In 1898, Ahmad Dahlan (1868–1923) – who would later in 1912 found Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s largest modernist Islamic mass organization – was a rabble-rouser in his native Kauman, Yogyakarta.1 He had performed the hajj in 1890 and had stayed for a year in Mecca in order to study, as many other young Muslims from the Netherlands East Indies did at the time.2 While in Mecca, Ahmad Dahlan became aware of reformist movements elsewhere in the Islamic world. Upon his arrival back in Yogyakarta, he pursued an interest in astronomy and, following in the footsteps of contemporaneous reformers in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, he sought to establish the exact location of the qibla, the direction of the Kaʿba in Mecca toward which Muslims were oriented during their prayers (Laffan 2002: 168–69). Equipped with a globe and compass, he determined that his fellow Kauman Muslims who prayed at the Great Mosque did not face Mecca, but rather the east coast of Africa, missing Mecca by thousands of miles. But when he campaigned for a change in the qibla, his superiors were dismayed. Not only was Ahmad Dahlan barred from implementing his newly established direction of prayer at the Great Mosque, but he was even prevented from implementing his corrected qibla at his own school and prayer house, the langgar kidul;3 which is to say, when he tried to make this change, his superiors had the building with the offensive qibla demolished. Their resistance, however, was short-lived: today, in the Great Mosque of Yogyakarta, as in most other mosques in Java, spherical trigonometric calculations determine the correct orientation during prayer.
Ahmad Dahlan is not the only Javanese Muslim who is remembered for correcting the qibla orientation of a famous mosque. When the so-called nine saints (J. wali sanga) who, according to tradition, converted the Javanese people to Islam, built the mosque of Java’s first Islamic polity Demak, they were at first unable to orient the mosque correctly toward the Kaʿba. Sunan Kalijaga, one of the nine saints with exceptional spiritual powers,4 adjusted both the Mosque of Demak and the Kaʿba, causing them to face each other, and thus established the right qibla.
No matter where they are in the world, Muslims face the Kaʿba from their respective locations. The geographic centrality of Mecca, and especially of the Kaʿba, becomes manifest in the five daily prayers (A. ṣalāh), one of the five pillars of Islam, where the ones praying are oriented toward the Kaʿba, the historical and ritual center of Islam. But as we see in these two examples, being oriented toward Mecca has not always meant the same thing to Muslims. In this chapter, I will analyze two accounts of how these particular Javanese Muslims, Sunan Kalijaga and Ahmad Dahlan, corrected and realigned the qibla of their mosques to the Kaʿba. While pointing to the differences in their premises and methods, I argue that both stories share a religious imaginary in which a periphery is linked to a center as the locus of authority. In both cases, however, through the way in which the linkage occurs, the status of periphery and center seems to be undercut. I draw on the work of the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, who posited that religious understandings of place are characterized by a conflict between two opposing senses, a “locative” and a “utopian” vision of the world. According to him, the locative sense focuses on a center as the locus of power and truth, whereas the utopian sense assumes that power and truth are not geographically bound, thus attributing equal status to places that the locative sense would consider peripheral. By focusing on stories of qibla alignments, I hope to take a new direction in the study of Javanese literature by comparing a literary text with the memory of Ahmad Dahlan. Despite their obvious differences, the conceptualizations of the qibla in both accounts decenter western understandings of religion and space. Specifically, I examine Smith’s distinction to show how, in the stories of Sunan Kalijaga and Ahmad Dahlan, the very meaning of center and periphery is not stable but shifts, complicating the clear distinction between the locative and the utopian, and inviting us to rethink the meaning of both.
K.H.A. Dahlan with his globe
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:K.H._Ahmad_Dahlan_%281868-1923%29,_p38.jpg1 Oriented toward the Center: Mecca and Islam in Southeast Asia
Islam as a historical religious tradition originated in Mecca, and the geographic location of Mecca continues to be of central importance for Muslims. Of the five pillars, two – the hajj and the five daily prayers – take Mecca, or the Kaʿba, as their destination and point of orientation. If Mecca is the center, every other place in the world is in a peripheral position to it. But some places seem to be more peripheral than others. Thousands of miles away from the Arabian peninsula where Islam was revealed and first spread, Southeast Asia was a relative latecomer to widespread conversion. When Islam arrived, it was first brought by seafarers to major port cities. Champa in contemporary Cambodia and Pasai, a city-state in northeast Sumatra, are thought to have been the first major centers of Islam in Southeast Asia in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; other port cities on the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago followed suit. The north coast of Java was largely Islamized by the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.5 Islam, it thus seems, arrived in Southeast Asia after its defining historical moments and the consolidation of its canonical scriptures, legal schools, theological orientations, and Sufi institutions and traditions.
