¹ Partial (and, in the case of the former, very free) English translations by Zoetmulder, P. J., Pantheism and Monism in Javanese Suluk Literature: Islamic and Indian Mysticism in an Indonesian Setting (Leiden, 1994), pp. 231–33Google Scholar, on the basis of mss. Leiden Cod. Or. 1795 I, pp. 191–95, and Cod. Or. 1796, pp. 91–95); and Florida, N., ‘Sex wars: writing gender relations in nineteenth-century Java’, in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, (ed.) Sears, L. (Durham, 1996), pp. 207–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the basis of ms. Keraton Surakarta 502, pp. 78–80, are available, as well as a complete translation into German by Wieringa, E., ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige? Der Kampf zwischen Javanismus und Islam im Suluk Lebé Lonthang’, Der Islam LXXVIII (2001), pp. 131–133Google Scholar, on the basis of ms. Leiden Cod. Or. 1796, pp. 91–95.

² See ‘The Islamic genealogies of the Suluk Lonthang’, below.

³ See Ricklefs, M., Polarizing Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (Honolulu, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laffan, M., The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige’, p. 130.

⁴ Cohen, M., ‘Brai in performance: religious ecstasy and art in Java’, in Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia, (eds.) Harnish, D. and Rasmussen, A. (Oxford, 2011), pp. 132–160CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Karamustafa, A., God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁶ Acri, A., ‘Becoming a Bhairava in 19th-century Java’, Indonesia and the Malay World XLVII (2019), pp. 285–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Acri, A., ‘Horror, transgression, and power: the “demonic numinous” in the Tantra-influenced literatures and visual arts of Java and Bali’, Bulletin de l’École française d'Extrême-Orient CVII (2022), pp. 137–206Google Scholar; Acri, A., ‘“Hard-core” Tantric traditions and the cult of Bhairava in Java’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies, (eds.) Payne, R. and Hayes, G. (Oxford and New York, 2024)Google Scholar.

⁷ Florida, ‘Sex wars’, pp. 221–224.

⁸ See Suluk Lonthang v. 8: ‘In truth there is no male or female!’

⁹ Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism, pp. 231–233.

¹⁰ Florida, N., ‘Writing traditions in colonial Java: the question of Islam’, in Cultures of Scholarship, (ed.) Humphreys, S. (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 187–217Google Scholar.

¹¹ A. Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions (New York, 1882), pp. 42–43; W. Marsden, The History of Sumatra, Containing an Account of the Government, Laws, Customs, and Manners of the Native Inhabitants, with a Description of the National Productions, and a Relation of the Ancient Political State of that Island (London, 1811), p. 346.

¹² C. Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago, 1968), p. 48.

¹³ For a Javanese critique, see I. Afifi, Saya, Jawa dan Islam (Yogyakarta, 2019).

¹⁴ See N. Florida, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (Durham, 1995); and Florida, ‘Writing traditions in colonial Java’, pp. 187–217.

¹⁵ Laffan, Makings of Indonesian Islam; T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005).

¹⁶ M. Khan, Who Is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms (New York, 2021); E. Morgenstein Fuerst, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad (London, 2018).

¹⁷ D. Ludden, Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (Oxford, 2006); A. Truschke, ‘Hindutva's dangerous rewriting of history’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal XXIV.XXV (2020), pp. 1–15.

¹⁸ C. Ernst and B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York, 2002); S. Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill, 2007).

¹⁹ C. Bellamy, The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (Berkeley, 2011); A. Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford, 2010); A. Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Palo Alto, 2017).

