“No city without a saint, no village without a righteous man”. Overview of the holy places of Indonesia based on the book Saint bandits of Java

Abstract

This article is a review of George Quinn's book, The Holy Bandits of Java, which examines the current state of Islam in Indonesia through the life stories of revered eccentric saints. The author sees Java's holy sites as pockets of localized culture, harking back to the island's pre-Islamic past, disappearing under the blows of orthodox Islam. Each chapter is devoted to a particular saint and, on the basis of his hagiography, discusses issues related to modernity: ecology, religious authority, the “invention of tradition”, etc.