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The Javanese - one of the largest ethnic groups in the Islamic world - were once mostly 'nominal Muslims' with pious believers a minority and the majority seemingly resistant to Islam's call for greater piety. Over the tumultuous period analyzed here - from the 1930s to the 2000s - that society has changed profoundly to become an extraordinary example of the rising religiosity that marks the modern age.

Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java draws on a formidable body of sources, including interviews, archival documents and a vast range of published material, to situate the Javanese religious experience. Winner of the Kahin Prize from the Association of Asia Studies, the study has considerable relevance for much wider contexts. The final section of the book, which considers the significance of Java's religious history in global contexts, shows how it exemplifies a profound contest of values in the universal human search for a better life.

Merle C. Ricklefs
There is a tradition of scepticism about the historical value of Javanese chronicles (babad), which has led to a privileging of European sources in the study of Javanese history. This scepticism may rest upon doubt whether the Javanese even have a sense of history.
This paper argues that there is ample evidence in Javanese chronicles of a vibrant sense of the past. It analyses particularly Babad Sangkala. The original version of this work (Leiden cod. or. 4097) seems to have been completed c. 1750 and is shown here to be very accurate in its account of the reign of Pakubuwana II (1726-49). This babad demonstrates that in the mid-eighteenth century there was a Javanese chronicle tradition which assumed that events occurred in a sequence, that they had causes and consequences, that they could be judged and that the past was worth both knowing and recording accurately. This demonstration that Javanese chronicle writers could be concerned to record the past with precision is essential to showing that the Javanese were indubitably people with a sense of history and a capacity to record it. Clearly therefore historians of pre-colonial Java are as much obliged to take Javanese sources seriously as historians of France or Germany are obliged to use French or German sources. The author expresses regret that this seems not yet to be accepted by all scholars of Javanese history.