²⁰ See the introduction to the Special Issue edited by A. Acri and V. Meyer, ‘Indic-Islamic encounters in Javanese and Malay mystical literatures’, Indonesia and the Malay World XLVII (2019), pp. 277–284, and various contributions found therein, including Acri, ‘Becoming a Bhairava’, pp. 285–307; B. Arps, ‘The power of the heart that blazes in the world: an Islamic theory of religions in early modern Java’, Indonesia and the Malay World XLVII (2019), pp. 308–334; V. Braginsky, ‘Through the optics of imagination: the internal vision of the science of women’, Indonesia and the Malay World XLVII (2019), pp. 373–405; V. Meyer, ‘Translating divinity: punning and paradox in Hamzah Fansuri's poetic Sufism’, Indonesia and the Malay World XLVII (2019), pp. 353–372; and E. Wieringa, ‘A nativist defense of Javanism in late 19th-century Java: the Suluk Gaṭoloco and its co-texts in the Sěrat Panaraga compilation’, Indonesia and the Malay World XLVII (2019), pp. 335–352. See also S. Headley, Durga's Mosque: Cosmology, Conversion and Community in Central Javanese Islam (Singapore, 2004); and V. Gottowick, ‘Pilgrims, prostitutes, and ritual Seks: heterodox ritual practices in the context of the Islamic veneration of saints in Central Java’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde CLXXIV (2018), pp. 393–421; V. Gottowick, ‘Ritual, sex and the body: heterodox ritual practices at pilgrimage sites in Central Java’, The Pacific Journal of Anthropology XXI (2020), pp. 332–351. The last two articles by Gottowick on heterodox ritual practices in modern Central Java are particularly relevant as they draw a parallel between ritual sex and Tantric traditions to show that the Islamisation of Java is not a linear process. Note, however, that they are marred by the author's reliance on outdated secondary sources on Indian Tantra such as Woodroffe, Bharati, and Eliade, and of a controversial publication by Peter Levenda on Tantra in Java rather than the growing body of specialised scholarly research produced in the past two decades. The statement in Gottowick, ‘Pilgrims, prostitutes, and ritual Seks’, p. 408, borrowed from R. Rubinstein, Beyond the Realm of the Senses: The Balinese Ritual of Kekawin Composition (Leiden, 2000), p. 224, that ‘Tantrism remains a largely unexplored field in Indonesia as elsewhere’ reflects a state of the art of at least two or three decades ago.

²¹ Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism, pp. 231–233.

²² Florida, ‘Sex wars’.

²³ Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’.

²⁴ See Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java: Catalogue Raisonné of Javanese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Public Collections in the Netherlands, vol. II: Descriptive List of Javanese Manuscripts (The Hague, 1968), p. 28. For the edition, see Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’.

²⁵ See Pigeaud, Literature of Java, II, p. 842.

²⁶ See Florida, Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts, vol. 1: Introduction and Manuscripts of the Karaton Surakarta (Ithaca, NY, 1993), p. 279.

²⁷ See Florida, Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts, vol. 2: Manuscripts of the Mangkunagaran Palace (Ithaca, NY, 2000), p. 205.

²⁸ See Florida, Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts, vol. 3: Manuscripts of the Radya Pustaka Museum and the Hardjonagaran Library (Ithaca, NY, 2012), pp. 238–240.

²⁹ See ibid., pp. 240–245.

³⁰ See Florida, Javanese Literature, I, p. 283.

³¹ See, for example, Suluk Lunthang, Leiden Cod. Or. 2319, pp. 70–73, and Leiden Cod. Or. 8562, p. 45.

³² See, for example, the aforementioned Babad Tanah Djawa Poerwaredja and Sĕrat Seh Sitijenar.

³³ See S. O. Robson, Principles of Indonesian Philology (Dordrecht and Providence, 1988), pp. 27–29.

³⁴ B suluk.

³⁵ B lonthang-lonthang-lonthang.

³⁶ B kang ginita lĕlakone.

³⁷ FG omits lebé Lonthang.

³⁸ B saka.

³⁹ Modern Javanese poetry is composed according to standard forms with their respective rules of poetic construction that determine the number of lines per stanza, the number of syllables per line, and the vowel of the final syllable; the form of the Lonthang is 12a, 12a, 12a. The Lonthang has the characteristic of macapat prosody but, because it is rare and not well known, it is not usually included in the common lists of těmbang macapat metres: see Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java, vol. III: Illustrations and Facsimiles of Manuscripts, Maps, Addenda and a General Index of Names and Subjects (Leiden, 1970), pp. 83–85; for an exception, see D. van der Meij, Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok (Leiden, 2017), pp. 245–249. W. J. S. Poerwadarminta, Baoesastra Djawa (Groningen-Batavia, 1939), considered it to belong to the category of the těmbang těngahan. Lonthang, which is the name of both the metre and the protagonist of the poem, could also mean ‘empty-handed’, which may describe a characteristic of Lěbe Lonthang, and also enables us to read the first line as ‘I compose a poem empty-handed’, perhaps in anticipation of the writer's voice at the end that is unable, or unwilling, to reveal the meaning of the poem.

⁴⁰ A pĕngajèné.

⁴¹ B pan nora.