Muslims in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago were often aware of the historic and geographical gap that separated their Islamization from the Prophet Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam. In a collection of Southeast Asian conversion narratives published by Russell Jones (1979), many narrators constructed direct spatial and temporal links between the Mecca of Muhammad and his companions and the Islamization of their respective times and places.6 One such example is a story about Samudera-Pasai, the first Islamic city-state in insular Southeast Asia at Sumatra’s north coast, which had probably become Islamic by the late thirteenth century.7 The Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, a classical Malay prose narrative of the kings of Samudera-Pasai that was likely composed in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century (Braginsky 2004: 111), includes an account of the conversion of Malik al-Salih, the city state’s first ruler. The Islamization of Samudera-Pasai, we read here, had already been ordained by the Prophet Muhammad, who foretold the city’s foundation and instructed his companions to go there and to convert its people (Jones 2013: 18). Then, some time after the Prophet’s death, the caliph heard of the city called Samudera and set out to go there. Meanwhile, the ruler of Samudera-Pasai, Merah Silau, had a dream in which he encountered an unknown man who ordered him to open his mouth. When Merah Silau obeyed, the person spat into it and said: “Your name shall be Sultan Malikul Saleh. Now you will become a Muslim by reciting the two statements of the profession of faith” (Jones 2013: 21). The man then announced the arrival of the ship and ordered that the ruler and his people follow their words and practices, which were in accordance with the teachings of Islam. In response to Malik al-Salih’s question who the man was, he answered: “‘I am the Prophet Muhammad the Apostle of God’ (may God bless him and give him peace) ‘who was in Mecca’” (Jones 2013: 22). As Malik al-Salih woke from his sleep, he realized that not only was he circumcised, but he was also able to recite by heart the Qurʾan although he had never been taught. In this conversion narrative, the temporal and spatial gap between the moment of Revelation and the coming of Islam to Southeast Asia is bridged by the Prophet Muhammad himself, who becomes a central agent in the Islamization of a local community.
The Muslims of Samudera-Pasai were not the only ones to remember their conversion as having occurred at the hands of the Prophet Muhammad, or as an event that was initiated in the Middle East.8 Neither did the centrality of Mecca as the historical center of Islam only play a role in conversion narratives. Indeed, the Kaʿba and Mecca have long figured as sites of authenticity in Southeast Asian Muslims’ theological imaginaries. In traditional Javanese literature,9 kings or wali are often said to have prayed every Friday at the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca (Drewes 1995); and many Javanese narratives, including stories of the Arab hero Amir Hamzah (see Arps in this volume) or the wayang Menak (Setiodarmoko 2002), are also set in Mecca.
In his collection of essays entitled Map is Not Territory, J.Z. Smith drew on the work of Mircea Eliade to discuss the religious meaning of space and spatial relations, calling it “the fundamental question” (1993: 103). According to him, religious understandings of space are universally characterized by a “coexistential conflict” (1993: 102) between two different senses. The one he calls the “locative vision of the world (which emphasizes place)” (1993: 102) appears to map onto these common representations of the relation between Mecca and Southeast Asia. They are characterized by a clear hierarchy: Mecca, as the center, is the locus of truth that needs to be accessed from the periphery to partake in this truth. Only through its connection to Mecca can the periphery be Muslim in the first place. This locative mapping of religious truth, according to Smith, points to a “centrifugal view of the world which emphasizes the importance of the ‘Center’” (1993: 101) which “guarantees meaning and value through structures of congruity and conformity” (1993: 292). The opposite of the locative vision is the “utopian vision of the world (using the term in its strict sense: the value of being in no place)” (1993: 101). Religious traditions with a utopian vision have “a more centripetal world which emphasizes the importance of periphery and transcendence” (1993: 101), such that adherents are likely to “turn[] in rebellion and flight to a new world and a new mode of creation” (1993: 309).
The injunction of facing Mecca during prayers and other pious ritual acts suggests that this locative vision of the world is characteristic not just of Islam in Southeast Asia, but Islam more generally.10 This direction of prayer, or qibla, goes back to the Prophet Muhammad, who changed the direction of prayer by replacing Jerusalem with the Kaʿba in Mecca. This shift in the direction of prayer is documented and discussed in the Qurʾan and the Sunna.11 The geographic orientation toward Mecca was understood to correspond to the intention of those performing ṣalāh to direct their prayers to no one other than God. According to Ari Gordon, who studied the role of the qibla in early Islam, the orientation for prayer was a distinctive marker of religious identity that demarcated communities from others (Gordon 2018: 66). In part, this was attributable to the spread of imperial or diasporic religions, where people in far-flung places shared a spiritual orientation that was inscribed through a common spatial orientation (Gordon 2018: 81). Because of their common orientation toward Mecca, Muslims came to be known as the ahl al-qibla, or “the people of the qibla” as an inclusivist identity marker for all Muslims during the first centuries of Islam. Leor Halevi similarly showed that in the early years of Islam, Muslims adopted the practice of burying the dead in graves oriented toward Mecca, arguing that it “promoted a sense of belonging to a single community, a community whose members, no matter where in the world they died, would all seem equal to one another – yet manifestly different from outsiders,” such that burial in the direction of the qibla “represented for Muslims a ritual form expressive of their own particular confessional identity” (Halevi 2007: 189). To slightly paraphrase Smith, early Islam, like other religions, strove to manipulate situations in order to create spaces where power and truth are translated into particular sites and mapped onto a sacred landscape (Smith 1993: 291). The center, and the orientation of people on the periphery to it, established what it meant to be a Muslim, no matter where people were.
While the qibla orientation thus seems to correspond closely to Smith’s locative sense, Smith explicitly distanced himself from the notion that the two senses of space can exist apart from each other; instead, they are coeval and available everywhere, at any time.12 Drawing on Smith, Gordon similarly argued that the locative and the utopian cannot be neatly disambiguated with regard to the qibla, since the possibility to access the center from any location in the world enables performances of sacred geography from any location. Through their “bodily reference to the epicenter of all places, Muslims performed identification with the collective when- and wherever they aligned with Mecca for worship,” thereby transforming “any location into a sacred place” (Gordon 2018: 16). Furthermore, the centrality of Mecca can only be sustained if it is constantly acknowledged at the periphery through the qibla orientation (Gordon 2018: 13–14). In this context, Gordon disagreed with Smith that the relation between the locative and the utopian was always a “coexistential conflict,” (Smith 1993: 102), calling it instead one of “synergism” (Gordon 2018: 14).
