Lecture | Research Seminar
Fighting Excess from Below | The Ambivalent Virtue of Simplicity in Islamic Java
- Date
- Monday 7 April 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- t.b.a.
In Java, the appearance of graves is one of the primary sites where self-identified traditionalist Muslims perform their identity and difference from their modernist counterparts. Traditionalist graves often show their admiration for the pious dead through lavish decoration. Modernists, by contrast, insist that graves must be simple and often consider traditionalist graves “excessive.” Yet the rejection of excess — among Sufis often conceptualized as asceticism or “poverty” (A. faqr) — is not absent from traditionalist ethics and may even be revered in the dead person the grave commemorates.
In this talk, I discuss the phenomenon of “obstinate graves,” where dead people cause their beautiful grave to mysteriously decay and fall apart. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted at grave sites in East Java and the Sufi concepts which my interlocutors have invoked in their conversations with me, I make two interrelated arguments. First, I show that excess is an ambiguous category in traditionalist discourse. Excessive love for God, miracle working, or ascetic feats legitimate a saint, and lavish post-mortem care is an appropriate response, but this very excess is sometimes also seen as undermining the virtue it is supposed to honor and may be corrected by the honored departed. And second, I argue that these ambiguous dynamics arise from an ethic where the living and the dead take on different roles that complement rather than oppose each other, but also gesture toward God’s truth, which utterly exceeds the grasp of any humans, dead or alive.
About Verena Meyer
I am an Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent) of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. In my work, I draw on ethnographic field research, training in contemporary critical theory, and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Before coming to Leiden, I received my PhD at Columbia University and held a postdoc in Norway.