⁴² A pan no.

⁴³ B dipun-gawé D pan dèn-gawé.

⁴⁴ For the wayang, the shadow puppet theatre, a lamp is positioned behind a screen to produce shadows of puppets that are visible from the other side where the audience is sitting. The wayang is a pre-Islamic art form through which originally a repertoire of Indic, Hindu-Buddhist stories were performed. In this poem, the wayang is implicitly set against scripturalist Islam, represented by Lěbe Lonthang's religious books, which are appropriated as props for performing the wayang. Alternatively, according to Acri, this could be a reference to book-manuscripts containing pre-Islamic lore of the type used by puppet masters (dalang).

⁴⁵ CEFG sambi.

⁴⁶ B sisirigan; F ategar.

⁴⁷ Klĕbut, a rack or stand, is probably the stand of the books mentioned in the previous stanza: see Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’, p. 131; Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism, p. 232.

⁴⁸ BC gĕlambrèha gĕgambèran; EF gĕlambrèha gĕbambèran; G gĕgambèrna gegambèran.

⁴⁹ ACDEFG mung.

⁵⁰ B omits yèn.

⁵¹ B dinulua.

⁵² G thĕtholangan.

⁵³ B kamigilan.

⁵⁴ B omits ing.

⁵⁵ D pangucap.

⁵⁶ G kĕpéngina.

⁵⁷ B olèh.

⁵⁸ B omits sampun; G wis.

⁵⁹ B kempong pérot.

⁶⁰ Lĕbe Lonthang's demand for bridal makeup introduces a gender-bending discourse that becomes more explicit in stanza 8.

⁶¹ E papasar.

⁶² B kagum.

⁶³ B wadon.

⁶⁴ C dati.

⁶⁵ BCEF dhogolé; G padha golèng.

⁶⁶ D dèn-guryang.

⁶⁷ G omits dipun-guyang.

⁶⁸ B déning.

⁶⁹ G kang dol bikang anggitiki sru dikayang.

⁷⁰ BCEF guthulé; G guguthulé.

⁷¹ B bĕranang.

⁷² AD tatayungan.

⁷³ ACDEF pancak.

⁷⁴ The dance in question is called tayungan. According to C. Brakel-Papenhuyzen, Classical Javanese Dance: The Surakarta Tradition and Its Terminology (Leiden, 2015), p. 31, the tayungan is a male warrior or battle dance in which warriors display their prowess and virility. Characteristic of the tayungan is stylised, ceremonial striding (ibid., p. 36). The term may also refer to a simple choreography taught to the untrained, even including servants and schoolchildren, so they too could profit from the benefits of dance (ibid., pp. 178, 194–195).

⁷⁵ G dudu.

⁷⁶ BCDEFG pasar.

⁷⁷ ACEF ing.

⁷⁸ G kyai modin kang sĕmbayang.

⁷⁹ kang sĕmbayang: G angarani ing wong edan.

⁸⁰ This drum, the bĕdug, is beaten to accompany the call to prayer in Javanese mosques. It has become less common because of opposition to its use, especially by modernist Muslims due to its extra-scriptural origins.

⁸¹ A kyai is an Islamic teacher or can be more generally a honorific. The term modin is a Javanese adaptation of the Arabic mu'adhdhin, the muezzin.

⁸² B sarwi; G sambi.

⁸³ G ambathang.

⁸⁴ B nora.

⁸⁵ Sěmbahyang specifically refers to ritual prayer, or ṣalāh—one of the five pillars and thus a legal obligation for Muslims. The poem thus specifically criticises formal observance of ritual law, which is implicitly contrasted with a superior form of observance, the inner understanding and realisation of religious truth. While the two need not be in conflict, some Sufis have claimed that their high level of spiritual realisation makes their observance of Islamic law, ritual prayer, unnecessary.

⁸⁶ B sĕmbanghyangé.

⁸⁷ D nora.

⁸⁸ D omits prenah-;.

⁸⁹ A lĕbé.

⁹⁰ D ngucup.

⁹¹ BCDEFG sarwi.

⁹² B lara; G ika.

⁹³ D sarwi.

⁹⁴ Briga-brigi, according to Poerwadarminta, Baoesastra Djawa, denotes the display of anger through actions or facial expressions. The sense appears to be of a lack of restraint and submission to passion, an unrefined and childish behaviour.

⁹⁵ B nglèmbèh; G nglébar.

