THE PEACOCK IN SUFI COSMOLOGY AND POPULAR RELIGION

In various cultural and religious contexts, from West Asia to Southeast Asia, we come across a number of quite similar creation myths in which a peacock, seated on a cosmic tree, plays a central part. For the Yezidis, a sect of Sufi origins that has moved away from Islam, the Peacock Angel, who is the most glorious of the angels, is the master of the created world. This belief may be related to early Muslim cosmologies involving the Muhammadan Light (Nur Muhammad), which in some narratives had the shape of a peacock and participated in creation. In a different set of myths, the peacock and the Tree of Certainty (shajarat al-yaqīn) play a role in Adam and Eve’s fall and expulsion from Paradise. The central myth of the South Indian Hindu cult of the god Murugan also involves a tree and a peacock. The myth is enacted in the annual ritual of Thaipusam, like the Nur Muhammad myth is still enacted annually in the Maulid festival of Cikoang in South Sulawesi. Images of the peacock, originating from South India, have moved across cultural and religious boundaries and have been adopted as representing the different communities’ peacock myths

‘I would be sitting in the village room where people gather.’ Interview with Martin van Bruinessen

I. Interview Interview conducted by Marie Le Ray, Utrecht, 23/12/06. EJTS: Could you introduce yourself and let us know more specifically how you got interested in the Kurdish question as a scholar? Martin Van Bruinessen: It is a story that I have told too many times and it has become perhaps too polished to be exactly what happened. The story that I have told seems to have shaped my memory. Anyway, I was a student of mathematics. I enjoyed travelling. I was going every summer holidays to the..

In the Tradition or Outside? Reflections on Teachers and Influences

In this autobiographical essay, Martin van Bruinessen looks back at the diverse intellectual influences that contributed to his formation as a scholar of Indonesian Islam. He was never trained as an Indonesianist or a scholar of Islam, and came to the subject through a series of unplanned changes in his life trajectory. His first acquaintance with Indonesia was through late colonial and post-colonial Dutch literature. It was followed in his student days by critical reporting on the massacres of 1965-66 and a re-reading of Indonesian history from an anti-imperialist viewpoint. His formal academic training was in entirely different disciplines, and his first experience with anthropological fieldwork took place in a different part of the world. A fortuitous post-doctoral appointment at KITLV, followed by four years at LIPI as a consultant for research methods, enabled him to acquaint himself directly with contemporary Muslim discourses and movements. He had the good fortune of working with leading Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, who became his major teachers. Only when he became a teacher and thesis supervisor himself, at the IAIN Sunan Kalijaga and later at Utrecht University, did he feel the need to reflect on how his own research relates to established academic traditions. The essay documents his growing appreciation of, and lasting critical distance from, the Leiden school of Oriental studies and his relationship with the French tradition of Islamic and Indonesian studies. It also attempts to be the story of the rise and decline of Leiden’s tradition of Indonesian Islamic studies, from the perspective of a critical reader who wishes to remain an outsider.[Dalam tulisan biografis ini, Martin van Buinessen melihat kembali beberapa pengaruh pembentukan dirinya sebagai sarjana tentang Islam Indonesia. Martin tidak belajar khusus tentang keindonesiaan atau keislaman, minat itu muncul dari perubahan-perubahan dalam hidupnya. Perkenalannya dengan Indonesia dimulai lewat tulisan-tulisan dari masa akhir dan pasca penjajahan. Pengalamannya berlanjut pada masa studinya saat menulis laporan kritis tentang kasus 1965-1966 dan dengan pembacaan ulangnya atas sejarah Indonesia dari sudut pandang anti imperalisme. Latar belakang pendidikan formalnya sama sekali berbeda, sementara pengalaman pertama riset antropologinya juga di tempat yang berbeda. Posisi post-doktoral di KITLV dan diikuti empat tahun di LIPI sebagai konsultan metodologi riset membuat Martin bersinggungan langsung dengan wacana muslim kontemporer dan gerakannya. Martin sangat beruntung bertemu dengan para cendikiawan muslim Indonesia yang kemudian menjadi guru-gurunya. Dari pengalamannya menjadi dosen dan supervisor disertasi di IAIN Sunan Kalijaga, sekarang UIN Sunan Kalijaga, dan selanjutnya di Universitas Utrecht juga, Martin merasa perlu untuk merefleksikan kembali penelitiannya dalam kaitannya dengan tradisi akademik yang mapan. Tulisan ini mendokumentasikan perkembangan apresiasinya, sekaligus kritiknya, terhadap studi ketimuran mazhab Leiden serta keterkaitannya dengan studi keislaman dan keindonesiaan dalam tradisi Perancis. Ini juga merupakan upaya untuk menulis sejarah naik-turunnya studi keislaman Indonesia mazhab Leiden dari perspektif seorang pembaca kritis yang berusaha tetap menjadi ‘orang luar’.

Boris James, Genèse du Kurdistan. Les Kurdes dans l’Orient mamelouk et mongol (1250-1340)

Serious historical studies of the Kurds are few and far between and tend moreover to focus on the modern period. As part of the current flourishing of Ottoman studies, it is true, there has been a steady trickle of studies on the Kurds, their neighbours and the state in the Ottoman period (which for the Kurds began around 1500 CE), but hardly any work has been done on pre-Ottoman times. The most authoritative general overviews of Kurdish history, by McDowall (1996), Jwaideh (2006) and Bozarsl..

Global and Local in Indonesian Islam (<Special Issue>Islam in Southeast Asia)

この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました。One important aspect of globalisation is the process of Islamisation of Indonesia. For many centuries this process consisted of a constant stream of ideas and practices from Mecca to Indonesia. Hajis and Arab traders were the carriers of this cultural flow, which was largely one-directional. Cultural practices originating from the Middle East were integrated into local custom and belief. Such well-known cultural and political oppositions as santri and abangan or shari'a and adat did not so much represent Islam versus non-Islam as disjunctions in the process of globalisation and Islamisation. In the course of the twentieth century, the pattern of Islamising influences changed; they no longer flow to the periphery from a single centre at Mecca but emanate from numerous different sources. Their impact has been differential too. Explicitly anticosmopolitan ideas (anti-Semitism) have been adopted and been spread by groups that are internationally oriented and reject all that smells of local adaptations. It has been the most cosmopolitan of Indonesian Muslims, on the other hand, such as the so-called pembaharuan ('renewal') group, who have insisted most clearly on the legitimacy of specifically Indonesian forms of Islam

Kurds and the City

In September 1996, Joyce Blau, Bernard Hourcade and myself convened a conference on the place of the city in Kurdish history and society. With over thirty participants from more than fifteen different countries, including speakers from the former Soviet republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, this was an exciting and memorable event. Unfortunately, we were during the subsequent years overwhelmed by other obligations that demanded our attention, so that we never managed to publish proceed..