Besides being wellknown as one of two heartlands of Javanese civilisation and a city with conflicts between ethnic groups and religious adherents where Islam has been highly involved in the struggle for authority among views, perspectives and groups, Surakarta is also renowned as a safe haven for disseminating radical ideologies and a breeding ground for terrorist activities. The historical account of Islamisation in Surakarta takes us to the eighteenth century, when the Javanese court, pesantren and Arab migrant communities played important roles in the Islamisation process (Wildan 2008). The dominant role of the Javanese court gave birth to a mix of Islamic principles and the Hindu-Buddhism tradition, or the so-called abangan tradition as the 1950s American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, described it. Unlike santri or ‘committed Muslims’ who demonstrate more Islamic orthodoxy, abangan practise Islamic values while continuing to hold animistic values as central to their own well-being (Geertz 1964: 5-7; Boland 1971: 4; Koentjaraningrat 1985: 316-23).

It was in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century – along with the intensification of communication and contact particularly through the arrival of hajjis, Indonesian students who studied in the Middle East (Laffan 2004: 3-5), and printed media – that Islamic reformist (or modernist for some) ideas emanating from the Middle East started to put the abangan and issues about the relationship between Islam and locality at large into questions pertaining to the truthfulness of Muslim belief (Noer 1973; Liddle 1996: 622-3). Reformism also criticised the existing Islamic practices among traditionalists who were highly influenced by mystical Islam (tasauwuf) and relied too heavily on the scriptural and legal commentaries of previous scholars (taqlid) as codified in Islam jurisprudence schools (madhab) (Hooker 2003: 23; Zulkifli 2003: 111-4; Federspiel 2001: 6). From a theological perspective, Islamic reformism began to emphasise the selfsufficiency of scripture, to call for deliberation pertaining to Islamic legal decisions (’ijtihād), decry what were regarded as unacceptable innovations in matters of worship (bid’a) and suggest that traditionalist ‘ulamā had been too tolerant of popular ritual practices, which were regarded as bid’a or, worse yet, polytheistic deviations (širk) from the true Islam.