⁹⁶ BCEF lir iyan; G lir diyan.

⁹⁷ B wus.

⁹⁸ BCEFG marga.

⁹⁹ B asih.

¹⁰⁰ B guthulé; CEFG dhogolé.

¹⁰¹ A barangnang.

¹⁰² B bahi.

¹⁰³ A lona.

¹⁰⁴ B ingkang nurat gumuyu datan parowang.

¹⁰⁵ A tĕtĕsé.

¹⁰⁶ As Florida noted, the Javanese expression ‘be covered by skirts’ is a trope for being ‘hen-pecked’, thus providing a counterpoint to the gender dynamics earlier in the poem: whereas Lĕbe Lonthang vehemently pursues the market women, he is subdued by his wife. See Florida, ‘Sex wars’, p. 224.

¹⁰⁷ Kang nunurat, the one who is writing, could reference to either the scribe of a particular copy or the author of the poem. According to Florida, there is no clear distinction between these two categories of writing in traditional Javanese literature: see Florida, Writing the Past, p. 19.

¹⁰⁸ B dènira; CEFG dènya; D olihé.

¹⁰⁹ BCDEFG darbé.

¹¹⁰ The one who owns or holds (darbe) the script is presumably the reader, who is directly addressed in these last stanzas of the poem.

¹¹¹ BCDEFG bĕnĕr luput kang nurat darma tumandang.

¹¹² B sampun tĕlas caritané lebé Lonthang; CDEFG sampun titi ingkang aran suluk Lonthang.

¹¹³ Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism, pp. 234–238.

¹¹⁴ Florida, ‘Sex wars’, p. 207, calls him a ‘classic Sufi saint’. See also the discussion in Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’, who associates this character with the same milieu—influenced by the Sufism of Al-Ḥallāj—of Siti Jĕnar and Sunan Panggung.

¹¹⁵ Wieringa (ibid., p. 137) concedes that Śaiva and Bhairavika concepts in particular may have possibly influenced the Suluk Lonthang, as Zoetmulder surmised, though he does not elaborate on this issue, and points out that this is not a particularly early text.

¹¹⁶ See M. Feener, ‘A re-examination of the place of al-Hallaj in the development of Southeast Asian Islam’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 154.4 (1998), pp. 571–592. Cf. M. C. Ricklefs, Polarizing Javanese Society, p. 41, fn. 25, on what he perceived as an overemphasis by Soebakin Soebardi on the direct influence of al-Ghazālī on Prince Mangkunagara IV, a ruler and poet, author of the Suluk Wedhatama.

¹¹⁷ The question as to whether the Malammatiyya and Qalandariyya currents of Sufism may themselves have been influenced by Indic antinomian ascetics such as the Pāśupatas is a pertinent one, although it will not be entertained here. On the influence of Indian ascetic traditions (for instance, in terms of respiration techniques) on the Naqshbandiyya Sufi tradition in Central Asia, see J. Paul, ‘Influences indiennes sur la Naqshbandiyya d'Asie centrale?’, Cahiers d'Asie centrale 1.2 (1996).

¹¹⁸ Braginsky, ‘Through the optics of imagination’, pp. 373–405. Braginsky, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden, 2004), pp. 142–148, also argued that even the issues current in Middle Eastern Sufi milieus could have reflected ideas carried by influential Sheyks from India, which were already the result of a dialectic process between Islam and Hinduism.

¹¹⁹ See K. Foley, ‘Saintly puppet masters and sacred clowning: antinomian religion and patterns in Islamic puppetry of Java’, in Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, vol. I: Sacred Roots: Material Entities, Consecrating Acts, Priestly Puppeteers, (ed.) C. Orenstein and T. Cusack (Abingdon, 2024), pp. 184–196 (esp. 192–193).

¹²⁰ See Acri, ‘Horror, transgression, and power’ and ‘“Hard-core” Tantric traditions’.

¹²¹ The word maṇḍala here refers to the communities of Śaiva ascetics-cum-scholars living in hermitages located in isolated mountainous areas of Java, and especially East Java, around the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

¹²² See S. O. Robson and Hadi Sidomulyo, Threads of the Unfolding Web: The Old Javanese Tantu Panggĕlaran: Translated by Stuart Robson with a Commentary by Hadi Sidomulyo (Singapore, 2021), pp. 77–78.

¹²³ See Acri, ‘“Hard-core” Tantric traditions’.

