The pious believers of Bernie Adeney

Last two weeks I have been reading the fascinating book by Bernard Adeney, Living in a Sacred Cosmos, Indonesia and the future of Islam 2018, Yale Southeast Asia Studies vol.66.

Initially it was difficult reading: I was expecting some broad and general theories and observations about Indonesian Islam, how the largest Muslim country takes a different position than the Middle East or India-Pakistan. Or rather: How it is now also developing towards a more 'conservative turn' (Bruinessen 2013, Madinier The end of innocence). But the book is not about Islam as an institution, even not about Islam as a community. In the first chapter only one page (24-5) is devoted to the the more than 50 salafi organizations that have started since 1998, the end of the Soeharto regime. It is not about organizations, it is all about individuals, and most often about personal meetings of Adeney in his Indonesian period, roughly 1993-2013. He was the leader of the postgraduate centre at the UGM, Universitas Gadjah Mada  in Yogyakarta,  where Christians (UKDW, Universitas Kristen Duta Wacana) and UIN, the Islamic State University of Yogyakarta come together as ICRS the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies.
Adeney writes about religious individual experiences not about universal or local Muslim development in leading persons or organizations (and Indonesia is better in organizations than in the great leaders). He gives wonderful interpretations of the creative sensitivity for religious ideas and emotions. He avoids the doctrines and formal organizations.This makes the book sometimes a learned annotated personal diary. It is its weakness, also its strength.
As to formal Islamic learning there is much available in Indonesia and Adeney has not the ability to equal or even to understand them easily. There is one Arab word in Arab script in the book, but unfortunately, the letters are not from right to the left, but the other way round on p.68.When reading the word tauhid or 'Unity of God' here one wonders: did nobody in his office correct him? I have seldom read more awkward Arabic!

But the weakness about 'formal'  or 'official' Islam is corrected by the nice anecdotes, personal stories in this book. Here he often writes more about Indonesians in general than about Muslims more specifically. An excellent example is pp. 237-247 about 'imagination of nature'. It first gives his imression of the dramatic eartquake in Yogyakarta, 27 May 2006, when he saw people saying their ritual prayers amidst the ruins of their house. Then he turns to the tsunami of Aceh, 26 December 2004. It begins with the story of the Protestant minister Elisa who missed his appointment, arrived late in Aceh and found 15 members of his family lost or/and dead. This minister had for some time great problems in accepting God's goodness for his creation, while a Muslim grandmother in Yogyakarta could more quickly put the disaster in her religious imagination. He ends then with a long quote from the Jesuit writer Sindhunata about God as Grandfather Merapi, the volcano north of Yogyakarta: 'With his lava and eruptions that kill, grandfather Merapi demands human victims, but Grandfather Merapi also pays us back with the overflowing richness of nature..'
What has this to do with Indonesia and the Future of Islam? Probably that title was good enough for the marketing of the book. But this is very different from the large amount of studies complaining about the salafi invasion and infiltration in Indonesia and a possible strategy to turn it: that theme is restricted to one page only!