But irrespective of whether conflict or synergism is dominant, a problem that remains is that the meaning of the center, of Mecca, is not always the same or self-evident, complicating the very meaning of the locative and the utopian sense. As historians of Islamic science have shown, Muslim scientists had developed the mathematical methods to determine the qibla with a very high degree of accuracy as early as the ninth century. Nonetheless, for a long time Muslims continued to use a variety of methods, based on different paradigms of knowledge, to ascertain the correct orientation during prayer, including folk astronomy or alignments with mountains or winds.13 Although they were misaligned from a mathematical perspective, the Muslims who built the mosques and prayed in them still understood themselves to be fully oriented toward Mecca (Gordon 2018: 234–35). If studying religion means exploring what Smith understood as maps of sacred sites or the construction of conceptual space within which practitioners can meaningfully dwell (1993: 291), we also need to consider differences between what these metaphorical maps look like and what they are supposed to do. With their fluctuating understandings and implementations of the qibla, these different maps make evident that the very meaning of Mecca as the historical and geographic center of Islam, and of one’s orientation toward it, was constructed not from the center, but from the periphery. In Java, many such metaphorical maps, or conceptualizations of space imbued with religious meaning, define space as Islamic by pointing to the center, Mecca. But how the center is mapped is not always the same, and neither is the meaning of Mecca.
2 Realigning the Periphery, Realigning the Center: a Traditional Narrative
The historian Nile Green has shown that the Islamization of South Asia through Sufi migrants was a process whereby mobile and portable religious resources of Islam, such as stories, beliefs, and rituals, became imprinted and enshrined in the immobile and static resources of sacred landscapes (Green 2012: xiii). This was especially the case with shrines around the tombs of wali, as their graves fastened the global and timeless truths of Islam to a particular place. “In this way,” Green wrote, “narrative and space, text and territory, worked together as the saint served to bridge the past and present time of his followers” (2012: 3). In the Islamization of Southeast Asia, the acceptance of the new religion was likewise marked by processes of emplacement that were accompanied by stories and texts that narrated the coming of Islam to the region. The sacred geography that was imprinted in Javanese lands and told in their stories joined a strong localism with a connective cosmopolitanism (Green 2012: 35), ultimately linking Java to Mecca. The local and the global were intimately entwined in these geographic and spiritual imaginaries. To explore these processes, I will analyze the Seh Malaya, the story of Sunan Kalijaga, arguably the most famous of the nine saints, who is also discussed by Bogaerts and Ricci in this volume. According to tradition, Sunan Kalijaga is the only one of the nine saints to be native Javanese, and as such perhaps uniquely suitable for mapping the global onto the local. This is especially the case in the famous episode of his aligning the qibla, in which the global is imprinted on the local and vice versa through such a working together of text and territory. Through this process of emplacement, I argue, the distinction between the utopian and the locative sense is effectively collapsed.
The story of Seh Malaya, another name for Sunan Kalijaga, is based on and incorporates older textual traditions, both from Java and the wider Islamic world.14 One of them is the Dewa Ruci or, in English, The Subtle God, which tells the story of Bima (Skt. Bhīma), one of the Pandawa (Skt. Pāṇḍava) brothers from the Mahābhārata, who searches for the water of life. In the process, he finds Dewa Ruci, a miniature version of himself, who invites Bima to enter him through his ear. Once inside, Bima finds an immense ocean and attains mystical realization. Beginning in the eighteenth century, poets at the Javanese royal courts reworked the Old Javanese text into a Sufi allegory (Arps 2011: 12). The Seh Malaya is one such Sufi adaptation. It also draws on Islamic textual antecedents, including the stories of the wali sanga and the Qurʾanic Sura of the Cave, in which Moses (Nabi Mūsā) encounters God’s mysterious friend Khiḍr.15 Bima, in the Seh Malaya, is thus replaced by Sunan Kalijaga and Dewa Ruci turns into Khiḍr, called Nabi Kilir in Javanese.