¹²⁴ See Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism, pp. 234–235. The Pāśupatas were the earliest known Śaiva ascetic movement, which was important for the diffusion of Śaivism across the Indian subcontinent and beyond to Southeast Asia in the first half of the first millennium CE. The final stage of the Pāśupata practitioner brought him in contact with impurity in a charnel ground; by way of meditation and yogic techniques, he achieved liberation conceived as a state of unity with Rudra. The Pāśupatas must have been important realities throughout the history of premodern Java, as attested to by the relatively abundant references to them and their doctrines found in Old Javanese literature.

¹²⁵ A. Acri, ‘Pāśupatas’, in Springer's Encyclopaedia of Indian Religions. Hinduism and Tribal Religions, (ed.) J. Long et al. (Dordrecht, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1188-1_646

¹²⁶ See A. Acri, ‘Kāpālikas’, Springer's Encyclopaedia of Indian Religions, (ed.) Long et al., https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1188-1_99.

¹²⁷ On which, see the contributions in R. Linrothe (ed.), Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas (New York and Chicago, 2006).

¹²⁸ See, for example, the circa mid-ninth-century kakavin Rāmāyaṇa, in particular 24.112 and other relevant passages of chapters 24 and 25, discussed in Acri, ‘More on birds, ascetics and kings in Central Java. Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa, 24.111–115 and 25.19–22’, in From Laṅkā Eastwards: The Rāmāyaṇa in the Literature and Visual Arts of Indonesia, (ed.) A. Acri, H. Creese, and A. Griffiths (Leiden, 2011), pp. 53–91.

¹²⁹ See Pārthayajña 8.6 and 8.9. Old Javanese text, translation, and discussion in A. Acri, ‘Performance as religious observance in some Śaiva Ascetic traditions from South and Southeast Asia’, Cracow Indological Studies (Special Issue: ‘Theatrical and Ritual Boundaries in South Asia. Part II’) 20.1 (2018), pp. 1–30.

¹³⁰ See A. Acri, ‘Birds, bards, buffoons, and Brahmans: (re-)tracing the Indic origins of some ancient and modern Javano-Balinese performing characters’, Archipel 88 (2014), pp. 13–70, at pp. 24–26.

¹³¹ See, for example, E. C. Horne, Javanese-English Dictionary (New Haven, 1974).

¹³² See J. F. C. Gericke and T. Roorda, Javaansch-Nederlandsch handwoordenboek (Amsterdam, 1901).

¹³³ Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism, p. 236.

¹³⁴ See Acri, ‘Birds, bards, buffoons, and Brahmans’.

¹³⁵ A. Dasgupta, ‘The Bauls and their heretic tradition’, Social Scientist 22.5–6 (1994), pp. 70–83, p. 70.

¹³⁶ K. E. Cantú, ‘Islamic esotericism in the Bengali Bāul songs of Lālan Fakir’, Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism (Special Issue: ‘Islamic Esotericism’) 7.1 (2019), pp. 109–165.

¹³⁷ R. C. Temple, The Word of Lalla the Prophetess: Being the Sayings of Lal Ded or Lal Diddi of Kashmir (Granny Lal), Known as Laleshwari, Lalla Yogishwari & Lalishri, between 1300 and 1400 A.D. (Cambridge, 1924).

¹³⁸ 47.35–36; see D. A. Rinkes, De heiligen van Java (Batavia, 1913), p. 183; cf. the parallel in the Serat Seh Sitijenar.

¹³⁹ Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’, p. 130, n. 6. See also Tanaya, Sajarah Jati (1975), stanzas 60–74, https://www.sastra.org/katalog/judul?ti_id=296 (accessed 15 July 2021); H. Buning, Serat Seh Sitijenar (1921–1922), pp. 103–118 (from Sĕrat Babad Dĕmak), https://www.sastra.org/katalog/judul?ti_id=436 (accessed 15 July 2021); R. Sasrawidjaja, Serat Sitidjenar (tembang) (Yogyakarta, 1958), pp. 35–41; Yayasan Sastra Lestari #1297 (based on the anonymous edition of 1831), Sĕrat Demak, pp. 379–393.

¹⁴⁰ Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’, p. 129.

