Journal Special Issues by Verena Meyer
International Journal of Islam in Asia, 2024
Looking back at the articles collected in this issue, I want to propose that Asia is a privileged... more Looking back at the articles collected in this issue, I want to propose that Asia is a privileged space for Islamic studies for addressing three questions in particular that are relevant for the wider discipline and demand a radical rethinking of familiar understandings of Islam as it has come to be represented in contemporary scholarship. First, the highly heterogeneous landscapes of Islamic Asia invite us to consider the significance of cultural, linguistic, and religious complexity in Islam more broadly. Second, while exhibiting the fundamental changes that Asian Muslims have navigated against the background of the increasing reach of colonialism and globalization, the preceding articles simultaneously resist easy dichotomizations between tradition and modernity. And third, a focus on Islam in Asia allows us to reassess established paradigms of transmission with its various infrastructures, as well as understandings of centers and peripheries undergirding such processes of transmission.
Pilological Encounters, 2023
Contemporary Javanese Islam is often imagined as unusually peaceful, the result of an allegedly c... more Contemporary Javanese Islam is often imagined as unusually peaceful, the result of an allegedly conflict-free early history populated by Sufis and saints. Yet not all of Java’s Islamic history is peaceful, and neither were violent historic episodes always marginalized by historians and writers. This article discusses two literary accounts of a murder that happened in the early years of Mataram, the dynasty that facilitated widespread Islamization. Their two authors—Raden Ngabehi Suradipura and Pramoedya Ananta Toer—used the story as a familiar allegory to process their own experiences of violence and oppression in the colonial and postcolonial state. Belying normative visions of a teleology of peace, they present theo-political imaginaries in which violence is accepted in the cultivation of virtue and the creation—or aspirational creation—of a just polity. Through their literary work, these writers expressed their complex positionalities as they made sense of oppressive regimes, the political role of Islamic beliefs, and the normative content of history.
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2022
Indonesia and the Malay World, 2019
Introduction to the eponymous special issue in Indonesia and the Malay World 47 no 139.
Indonesia and the Malay World, 2019
Editorial: Indic-Islamic encounters in Javanese and Malay mystical literatures
Andrea Acri & Ver... more Editorial: Indic-Islamic encounters in Javanese and Malay mystical literatures
Andrea Acri & Verena Meyer
Pages: 277-284
Becoming a Bhairava in 19th-century Java
Andrea Acri
Pages: 285-307
The power of the heart that blazes in the world
An Islamic theory of religions in early modern Java
Bernard Arps
Pages: 308-334
A nativist defence of Javanism in late 19th-century Java
The Suluk Gaṭoloco and its co-texts in the Sĕrat Suluk Panaraga compilation
Edwin P. Wieringa
Pages: 335-352
Translating divinity
Punning and paradox in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetic Sufism
Verena Meyer
Pages: 353-372
Through the optics of imagination
The internal vision of the science of women
Vladimir Braginsky
Pages: 373-405
Articles by Verena Meyer
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2024
Although graves of famous figures are often important sites of commemoration where religious comm... more Although graves of famous figures are often important sites of commemoration where religious communities invoke a normative past, the very act of commemoration can coexist uneasily with a religious community's values and self-understanding. This is the case with Muhammadiyah, an Indonesian modernist Islamic mass organization focused on the purification of Islam from what they consider heretical innovations, including memory practices at graves. Yet, to differentiate themselves from radical Islamist organizations they find objectionable, Muhammadiyah's leadership has begun to draw on their organizational history and its physical remnants, including graves, to articulate a "moderate" identity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Yogyakarta, I show how Muhammadiyah's conflicting desires produce an ambiguity that is productive for articulating the organization's complex ideological positionings. In so doing, I argue against the pervasive claim that with modernity, Islam lost its tolerance and appreciation of ambiguity. "Have you heard of the grave that disappeared?" I was sitting in the office of the Council for Libraries and Information on the top floor of the old headquarters of Muhammadiyah, an Indonesian Islamic mass organization, on Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan Road, a major thoroughfare in downtown Yogyakarta. Founded in 1912 by the namesake of the road, Ahmad Dahlan (1868-1923), Muhammadiyah self-identifies as modernist (I. modernis) and progressive (I. berkemajuan). 1 The comfortable office was one of my favorite places during my field research in Yogyakarta, with books and magazines stacked everywhere, on shelves, in boxes, and on the floor, and a large square table in the middle for people to work, chat, and drink tea. I spent many