In the following, I will base my textual analysis on a version of the Seh Malaya written in macapat verse entitled The Story of Seh Mlaya Beginning at the Time when He was Not Yet a Wali (J. Cariyosipun Seh Mlaya Awit Kala Dereng Juměněng Wali).16 This version of the Seh Malaya17 begins with the familiar story of Sunan Kalijaga or Seh Malaya’s youth as a highwayman. Humbled and awed after trying and failing to rob Sunan Benang (more usually known as Sunan Bonang), a wali with superior spiritual gifts who proves to be invulnerable to Sunan Kalijaga’s attack, Sunan Kalijaga repents of his criminal ways and asks to become Sunan Benang’s student. Sunan Benang agrees, instructs him to practice extreme acts of asceticism, and leaves him again to follow his own pursuits: “It is said about Sunan Benang,” we read in the Seh Malaya, “that he wanted to pray in Mecca. In the blink of an eye, he was there, and after his prayers he went back home.”18 By virtue of his spiritual powers, the text seems to suggest, Sunan Benang can overcome the geographic difference between Java and Mecca. Eventually he returns to Sunan Kalijaga, who had persevered in his rigorous ascetic exercises, including the tapa ngidang, living with and like the deer.19 But whereas Sunan Benang is happy with his student’s progress, the latter is not satisfied and asks Sunan Benang for clear answers about God’s truth and guidance. Sunan Benang cannot offer a direct answer, but tells him:
Sunan Kalijaga obeys Sunan Benang’s command, but not having acquired the fullness of his teacher’s spiritual powers, he cannot get to Mecca in the blink of an eye. For him, the distance is a problem. Mecca is out of reach. After a cumbersome journey through Java, he eventually reaches the ocean, where his journey ends: there is no way to continue on to Mecca. Desperate, he seems to have no choice but to give up when he encounters a small figure who turns out to be Nabi Kilir, who tells him that there is no use for him to go to Mecca when he does not yet know what he is looking for.20 Moreover,
In these passages, Nabi Kilir appears to differentiate between a physical, geographical Mecca and Kaʿba on the one hand which, he seems to suggest, are irrelevant, because these holy sites ultimately are just old rocks, left behind by Nabi Ibrahim who died a long time ago. The real Mecca, Nabi Kilir explains, requires no physical journey, but a spiritual journey inside oneself.23 And indeed, as Bima does with the miniature version of himself in the Dewa Ruci,24 Sunan Kalijaga enters Nabi Kilir through his ear and, once inside his body, is shown God’s truth and guidance, attaining mystical realization. The narrative of this part of the story, and the teachings Sunan Kalijaga receives, closely follow the model of the Dewa Ruci. Having been shown these esoteric secrets by Nabi Kilir, the two part ways and Sunan Kalijaga once again joins Sunan Benang, who asks his student why he never went to Mecca. Sunan Kalijaga replies:
Sunan Benang, who had ordered Sunan Kalijaga to go to Mecca, now concedes that reaching the physical destination of the Kaʿba is no longer important. Put differently, in his failure to reach Mecca, Sunan Kalijaga has attained his actual goal of understanding God’s truth and guidance. As one of God’s beloved, Sunan Kalijaga now has superior powers like his teacher, including the power to travel to Mecca in the blink of an eye to pray (RP 333, 272). Having realized that the physical location of Mecca is not as central as the real, interior Mecca, the physical Mecca is now accessible to him.
These relations between the physical and the real Mecca surface again in one of the last episodes narrated in this version of the Seh Malaya about the construction of the Mosque of Demak, Java’s first mosque and spiritual center of its first Islamic polity.26 According to this well-known episode, the wali sanga all cooperated to build the mosque but faced a crisis when they realized that they were missing one of the central pillars. Sunan Kalijaga was able to solve the problem by gathering together the debris left over by the construction of the mosque and building from it the needed pillar. Nancy Florida, who analyzed this episode in a different text, argued that Sunan Kalijaga’s gathering of the debris to construct a central pillar of the mosque signals that the center of support is put together by peripheral pieces.27 She suggested that “the poet, perhaps bearing in mind the egalitarianism of Islam, very subtly reminds the careful reader that the central authorities subsist only under the weight of ‘the people’” (1995: 332). The subsequent events seem to suggest that a similar relation exists between the peripheral Java and Mecca, the center; for shortly after the pillar has been placed, the wali sanga face another crisis:
The understanding of the qibla we encounter in this passage resonates with the writings of the Islamic Arab-Andalusian theologian Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), whose thought was often appropriated in Javanese literature, including RP 333.30 In Ibn al-ʿArabī’s speculative Sufism, God is pure essence or being (Ar. wujūd), whereas all entities in the universe only have a contingent existence derived from wujūd. Crucially, wujūd not only has an ontological dimension as pure being, but is also an epistemological process, since the Arabic wujūd also translates as “finding,” or the phenomenological realization of God’s being in a person’s awareness (Chittick 2005: 36–37). God in God’s pure essence or being, however, cannot be known; it is only through God’s attributes or forms in the cosmos that God is disclosed. To articulate this relation between God and the cosmos, as well as being and knowing, Ibn al-ʿArabī often cited a Qurʾanic verse according to which “[t]he East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face” (Abdel Haleem 2010, 2: 115), and a similar hadith, in which the Prophet Muḥammad is recorded as saying: “God is in the kiblah of the person who performs the ṣalāt.”31
Like Ibn al-ʿArabī, Sunan Kalijaga in the Seh Malaya seems to suggest that knowledge of God is only possible through God’s self-disclosure through things in the cosmos, so God’s servants need to “turn toward themselves and come to know themselves” (Chittick 1998: 95) to know God, as Sunan Kalijaga did during his encounter with Nabi Kilir. As Ibn al-ʿArabī wrote in the Meccan Openings, “The face of God is you, so you are the kiblah wherever you may be” (as cited in Chittick 1998: 95). But the narration makes clear that God’s disclosure in all places does not undo the significance of central, universally significant places like Mecca, nor of particular and seemingly peripheral places like Java. The relation between center and periphery is not static: when Sunan Kalijaga aligns the Mosque of Demak with the Kaʿba, he grasps both and wiggles the two into alignment with each other. God has no static being apart from God being sought and found as wujūd, and Mecca has no static existence apart from Sunan Kalijaga’s quest for it. His wiggling center and periphery into alignment with each other corresponds to the moment when seeking and being are collapsed into a phenomenological realization of God’s truth and knowledge. Just as God’s being is found when the creatures seeking and God’s self-disclosure are realized to be identical, Mecca becomes accessible when Sunan Kalijaga discovers it not by arriving, but by its disclosure to him through his quest for it. Mecca then becomes local in Java, because the identity of being and seeking imprints universal Islamic space and particular Javanese space on each other. As the difference between center and periphery makes way for the realization of God’s presence, the meaning of the center – and hence of one’s locative orientation toward it – is redefined by the periphery in a revolutionary, utopian move, thus collapsing any meaningful distinction between the two.