¹⁴¹ Ibid., p. 130, fn. 6; cf. Sĕrat Cabolek 6.5. According to Javanese tradition, Haji Mutamakin, Ki Bagdad (= Ki Bebeluk), and Seh Amongraga (the protagonist of the Sĕrat Centhini) were also executed for heresy: see Sobakin Soebardi, The Book of Cabolek: A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Notes (The Hague, 1975), pp. 7, 36–39; Sĕrat Cabolek 6.7; cf. Feener, ‘Re-examination’, pp. 577–578.

¹⁴² Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism.

¹⁴³ With respect to the issue of the similarity between the hagiographies of al-Ḥallāj and Siti Jĕnar, see, in particular, Feener, ‘Re-examination’, pp. 576–577: ‘no elements of this story need necessarily have come from what one might consider “Hallajian sources” in the strict sense, that is, sources that either profess Hallaj's doctrine or especially revere him as a figure. For it appears that the elements of the story which have generally been regarded as so “clearly Hallajian” may in fact be simply a reflection of more common motifs in the literature of medieval Muslim mysticism in general’; p. 579: ‘The origin of the Siti Jenar narrative is due not to the presence of any specifically Hallajian texts or teachers in Java, but rather to an affinity between elements of the Hallajian narrative that were more widely spread in the medieval Muslim world and the pre-existing local tradition’. In ibid., n. 20, Feener adds that ‘It may be due to the existence of such figures [i.e. the Indic/pre-Islamic Ṛṣi Viśrava, who was cursed by the gods because he proclaimed himself to be God] in pre-Islamic Javanese religious thought that elements from the Hallaj narrative were incorporated into later Javanese Muslim texts’.

¹⁴⁴ S. C. Headley, ‘Being a “martyr” [syahiîd] in Java today: a deformation of sacrifice?’, Paper presented at the conference on ‘Martyr(e) et suicide dans l'islam contemporain’, Paris, 6–7 March 2006, CNRS, EHESS, https://secular.hypotheses.org/!les/2013/07/Being-a-martyr-in-Java.pdf (accessed 15 July 2021).

¹⁴⁵ Acri, ‘“Hard-core” Tantric traditions’.

¹⁴⁶ Robson and Hadi Sidomulyo, Threads, p. 77.

¹⁴⁷ Acri, ‘Becoming a Bhairava’.

¹⁴⁸ Robson and Hadi Sidomulyo, Threads, pp. 47, 53, 58, 60.

¹⁴⁹ Acri, ‘Becoming a Bhairava’.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 291.

¹⁵¹ Ms. CS 78, paper, Javanese script, Uttarasabda (Suluk Lonthang), from lontar Merapi-Merbabu 1 L 225; see T. E. Behrend, Katalog Induk Naskah-naskah Nusantara. Jilid 4. Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (Jakarta, 1998), p. 131; cf. Ms. 86 L 334, a lontar belonging to the Central Javanese Merapi-Merbabu collection listed as Uttarasabda (Suluk Lonthang) in ibid., p. 383. This Hindu-Buddhist text was composed in the period after the arrival of Islam, probably in the seventeenth century, as it betrays some Islamic influences: see Abimardha Kurniawan and Dwi Puspitorini, ‘Uttararaśabda in Java and Bali’, in Cultural Dynamics in a Globalized World, (ed.) M. Budianta et al. (London, 2018), pp. 531–537, at p. 533.

¹⁵² Ibid., p. 536.

¹⁵³ In the context of Sufism, the term more commonly employed to indicate the adept's spiritual progress on the Sufi path is the Arabic ṭarīqa or one of its vernacular derivations (e.g. J. tarekat). In its second sense, sulūk references correct and spiritually beneficial comportment for Sufi adepts. For more on sulūk in the Arabic and Persian tradition, see L. Lewisohn, ‘Sulūk’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn, (eds.) P. Bearman et al. (2012), http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_1119.

¹⁵⁴ Florida, Writing the Past, pp. 259–260.

¹⁵⁵ See Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java, vol. I: Synopsis of Javanese Literature 900–1900 A.D. (Leiden, 1967), p. 86. It should be noted that Pigeaud, like many other Dutch scholars, downplayed the Islamic lineage and quality of the suluk. Cf. Florida, Writing the Past, p. 259, n. 21.

¹⁵⁶ Mas Ronggasasmita was a writer from a family of Javanese court poets. For more on him and his background, see Florida, Writing the Past, pp. 1–3; and N. Florida, ‘Shaṭṭāriyya Sufi scents in the literary world of the Surakarta Palace in nineteenth-century Java’, in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia, (eds.) M. Feener and A. Blackburn (Honolulu, 2019), pp. 153–184.

