Introduction: Muslim Pilgrimage in Bali

Summary

This book discusses the new emergence of the saint worshipping tradition in contemporary Indonesia and Muslim pilgrimage to Bali through the lens of the travelling tradition and pilgrimage studies and it partly touches upon the aspect of religious economy. Scholars particularly see travelling traditions through the perspectives of travelling cultures in the Muslim world, the circulation of texts, mobile societies, networks, technologies, and commodities. By extension, this book examines the travelling tradition in the light of translocal mobility of culture and people, and Muslim pilgrimage from the perspectives of multifaceted cultural geographies, boundaries, and encounters. It also looks at how transfer and adaptation, as consequences of the mobility of cultures and agency, stimulate questions of authority and authenticity and the roles of ‘religious economy’ in cultural relocation. In so doing, the book focuses on the adaptation of saint worshipping deeply rooted in Islamic Java in the dominant Hindu environment of Bali, and its marketplaces, religious products, and entrepreneurs as well as scrutinises the transgression of multifaceted boundaries through religious travel. This book offers a new light on Bali and sees the island as a site of a cultural motion straddling Islam and Hinduism with the complexities of the local figurations, attachments, and belongings of ‘Muslim Balinese’. Religious travel, this book argues, allows us to look at cultural traffic in localities, exchanges, commodification, competition and contestation which are framed in translocal sociocultural settings but shaped by local specificities of spatial and cultural identities.

Religious travel is one of the main elements constituting Islam and it is part of the tradition of Muslim mobilities, such as hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), hijrah (emigration), and rihlah (travel for learning purposes). Islam encourages and even obliges certain forms of religious travel and the best known is the hajj that takes place every year. The hajj is the most important form of religious travel and it is considered one of the pillars of Islam (’arkan al-’Islam), along with faith testimony (shahada), daily obligatory prayers (shalat), almsgiving (zakat), and fasting during the month of Ramadan. All Muslims who can afford the journey are obliged to perform hajj at least once in their lifetime. Less important than hajj is umrah, where Muslim pilgrims travel to Mecca and Medina and pray at various sacred places located in both cities.