Antinomianism as a way to God in nineteenth-century Java: the Suluk Lonthang between Islamic and pre-Islamic religious discourse

Abstract

This article presents the first complete critical edition and annotated English translation of the nineteenth-century Javanese mystical poem Suluk Lonthang. Combining different disciplinary expertise in old and modern Javanese philology, Tantric Studies, and Islamic Studies, it interprets the protagonist of the poem as an expression of the multifaceted and multivocal Javanese religious landscape of the time, whose historical—and translocal—roots can be discerned in Sufi traditions from the Islamicate and Persianate worlds, as well as Tantric traditions from both pre-Islamic Java and the Indian subcontinent.