¹⁵⁷ Nancy Florida, personal communication (2018). Going further, E. Wieringa, ‘Aanvullende gegevens over de Suluk Acih van Ranggasasmita’, Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde CXLIX (1993), pp. 362–373, has even disputed Ronggasasmita's authorship of the Suluk Acih altogether. Suffice to say, the author of the Suluk Lonthang is unknown.

¹⁵⁸ Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’, pp. 137–138.

¹⁵⁹ Florida, ‘Sex wars’, pp. 210–212, 221–223.

¹⁶⁰ For a presentation of the fluidity of Islamic law in its classical, premodern form, see W. Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 57–71.

¹⁶¹ An instance of such rule-breaking is the now well-known example of the wine-drinking Sufi that has been brought to attention by S. Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), who considered it one of the quintessential paradoxes of Islamic practice.

¹⁶² For more on these ecstatic utterances and their theological significance, see C. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany, 1985).

¹⁶³ The similarity of the two stories suggests that Ḥallāj's story had become a hagiographic prototype onto which narratives of new figures were grafted. For more on these links, see C. W. G. Drewes, ‘Het Document uit de Brandstapel’, Djåwå VII (1927), pp. 97–109; Feener, ‘Re-examination’, pp. 571–592. The Javanese original and an English translation of one of the narrative traditions around Seh Siti Jĕnar can be found in D. Rinkes, Nine Saints of Java (Kuala Lumpur, 1996), pp. 18–19, 22–23.

¹⁶⁴ See Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige?’, p. 130, for numerous examples of such narrative links between Seh Siti Jĕnar and Ki Lonthang. Indeed, Ki Lonthang's discipleship of Seh Siti Jĕnar is often mentioned in Javanese historical writing, including also ‘Sĕrat Dĕmak’, Yayasan Sastra Lestari, 17 August 2021, https://www.sastra.org/kisah-cerita-dan-kronikal/babad/1704-serat-demak-anonim-1831-1297-pupuh-01-15 (accessed 8 February 2024).

¹⁶⁵ D. Rinkes, De Heiligen van Java (Batavia, 1912–1913), pp. 31, 186; Wieringa, ‘Ketzer oder Wahre Gläubige’, p. 130.

¹⁶⁶ Interestingly, the perception of Seh Siti Jĕnar's legitimacy does not always map onto expected boundaries between Islamic orientations, where only traditionalists and Sufis value his hagiographic persona. Over the last decades, Seh Siti Jĕnar has also been discovered by members of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's largest modernist Islamic mass organisation known for its agenda of purifying Islam and for its sceptical attitude in relation to practices that push the boundaries of the legally permissible. See, for example, A. Munir Mulkhan, Makrifat Burung Surga dan Ilmu Kasampurnan Syekh Siti Jenar (Yogyakarta, 2002), who sees Seh Siti Jĕnar as a social activist who cared about the poor.

¹⁶⁷ Florida, ‘Shaṭṭāriyya Sufi scents’.

¹⁶⁸ Ernst, Words of Ecstasy, p. 11.

¹⁶⁹ For more on the Shaṭṭāriyya in India, especially on Muḥammad Ghawth, see C. Ernst, ‘Persecution and circumspection in Shaṭṭārī Sufism’, in Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, (eds.) F. de Jong and B. Radtke (Leiden, 1999), pp. 416–435; S. Kugle, ‘Heaven's witness: the uses and abuses of Muḥammad Ghawth's mystical ascension’, Journal of Islamic Studies XIV (2003), pp. 1–36. For the involvement of the Syattariyah in the Mughal court, see A. Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York, 2012).

¹⁷⁰ K. El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghrib (New York, 2015).

¹⁷¹ A.H. Johns, ‘Friends in grace: Ibrahīm al-Kūrānī and ‘Abd al-Ra’ūf al-Singkeli’, in Spectrum: Essays Presented to Sutan Takdir Alishahbana on His Seventieth Birthday, (ed.) S. Udin (Jakarta, 1978), p. 484.

¹⁷² S. Shaikh, Sufī Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill, 2014), pp. 120–121; K. Ewing, ‘Embodied metaphor: playing with gender in South Asian Sufism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXXXIX (2021), pp. 1261–1262.

