Cult of Muslim Saints in Indonesia: Religious and cultural practices of imagining and “consuming” holiness in Indonesian society

The article analyses the social and cultural dynamics of the historical development of the cult of saints in Indonesia. The author studies modernization and traditionalism, which influenced significantly the history of the cult of saints in the social history of Indonesian Islam. The author highlights several elements of the modern social history of the cult of saints in Islam in Indonesia. It is assumed that 1) images of saints have become invented cultural and social constructs, 2) folk Islam is a space for the development of ideas about saints, 3) ziyarat has become a universal form of functioning of the cult of saints, 4) ziyarat practices are integrated into the modern economic model, 5) saints have become the object of consistent marketization and therefore mass culture is turning into one of the spaces for the development of their images. Analysing the role of the Ummah, the author believes that 1) the development of the cult of saints in the history of the Indonesian Muslim Ummah became the result of the transformation of folk Islam, 2) the development of ideas about saints in Islam became a form of folk memorial culture, 3) the history of the cult of saints in Indonesian Islam actualised adaptive potential of the Ummah, its reaction to the secularization of society. It is assumed that the process of modernization and secularization in Indonesia influenced the cult of saints significantly. The author of the article shows that the history of the cult of saints actualised the contradictions in the development of the Muslim Ummah in contexts of parallel co-development and simultaneous co-functioning of “high” (“scholarly”) and “low” (“folk”) Islam.

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