1653 - 6355 . Published 2006 - 05 - 04 1 Islam and Traweh Prayers in Java Unity , Diversity , and Cultural Smoothness

This article has as its main focus the supererogatory nightly prayers, the traweh prayers, as they are performed in the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia. These prayers are of immense importance to the Javanese Muslim community, and are often regarded as constituting an obligatory part of the Islamic religion. In the article, the author describes how these prayers are performed in both modernist and traditionalist settings in Central Java, and argues that different ideas of how they should be performed not necessarily plague the Javanese umat, but rather only colors it. This, it is argued, is due to the cultural smoothness of the Javanese. Javanese Muslims orient their daily lives around the five obligatory daily prayers (I. sholat), and their year around the fasting month of Ramadan. It is the performance of these rituals with their various sub-rituals that makes people Muslims in Java. As such, the self-ascribed Muslim identity of the Javanese cannot easily be detached from the execution of the prayers and the Ramadan fast. Muslim identity is thus far more concerned with ritual practice than with theological or philosophical speculation. This relationship between practice and faith is not peculiar to Islam in Java; rather, it can be said to be the norm outside Christian Protestant circles. Tord Olsson has argued that there has been an unfounded conviction among scholars of religion that religion is first and foremost about questions pertaining to faith and belief, and only secondarily to rituals. Olsson assigns this misperception to the intellectual and (conscious or unconscious) Protestant background of most western scholars who have studied religion, and to the fact that these same 1 This article was first published in Indonesia and the Malay World (vol. 33, no. 95, March 2005). It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editors of IMW. 2 I., J., and A. in this text refer to Indonesian, Javanese, and Arabic respectively. 3 This article is based on a three-year sojourn in Java between 1999 and 2002, and a two-month visit in connection with Ramadan in 2003.