Antinomianism as a way to God in nineteenth-century Java: the Suluk Lonthang between Islamic and pre-Islamic religious discourse

Abstract

This article presents the first complete critical edition and annotated English translation of the nineteenth-century Javanese mystical poem Suluk Lonthang. Combining different disciplinary expertise in old and modern Javanese philology, Tantric Studies, and Islamic Studies, it interprets the protagonist of the poem as an expression of the multifaceted and multivocal Javanese religious landscape of the time, whose historical—and translocal—roots can be discerned in Sufi traditions from the Islamicate and Persianate worlds, as well as Tantric traditions from both pre-Islamic Java and the Indian subcontinent.

Introduction

This article presents the first complete critical edition and English translation as well as a comprehensive analysis of the nineteenth-century Javanese mystical poem Suluk Lonthang.¹ By combining different disciplinary expertise in Old and Modern Javanese philology, Tantric Studies, and Islamic Studies, it introduces and analyzes the protagonist of the poem as an expression of the multifaceted and multivocal Javanese religious landscape of the time, whose historical—and translocal—roots can be discerned in Sufi traditions from the Islamicate and Persianate worlds, as well as Tantric traditions from both pre-Islamic Java and the Indian subcontinent.

Composed in the rather uncommon eponymous verse metre, and part of the compilation entitled Suluk Acih by Mas Ronggasasmita,² the Suluk Lonthang tells the story of a renegade saint, Lĕbe Lonthang, whose sexual ventures and antinomian behaviours cause uproar in a Javanese town, and who is eventually curbed by his own wife. The poem ends on a deliberately ambiguous note, as the narrator directly addresses the audience and instructs them to use this poem for their own religious education. This text presents a fascinating window into Javanese religious imaginations of the nineteenth century—a time of major upheavals and transformations, a ‘time of madness’ (Florida 2019a)—making visible the disagreements and contestations of normative religious thought and practice in the context of colonialism and Islamic reform. With its focus on subversion and transgression as a possibility for the advanced mystic—especially in relation to gender roles and sexual mores—the poem raises questions about the relationship between spiritual prowess and norm breaking as opposed to puritan legalism, thus situating itself in a broader religious debate in Java and beyond.

A second question raised by the Suluk Lonthang concerns the contribution of pre-Islamic religious and cultural heritage to shaping contested articulations of (‘normative’) Islam in nineteenth-century Java. The nineteenth century was characterised by tensions between Muslims labelled ‘Javanist’ or ‘heterodox’ on the one hand and those who were increasingly concerned about reformist purity on the other.³ One manifestation of the former were Sufi groups that engaged in ecstatic practices, such as the Santri Birahis. The Santri Birahis were often mentioned for their outrageous practices as their passion for God was reported to lead to group orgies.⁴ The author's refusal to flat-out condemn Lĕbe Lonthang, and the dominance of the sexual in the figure's account, begs the questions of the meaning of sexual transgression for achieving spiritual accomplishment as well as the reverse—that is, the advanced mystic's authorisation to break sexual norms. These questions may perhaps be answered by taking into account not only Islamic, but also pre-Islamic, sources. Upon entering the village mosque, Lĕbe Lonthang accuses the pious Muslims of not knowing where God is, which shows that the issue of norm breaking in sexual ethics and, more generally, antinomian behaviour are signs of spiritual advancement—a motive known in both Islam⁵ and pre-Islamic, Hindu-Buddhist Java.⁶ Another avenue for investigating the poem's subversion of traditional gender roles⁷ is the pre-existing idea in both Sufism and Tantric Śaivism that realising advanced spirituality required the overcoming of all oppositions, including those relating to gender⁸ and social status.⁹

The project of looking for traces of Java's pre-Islamic religious heritage in sources that are self-consciously Islamic is controversial and has often been carried out in highly problematic ways. In the colonial period, scholars asserted that Javanese literature had reached its peak in the pre-Islamic era, to only partly recuperate its former glory in the so-called Surakarta Renaissance, and only when writers turned away from their preoccupations with Islam to pre-Islamic topics and motifs that corresponded to their essential nature.¹⁰ Based on this conviction that Java was inherently Hindu-Buddhist, Orientalist scholars often went to great lengths to show that Islam in the Malay-Indonesian world was syncretic and ideologically feeble, and therefore definitely unsuited for the political Islam the colonial powers feared.¹¹ In the postcolonial era, these impressions persisted in scholarly works, perhaps most famously in the work of Clifford Geertz, who found that the religion of the Javanese had ‘Indicism maintained beneath an Islamic veneer’.¹² These studies were problematic, because they assumed an essentialised nature of Javanese religious life that was unknown to its own practitioners but could be detected by the Orientalist scholar.¹³ Beginning in the 1990s, scholars of Javanese literature started to push back against the idea that the religious texts written at the literary centres of Java's royal courts were just superficially Islamic, showing instead that the writers were trained Islamic scholars and situated themselves squarely in Islamic intellectual discourse.¹⁴ Meanwhile, historians began to point to the genealogical links of the thin veneer argument and its rootedness in colonial and postcolonial politics.¹⁵ This resulted in a reorientation in the scholarship in which scholars, aware of their colonial baggage, refrained altogether from tracing aspects of Javanese Islam back to pre-Islamic times. Yet, this reorientation runs the danger of reifying firm boundaries between religions—itself a colonial construct—that may not have existed in the same way among the authors of the texts that we are studying.