3 Making Space for Modern Science: Correct Prayer and Dahlan’s Globe
Although Ahmad Dahlan, with the help of his globe and compass, aligned the qibla of the Great Mosque of Yogyakarta in 1898 just a few decades after the Seh Malaya was inscribed in Surakarta in 1864 , it seems as though these two stories are ages apart, located on two sides of a gulf separating traditional Java with its enchanted, mystical worldview and poetic preoccupations from modern, rational Java. Yet, the relation between locative and the utopian in Dahlan’s reorientation of the qibla point to a dynamic of redefining the center from the vantage point of the periphery that transcends these differences in world view. Ahmad Dahlan himself was personally acquainted with both center and periphery. Born in Kauman in 1868, he was the son of a religious official of the Yogyakarta Sultanate and the Great Mosque of Kauman. As the only son, Ahmad Dahlan would later inherit his father’s position. After his education in Java, first at the hands of his father and later with the great scholars and teachers (J. kyai) of nineteenth-century Java, he left for the Middle East in 1890 to go on the hajj and to study with Mecca’s famous ulama, as many Southeast Asians did at the time. The Jawi scholars who met in the Mecca of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century became acquainted with reformist ideas and, upon arriving back home, often implemented these ideas in their own communities.32 Ahmad Dahlan and his foundation of Muhammadiyah was thus part of a wider movement of reform. Upon returning to Yogyakarta, Dahlan at first focused on social service, organizing his friends to empower Kauman’s Muslims through voluntary work (Noer 1973: 74). While in Mecca, he had moreover developed an interest in astronomy and the use of a globe for trigonometric calculations. Thus equipped, he established that from a mathematical viewpoint the qibla of the Great Mosque of Yogyakarta was incorrect.
While medieval Arab astronomers had already worked out a way to determine the direction of Mecca with considerable accuracy, it was only in the eighteenth century that it became possible to measure longitudinal differences correctly, with the result that the qibla of older mosques could be shown to be incorrect (King 1999: 161). While evidence is scarce, there are indications that around that time Islamic scientists and cartographers increasingly adopted European conventions and technologies in their maps and instruments (King 1999: 274–328; see also Rapoport 2020: 159). By the late nineteenth century, many reformers had adopted the cause of establishing the accurate direction of prayer (Laffan 2002: 49–50, 249 n.1), which sometimes entailed correcting existing practices, as was the case in Kauman.
Ahmad Dahlan’s correction of the qibla was vehemently opposed by the Kauman authorities, even to the point that they demolished his prayer house. Dahlan was reportedly criticized for making use of western technologies, the technologies of the unbelievers, to calculate something as significant as the orientation during prayer. In the minds of his traditionalist critics, the epistemology of western science was incompatible with ritual performance as understood in traditional Islamic epistemology. After the controversy around the qibla had escalated in Yogyakarta, the authorities of Kauman decided to send Ahmad Dahlan back to Mecca in 1903; but while there, his views were likely reinforced rather than challenged. In the Hijaz, he studied with the Sumatran reformer Aḥmad Khāṭib and was exposed to a Cairene Reformism that emphasized science and rationality to fight ignorance and promote progress (Laffan 2002: 120). Indeed, with his openness to western science, Dahlan participated in a wider trend of reformism in Islam that considered European technologies and commodities not only compatible, but even potentially beneficial for Muslim belief and practice. In 1897, around the same time as Dahlan’s campaign in Yogyakarta, Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā in Cairo founded a magazine entitled al-Manār, or “The Lighthouse,” in which he published fatwas that explicitly endorsed the adoption of western technologies as boons to modern worshippers (see Halevi 2019). Others went even further, arguing that modern science and technology were inherently Islamic. These included Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb (d. 1969) and ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Qaṭlān (d. 1931), who published a journal from 1917 to 1919 titled Salafiyya Review (Ar. al-Majalla al-Salafiyya), in which they sought to introduce their readers to the religious and secular benefits and uses of the scientific insights of the pious ancestors (Ar. salaf) and their compatibility with modern, western scientific methodologies.33 In Southeast Asia, other modernists who had also lived and studied in the Middle East similarly strove to determine the correct orientation during prayer by making use of the scientific innovations of the West. These included Djamil Djambek (d. 1947), who reformed the Islamic education system in his native Minangkabau; Tahir Jalaluddin (d. 1956), who studied at Cairo’s al-Azhar and, as a specialist in astronomy, subsequently taught in Mecca before returning to Southeast Asia to spread Islamic reform; and the Cambodian scholar Mat Sales Haroun (d. 1950).34
The reorientation of the qibla, however, entailed more than having Kauman’s Muslims turn a certain number of degrees when praying at the Great Mosque. By modifying the map, Ahmad Dahlan also changed what it meant to face Mecca. When we read accounts of Dahlan’s initiative, the mathematical correction is often grafted onto a spiritual or moral rectification. In the following, I will use as an example an article published in an Indonesian journal that espouses such a view. The article’s author, Imroatul Munfaridah, discusses Ahmad Dahlan’s use of globe and compass as a way to set his fellow Muslims straight when praying and to address fundamental problems of the Islamic society of his day. “The Islamic umma had forgotten the religious requirements based on Qurʾan and Hadith,” Munfaridah explains. “They were deviating far from the true religious requirements” (2011: 101–02). Here, Ahmad Dahlan’s straightening of the qibla is immediately related to his reform as an intervention in a spiritual crisis, a connection that can often be found in Muhammadiyah