Abstract
This article is a feminist ethnographic exploration of how ‘indigenous’ notions of a ‘sacred feminine’ shape Sufi praxis on the island of Lombok in the eastern part of Indonesia in Southeast Asia. I demonstrate through long-term immersive anthropological fieldwork how in her indigenous form as Dewi Anjani ‘Spirit Queen of Jinn’ and as ‘Holy Saint of Allah’ who rules Lombok from Mount Rinjani, together with a living female saint and Murshida with whom she shares sacred kinship, these feminine beings shape the kind of Sufi praxis that has formed in the largest local Islamic organization in Lombok, Nahdlatul Wathan, and its Sufi order, Hizib Nahdlatul Wathan. Arguments are situated in a Sufi feminist standpoint, revealing how an active integration of indigeneity into understandings of mystical experience gives meaning to the sacred feminine in aspects of Sufi praxis in both complementary and hierarchical ways without challenging Islamic gender constructs that reproduce patriarchal expressions of Sufism and Islam.
Highlights
The ‘sacred feminine’ as cultural praxis is an under-researched area in the anthropology of Sufism in Indonesia, mostly because normative Sufism as organized through the tariqa, like Islam, is structurally and ideologically patriarchal and formally speaks to a male audience
I begin by looking at what I call ‘Muslim ethnoscapes’ into which Islamic heterogeneity is inscribed through praxis in overlapping, shifting, and complex ways in Indonesia and Lombok, and turn to locate Dewi Anjani in wider Indonesian patterns of sacred relations between Spirit Queens and rulers, in order to provide a depth of understanding for the ethnography that I present thereafter in relation to Nahdlatul Wathan’s Sufi order
Ummi Raehanun ascended to sainthood in 2010. Through his ongoing role in the ghaib, Maulana Syeikh informed his disciples that his daughter had ascended to sainthood and that she should be honored. In her role as head of the Sufi order, Tarekat Hizib Nahdlatul Wathan, this living female saint, perceived to be a Murshida, acted as a spiritual head, rather than a ‘traditional’ Murshid or a Syeikh, by overseeing the network of male ahli wirid located across Lombok and other islands in Indonesia
Summary
The ‘sacred ( read as divine) feminine’ as cultural praxis is an under-researched area in the anthropology of Sufism in Indonesia, mostly because normative Sufism as organized through the tariqa, like Islam, is structurally and ideologically patriarchal and formally speaks to a male audience. Spirit Queens ( read as Goddesses) play roles in the unseen ‘mythical,’ eternal realms in their augmentation of power in human kings or leaders through marriage or other historical dynastic partnerships in Sumatra, the Sultanates of Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Central Java, and as I show here for the first time, in Lombok In such communities, we find an ongoing reproduction of ritual praxis that invokes the feminine as sacred in a cosmology that has indigenized Sufism. I begin by looking at what I call ‘Muslim ethnoscapes’ into which Islamic heterogeneity is inscribed through praxis in overlapping, shifting, and complex ways in Indonesia and Lombok, and turn to locate Dewi Anjani in wider Indonesian patterns of sacred relations between Spirit Queens and rulers, in order to provide a depth of understanding for the ethnography that I present thereafter in relation to Nahdlatul Wathan’s Sufi order. There are Sufi orders that exist alongside these ‘formally’ recognized ones, and some of these embrace the teachings of, and those derived from, Ibn Al-Arabi
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