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8 The Discourse on Islam and Music in West Java, with Emphasis on the Music Group, Ath-Thawaf

Wim van Zanten

in Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia

This chapter addresses the elements that allow a contemporary composition to be considered both Islamic and regional in West Java, the area known as Sunda. It first explores the general debates on ... More

This chapter addresses the elements that allow a contemporary composition to be considered both Islamic and regional in West Java, the area known as Sunda. It first explores the general debates on music and Islam in Indonesia and those circulating in West Java, and then focuses on a case study of the topic around the contemporary band, Ath-Thawaf. The first half of the chapter reveals how special verse forms, such as macapat, became affixed to a variety of ritual events and were used to spread Islamic teachings throughout the West Java region. It is argued that, while religious music has become more prominent in public life since 1980, most people in West Java have considered music and other performing arts from West Java as compatible with Islam. Some intellectuals hold the view that music and art should not be judged solely in religious terms as forbidden (haram) and permitted (halal), but also in terms of the aesthetical values of the beautiful and the ugly. The chapter answers the important question “What makes the music produced in the Sundanese soundscape Islamic?” through the Islam-inspired music of Ath-Thawaf, which combines Sundanese cultural elements with global music elements and Islamic themes. This band's music provides a context for examining the various ways that Sundanese Muslims, musicians, and intellectuals view music and its potential uses. The group and its leader, Yus Wiradiredja, are connected to the performing arts institute (STSI) in Bandung, thus the group's cultural expressions have tacit regional sanction, are widely acceptable, and begin to define how a modern form of hybridized music can be interpreted as Islamic. The chapter looks at the music and notes from their recordings, explores Wiradiredja's words and ideas, and analyzes a composed version of the Islamic confession of faith to illustrate the aesthetics and elements that create a modern Islamic music in West Java.Less

Triangulating Sundanese Dance

in Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

Sundanese dance derives meaning from the relationships between three readily recognizable elements: ronggeng, drumming that animates male dancers, and a sense of freedom on the part of the dancers. ... More

Sundanese dance derives meaning from the relationships between three readily recognizable elements: ronggeng, drumming that animates male dancers, and a sense of freedom on the part of the dancers. These elements comprise three “sides” of an erotic triangle, each of which explores a cultural contradiction; when taken together, these model the twists and turns of Sundanese gender ideologies. This chapter applies this trigonometry to a selection of recent Sundanese performances to explore the relationship of participatory men's dance traditions to the presentational genres that reference them and examine why some of these new genres seem to be more successful at transforming Sundanese dance—and Sundanese values—than others.Less

Introduction

Julian Millie

in Hearing Allah's Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam

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 ... More

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.Less

The Unique Voice … and Its Travails

Julian Millie

in Hearing Allah's Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam

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. ... More

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.Less

The Languages of Preaching in the Islamic Public Sphere

Julian Millie

in Hearing Allah's Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam

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 ... More

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.Less

Translating Asia

Robert K. Batchelor

in London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689

Oxford’s Bodleian library in 1549 and 1687 is used as a symbol of broader changes occurring in nearby London, including a shift in the kinds of texts collected and read there. This introduces the ... More

Oxford’s Bodleian library in 1549 and 1687 is used as a symbol of broader changes occurring in nearby London, including a shift in the kinds of texts collected and read there. This introduces the discussion of translation of Asian texts and how they can serve as sources to open up new dimensions of the history of London during this period. R. G. Collingwood’s notion of “re-enactment” is used to open up the problem that historians face in incorporating translation between languages into their work, which often relies on ideas of national continuity. The basic history of London in this period is reviewed and described in terms of a kind of localized break from the past and a shift in the national and regional economy because of urbanization. The content of subsequent chapters in the book, which are organized historically, is reviewed.Less

Discourses of Sundanese Dance

in Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

This book develops the argument that men's dancing persists in myriad forms in West Java because it satisfies a crucial need: through dancing, participants explore and enact the contradictions ... More