narratives telling the beginnings of the organization.35 He had learned astronomy from traditional kyai in Java, but when he went to Mecca to go on the hajj and to deepen his knowledge, he learned to employ contemporary science that made use of the globe.36 Mecca, constructed from Ahmad Dahlan’s perspective, was no longer the Mecca of Sunan Kalijaga, whose reorientation of both the Mosque of Demak and the Kaʿba constituted Mecca as a spiritual state rather than a geographic site. Yet, Dahlan’s reorientation of the qibla also complicates the relation between center and periphery. His Mecca is accessible from anywhere because its precise location can be known wherever western, modern science and gadgets are employed. Like in Sunan Kalijaga’s story, the difference between center and periphery is thus undercut. This is not to say that the changes between the two stories are merely superficial. Clearly, there is a big difference between Sunan Kalijaga’s Sufi metaphysics and Ahmad Dahlan’s rationalism. Neither do their similarities point to an essential Javaneseness, a “culture of compromise” that can “never hope to progress.”37 Instead, I suggest that both stories show how the qibla in Islam fundamentally challenges conventional notions of periphery and center, irrespective of the wide range of meanings assigned to facing Mecca in history.
Sunan Kalijaga’s phenomenal realization of Mecca gives way to a new epistemology that also claims for itself a salvific truth. As Munfaridah explains, “the paradigm that was brought by K.H. Ahmad Dahlan had the objective to straighten religion (I. meluruskan agama) with reference to astronomy, which is related to the pious obligation of prayer by way of the direction of the qibla” (2011: 105). Straightening the qibla is thus understood as equivalent to straightening religion as a whole, aligning it with a new scientific epistemology that maps Mecca as present wherever correct scientific methodologies were used to establish the right qibla.38 Indeed, the correct epistemology in establishing the qibla appears to be almost more significant than the actual, physical orientation during prayer. Munfaridah’s article concludes with the note that while Ahmad Dahlan significantly improved the orientation during prayer, contemporary methodologies reveal that the direction he came up with, the 24° angle, was not quite correct either: according to the software Mawaqit, based on the most cutting-edge contemporary astronomic data, the angle should not be 24° but 25° 11′ 0″ (2011: 108). This deviation, Munfaridah argues, was insignificant because more crucially, Ahmad Dahlan established a new epistemology about astronomy that, going forward, would enable Southeast Asian Muslims to keep developing their scientific tools and to keep improving the qibla.
While oriented toward a center, Ahmad Dahlan defied the Kauman authorities and their established qibla, designating the periphery as a site where congruity and conformity to an accepted but fallacious standard could be overcome to establish a new paradigm and a new map of Java and the world. His locative orientation toward the center could only be realized through a rebellion and reform at the periphery that constructs Mecca as accessible whenever Muslims are keeping up with scientific advancements, always reforming established orientations as necessary. In Ahmad Dahlan’s new map, the distance and difference between Java and Mecca, or center and periphery, is used to transcend this distance while pointing instead to the new epistemology on which this conceptual map is based. In this new epistemology, the locative and the utopian lose their central status in defining what the map looks like, making space for modern science. When praying at a corrected angle at an old mosque in Java built before these reformist initiatives, Muslims are not just correctly oriented toward Mecca in an oddly slanted space; they also make a statement about how to know God, or to be oriented toward God.
If Mecca is constructed at the periphery, the very center is decentered and what looked like a localized vision therefore becomes much more utopian. The locative and the utopian become inextricably connected as the meaning of a correct orientation of the center is created at the periphery. Studies conducted elsewhere in the Muslim world would be needed to show whether the Javanese cases exemplify a broader dynamic in Islam. Yet the two stories I discussed demand that we revisit our understandings of the spatial imaginaries of religions. “Map is not territory,” J.Z. Smith cited Alfred Korzybski in his eponymous essay, “but maps are all we possess” (1993: 309). Sometimes, however, the two may not be as different as they seem, since maps do more than just represent the territory; in representing territory, they create it.
4 Conclusion
Mecca is in a particular place in the Arabian peninsula. But to figures as seemingly different as Sunan Kalijaga as remembered in the Seh Malaya narrative and Ahmad Dahlan as remembered in contemporary Muhammadiyah, this center of the Islamic world is accessible from any point once the significance of the peripheral point is grasped. In the case of Sunan Kalijaga, the peripheral point is the place where the divine that is sought in Mecca reveals itself, not through the peripheral devotee’s reaching Mecca, but through their looking for it. Only upon realizing that Mecca was in some sense always already there in Java can Sunan Kalijaga travel there at will and move Mecca and Java into alignment. For Ahmad Dahlan, the peripheral point is a place where the right tools and rationality must be deployed to determine the right relationship to Mecca. Aligning the Kauman mosque with the Kaʿba presses western tools into the service of Islam and also aligns religious practice with the norm, even as it defines the norm. The significance of there and here is upheld in both sets of memories, but the distinction is also meaningfully collapsed because in both cases, the alignment occurs as much in the architecture of mosques as in the mind and body of the worshipper, whether because Sunan Kalijaga wiggles the world into place, or because Ahmad Dahlan uses a globe and compass. If the world is charted correctly, space can become a vehicle to greater truths: Mecca comes to Java. Sometimes, it seems, map can be territory after all; or at the very least, the two meet in the cartographer’s imagination and the traveler’s journey.
