Sufism and the Sacred Feminine in Lombok, Indonesia: Situating Spirit Queen Dewi Anjani and Female Saints in Nahdlatul Wathan

This article is a feminist ethnographic exploration of how ‘indigenous’ notions of a ‘sacred feminine’ shape Sufi praxis on the island of Lombok in the eastern part of Indonesia in Southeast Asia. I demonstrate through long-term immersive anthropological fieldwork how in her indigenous form as Dewi Anjani ‘Spirit Queen of Jinn’ and as ‘Holy Saint of Allah’ who rules Lombok from Mount Rinjani, together with a living female saint and Murshida with whom she shares sacred kinship, these feminine beings shape the kind of Sufi praxis that has formed in the largest local Islamic organization in Lombok, Nahdlatul Wathan, and its Sufi order, Hizib Nahdlatul Wathan. Arguments are situated in a Sufi feminist standpoint, revealing how an active integration of indigeneity into understandings of mystical experience gives meaning to the sacred feminine in aspects of Sufi praxis in both complementary and hierarchical ways without challenging Islamic gender constructs that reproduce patriarchal expressions of Sufism and Islam.

Nirañjanī Sampradāy

Believed to have been founded by the saint-poet Svāmī Haridās (d. 1601?) in the late 16th or early 17th century, the Nirañjanī Sampradāy is one of the bhakti communities associated with the so-called nirguṇ sant movement that began in northern India sometime in the 15th century. The Sampradāy, which consists of both monastic initiates and lay followers, flourished during the 17th and 18th centuries in what is now Rajasthan, during which time it also established monastic outposts at locations as distant as Aurangabad and the Narmada River valley. Nirañjanī hagiographical traditions acknowledge the community’s early connections with the Nāth Sampradāya and with the Dādū Panth, another nirguṇ sant tradition that arose at roughly the same time as the Nirañjanī Sampradāy. These close connections are also reflected in the literature, theology, and practices of the sect, which combine Vaishnava bhakti with aspects of yoga as well as elements adapted from Sufi traditions. After the passing of Haridās, the monastic order expanded quickly in a decentralized fashion, with several of Haridās’s direct disciples founding monastic centers and lineages in different parts of Rajasthan (and eventually in Hyderabad as well). Among the later monastic disciples were several prominent saint-poets, including Santadās, Turasīdās, Manoharadās, Bhagavānadās, Dhyānadās, and Harirāmadās. Importantly, the Nirañjanīs also give prominence to Pannājī, an 18th-century female saint, and recognize several other female saints as being part of the tradition. Although the Nirañjanīs themselves were prolific writers, very little material by or about the Nirañjanīs is available in published form. This article lists the few original works of scholarship that have been produced on the Sampradāy in Hindi and in English along with any relevant primary sources that have been published.

Channelling the Divine

This chapter surveys pagan, Christian, and early Islamic attitudes to dream divination and oracles, and the associated practice of incubation at shrines that continued from Antiquity in a religious guise. Divine messages received in oracular dreams in the pagan, Judaeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman, and early Islamic traditions required specialist interpreters and specific locations for gaining privileged access to the divine. It shows how the pagan practices of consulting oracles and sleeping at shrines were adopted and adapted by Byzantine Christians and early Muslims. The first half of the chapter deals with the pagan and monotheist reliance on oracles. Oracles came in many shapes and sizes, but one thing they had in common across the various religious traditions was a starring role for women. Oracles were usually delivered in a state of ecstatic frenzy, the sign of possession by a god or a demon. The process of dream incubation also involved visitations by a god or a saint, gained by sleeping at a holy place, temple, or shrine. The second half of the chapter examines pagan records of the practice of incubation, before discussing how this tradition was transformed in the miracle collections of male and female saints in the Byzantine milieu, where it attained spiritual overtones. The limited evidence for incubation in the Talmud will be treated, as well as early Islamic incubation practices.

Women and the Reformation

The historiography of the Reformation era, roughly 1517–1650, was long dominated by scholarship that focused on theological developments, religious debates, and major reformers, such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola. The late 20th century, however, saw an expansion in areas of scholarly inquiry, with many new works on the period’s extraordinary cultural, social, economic, and political transformations and conflicts. Scholars increasingly argued, moreover, that the era had weathered not a single, traumatic “Reformation,” but multiple and diverse “Reformations,” whose impacts had rippled throughout early modern society in a variety of ways. Part of this historiographical shift involved the exploration of new perspectives and voices, which included a growing interest in the role of women as active participants in and contributors to historical change. Scholars thus began to investigate the ways in which women had experienced the Reformation, perhaps differently from men, and how the Reformation had influenced women’s social roles, marriages, family lives, faith and religious expressions, and all other aspects of their everyday lives. In the process, there emerged what became a long-running controversy, often with confessional overtones, over whether the Reformation was “good” or “bad” for women. This has thankfully now died down, since partisans on both sides have mainly accepted that the question was not only overly simplistic, but also tended to lump together all women as an undifferentiated mass. Nevertheless, readers cannot fail to find signs of the old battle everywhere they look. To explain it briefly, therefore, the argument on the one side was that Protestants, and particularly radical reformers, had benefited women by elevating them as equal to men in spiritual worth, introducing a more egalitarian form of marriage, which they had praised as a noble institution, and freeing from their bondage the nuns previously forced into involuntary celibacy and enclosure. The argument on the other side, however, was that Protestants had, on the contrary, harmed women by toppling the Virgin Mary from her seat as Queen of Heaven and frowning on her veneration, and by discouraging women from turning to Mary or the female saints as intercessors and models of strong and influential women. By closing the monasteries and emphasizing marriage and motherhood as women’s highest calling, moreover, Protestants had limited the independence and freedom formerly enjoyed by women religious, ended the political and social power of abbesses, and removed women’s ability to choose the unmarried life.