A comparative glance at the study of Islam in South Asia shows how powerfully this colonial legacy has shaped contemporary academic inquiry. In South Asia, the colonial narrative about Islam was a very different one, casting Muslims as belligerent invaders who were foreign to South Asia and inherently different from the adherents of Indic religions around them.¹⁶ These colonial tropes powerfully affected contemporary communalism in India and Islamophobia among the Hindu Right.¹⁷ The tracing of pre-Islamic continuities in South Asian Islamic thought,¹⁸ or of crossovers and interreligious community in contemporary times,¹⁹ has thus been embedded in a very different political project than it ever could have been in Java.

Only recently have scholars begun to explore new and more productive ways in which to discuss religious complexity—including its Indic roots—in Islamic Java.²⁰ We hope that this study of the complexity of the Suluk Lonthang, especially in relation to its understanding of transgression, will further contribute to these endeavours. To this end, we present a translation of the poem alongside a critical edition of the Javanese text, followed by two analyses of the Suluk Lonthang, first from a pre-Islamic viewpoint, and then from an Islamic one. Rather than synthesising these readings, we offer them alongside each other to exhibit the entanglements, ambiguities, and multivocality of the religious world within which the Suluk Lonthang was written and read.

Critical edition and translation of the Suluk Lonthang

The Suluk Lonthang was partially collated by Zoetmulder from two Javanese codices (Leiden Cod. 1795 I, ff. 191–195, and Cod. 1796, ff. 91–95).²¹ Zoetmulder omitted what he defined as ‘a few obscene lines’ from the Javanese; some of these were rendered by Florida in her translation of the suluk, on the basis of a manuscript kept in the kraton of Surakarta.²² Wieringa also presented an edition of the full text on the basis of the second manuscript used by Zoetmulder, i.e. Cod.Or. 1796, ff. 91–95.²³

The Romanised edition presented here is based on the following manuscripts (all written in Modern Javanese script on paper):

A: Suluk Lonthang, Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 1796, ff. 91–95. Inscribed: Surakarta n.d.²⁴

B: Suluk Lonthang, KITLV Or 391/20. Copy of a ms at the Radya Pustaka Library, made in 1926.²⁵

C: Suluk Lonthang/Sĕkar Lonthang, KS [Karaton Surakarta] 496.7, digital photographs of SMP 152_13 (Cornell University Library). Inscribed: Surakarta, 1885/6.²⁶

D: Suluk Lĕbe Lonthang, MN [Mangkunagaran Palace] 313.22, digital photographs of SMP 16-5-1 (Cornell University Library). Inscribed: Surakarta 1896/97.²⁷

E: Suluk Lonthang, within Suluk Warni-Warni (pp. 83–86), RP [Radya Pustaka] 332, digital photographs of SMP 16-51_4 (Cornell University Library). Inscribed: Surakarta 1886.²⁸

F: Suluk Lonthang, within Serat Suluk Warna-Warni tuwin Wirid Syattariyah (pp. 111–115), RP [Radya Pustaka] 333, digital photographs of SMP 16-51_5 (Cornell University Library). Inscribed: Surakarta 1864.²⁹

G: Suluk Lonthang, KS [Karaton Surakarta] 502.14, digital photographs of SMP 152_19 (Cornell University Library). Inscribed: Surakarta, 1867.³⁰

The manuscripts enumerated above share a consistent version of the text, while a contrasting rendition of the Suluk Lonthang is documented in the Leiden Cod. Or. 179 manuscript. Despite encompassing some overarching similarities in the plotline, this version simultaneously presents disparate verses from the previously mentioned renditions. It is highly probable that some lines of the verses contained within it constitute an addendum, resulting in a total of 26 verses instead of the 23 verses found in the other seven versions. As a result, the Leiden Cod. Or. 179 manuscript is not collated together with the other seven texts, but rather presented in Appendix A to this article. Additionally, an alternative text bearing the title Suluk Lonthang is extant, specifically discovered in manuscripts Leiden Cod. Or. NBS 87 and NBS 89. An edited version of this text, collated from both manuscripts, is offered in Appendix B to this article. Furthermore, it merits mentioning that other brief texts under the title Suluk Lonthang have been identified. These texts encompass distinct material on Javanese mysticism and do not reference Lĕbe Lonthang.³¹ An editorial, translational, and scholarly examination of this relatively compact textual corpus, encompassing other segments of Modern Javanese texts, which presumably feature the interconnected character of Ky Lonthang,³² remains a hopeful undertaking for the future.

As for the editorial policies applied in this edition, not all variations are recorded in the apparatus, such as those that Robson described as ‘white noise’ or spelling options, unless the different spellings change the meaning.³³ Spelling options or ‘free variants’ that are not considered variant readings include the nasal prefix, the passive prefixes dèn- and dipun-, the possessive suffixes -é and -ipun, and consonantal gemination (even if it results in metrical problems).

The pre-Islamic genealogies of the Suluk Lonthang

In his pioneering dissertation Pantheism and Monism in Modern Javanese Suluk Literature, originally published in 1935 in Dutch and again in 1994 in English translation, Zoetmulder discussed some antinomian characters described in nineteenth-century Javanese Islamic mystical texts. Among these was the bizarre and controversial figure of Lĕbe Lonthang. Zoetmulder, while suggesting a possible influence by Islamic antinomianism of the Sufi Malāmmatiyya, considered Lĕbe Lonthang a remnant of a radical strand of Tantric mysticism in which moral laws no longer apply to its initiates.¹¹³ Further, he pointed at the existence of apparent similarities between the characteristics and behaviours of this figure and what he deemed to be his Indic counterparts, namely the transgressive practitioners of the Pāśupata and Kāpālika traditions of pre-Tantric and Tantric Śaivism. He thus regarded Lĕbe Lonthang as a figure representing a bridge, or synthesis, between pre-Islamic Tantric lore that was prevalent in Java up to the fifteenth century and Sufi-influenced Javanese mysticism. In doing so, he hypothesised the existence of historical continuities between pre-Islamic Indic religiosity and the Islamic paradigm that gradually became prevalent in Javanese literature, including the suluk genre, from the sixteenth century onwards.