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The Kauman is a quarter in many Javanese cities that is home to the kaum or religious officials. In Yogyakarta, the kaum of Kauman have traditionally been in charge of the Great Mosque (J. Masjid Gedhe), the spiritual center of the Yogyakarta Sultanate, erected in 1773. For more on the history of Kauman, see Bonneff 1985 and Adaby Darban 2010.
See Laffan 2002: 103–12 for a description of the educational milieu of Mecca at the time and the influence the Meccan teachers had on their Southeast Asian students.
The Javanese langgar kidul means “southern prayer house.” At the time, there were four prayer houses (J. langgar) in Kauman, where teachers would gather students for instructing them in Qurʾanic recitation, Islamic sciences, and communal prayer. Ahmad Dahlan’s langgar kidul was the site where Muhammadiyah came into being as a movement.
For more on Sunan Kalijaga, see also Bogaerts’s and Ricci’s contributions in this volume.
The coming of Islam to Java was described for instance by Djajadiningrat 1983, de Graaf and Pigeaud 1976: 1–24, and Ricklefs 2006: 11–32.
The narrative link of conversion to Islam on the one hand, and Mecca as the center of Islam on the other, also appears in more recent conversion narratives discussed in Hermansen 1999, where the embrace of Islam by Western subjects often culminates in their journey to Mecca.
A dated tombstone of a ruler of Samudera-Pasai, Malik al-Salih, bearing an Islamic inscription in Arabic, led scholars to believe that Samudera-Pasai had become Islamic by 1297. See Jones 1979: 133. See also Drewes 1968. More recently, Lambourn 2008 has complicated this assumption by showing that the tombstone in question originated two centuries after the ruler’s death, thus calling into question the veracity of the exact date.
Other examples include Malacca on the Malay peninsula, the city state that succeeded Samudera-Pasai as the economic, political, and religious center for the region, and which recorded a narrative that is markedly similar to the one told in Pasai, and Talloʾ in Sulawesi, where the Prophet arrives on a ship to teach the king to pray. A different variant can be found in a Bugis narrative, where the movement is reversed as the king journeys in a dream to Mecca, where he learns about Islam, thus also closing the geographic gap. See Jones 1979: 136–37, 149–52.
I follow Florida 1995 in my understanding of traditional Javanese literature. Florida (1995: 10) defines “traditional Java” as the “nonunitary discursive world through which a wide variety of Javanese subjects lived” during Dutch colonialism in Java. The literature of this discursive world, while heterogeneous, shared certain unifying characteristics, such as usually being composed in macapat meters (1995: 11), and their high degree of intertextuality and reflexivity (1995: 21).
This vision is, however, not limited to Islam, but can also be found in Judaism, where facing Jerusalem during prayer has been practiced since at least the Second Temple period. See Neis 2018.
In the Qurʾan, the qibla is specifically discussed in Sūrat al-Baqara: “Foolish people will say, ‘What has turned them away from the prayer direction they used to face?’ We only made the direction the one you used to face [Prophet] in order to distinguish those who follow the Messenger from those who turn on their heels … Turn your face in the direction of the Sacred Mosque: wherever you [believers] may be, turn your faces to it.” See Abdel Haleem 2010, 2: 142–44. For Prophetic traditions around the qibla, see Bukhārī 1976: 394, 405, 428. For a more general overview, see Wensinck and King 2012.
Specifically, Smith rejected Eliade’s understanding according to which the locative and utopian correspond to archaic and modern societies, respectively. Faure (1987), building on Smith, used the example of ancient China to show that the locative and utopian likewise do not map onto so-called “great” and “little” traditions.
See King 1982; Hawkins and King 1982: 104. A particularly interesting example is the qibla orientation of the Javanese in Suriname, who came as plantation workers in the 1890s and continued to face west during prayer, as they had done in Java. Even after their supposed error was pointed out to them, many insisted that they were nonetheless facing Mecca. See Suparlan 1995: 141–49; Hoefte 2017.
For more on the Seh Malaya and its textual antecedents, see Johns 1966; Arps 2011; and Quinn 2018.
The Sura of the Cave (Ar. Sūrat al-Kahf), the eighteenth chapter of the Qurʾan, is made up of three principal narratives, but all three of them seem to elude coherent narrativization. In the story of Mūsā and Khiḍr, the second of these three narratives (65–82), Khiḍr repeatedly acts outrageously, ultimately revealing that he has knowledge of the future and hidden things unknown to Mūsā that make his actions reasonable and good. Historically, Khiḍr has been a popular figure all over the Islamic world and is especially prominent in Sufi traditions.
