Year: 2023
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: No matter where they are, Muslims around the world face the Kaʿba in Mecca during prayer. Yet the meaning of facing Mecca has not always and everywhere been the same. In this chapter, I discuss two famous stories of Javanese Muslims – one a semi-legendary saint, the other a modern reformer – who re-oriented their contemporaries’ prayers by discerning a new and better way to align Java with Mecca. Comparing the two accounts, I argue that these Javanese examples share a religious imaginary in which a periphery is contingent on a center as the locus of authority. In the conceptual vocabulary of Jonathan Z. Smith, Islam appears to have a strong locative sense, where religious truth is mapped onto a central site. The two Javanese narratives, however, undercut this possibility of a clear distinction between center and periphery on which Smith’s theory rests, as it is from the periphery that the center is established and given its meaning. These accounts therefore de-center common understandings of religion and space and invite us to rethink the relation between center and periphery in religious contexts anew.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Verena Meyer
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4385584507