Zoetmulder's ideas have not been pursued further by scholars of Javanese studies. Florida has interpreted Lĕbe Lonthang as a squarely Islamic figure who is the expression of a Sufi milieu,¹¹⁴ while Wieringa has discussed the intertextual connections between the poem and other Javanese works such as the great Centhini, the Suluk Gatholoco, and the Sĕrat Dĕrmagandhul, which belong to the Javanese ‘carnivalised’ literary genre of the nineteenth century, characterised by erotic humour and a critical stance towards legalistic Islam in defence of Javanism.¹¹⁵ These readings are legitimate, and yet the textual evidence, both within and without the Suluk Lonthang, would admit a more nuanced interpretation of the poem and its protagonist as expressions of, or reactions to, both Islamic and pre-Islamic religious strands. Feener, among others, has warned against the tendency to overestimate the importance of Sufism and its influence on Islam in Java.¹¹⁶ Along similar lines, one could point out that, while Lĕbe Lonthang's behaviours seem indeed compatible with those associated with Islamic antinomianism, and in particular the ‘way of blame’ practised by the Malāmmati and Qalandari strands of Sufism,¹¹⁷ those currents have never been strong in Java, and hence it is unlikely that they exerted any meaningful influences on the Suluk Lonthang and the Javanese suluk literature in general. Braginsky, discussing the hybrid erotological ‘Sufi-Tantric’ literature in Classical Malay, has suggested that Sufi mysticism was located in an existing local discourse indebted to pre-Islamic milieus rather than uniquely echoing issues current in Middle Eastern Sufi milieus.¹¹⁸ And Foley, while noting in her discussion of the intersection between antinomian mysticism and performance in Java that, in Muslim Eurasia, the myths of ‘undisciplined mad men who defy norms and joke as they teach, advancing others toward mystical truth’ are widespread and often associated with performative arts such as music and puppetry, she also argues that

[i]t is possible that the god-clown mythos of Southeast Asia grows from the popularity of this Hindu religious group or one of its tantric offshoots in South and Southeast Asia—all Pāśupata streams prescribed antinomian behaviors to move toward gnosis. It seems likely that such religious figures laid the groundwork for the lore of the Javanese bandit saints and the clowns of wayang, and the model was then reinforced by antinomian strains in Muslim culture.¹¹⁹

Thus, resuming Zoetmulder's thought-provoking analysis of the deeper religio-cultural roots of Lĕbe Lonthang, one may regard this figure as a ‘survival’ (almost in a Taylorean sense) and comparatively analyze it in the context of pre-Islamic, non-mainstream Tantric strands that included antinomian religious figures, radical monism, an ascetic regimen revolving around transgression of social rules, and supernatural empowerment. This ‘hard-core’ Tantric strand, existing as a religious undercurrent through much of Javanese history, became prevalent in the Old/Middle Javanese text Tantu Paṅgәlaran, which is the expression of a form of Tantric Śaivism practised in isolated hermitages and mountainous areas of Java in around the fifteenth century. This strand did not suddenly disappear from the religious and cultural landscape of Java after the rise to dominance of Islam, but apparently survived in some guise and even informed, arguably via the Tantu Paṅgәlaran itself, the mystical milieus of Islamic Java and the literature produced by them, as well as the Javanese (and Balinese) literary and artistic imaginaries to the modern period.¹²⁰ Playing the role of a textual bridge between pre-Islamic and Islamic religious traditions in Java, the Tantu Paṅgәlaran was reused in Islamic texts and may ‘help us to establish a line of continuity, linking the age of the Hindu-Javanese maṇḍala ¹²¹ with that of the early Islamic period’.¹²² It is, therefore, to the aforementioned Tantric strand that the prototypes of antinomian figures (such as Siti Jĕnar/Lĕmah Abang, Malang Sumirang, and, perhaps, Lĕbe Lonthang indeed) known from Modern Javanese suluks may be traced to, rather than (uniquely) Sufism and Sufi characters such as al-Ḥallāj, thereby reflecting an original polemic among different Śaiva strands that was transmogrified into a polemic between ‘orthodox’ (mainstream, legalistic) and ‘unorthodox’ (antinomian, mystical) Islam in Java.¹²³

Without denying the influence of Sufi ideas, practices, and practitioners on antinomian aspects of Javanism in general and the figure of Lĕbe Lonthang in particular, there is a need to integrate into the current scholarly paradigm the elements of continuity with pre-Islamic Javanese religions, for the boundaries between the ideologies and practices of Tantric and Sufi antinomian practitioners were seemingly blurred in the early Islamic period, being the outcome of a process of adaptation and synthesis. It seems reasonable to assume that the antinomian behaviours propounded by Sufi currents were not adopted on a tabula rasa, but struck a chord with Javanese authors and their audiences precisely because they overlapped with those by pre-existing categories of practitioners that populated both the Javanese literary imagination and the socio-religious landscape in which it was anchored. Those pre-Islamic motifs, probably drawn from such Old/Middle Javanese sources as the Tantu Paṅgәlaran, were used as the ‘building blocks’ in the process of textual bricolage that characterises the Javanese literary tradition throughout much of its history.