This version is part of a Surakarta manuscript titled Various Books and Poems and Shaṭṭāriyyah Teachings (J. Sěrat Suluk Warna-Warni tuwin Wirid Syattariyah), a compilation that was inscribed in Surakarta in 1864 for K.G.P.H. Cakradiningrat by R. Panji Jayaasmara. See Florida 2012: 240–45 for a description of this compilation and the different suluk it comprises.
Cariyosipun Seh Mlaya Awit Kala Dereng Juměněng Wali, 1864. Inscribed for K.G.P.H. Cakradiningrat by R. Panji Jayaasmara. Surakarta, Radya Pustaka Museum, Surakarta, MS 333 (henceforth RP 333), 217–87.
The Javanese text reads as follows: “Wuwusěn Sinuhun Benang/arsa salat mring Měkah/ sakědhap netra wus rawuh/sabakdane salat pulang” (RP 333, 226).
The tapa ngidang is one of several ascetic practices that have likely been practiced in Java since before the advent of Islam. The precise meaning of the practice may have changed over time. Whereas Sunan Kalijaga lived with the deer in the forest and ran like them on all fours, at other times it appears to have been a dietary practice, only eating herbs and grass. See Juynboll 1921.
A more detailed discussion of these passages in the Seh Malaya, especially the significance of Nabi Kilir, can be found in Meyer 2021.
The Javanese term tapekong/těpekong references Tua Pek Kong, a popular deity among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, whose name literally means “Grand Uncle.” For more on Tua Pek Kong, see Chia 2017.
For an overview of the range of meanings of guwagarba, see Arps 2016: 563–64. I have opted to translate the term as womb for its connotations of gestation and new (spiritual) life. It could also be translated as “the depths of my body.”
Not all representations of Mecca in Javanese literature differentiate between an authentic internal and an insignificant geographical Mecca like the author of the Seh Malaya did. For a counterexample, see Ricci’s contribution to this volume, where Mecca and Demak are intimately linked, both spiritually and physically, for example through earth brought from Mecca to Java.
In the Dewa Ruci narrative, there is an even stronger notion of seeking interior knowledge, since Dewa Ruci, who invites Bima to enter him through his ear, is just a miniature replica of Bima himself.
Gadhuh, here translated as hold, means to be entrusted with and use something for a certain amount of time without possessing it.
See Florida 1995: 325–37 for a similar analysis of the construction of the Mosque of Demak in a different text. In her analysis, which complements mine, Sunan Kalijaga “effectively localizes universal Islam in Java” (1995: 337) in his construction of the Mosque of Demak. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me that another such example of a localization of universal Islam in Java can be found in the name of the city Kudus, an adaptation of al-Quds (Jerusalem). Such localizations are, of course, not exclusive to Java. According to Ricci 2019: 131, a Sri Lankan tradition holds that the Kaʿba was partially constructed from the rock of Adam’s Peak, where Adam fell to earth after his banishment from paradise.
Florida 1995: 327–32. See also Ricci’s chapter in this volume.
Alip is the first year in the eight-year cycle, or windu. Kulawu is one of thirty wuku weeks or pawukon, each lasting for seven days, in the wuku year of 210 days. For more on the pawukon, see Kumar 2018.
The year date, 1400, is given as a chronogram (J. sangkala), whereby particular words are associated with a number which, put together, are then read back to front. Sirna (extinguish) and ilang (disappear) appropriately indicate 0. Kartining (maker/works) indicates 4 and rat (world) is 1. Ricklefs (1978: 18–19) translates the sentence in a different manuscript as “disappeared, gone, was the prosperity of the world.” On the significance of the year 1400 AJ in Javanese chronicles marking the fall of Majapahit and the beginnings of Islam, see also Wieringa 2012.
See Florida 2019; Meyer 2021.
As cited in Chittick 1998: 92. See also Chittick 1989: 389 n. 6.
For more on these dynamics, see Laffan 2002.
See Lauzière 2010 for more on the intellectual commitments of Khaṭīb and Qaṭlān. According to Lauzière, these two modernists were instrumental in articulating a modernist vision of returning to the teachings of the pious ancestors (Ar. salafiyya), coining the contemporary understanding of Salafism.
See Munfaridah 2011 and Susiknan 2007: 10 for a list of Southeast Asian reformers who were committed to straightening the qibla and their relation to Ahmad Dahlan. For more on Tahir Jalaluddin, Djamil Djambek, and Mat Sales Haroun, see Ramli 1980; Abdullah 2014; and Bruckmayr 2019.
For an example of this, see Pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiyah 2010: 2–3.
More specifically, Ahmad Dahlan’s globe replaced the sine quadrant (A. rubʿ al-mujayyab), a device in the shape of a quarter circle that had been used by medieval Arabic astronomers. See King 1999: 16. According to Munfaridah, 2011: 107, the sine quadrant did not work in Yogyakarta because of its location below the equator and thus had to be replaced with the globe, which had not traditionally been used in spheric trigonometric calculations by Arab mathematicians. See also Susiknan 2007: 45–46 for an account of Dahlan’s scientific and mathematical innovations.
This was one of the central critiques of Javanese culture by Indonesia’s renowned writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, as detailed by Cheah 2003.
Again, it is instructive to compare this notion with Florida’s analysis, where the qibla in traditional Javanese literature means obedience in addition to geographical alignment. See Florida 1995: 332–37. In both cases, the right physical orientation engenders or is equivalent to a religious virtue. See also Rapoport 2020: 159–60 for a similar account of calculations of the qibla in Safavid Iran.