Muslims through Discourse

by John R. Bowen

In this rich account of a Muslim society in highland Sumatra, Indonesia, John Bowen describes how men and women debate among themselves ideas of what Islam is and should be--as it pertains to all areas of their lives, from work to worship. Whereas many previous anthropological studies have concentrated on the purely local aspects of culture, this book captures and analyzes the tension between the local and universal in everyday life. Current religious differences among the Gayo stem from debates between "traditionalist" and "modernist" scholars that began in the 1930s, and reveal themselves in the ways Gayo discuss and perform worship, sacrifice, healing, and rites of birth and death, all within an Islamic framework.


Bowen considers the power these debates accord to language, especially in arguments over spells, rites of farming, hunting, and healing. Moreover, he traces in these debates a general conception of transacting with spirits that has shaped Gayo practices of sacrifice, worship, and aiding the dead. Bowen concludes by examining the development of competing religious ideas in the highlands, the alternative ritual forms and ideas they have pro-mulgated, and the implications of this phenomenon for the emergence of an Islamic public sphere.

Genres: Nonfiction

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

John Richard Bowen

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Midway through John R. Bowen's account of Islam in northern Sumatra comes an astonishing story. In it, Adam and Eve's daughter Fatima has a child with Muhammad (yes, the prophet) without so much as touching him. God informs Muhammad that he wishes him to sacrifice his daughter and place her in a field. She becomes the first rice, and God teaches Muhammad how harvest, thresh, and cook it, along with the rice-related rituals. Variations on the story are found throughout Western Indonesia. The story is shockingly ahistorical in a religion and in a region that both insistently explore and dispute the basic historical documents (not just the Qu'ran, but the stories of Muhammad's sayings and the various legal, doctrinal and mystical traditions that issue from them). It is surprising to find in Aceh, the oldest and reputedly the most religious of Indonesia's Muslim communities, one of those moments when the native belief system forces its way into the one that displaced il--like the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing on a hill that had been consecrated to an Aztec goddess (named Our Reverend Mother) or how shamanism endures throughout Asia, influencing whatever happens to be the major religion is Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or in this case, Islam. Bowen introduces moments like that throughout the text, teasing out their meaning in terms that are both academic and deeply sympathetic to many practitioners, even when they stand on opposite sides of a doctrine or accuse each other of bad magic. The nominal dispute in the discourse referenced in the title is a dispute between "traditionalist" and "modern" schools of Islam. The modernists, contrary to what one would expect from the use of the term. insist on using the Qu'ran as the foundation of the religion; the traditionalists also use the sayings of the prophet and the doctrines that have been developed over the intervening centuries. The modernists are in a sense like those early Protestants who emphasized the importance of reading the Bible for oneself (although it must be admitted that Islam offers no central authority like the Catholic Church to rebel against). There is some implication that the traditionalists prospered under the Dutch, and the modernists took over under the Japanese and favored independence; it is one of the hallmarks of Suharto's control that the government built a new mosque and controlled who offered sermons there, with traditionalists and modernists alternating. It is a dispute that reaches deep into local life, with the modernists opposing a communal feast when someone dies -- on grounds that it is not consonant with Muhammad's teaching, takes resources from the bereaved when they can least afford it, and that one can pray for oneself but not for the dead. They also differ on the meaning of the annual sacrifice. But scattered all through are these hints of earlier, enduring religions, like the two quarreling practitioners of magic, and an exorcism. There is a moving incident in which one caster of spells is anguished to learn that the Arabic that he has been using to give invulnerability are in fact a verse of the Qu'ran in which God called upon Muhammad to stop fighting.