Returning to the pioneering work of Zoetmulder on suluk literature, it seems useful to revisit and fine-tune in light of recent scholarship the idea that the behaviours of Lĕbe Lonthang are reminiscent of those of Pāśupata ascetics known from premodern Indian (as well as Old Javanese) literature.¹²⁴ Pāśupatas were notorious for their antinomian acts of devotion towards the demonic, early form of Śiva called Rudra (with whom they aimed to unite at the end of their life), which consisted of singing, dancing, and laughing boisterously, as well as extravagant acts such as bathing in and sleeping on ashes, adopting the behaviours of animals, importuning people, and acting improperly.¹²⁵ This behaviour was part of the ‘observance of the madman’ (Skt unmattavrata), aimed at making the Pāśupata adept appear as a madman and be slandered by onlookers so as to cause a karmic transfer to his own advantage. Carrying out the unmattavrata along with a more transgressive set of practices were the skull- and bone-wearing Kāpālikas, who were scornfully depicted in sources from the Indian subcontinent as supernaturally endowed, evil sorcerers and hedonists who often posed as false Brahmans or ascetics; who sang, danced, and played in theatrical performances; and who engaged in sex with promiscuous female attendants, etc.¹²⁶ Some of these behaviours are indeed evocative of those by Lĕbe Lonthang, such as going about naked or wearing a loincloth in the manner of Indian ascetics (3–4, 18); engaging in dance (12, 17) as a form of ‘prayer’ (15); madman-like behaviours, which result in being called a madman (5) and ‘madder than mad’ (17) by the onlookers; importuning and harassing female onlookers (6–12); and publicly performing obscenities with his female partner (18–21).

The religious culture of ‘holy madness’ or mystical antinomianism of the Pāśupata and Kāpālika traditions (and, perhaps, also the elusive Siddhas or ‘Holy Madmen’)¹²⁷ has a long history in Java: just as had occurred in the subcontinent, these groups were made objects of critique by mainstream literati, who scornfully described them as being associated with supernatural powers, wizardry and antinomian behaviours, and the performing arts.¹²⁸ Two stanzas in the late kakavin Pārthayajña (circa fourteenth century) scornfully portray a category of itinerant, power-seeking ascetics who behave in a crazy manner, which seems to correspond to Pāśupatas practising the unmattavrata and ascetics who dance and recite stories in front of an audience, boasting supernatural powers,¹²⁹ who call to mind the Kāpālikas and the Siddhas. Lĕbe Lonthang's exploits remind us of the description of the obscene performances, buffoonery, and dances by different categories of folk performers and religious characters described in Old Javanese kakavins, such as instance comedians (OJ abañol), vidus performing the wayang, piruses, etc.—see in particular Sumanasāntaka 113.5.¹³⁰ Lĕbe Lonthang's ‘dance’ is described using the word tatayungan, which Javanese dictionaries gloss as a rhythmical walking step in the classical dance¹³¹ or a war dance or weapon dance,¹³² and which indeed we find among the martial dances performed by antinomian characters—for instance, the tayungan walking step in the dance performed by demonic, Bhairava-like characters in the Balinese masked performance topeng pajengan, as well as by the chaṇṭang balungs of Surakarta.

Zoetmulder described Lĕbe Lonthang as a ‘bhairawa type’, namely a practitioner assuming the tricksterish behaviours of Bhairava, the wrathful and demonic hypostasis of Śiva-Rudra.¹³³ Bhairava was the elected deity of the Kāpālikas. The survival of ‘descendants’ of those groups in Java centuries after the fall of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms may be gathered from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dutch written accounts and photographic evidence of the chaṇṭang balungs (‘rattling bones’)—the buffoons who played a role in the patronage of female singer-dancers-cum-prostitutes at the Central Javanese court of Surakarta. Those figures, characterised by un-Islamic antinomian behaviours, epitomise a process of both continuity and change, through which those who were originally Tantric practitioners evolved and adapted their roles to the local mainstream (Islamised) politico-ritual economy, adopting new modes of negotiating with audiences, patrons, and prevalent religious fashions.¹³⁴ Lĕbe Lonthang could be the result of a similar process involving the transmogrification and synthesis of Hindu-Buddhist (Tantric) motifs into the Islamic (Sufi) discourse of (Early) Modern Javanism. One could also draw a comparison between Lĕbe Lonthang and the peripatetic antinomian ascetics, minstrels, and mystics known as Bauls (probably from Skt vātula, meaning ‘mad’) or Fakirs in Bengal, whose repertoire (in terms of both doctrines and practices, as well as performances) drew upon different traditions, including Sufism, devotional Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism/Śāktism, and Tantric Buddhist Sahajiyas, who provide a ‘heretic counterpoint to the sectarian scholastic scriptures of both Hindu and Islamic religious establishments’,¹³⁵ and whose sexo-yogic practices are phrased by means of Islamic, Tantric, and Haṭhayogic terminology.¹³⁶ Another figure who comes to mind is that of the mystic, Śaiva yoginī, and poetess Lallā (fourteenth century), who wandered around Kashmir naked, dancing and singing as an ecstatic madwoman, and composing religious songs transcending the Hindu–Muslim (Sufi) divide. This mix of Hindu and Islamic mysticism granted her the veneration that still exists to this day of Hindus and Muslims alike.¹³⁷

