![]() Quietly but tenaciously - just outside the great echo chamber of public space - it is growing as fast as the higher profile neo-orthodoxy. It is powerfully Islamic but it fuses Islam with local history, the ancient power of place and a pastiche of devotional practices with roots deep in the pre-Islamic past. Local pilgrimage is anything but pure and exclusive or rigidly authoritarian. Piety comes from obedience to religious authority and its rules. In the rhetoric of this orthodoxy the "real" Islam is pure and exclusive. The pilgrimage culture on the island of Java in Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim country - is a rebuke to the conservative orthodoxy that has been gaining ground in Indonesia's religious landscape since the 1980s. Java's pilgrimage culture is a dense, batik-like pattern of contradictions: seriousness collides with laughter curiosity with bewilderment piety with scepticism intense spirituality with, in some places, the joy of shopping. ![]()
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