. What follows is a general consideration of these issues focusing on Southeast Asian cases.
• Civilizational boundaries are fuzzy. It is sometimes not easy to say which groups or individuals should be located where. Some can be located within multiple civilizational complexes. Hadhrami Sayyids are an example because to varying degrees they are located within national, regional Southeast Asian Arab and an encompassing Hadhrami diaspora that extends around the Indian Ocean litoral civilizational spheres. (Ho, 1997) • Like ethnicity, civilization is a hierarchical concept. 10 One can, for example, think of Sundanese and Javanese Islamicate civilizations. At a higher level of specificity, it is possible to distinguish between East and Central Javanese. At a still greater level of specificity the kingdoms/cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta are very different places. I do not know West Java well enough to speak with certainty about the subcategories of Sundanese Islamicate civilization but am willing to make a theoretically driven prediction that they exist. At a more inclusive level it is clear that West Sumatran and Malaysian Minangkabau, Johor Malay, Sundanese, East and Central Javanese cultures share can be understood as a higher-level trans-ethno-linguistic Islamicate Civilization. Here, it is illuminating to compare (Skeat, 1900) Malay Magic with Geertz's (1960) Religion of Java. The lists of "magical" practices included in these works correspond very closely. (C. Geertz, 1960;Skeat, 1900) • Universalist, Essentialist and Local Islams Eickelman phrased these issues in the following terms.

The main challenge for the study of Islam in Local contexts is to describe and analyze how the universalist principles of Islam have been realized in various social and historical contexts without presenting Islam as a seamless essence on the one hand or as a plastic congeries of beliefs and practices
on the other. (Eickelman, 1982) With an eye towards furthering these discussions and developing more powerful analytic tools for capturing the complexity this discourse I developed a four-level classification system twenty years ago. (Woodward, 1989) This system now requires further elaboration to address issues Islamicate Civilization and national Islams.
• A very limited Universalist Islam that would include the Qur'an and the five pillars of faith. This is a vexing issue because while there are many claims about what should be included there is no consensus among Muslims even concerning the Hadith because the Sunni and Syiah have different collections. It is, therefore, necessary to keep the list as short as possible. • A much more expansive Essentialist corpus including the Hadith collections and the foundational texts of Sunni and Syiah legal schools and a large corpus of theological and mystical texts and associated rituals. Here I build on Eickelman's observation that within and across local contexts, it is essential to pay greater attention to the vicissitudes of the textual tradition. • Received Islam, by which I mean the portion of the Essentialist corpus present in a particular physical or social space. This includes ritual and social practices as well as texts. I was struck by the importance of including ritual practice when I visited a Sufi shrine in Niger, West Africa. When I visited the founder's grave my guide and companion explained that on Thursday evenings after the maghrib prayer many people visited (he used the term ziyarah) the grave and recited "parts of the Qur'an). I asked: "Do you mean Surah Yasin?" He asked: "How did you know?" I replied: "Because that is what we do in Indonesia?" And regarding social practices: We left the shrine, returned to the Syech's house and had a meal similar to those I have often had with Javanese kyai: yellow rice, roasted goat, cucumbers, tomatoes and tea. This was perhaps the most illuminating encounter I have had in forty years of studying Islam local contexts. Again, it necessary to distinguish academic and ideological/theological uses of this concept. For example, it is sometimes said that: "To be Sundanese is to be Muslim." This phrase has often been used as an ideological-theological construct. It is also an ambiguous concept because it can be interpreted as meaning either: • Sundanese culture is by definition Muslim. This is an affirmation of the Islamic authenticity of culture. It is expressed in the proverb, "Islam teh Sunda, Sunda teh Islam" (Islam is Sunda and Sunda is Islam.) • Sundanese culture is not Islamiclly authentic and must be brought into conformance with Islamic norms. This is the view of Persatuan Islam and other modern Islamist organizations.  (Johns, 1961;Ricklefs, 2006) It had strong ties with Arab Islamicate civilizations through the haj and the Hadhrami diaspora. (Ho, 1997;Laffan, 2007;Sirriyeh, 1999) One of the most important religious developments during the colonial period were the introduction of the Egyptian modernism associated with Muhammad Abduh and Salafism. (Alatas, 2008;Azra, 2004;Noer, 1973) Both called on Muslims to "return to the Qur'an and Hadith" --but understood this call is very different ways.
Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's largest organization has generally sought to accommodate local cultures, partly because it has always stressed education and health care, though more so in Java than Sumatra.
Others including Sumatran Muhammadiyah leader Haji Rasul  and Persatuan Islam founder Ahmad Hassan (1887-1958) were unrelenting in their opposition to anything that they considered to be bid'ah (religious innovation) or syirik (polytheism) and local culture. They wander the face of the earth spreading enmity and hatred. They tell lies about God even though they know the truth. (Mahmud, 2008) Debates concerning the powers of saints, their ability to intercede with Allah on behalf of their devotees and intercessory prayers for the dead were, and sometimes still are, equally caustic. All parties to these debates cite the Qur'an and Hadith in support of their positions.
Traditionalists also cite classical Arabic texts on Islamic theology and law or what I have described here as Essentialist Islam in support of their positions. (Maskumambang, 2015) Colonial policy shaped the ways in which these developments