Elements of continuity with pre-Islamic lore in the description of Lĕbe Lonthang include his performance of the wayang with the aid of holy books (palm-leaf manuscripts?)—an activity that was deeply connected with pre-Islamic religious and ritual practice, and required initiation. In the Babad Tanah Djawa Poerwaredja,¹³⁸ a Ki Lonthang from Semarang—apparently corresponding to Lĕbe Lonthang—refers approvingly to a wong buda desa, a non-Islamic/Javanist countryman, claiming that the world is equal to Hyang Suksma, the single divine principle existing within all animate and inanimate beings. Ki Lonthang is mentioned in various sources, along with Malang Sumirang/Sunan Panggung, as a pupil of Siti Jĕnar, one of the additional saints (MJ wali) besides the canonical nine (MJ wali songo) who propagated Islam through Java, who was executed for his heterodox pantheistic doctrines.¹³⁹ The association in textual sources between Lĕbe Lonthang and the radical monism of Siti Jĕnar seems significant indeed, and needs to be explored further. The figures of Lĕbe Lonthang/Ki Lonthang, Malang Sumirang/Sunan Panggung, and Siti Jĕnar, whether historical or legendary, were deemed to be related to each other, not only on account of their biographical vicissitudes, but also for having publicly and unscrupulously proclaimed an extreme doctrine of heterodox mysticism¹⁴⁰—in the case of Siti Jĕnar, for having claimed identity between himself and God. Just like Siti Jĕnar, Sunan Panggung was sentenced to death by a synod for his heretic ideas of radical monism and the two died under similar circumstances, performing miraculous acts at the very end of their lives. Ki Lonthang was killed at the synod by the same sword of Sunan Kalijaga that had put an end to the life of Siti Jĕnar.¹⁴¹

All those characters have often been associated by scholars with the radical doctrines expounded by Sufis, such as the cosmology of the twelfth- to thirteenth-century Ibn Arabi, and the biographical episode of their execution has been linked to the similar story of the capital punishment of the ninth- to tenth-century Persian mystic al-Ḥallāj, who was put to death on the ground of blasphemy (allegedly for having declared himself to be God). While the link with Ibn Arabi is pertinent, that with al-Ḥallāj is more problematic, especially as his direct influence on Javanese mysticism has been rightly downplayed by leading scholars of Javanese Islam, such as Zoetmulder,¹⁴² Feener,¹⁴³ and Headley.¹⁴⁴ Indeed, without entirely discounting the possibility that the story of al-Ḥallāj as reported in medieval Islamic sources could have played a role in the formation of the unorthodox figure of Siti Jĕnar, Acri¹⁴⁵ has advanced the hypothesis that the latter figure may represent the Islamic counterpart of a character stemming from, or including elements of syncretism with, pre-Islamic heritage, especially in view of the close parallels in the biography (including capital punishment) and doctrines of Siti Jĕnar with episodes of the Old/Middle Javanese text Tantu Paṅgәlaran mentioning renegade Śaiva/Bhairavika men of religion (OJ viku), such as King Aji Uṇḍal of Daha, who intended to become a viku and raise his status to that of the superior of a religious community (Skt/OJ devaguru), imparting radically monistic teachings and criticising mainstream Śaiva religiosity.¹⁴⁶ We may regard this mainstream Śaiva religiosity as a counterpart of the premodern, pre-Islamic counterpart of early modern and modern ‘legalistic Islam’.

Furthermore, some of the doctrines of Siti Jĕnar present intriguing resonances with those characterising the aforementioned ‘hard-core’ Tantric undercurrent revolving around a non-dual metaphysic and transgressive praxis.¹⁴⁷ For instance, the Tantu Paṅgәlaran attests to the word ambhairava (‘to act like a Bhairava/to follow the way of Bhairava’) to denote the antinomian behaviour of Śaiva anchorites eating corpses in the middle of the night at a charnel ground,¹⁴⁸ and the same term is attested in Modern Javanese suluks (as ambirawa/abirawa) to describe the behaviours of antinomian mystics transgressing moral, social, dietary, and religious rules, who become ‘one with Bhairava’ and identify with God.¹⁴⁹ Among these characters is also Malang Sumirang, pupil of Siti Jĕnar, who, in the eponymous suluk, is described as an infidel heretic (kupur kapir) who, having become a ‘Bhairava’, behaves randomly like a madman, is free of dichotomising thought, and is unafraid of committing acts that are forbidden (haram).¹⁵⁰ In the variant version of the Suluk Malang Sumirang appended to the Sĕrat Cabolek, the same character is said to be inconsiderate, ill-mannered, and extreme, rejecting generally held opinions and mainstream religious lore, and acting like a madman (liwung kadya wong edan; 11.7–8). These behaviours and characterisations are reminiscent of those of Lĕbe Lonthang, which, in the Javanese imaginary, are associated with the same constellation of ideas representing the radical and antinomian form of mysticism condemned by legalistic Islam. In turn, these may be regarded as the continuation and recast into an Islamic garb of a resilient Tantric ideology grounded on transgression and monism, which, in both the Indian subcontinent and pre-Islamic Java, is associated with Rudra- and Bhairava-worshipping practitioners such as the Kāpālikas and Pāśupatas, as well as the Tantric current of the Kaula.

