Islam Jawa in Diaspora and Questions on Locality

This article examines the translocal Islam Jawa (Javanese Islam) that characterises the deterritorialisation of culture through space and time. Contrary to mainstream approaches to Islam Jawa that tends substantially picture Islam and Muslim in Java as a mere “localised form of Islam”, it sees Islam Jawa as a “translocal” practices. In addition, it sees that the idea of Islam Jawa travels, deterritorialises, and reterritorialises in different times and places. Therefore, what is imagined by scholars as “local Islam” is not local in traditional and geographical senses because Islam Jawa is formed, shaped and influenced by the mobility, entanglement, connectivity across oceans, regions, and borders. The Islam Jawa also travels to a different place, transcending the modern limits of nation-states\u27 boundaries. Islam Jawa is a product and a consequence of the efforts to establish between “imagined” spatial and temporal congruence