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West Java is a diverse Islamic society in which different segments attach contrasting meanings to Islamic communications. Many Muslims are accustomed to listening to preachers when carrying out their routines of piety and celebration. These preachers shape their messages to everyday realities. Other segments problematize routine preaching, arguing that preaching should enable Muslims to transcend their everyday realities. The chapter introduces West Java and its capital city, Bandung, and conveys the multi-faceted Islamic heritage of the region, providing background to the critiques of preaching produced by Muslim elites of the region.

Chapter Two documents waves of novelty in preaching styles, plotting successive embraces by West Javanese Muslims of new preaching forms that remain valid for contemporary audiences. The sketch is constructed around clusters of terms that correspond to historically-specific understandings of Muslim subjectivity.

Chapter Five explores the ways in which the preaching styles analysed in the two preceding chapters are publically evaluated, pointing out the way in which public norms about appropriate communication inform negative judgements of one of them (Al-Jauhari’s). The analytical approach to those norms is made through the subject of language selection (Sundanese versus Indonesian), a variable that expresses listeners’ recognition of a hierarchy of preaching styles.

Chapter Three is the first in a bracket of two which compares orations by two skilled preachers, and which provides contextual background to the evaluations of preaching explored in later chapters. Kyai Al-Jauhari (b. 1971) is the most popular preacher amongst village audiences in West Java. His success is premised on his bold and shocking exercise of virtuoso skills in a number of performance genres. These skills are in great demand by mosque committees intent on attracting large audiences to community celebrations. At the same time, his unique voice leads to negative evaluations from outside the environment in which his preaching is valued so highly.

Chapter Eight analyses preaching as medium for change, viewing it from the perspective of an activist group that contributes to public contest by circulating ideas through the Province’s media. The group is frustrated by the pragmatic tendencies of preachers who realise their careers depend on avoidance of contest. The Chapter highlights the distinctions between oral preaching and print publication as modes for the conduct of public contest.

This chapter notes how the study of Islamic preaching came into fruition. This study is the accumulated product of several periods of field research, the longest of which was the first, an eighteen-month residence in a provincial town in Upper Egypt. The late 1970s marked the beginning of a time of exceptional socioreligious ferment in Egypt. The fact of being an American in Egypt at this time occasionally invited direct associations between the author of this book and the official foreign policy maneuvers that were then in high profile. He was Christian engaged on quite friendly terms with Islamic preachers. But when the author went back to Egypt in 1984–1985, hoping to reside in Minya to follow up and elaborate on earlier research, he shifted the focus to mosques and preaching on the national and transnational level.

Chapter Nine reflects further on the meanings of oral preaching in Indonesia’s Islamic public sphere, searching for alternatives to the modernist perspectives explored in earlier chapters. It finds support for the medium in the traditionalist project of the mass organisation known as NU (Nahdlatul Ulama, or the Rising of the Scholars). Through its doctrine as well as its characteristic forms of public communication, the organisation advocates passivity as an acceptable Muslim position.