That the Suluk Lonthang and its bizarre protagonist might have represented some sort of half-digested ‘survivals’ in the Islamic milieu of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Java is suggested by the explicit of the text, in which the copyist/redactor declares: ‘Obscure are the ways of Lĕbe Lonthang's conduct. … Go seek instruction from someone who already knows where God is’, as if admitting his uneasiness towards this mystifying character and the purport of his acts, as well as his puzzlement towards the intention of the author of the text he was copying (21–22). Also diagnostic of the fact that Lĕbe Lonthang may have been perceived in the Early Modern Javanese imaginaire as a stereotypical corpus extraneum linked to pre-Islamic heritage is the recopying of the manuscript of a circa sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Old/Middle Javanese Śaiva catechism, the Uttaraśabda, under the label of Suluk Lonthang by Cohen Stuart, R. P. Suryawijaya, and R. M. Samsi (Raden Panji Suryawijaya's son) in the 1860s.¹⁵¹ Kurniawan and Puspitorini argue that this copyist's ‘horizon of expectation’ was directed at the Suluk Lonthang, even if those words never appear in the text, as if both of them were regarded as expressions of pre- or non-Islamic lore, just like the Uttaraśabda was.¹⁵² All these elements suggest that the character of Lĕbe Lonthang could have been influenced by a deeply rooted pre-Islamic Javanese Tantric tradition of transgressive religious praxis, and could thus represent a synthesis of monistic-oriented Tantric and Sufi radical antinomianism recast in a Javanese dress.

The Islamic genealogies of the Suluk Lonthang

The Suluk Lonthang belongs to the genre of the suluk—a term derived from the Arabic sulūk, which can be translated as either ‘walking a path’ or ‘comportment’. Both translations point to the centrality of Sufism in the suluk, as Sufi adepts have often conceptualised their spiritual progress as either a path or the careful observance of proper conduct.¹⁵³ Suluk were often highly complex and subtle, exploring elusive themes such as the relation of God to the world or the possibilities of human spiritual perfection.¹⁵⁴ In Java, the genre of the suluk flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when suluks were produced and read especially at the centres of Islamic learning and the royal courts,¹⁵⁵ including Surakarta—home to a lineage of court poets who were steeped in both Java's literary heritage and the Islamic sciences.

In many of the extant manuscripts under consideration here, the Suluk Lonthang is part of compilations of texts that together make up Mas Ronggasasmita's Suluk Acih collection that was composed in 1815.¹⁵⁶ Whether this means that the Suluk Lonthang was actually composed by Mas Ronggasasmita, or only later added to compilations that also included the texts of the Suluk Acih, cannot be answered with certainty.¹⁵⁷ With its strong antinomian tendencies, however, it contrasts with the other texts of the Suluk Acih, which are mystical and speculative rather than antinomian. The poems of the Suluk Acih draw on a broad range of spiritual and intellectual traditions from the broader Islamic world, ranging from the ecstatic practices of the Shaṭṭāriyya Sufi tradition to Ibn al-’Arabī's speculative philosophy and even Ghazālī's sharia-minded vision of Sufism. Despite the fact that the Suluk Lonthang has a very different quality from the texts with which it is normally grouped, I want to suggest that the poem invites a similarly broad range of interpretative Islamic approaches and frameworks.

Wieringa's and Florida's studies have situated the Suluk Lonthang within its environment—the Muslim world of nineteenth-century Java, in which normative understandings of Islam, gender, and power were articulated and contested by the traditional elites, Islamic scholars, reformers, and colonial scholars and institutions. Wieringa argues that Lĕbe Lonthang deliberately transgresses normative religious conduct and the moral law in order to ultimately transcend and be liberated from both. This deliberate transgression, he further suggests, was a critique of reformist movements in Islam that began to gain traction in Java at the time and that emphasised ritual and legal correctness. According to this reading, Lĕbe Lonthang ridicules and repudiates formal religious rites such as ritual prayer. By only engaging the most superficial layer of religious thought and practice, such rituals have no purpose if the one performing them does not know where God is.¹⁵⁸ Florida, on the other hand, has interpreted the text as a mockery of male sexual entitlement in the context of an ever-intensifying colonial order. In the traditional literature of nineteenth-century Java, a common genre was the didactic piwulang estri, or ‘lessons for women’, articulating virtuous gender relations through stories of a woman who completely submits to her polygynous husband's authority and desires. The ideology of male dominance in literature reinscribed male power against the background of their de facto military and political impotence in the face of Dutch colonial pressure and military supremacy. The Suluk Lonthang belongs to a genre of texts that refuse to celebrate this male sexual entitlement.¹⁵⁹

Wieringa's and Florida's work has significantly furthered our understanding of the Suluk Lonthang in its nineteenth-century context and has given us an impression of the range of interpretations that the suluk likely received from its diverse scribes and readers. In my brief comments, I propose a different approach that will hopefully complement these previous studies. Taking a step back from the immediate historical context of the text, I want to offer a reading of the Suluk Lonthang in light of different strands of the Islamic intellectual and spiritual traditions. While transgression is a familiar mode of Sufi articulation in Java and beyond, I propose that the Suluk Lonthang invites a broad range of understandings that can be held together in tension. With its polyvalence, the poem defies any simplistic understanding of the bounds of legitimate Islamic practice, the significance of transgression, and the meaning of the poem for its different readers.

