Religion & Mysticism

It is well known that Indonesia is home to the world's largest Muslim population: around 87 per cent of Indonesians are registered as Muslim. Those of us who live here feel the pervasiveness of Islam across the archipelago. Bali is the great exception, being overwhelmingly Hindu, along with the Christian regions of North Sulawesi, Papua and East Nusa Tenggara. Yet Indonesia is neither an Islamic state nor a strictly secular one. It is a Pancasila state, resting on the first principle of "belief in the One and Only God". The deeper reality is that Islam here is the most recent overlay in a long series.

Layers of belief

The ancient Javanese culture was animistic. All living things possessed a soul, from plants to animals that might serve or harm man without moral culpability; over all sat a divine spirit, serene and indifferent to man. This animism was never eradicated across the millennium and a half of religious colonisation that followed. The tradition of the selamatan is animistic in origin: Javanese families honour a relative's death on the third, seventh, fortieth, hundredth and thousandth day after their passing.

"The homeostasis sought via the 'selamatan' has an animistic background which is part of the Javanese cosmology: Man is surrounded by spirits and deities, apparitions and mysterious supernatural forces which, unless he takes proper precautions, may disturb him or even plunge him into disaster."Prof. J. M. van der Kroef

In the fifth century Hinduism arrived on Java and absorbed much of the animist tradition, creating a uniquely Javanese religion. Its core value was eling, a word difficult to translate but which manifests as self-control: a way of calming the mind and refusing to succumb to the confusion of powerful emotion, from anger to sorrow. It is not the Buddhist Nirvana of extinguished desire, but a process of remembering, of looking closely at what brings calm. A thousand years later Islam arrived as a further layer, taking on much of the animism and Hinduism beneath it and acquiring a flavour found nowhere else.

"'Eling' is a much-used word in Javanese because of its close connection to the deepest attitude of the Javanese to his inner life. It is operative not only in religion, but also in everyday life and in their ethical norms."Subagio Sastrowardoyo (free translation, Mansur Medeiros)

This mystic synthesis, once dominant, is neither static nor universal. Since the 1980s it has receded, in parts of Java quite sharply, under urbanisation, new youth cultures and the rising authority of orthodox agama. It persists in the background rather than the foreground.

The recognised religions

To the Indonesian way of thinking, religion is not separable from the individual. Although Indonesia has no national religion, six faiths are officially recognised: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The last was restored to recognised status under President Abdurrahman Wahid around 2000, after New Order-era suppression that had counted Confucians as Buddhists. Since a 2017 Constitutional Court ruling, adherents of native faiths (penghayat kepercayaan) may record "Kepercayaan" on their KTP identity card rather than being forced to nominate one of the six. Atheism is another matter: it has no place on the identity card, remains poorly understood socially, and the new Criminal Code in force since January 2026 criminalises publicly inciting others to abandon religion. If asked your religion, and you will be, answer straightforwardly and leave the subject there.

Magic and the everyday

The form of Islam first adopted here was the mystical Sufi variety, embraced largely because it paralleled the existing animistic mysticism: a Muslim patina over a Hindu coating over older mystical traditions. This helps explain the casual way black magic, witchcraft, sorcery, demonic possession and ghosts are accepted. To say a place is haunted may or may not be believed; that such a thing is possible is not open to question. Each region has its own traditional healers, shamans and supernatural bogeymen. Each tradition is accepted by the others, and where mysticism conflicts with formal religious belief, the contradiction is quietly glossed over in an everyday exercise of eling.

Contributors: patrick okusi

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