Ronit Ricci (ed.): Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, 2023
No matter where they are, Muslims around the world face the Kaʿba in Mecca dur- ing prayer. Yet t... more No matter where they are, Muslims around the world face the Kaʿba in Mecca dur- ing prayer. Yet the meaning of facing Mecca has not always and everywhere been the same. In this chapter, I discuss two famous stories of Javanese Muslims – one a semi-legendary saint, the other a modern reformer – who re-oriented their contempo- raries’ prayers by discerning a new and better way to align Java with Mecca. Comparing the two accounts, I argue that these Javanese examples share a religious imaginary in which a periphery is contingent on a center as the locus of authority. In the conceptual vocabulary of Jonathan Z. Smith, Islam appears to have a strong locative sense, where religious truth is mapped onto a central site. The two Javanese narratives, however, undercut this possibility of a clear distinction between center and periphery on which Smith’s theory rests, as it is from the periphery that the center is established and given its meaning. These accounts therefore de-center common understandings of religion and space and invite us to rethink the relation between center and periphery in reli- gious contexts anew.
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2022
The world, Fox shows in More than words, tends to be a lot more open-ended than we imagine, with ... more The world, Fox shows in More than words, tends to be a lot more open-ended than we imagine, with more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, not just in our philosophy but also our philology. As a student of Javanese literature, I had encountered glimpses of this open-endedness on the pages of manuscripts where we sometimes find little dots on top of Javanese letters. These dots often appear in the literature of Islamic Java written in the carakan alphabet. Known to us as diacritics, they are used for originally Arabic words to produce sounds for which there is no letter in Javanese. Not all originally Arabic words get dots in Javanese texts: while a significant percentage of the Javanese vocabulary is adopted from Arabic, many words have become naturalised to the extent that their origin has become invisible. Sometimes, however, one does find dotted letters, marking words as somehow different from the other Javanese words around them. With Fox's analysis in More than words, I want to ask: how do we understand these dots? And what should we do with them?
Indonesia and the Malay World, 2019
This article examines the 16th-17th century Malay poet Hamzah Fansuri as a figure at the threshol... more This article examines the 16th-17th century Malay poet Hamzah Fansuri as a figure at the threshold between not only two religious traditions, but also two linguistic worlds. Hamzah Fansuri is well known for introducing the Sufi poetic tradition to Malay-speaking audiences, translating the Arabic thought of Ibn al-ʿArabī into Malay verse. Writing in Jawi, he frequently employed Arabic words and bilingual puns. This article explores how, through his puns, Hamzah made use of the incommensurabilities of the Arabic and Malay languages to draw attention to the infinite and incomprehensible difference between God and humans, while showing how everything that exists does so by virtue of its participation in the reality of wujūd, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s term for God’s being, which is identical to God’s being found. Hamzah’s practice of translation and his puns is then used to bridge a divide in western theories of translation represented by Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur’s work. Whereas Benjamin emphasises an ontological reality that opens up through the process of translation and Ricoeur emphasises an epistemological process, Hamzah collapses the distinction through wujūd, being and finding. Hamzah’s puns can be understood as a translation that allow the incomprehensible real to be gestured at through language, as in Benjamin, even as it involves the reader in an unending hermeneutical process, like Ricoeur.