¹⁷³ Their sexual transgression was often accompanied by other antinomian behaviour, such as the consumption of alcohol and drugs. For more on these groups, see S. Digby, ‘Qalandars and related groups: elements of social deviance in the religious life of the Delhi Sultanate of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, in Islam in Asia, vol. 1, (ed.) Y. Friedman (Jerusalem, 1984), pp. 60–108; and K. Ewing and I. Gerbakher, ‘The Qalandariyya: from the mosque to the ruin in poetry, place, and practice’, in Routledge Handbook of Sufism, (ed.) L. Ridgeon (London, 2021).

¹⁷⁴ See Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends, pp. 21, 41.

¹⁷⁵ K. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, 1997), pp. 201–203.

¹⁷⁶ Ewing, ‘Embodied metaphor’, pp. 1256–1289.

¹⁷⁷ Similar movements have also existed elsewhere in the Islamic world. See M. Dols, Majnūn: The Madman in the Medieval Islamic World (Oxford, 1992), p. 413, on the early modern period, and S. Zerar, ‘Of folkloric eroticism in the Algerian Raï’, in PanEroticism, (eds.) A. Ben et al. (Leiden, 2015), pp. 63–72, on contemporary Algeria.

¹⁷⁸ M. Miller, ‘The Qalandar king: early development of the Qalandariyyāt and Saljuq conceptions of kingship in Amir Mo'ezzi's Panegyric for Sharafshāh Ja'fari’, Iranian Studies LV (2002), p. 521.

¹⁷⁹ The term was originally coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to the carnival in medieval Europe. See M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1984). The notion of the carnivalesque has been taken up widely in both literary and social studies to reference a liminal space in which the social order is temporarily suspended. See P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), pp. 6–26, on the carnivalesque in literary theory.

¹⁸⁰ Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 11–12.

¹⁸¹ On Ghazālī's influence in Java, see G. W. J. Drewes, An Early Javanese Code of Muslim Ethic (The Hague, 1978); P. Riddell, Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World: Transmissions and Responses (Honolulu, 2001), pp. 184–185; N. Said, ‘The significance of al-Ghazâlî and his works for Indonesian Muslims: a preliminary study’, Studia Islamika III (1996), pp. 21–45.

¹⁸² For an introduction on Ghazālī's legally-minded Sufism, see, for example, C. Hillenbrand, ‘Al-Ghazālī: in praise of Sufism’, in Routledge Handbook on Sufism, (ed.) L. Ridgeon (London, 2020), pp. 63–74; E. Moosa, ‘Islamic legal thought: a compendium of Muslim jurists’, in Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, (eds.) R. Peters and K. Reinhart (Leiden, 2013), pp. 261–293. For a discussion of the sober–drunk Sufi binary, see Mojaddedi, J., ‘Getting drunk with Abū Yazīd or staying sober with Junayd: the creation of a popular typology in Sufism’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London LXVI (2003), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸³ Al-Daghistani, S., Ethical Teachings of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī: Economics of Happiness (London, 2021), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸⁴ Meyer, V., ‘A Wali's quest for guidance: the Islamic genealogies of the Seh Malaya’, Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia XXII (2021), pp. 675–692CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸⁵ Moosa, I., Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill, 2005), p. 29Google Scholar.

¹⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 104.

¹⁸⁷ For an example of how this is accomplished in another Javanese poem, see Meyer, ‘Wali's quest’, pp. 691–692.

¹⁸⁸ Leiden Cod. Or. 1795 (pp. 192–195): collection dated 1763 A.J., i.e. AD 1835, originally belonging to the Delft collection; see Pigeaud, Literature of Java, II, pp. 27–28, text IX. In contrast to the aforementioned compiled texts of Suluk Lonthang, Leiden Cod. Or. 1795 showcases a plethora of metrical lines that exhibit significant disparities in content, characterised by notable augmentations and subtle omissions. Consequently, we have made a deliberate choice to include it as an appendix.

¹⁸⁹ Read: ingsun.

¹⁹⁰ NBS 87 (pp. 164–165): see Pigeaud, Literature of Java, II, p. 734, text VII; NBS 89 (pp. 74–75): originally Gericke collection Cod. 8995 II; see Pigeaud, Literature of Java, II, p. 737, text XII.

¹⁹¹ NBS 89 pakunĕgara.

¹⁹² NBS 89 wong.

¹⁹³ NBS 87 khaket.