Antinomianism occupies a central, but also controversial, role in Sufi history. To practise and internalise their submission to God, Muslims follow the mandates of Islamic law (sharia) in their everyday lives. While the sharia is, by design, not static and has therefore resulted in different rules and laws at different times and in different places,¹⁶⁰ its legal injunctions are not optional, but mandatory, for Muslims. Nonetheless, there have often been Muslims—mostly Sufis—who self-consciously defied ordinary rules.¹⁶¹ Among their contemporaries, their behaviour was controversial, as was their legacy for subsequent generations of Muslims. Some praised these lawbreakers as the most accomplished of Sufis while others condemned their comportment as un-Islamic. Through their antinomian behaviour, these figures rejected the external world with its rules and norms, or they pointed out the limitations of a spirituality that they considered empty and meaningless. Rule-breaking was the visible expression of their having transcended the mundane world of everyday life and a single focus on their interiority. Some Sufis were known for their ecstatic utterances (Ar shaṭṭ) that were linked to the annihilation of the Sufi practitioner's self to make room for God's presence alone. Their contemporaries were not always sympathetic, and some found a violent end. Mansūr al-Ḥallāj was killed in tenth-century Baghdad after proclaiming that he was the divine truth (Ar. ana al-ḥaqq).¹⁶² In early Islamic Indonesia, Seh Siti Jenar is remembered for having suffered a very similar fate when he failed to attend Friday prayer, taught his students secret knowledge, and, summoned by the other walis to be interrogated about his behaviour, proclaimed that Seh Siti Jĕnar was not there—only God was.¹⁶³ Some Javanese traditions situate a figure named Ki Lonthang in direct relation to Seh Siti Jĕnar, with the former being the disciple and student of the latter.¹⁶⁴ After Seh Siti Jĕnar's execution at the hand of the wali sanga, Ki Lonthang is invited to recant but declines, professing his allegiance to Seh Siti Jĕnar instead. As a result, he, too, is killed by the wali sanga.¹⁶⁵ Even to the present day, Seh Siti Jĕnar is a famous and very divisive figure in Indonesian Islam. Considered the most accomplished of Java's walis by some, he is denounced as a heretic by others.¹⁶⁶ The writer of the Suluk Lonthang thus drew on and situated Lĕbe Lonthang's story in a tradition in which antinomian actions, while controversial and denounced by the less spiritually mature, were also a well-known sign of the mastery of Sufi realisation.

Another avenue for investigating the Suluk Lonthang's Islamic genealogies is to situate it within the theological strands present elsewhere in the Suluk Acih collection, of which the Suluk Lonthang often is a part. The compilation provides the hermeneutic context within which readers have often encountered the poem, likely shaping their perception of it. Ronggasasmita, the author of other poems of the Suluk Acih, was well versed in Sufi thought and had been initiated in the path and discipline of the Shaṭṭāriyya (MJ Syattariyah).¹⁶⁷ The Shaṭṭāriyya tradition, the dominant Sufi lineage of the Malay-Indonesian world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emerged in fifteenth-century Persia among ecstatic Bistami Sufis. Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (d. 874), in whose legacy the movement situated itself, was another Sufi known for his ecstatic sayings, especially his phrase ‘Glory be to me!’.¹⁶⁸ Among the lineage's most famous practitioners was the South Asian Muḥammad Ghawth of Gwalior (d. 1562 or 1563), whose spirituality was likewise characterised by ecstatic spiritual states, including an ascension to God's throne and face-to-face meeting with the divine. Like Ḥallāj and Seh Siti Jĕnar, Ghawth was persecuted for his ecstatic utterances.¹⁶⁹ In the seventeenth century, initiates of the Shaṭṭāriyya based as scholars in Mecca and Medina integrated the speculative Sufism of the Arab-Andalusian scholar Ibn al-‘Arabī (d. 1240) into the tradition of the lineage.¹⁷⁰ When ‘Abd al-Raʿūf al-Singkilī (d. circa 1693) from Aceh's west coast brought the Shaṭṭāriyya to the Malay-Indonesian world, the path had synthesised the ecstatic impulses attributed to Bisṭāmī and Ghawth as well as Ibn al-‘Arabī's speculative metaphysics.¹⁷¹ The Suluk Lonthang embodies both of these strands of the Shaṭṭāriyya tradition. According to Ibn al-‘Arabī's metaphysical framework, the Sufi's ultimate goal is the realisation that the existence of all entities in the cosmos, including the Sufi seekers themselves, is derivative of God's pure being (Ar wujūd). In Ibn al-‘Arabī's work, the relationship between male and female is a complex metaphor for God's relationship with the cosmos, whereby the Sufi seeker needs to overcome this difference in order to realise God's oneness.¹⁷² Within the Shaṭṭāriyya tradition, Lĕbe Lonthang's ecstatic behaviour, and especially the pervasive theme of gender-bending or denying the reality of gender, is thus legible as a sign of the truly advanced adept.

Beyond Ibn al-‘Arabī's gender-bending, the transgression of sexual and gender norms in the Suluk Lonthang has many precedents in the history of Sufism. The principal (quasi-)institutionalised Sufi tradition with such a transgressive trajectory was the Qalandariyya. Prevalent as a movement of renunciants and dervishes, the Qalandariyya began to gain prominence in the thirteenth century, first in Khurasan and later in South Asia and Anatolia. Qalandars wandered from place to place in groups, begging for sustenance and shocking the people whom they encountered with illicit practices that included antisocial sexual behaviour.¹⁷³ According to Karamustafa, their ascetic and antinomian behaviour performed an emphatic rejection of conventional rules and norms, and often amounted to a social death or self-conscious liberation from mundane demands in hopes of gaining closer proximity to God.¹⁷⁴ Focusing on more contemporary contexts, Katherine Ewing has shown how the qalandar continues to be a significant figure in Pakistan today.¹⁷⁵ Following the same trajectory by engaging in illicit sex and other activities beyond the legal and social pale, they are simultaneously repulsive and enthralling; condemned by some, they are considered the most exalted of Sufis by others. In some cases, they explicitly deploy sexual difference to make their loss of self and love for and surrender to God manifest.¹⁷⁶ While there is no evidence of clear historical links between the Qalandariyya and Java, the impulse of using social transgression and antinomian behaviour as a vehicle for getting closer to God was not limited to the Qalandariyya.¹⁷⁷ Like Qalandar lyrics that present the reader with a poetic world that is the ‘nemesis and very antithesis of the Islamic social order’,¹⁷⁸ it is likely that poems such as the Suluk Lonthang were often understood as such an extreme expression of antinomian renunciation.