Wacana, 2021
The Seh Mlaya is a narrative tradition of Sunan Kalijaga’s conversion and becoming a wali that is... more The Seh Mlaya is a narrative tradition of Sunan Kalijaga’s conversion and becoming a wali that is well-known for its drawing on pre-Islamic narrative and discursive legacies. In this article, I explore the Islamic genealogies of the narrative as told in a Surakarta manuscript (RP 333). I argue that the author uses the verse narrative to articulate two prominent, yet seemingly opposed, intellectual and spiritual traditions in Islamic Java and the relation between them: the speculative and ecstatic teachings of the Sufi lineage of the Syattariyah on the one hand, and Ghazālī’s work with its emphasis on obedience and the purification of the soul on the other. Sunan Kalijaga’s quest narratively holds together these two currents and even gestures at a transcendence of their difference as Sunan Kalijaga’s efforts, even as they fail, lead to his realization of guidance.
Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde , 2021
Candra Aditya’s short film Dewi pulang (2018) shows how Dewi’s life in Jakarta is in tension with... more Candra Aditya’s short film Dewi pulang (2018) shows how Dewi’s life in Jakarta is in tension with the life of her Javanese village, to which she returns when her father dies. Understanding Jakarta and the village as Wittgensteinean ‘forms of life’, I argue that the film portrays the two as simultaneously antagonistic and mutually intertwined, as each form of life is present in the other as a trace. The film uses the Javanese literary convention of sěmu, through which subtle messages are simultaneously revealed and concealed, to suggest that the transcendence of the conflict in the final scene defies reification through language because it seems impossible. By pointing to the reality of the unthinkable, the film proposes an understanding of incompatible forms of life and social locations as connected through complex interplays of presences and absences.
Modern Sufis and the State: The Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond, 2020
This chapter will discuss the Indonesian scholar Nurcholish Madjid’s (1939-2005) use of the term ... more This chapter will discuss the Indonesian scholar Nurcholish Madjid’s (1939-2005) use of the term ‘Neo-Sufism’ in order to complicate the idea that Indonesian progressive Muslim intellectual have been on the receiving end of a one-way stream of cultural transmission favoring a modern, political Islam, with the very transfer process itself being mediated by western cold war interests. Madjid was Fazlur Rahman’s PhD student at the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1984 and, after returning to Indonesia, framed many of his ideas about the role of Islam in Indonesian politics with the term ‘Neo-Sufism,’ which was famously coined by Rahman. Madjid’s use of this term will serve as an example and a lens to investigate the ways in which Muslim intellectuals in New Order Indonesia participated in global debates on the role of Islam in contemporary politics from the vantage point of their own navigation of the marginalization and instrumentalization of Islam under Soeharto’s regime.
Events by Verena Meyer
New York Southeast Asia Network Conference, 2019
Indonesia’s largest Islamic modernist mass organization, Muhammadiyah, was founded in 1912 by Ahm... more Indonesia’s largest Islamic modernist mass organization, Muhammadiyah, was founded in 1912 by Ahmad Dahlan in his native Yogyakarta. Since then, Muhammadiyah has followed an agenda of, on the one hand, social activism, especially in the sectors of education and health; and, on the other, the purification of Islam from the so-called impure departures of traditionalism, especially the veneration of leaders, graves, or objects. As a result of these efforts to purify Islam and to prevent fetishization, since its beginnings Muhammadiyah refrained from commemorating Ahmad Dahlan’s life or the other historical leaders of the movement. However, as a result of having lost members to Islamist groups that have emerged since the fall of the New Order, Muhammadiyah’s leadership has recently been promoting memory work as a strategy to strengthen the organization’s identity. But memory practices, especially those associated with sites and objects, are in an uneasy relationship with the organization’s impulse to purify and to eliminate fetishization.
Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around the different branches of the organization’s central leadership in Yogyakarta and textual research of the Muhammadiyah’s official publications, this paper seeks to tease out how compromises between the organization’s conflicting agendas and anxieties and its quest for a moderate, modernist identity are negotiated. Practices of remembering the organization’s history promoted by the leadership include commemorations of people and events in the organization’s journals; seminars; the foundation of a Muhammadiyah museum; and the promotion of tours to historical sites. Focusing on the pedagogical steps the Muhammadiyah leadership has taken to cultivate among its members group memory and identity, I will argue that Muhammadiyah’s strategy entails the understanding that the memory’s contents contain the purifying impulses to counter the danger of fetishization that it presents.