Trans-national and National Islams
The concept of National Islam that explicitly references local cultural contexts and local Islams is a relatively new one. It emerged in response to the global spread of am especially intolerant Second Wave Salafism beginning in the 1980s. (Roy, 2010;Woodward et al., 2013) In Indonesia Second Wave Salafism was centered in the tarbiyah Indonesia students to study at Saudi Islamic Universities. (Hasan, 2007;Machmudi, 2008) In general, Second Wave Salafisms embrace various combination of Muslim Brotherhood activism and Salafi-Wahhabi religious teachings and cultural practices. (Hasan, 2008) There is a strong tendency to embrace what Roy calls de-culturalized Islam. (Roy, 2010) Exactly what this means varies significantly from individual to individual and from group to group. Many adopt pseudo Saudi clothing styles and other cultural practices. Some I have spoken with explicitly renounce ethnic (Javanese) and national (Indonesian) identities. One young man I spoke with at Gadjah Mada University stated: "I am not Indonesian, I am not Javanese, I am only Muslim." (Woodward, 2017) The political orientations of groups emerging from the tarbiyah movement vary greatly. Some live in pious isolation, distancing themselves from what they deem to be an irredeemably corrupt world.
There are now a number of pesantren that promote this view. At these pesantren there is no secular education. Some, including Pondok Pesantren Imam Bukhari in Solo, attract students from across INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS LITERATURE AND HERITAGE | 173 Indonesia and from Malaysia and Singapore. There are others with similar religious orientations that are highly socially engaged. The tarbiyah movement also gave rise to Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS), which is actively engaged in electoral politics and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, which describes itself as a political party but rejects participation in elections as being counter to Islamic teachings. (Ahnaf, 2011;Woodward et al., 2013) Still others have moved in the direction of armed struggle to establish either and Indonesian Islamic state or a regional or global Caliphate. (Hasan, 2008) Interest in, and concern with an Indonesian National Islams emerged in response to these developments. He outlined a three-point program for the realization of these goals: • The rapid, progressive transformation of systems, organizations and networks to make them advanced, professional and modern. • The development of high quality, independent charitable movements capable of supporting the establishment of a genuinely Islamic society. Nashir is implicitly critical of Islam Nusantara because it does not share Muhammadiyah's emphasis of "purification." He is, at the same time, supportive of its basic principle of recognizing the authenticity of culturally and historically specific interpretations of Islam. Hopefully with this shared sacrifice, the spirit of togetherness will be maintained. If NU has the concept of Islam Nusantara, and Muhammadiyah Islam Berkemajuan then it can move together into Islam Nusantara Berkemajuan. (NU Online, n.d.)

This is a striking example of what Diana Eck of the Harvard Pluralism
Project calls Civic Pluralism. (Eck, 2007) It does not require coming together on fundamental religious issues. It is rather people with differing faith convictions working together to achieve common goals. This is the vision of Islam that President Joko Widodo has proposed as be a model for other Muslim societies.