These different motives of antinomianism—the ecstatic Sufi experiencing the oneness of or with God and is ultimately executed by the authorities, the antisocial adept displaying transgressive sexual practice in public, and the speculative mystic who has transcended boundaries separating men from women and humans from God—are narratively entwined in the figure of Lĕbe Lonthang. But does this ultimately mean that his behaviour is uplifted as exemplary and good? The authorial voice in the final stanzas defy any such clear-cut answer by refusing to give an answer of any sort. The suluk's representation of his exuberant defiance of the Islamic social order is reminiscent of the carnivalesque as a mode of understanding, which describes a temporal inversion of conventional rules and norms that brings about a utopian place of freedom.¹⁷⁹ According to Bakhtin, the carnival is characterised by a laughter that is inherently ambiguous: ‘It is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.’¹⁸⁰ Bakhtin's characterisation of this laughter also aptly describes the laughter of the Suluk Lonthang's narrative voice, which is just as ambiguous as it declines to say who is right about the true meaning of Lĕbe Lonthang's story. But, amidst all this ambiguity, one thing is clear: after all the temporarily suspended conventional norms have been thoroughly mocked and the carnival is over, these social rules are once again in effect. Far from reducing their legitimacy during normal times, the mocking laughter of the carnival reinvigorates them.

An interpretation of the Suluk Lonthang as less cynical about the values of the Islamic social order based on the sharia is more in line with the dominant Islamic orientation in Java. Seh Siti Jĕnar's story and the Suluk Lonthang may be witnesses of the existence of transgressive behaviour and antinomian tendencies in Islamic Java but, by and large, Javanese Sufism, and Islam in Java as a whole, has been strongly influenced by the thought of the eminent classical theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111)¹⁸¹—the quintessential sober Sufi of Islamic history who emphasised that a person's spirituality could only develop and grow if it was in agreement with the sharia.¹⁸² At first glance, as a thinker who was very rational in his Sufi articulation, Ghazālī seems to be a poor fit for understanding the transgressive quality of the Suluk Lonthang. Indeed, as a practical example, the Suluk Lonthang does not represent the kind of Sufism that Ghazālī would have endorsed. But, even as he was weary of antinomian tendencies, the broader conceptual contours of his thought can be understood to undergird a central Sufi insight that is expressed in the poem as well. Famous for being a ‘scholar of heterogeneity’,¹⁸³ Ghazālī employed multiple epistemic registers in order to ultimately transcend all of them, because God's truth is irreducible to human knowledge of any sort. This transcendence also includes the rules and norms on which the Sufi seeker paradoxically simultaneously depends.¹⁸⁴ Lĕbe Lonthang's transgressions embody a version of Ghazālī's conceptual understanding of this transcendence in a practical or experiential form. Through his violations, he not only undercuts norms, but paradoxically also depends on and reinforces them.

According to Ibrahim Moosa, Ghazālī imagined new forms of knowledge through which contradictory or mutually exclusive views can be simultaneously maintained. The juxtaposition of incommensurable epistemologies resulted in tensions that proved very productive in Ghazālī's thought. Moosa argues that Ghazālī's epistemology was situated at the dihlīz or threshold—normally a transitional space between the house and the door.¹⁸⁵ A liminal space between binary opposites, the dihlīz both reinforces and undercuts the distinction between the inside and the outside, as it exists only by virtue of, but also in antithesis to, the structure it negates. Perhaps Lĕbe Lonthang can be understood as a rather unlikely embodiment of such knowledge situated at the threshold. His carnivalesque behaviour that inverts all religious values, including sexual and gender norms, can only derive its meaning through its dialectical relationship with prevalent social norms and epistemologies. The irreconcilable views that Lĕbe Lonthang makes visible—adherence to and transcendence of Islamic law—dialectically depend on each other and even construct each other as necessary antipodes for each one's significance and intelligibility. The narrator of the poem may refuse to condemn Lĕbe Lonthang in the last lines, but this does not mean that Lĕbe Lonthang's behaviour is elevated to a new standard. On the contrary, the moral and legal standards that are set by the sharia are reinforced because, without their authority, Lĕbe Lonthang would lose his transgressive Otherness, which makes his spiritual powers manifest.

Moosa calls Ghazālī's mystical writing that makes use of these tensions his ‘heart-writing’ or ‘dialogical writing’,¹⁸⁶ which is characterised by the productive tension between incommensurable discourses that point to each other's incompleteness and, in so doing, gesture beyond all human knowledge towards the God who utterly transcends both rationality and experience.¹⁸⁷ It does not merely store and transmit knowledge, but also has the pedagogical function of transforming both reader and writer. Ghazālī could be said to rely on conventional thought and discourses in order to transcend them, as he and others have to develop these discourses in order for him to transcend them in his heart-writing. Al-Ḥallāj and Seh Siti Jenar also needed others to think in conventional ways about the relationship between God and the adept in order for their bold statements to be meaningful. Likewise, Lĕbe Lonthang's transgression of sexual norms should not necessarily be seen as the poet's critiquing or rejecting those norms. Lĕbe Lonthang needs others to practise those norms in order for his transgression to be intelligible. How his example is meant to transform the reader is not the same for everyone. For some, it may be a warning tale about what Sufi excesses can lead to. Those are exhorted to be scrupulous in their adherence to the sharia. For others, Lĕbe Lonthang, with his laughable exuberance, may be an indication of a kind of knowledge that is irreducible to the mandates of the sharia. The text therefore ends with an exhortation not to imitate this most advanced of adepts, but to seek an authority who can guide one in appropriate emplotment.