Talks by Verena Meyer
Graves of famous figures are often important sites of commemoration where religious communities c... more Graves of famous figures are often important sites of commemoration where religious communities construct group identities by referring to a normative past. Yet for some, the very act of commemoration can sit uneasily with what the normative content of the past is understood to be. Drawing on ethnographic research in Java among members of Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously modernist Muslim organization, I show how their engagement with these grave matters balances the conflicting anxieties of forgetting their past or clinging to it, arguing that the tensions that emerge are productive sites for the articulation of the organization’s complex ideological positionings.
Conferences by Verena Meyer
Book Reviews by Verena Meyer
Review of David Kloos, Mark R. Westmoreland, Leonie Schmidt, & Bart Barendregt (Eds.), Provocative images in contemporary Islam, 2024
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Journal Special Issues by Verena Meyer
Andrea Acri & Verena Meyer
Pages: 277-284
Becoming a Bhairava in 19th-century Java
Andrea Acri
Pages: 285-307
The power of the heart that blazes in the world
An Islamic theory of religions in early modern Java
Bernard Arps
Pages: 308-334
A nativist defence of Javanism in late 19th-century Java
The Suluk Gaṭoloco and its co-texts in the Sĕrat Suluk Panaraga compilation
Edwin P. Wieringa
Pages: 335-352
Translating divinity
Punning and paradox in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetic Sufism
Verena Meyer
Pages: 353-372
Through the optics of imagination
The internal vision of the science of women
Vladimir Braginsky
Pages: 373-405
Articles by Verena Meyer
Events by Verena Meyer
Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around the different branches of the organization’s central leadership in Yogyakarta and textual research of the Muhammadiyah’s official publications, this paper seeks to tease out how compromises between the organization’s conflicting agendas and anxieties and its quest for a moderate, modernist identity are negotiated. Practices of remembering the organization’s history promoted by the leadership include commemorations of people and events in the organization’s journals; seminars; the foundation of a Muhammadiyah museum; and the promotion of tours to historical sites. Focusing on the pedagogical steps the Muhammadiyah leadership has taken to cultivate among its members group memory and identity, I will argue that Muhammadiyah’s strategy entails the understanding that the memory’s contents contain the purifying impulses to counter the danger of fetishization that it presents.
Talks by Verena Meyer
Conferences by Verena Meyer
Book Reviews by Verena Meyer
Andrea Acri & Verena Meyer
Pages: 277-284
Becoming a Bhairava in 19th-century Java
Andrea Acri
Pages: 285-307
The power of the heart that blazes in the world
An Islamic theory of religions in early modern Java
Bernard Arps
Pages: 308-334
A nativist defence of Javanism in late 19th-century Java
The Suluk Gaṭoloco and its co-texts in the Sĕrat Suluk Panaraga compilation
Edwin P. Wieringa
Pages: 335-352
Translating divinity
Punning and paradox in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetic Sufism
Verena Meyer
Pages: 353-372
Through the optics of imagination
The internal vision of the science of women
Vladimir Braginsky
Pages: 373-405
Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around the different branches of the organization’s central leadership in Yogyakarta and textual research of the Muhammadiyah’s official publications, this paper seeks to tease out how compromises between the organization’s conflicting agendas and anxieties and its quest for a moderate, modernist identity are negotiated. Practices of remembering the organization’s history promoted by the leadership include commemorations of people and events in the organization’s journals; seminars; the foundation of a Muhammadiyah museum; and the promotion of tours to historical sites. Focusing on the pedagogical steps the Muhammadiyah leadership has taken to cultivate among its members group memory and identity, I will argue that Muhammadiyah’s strategy entails the understanding that the memory’s contents contain the purifying impulses to counter the danger of fetishization that it presents.