Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

1 9 2Islam i n World Cult u r e ssistance against the Dutch. The war was led by a Javanese prince, Diponogoro,who laid the political and symbolic foundation for his campaign during hisyounger days traveling between Islamic holy sites in Java (Carey 1992). ByD i p o n o g o r o ’s time, devoting a stage of one’s life to local pilgrimage and religiousstudy had become standard practice for young Javanese aristocrats.Diponogoro, however, used his Javano-Muslim wanderings to contact Muslimteachers and students across a wide area and to communicate to them hisideas on the centrality of Islam to his struggle to purify Java and Javanese culturefrom the threat he saw posed by the Dutch.Increasingly during the nineteenth century, resistance movements againstDutch colonialism inside and outside Java appealed to forms of Islam thatclaimed to express universally Islamic, rather than local or culturally specific,ideals. One well-known example of such a movement is the Padris, a We s tSumatran revolt that lasted for most of the 1820s and 1830s (Dobbin 1983). Itbegan with a group of Sumatran Muslim students returning home after studyingin Arabia, which at the time had only recently been revolutionized by Abda l - Wa h h a b ’s movement. These returning h a j j is brought with them a considerableamount of reformist orientation and energy, and they quickly convincedlocal p e s a n t re n and t a re k a t leaders to join their campaign to purify Islamic practiceand establish Islamic law in their region of Sumatra. They appear at first tohave been less directly concerned with colonial encroachment than with concernsover the purity and reform of Islamic religious lifestyles and practices.Their criticism of local custom and conflict with the established Muslim elitessoon began to attract the attention of the Dutch, however, who were concernedwith the region’s lucrative coffee trade. Thus, this internal Islamicstruggle about faith and practice, connected to events elsewhere in the Muslimworld, grew into an anticolonial campaign. To this day, some of the leaders ofthe Padri movement are remembered as national heroes in Indonesia.Islam and Rapid Change in the Modern EraIn the era leading up to the birth of modern Indonesia, there was a great expansionof the connections between Muslim Southeast Asia and the broaderIslamic world, due to breakthroughs in technologies of transportation andcommunications. Later in the nineteenth century, contact between Arabicspeakinglands and the Malay world was further facilitated by the opening ofthe Suez Canal in 1869 and the replacement of sailing vessels with steamships.The early twentieth century saw a sharp increase in the amount of steamshiptraffic moving into the Indian Ocean, including more ships that could carryMuslim pilgrims between Southeast Asian ports and the holy cities of Arabia( Vredenbregt 1962). Aside from conveying many short-term visitors for h a j j