Pesantren and kitab kuning: continuity and change in a tradition of religious learning

Abstract

One of Indonesia's great traditions is that of Muslim religious learning as \nembodied in the Javanese pesantren and similar institutions in the outer \nislands and the Malay peninsula. The raison d'être of these institutions is \nthe transmission of traditional Islam as laid down in scripture, i.e., \nclassical texts of the various Islamic disciplines, together with \ncommentaries, glosses and supercommentaries on these basic texts \nwritten over the ages. These works are collectively known, in Indonesia, \nas kitab kuning, "yellow books", a name that they owe to the tinted paper \non which the first Middle Eastern editions reaching Indonesia were \nprinted. The corpus of classical texts accepted in the pesantren tradition \nis - in theory at least - conceptually closed; the relevant knowledge is \nthought to be a finite and bounded body. Although new works within the \ntradition continue to be written, these have to remain within strict \nboundaries and cannot pretend to offer more than summaries, \nexplications or rearrangements of the same, unchangeable, body of \nknowledge. Even radical reinterpretations \nof the classical texts are not \nacceptable. The supposed rigidity of this tradition has come in for much \ncriticism, both from unsympathetic foreign observers and from reformist \nand modernist Muslims themselves. In practice, however, the tradition \nappears to be much more flexible than the above sketch would suggest.

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