This book develops the argument that men's dancing persists in myriad forms in West Java because it satisfies a crucial need: through dancing, participants explore and enact the contradictions inherent in Sundanese gender identities. The combination of drumming and a female voice in effect grant men permission to “perform”—literally, onstage—the behaviors that constitute their own masculine identities that they unconsciously enact all the time. This chapter introduces some of the key concepts involved in the analysis: the panorama of Sundanese dance and some of the discourses around it; Sundanese ideas of masculinity and sexuality and how malu (shame) helps to regulate these ideas; and how masculinity, malu, and freedom govern Sundanese dance events. It also discusses how Sundanese dance might be conceived as an erotic triangle.Less

Drumming and Power

in Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

This chapter investigates the interaction between dancing and drumming. It argues that drum sounds have come to represent simultaneously and paradoxically both a cause and an effect of movement. The ... More

This chapter investigates the interaction between dancing and drumming. It argues that drum sounds have come to represent simultaneously and paradoxically both a cause and an effect of movement. The ambiguity about whether movement makes sounds or sounds animate dancers allows both explanations to be “true.” In large part because of this ambiguity, drumming emerges as a potent metaphor for power in Sundanese performance. Drumming, like Javanese power, is “an invisible presence,” with considerable influence on the actions of others. Since the control of invisible power is part and parcel of the creation and maintenance of gender identities, and because masculinity is measured by assessing how individuals accumulate, maintain, and display power, an awareness of how drumming models power is a key to understanding this element of erotic triangles in Sundanese dance.Less

Dance Events and Freedom

in Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

This chapter explores the landscape of Sundanese men's dance events up to the early twenty-first century and investigates changes and continuities in event protocols. The third essential piece of a ... More

This chapter explores the landscape of Sundanese men's dance events up to the early twenty-first century and investigates changes and continuities in event protocols. The third essential piece of a dance event is the potential for dancing by male participants who perceive themselves to be free of constraints. The male participants themselves dance the contradiction that regulates their daily lives: maintaining a sense of self, individual responsibility, and individual power in a social world that demands conformity. They must negotiate how to be bangga and malu at the same time.Less

The Erotic Triangle of Sundanese Dance

in Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

The erotic triangle of Sundanese dance is not a fixed structure. Rather, it provides a flexible framework not only for affirming ideologies of gender and power through interactive dancing, but for ... More

The erotic triangle of Sundanese dance is not a fixed structure. Rather, it provides a flexible framework not only for affirming ideologies of gender and power through interactive dancing, but for contesting them as well. This chapter begins by looking at the development of a pivotal Sundanese dance genre—tari kursus—through the lens of the erotic triangle to demonstrate how this flexibility operates. A geometric approach clarifies how tari kursus could be seen as maintaining traditional values about men's dancing—exhibiting signs of a participatory nature—while simultaneously being an icon of Sundanese presentational dance. Such an analysis also helps us to understand the always changing, often uneasy relationship between Sundanese classical dance and the enduring Sundanese regard for men's improvised dancing. It culminates in a theoretical exposition of how erotic triangles operate in Sundanese dance.Less

Fāṭima in Nusantara

Wendy Mukherjee

in Shi'ism In South East Asia: Alid Piety and Sectarian Constructions

The members of the Prophet Muhammad's House – he, his daughter Fatimah, her husband Ali and their two sons Hasan and Husein – receive veneration by Shi’is and Sunnis alike. Short narratives in which ... More

The members of the Prophet Muhammad's House – he, his daughter Fatimah, her husband Ali and their two sons Hasan and Husein – receive veneration by Shi’is and Sunnis alike. Short narratives in which the Prophet teaches Fatimah the womanly virtues, although probably Shi’a in origin, are found within all of the major Islamic manuscript traditions of Nusantara, the Malay–Indonesian areas of south east Asia. These texts entered the archipelago with Islam itself and were preserved in various forms up to the beginning of print culture around the turn of the twentieth century. While Fatimah was initially represented as a spiritual figure within an eschatological frame of reference, with the passing of time we see a development towards adab style texts in which the Prophet advises his daughter on wider and more mundane obligations to husband, household and neighbours in her community.Less