Negara dan Masjid: Mosque Architecture and Religious Change in Early Modern Period Java, Indonesia

Today, Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, yet up until the fifteenth century, Hinduism and Buddhism served as the dominant state religions. The transition from these Indic religions to Islam marks one of the most significant episodes of large-scale religious change in Southeast Asian history. Scholars have argued that religious beliefs in the past were not confined to a discrete religious sphere but are also woven into a society’s social, political, and economic structures. Within the Javanese context, the question then becomes: how do new religious ontologies become materially and spatially embedded in everyday life, and through what processes do these materializations reshape political economic organizations and other forms of belonging? Existing approaches to the study of Islamization in Indonesia emphasize trade or elite-led conversion but overlook the material and spatial mechanisms through which Islam transformed communities. To address this gap, this dissertation employs a comparative, multi-scalar methodology. By combining GIS-based spatial modeling and Social Network Analysis of 109 Early Modern mosques from West and Central Java, I examine how mosques, as one of the largest investments made for and by Muslim communities, record shifting religious and political economic arrangements. Results show that while Islamic ontologies facilitated the growth of coastal economies, governance remained broadly extractive across both the Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic states of Java. When seen through the lens of care, however, mosque distribution reveals how welfare as infrastructure was unevenly organized and often co-opted by the state and channeled into coercive political economies. At the same time, the data indicates that grassroots, community-funded mosque construction surged during periods of political crisis. These episodes demonstrate that when state provision faltered, communities mobilized religious giving to build their own infrastructures of welfare through collective action at local scales.

Author dc:creator

• Aldo W. Foe (24399041)

• Anthropology
• Archaeology

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32991923.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32991923