International Journal of Interreligious and Intercultural Studies (IJIIS) ISSN: 2654-2706, Volume I, Number 1, October 2018 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SITI KHOTIJAH: ISLAM AND MUSLIMS IN A BALINESE GALACTIC POLITY Mark Woodward Center for the Study of Religion and Confiict Arizona State University <
[email protected]> Introduction century and the performative approach This article seeks to describe the to ritual studies developed by Victor way in which Gusti Ayu Made Rai, an Turner in the 1970s. eighteenth-century Balinese princess Bali and Orientalist Romanticism from Badung became Raden Ayu Siti Khotijah, one Indonesia’s few widely Bali is often called the “Island recognized female Muslim saints. In so of the Gods.” As Boone observes doing I develop an alternative reading of representations of Bali have been tinged the dynamics of the history of religion with romantic longing since the days of 1 in Bali, countering the common view the Netherlands East India Company. that it is a static monolithically Hindu Tropes of Rousseau’s “noble savage” tradition. Rather than turning inward as and a longing for an other than Muslim the surrounding areas embraced Islam, Indonesia are the implicit subtexts of Balinese kingdoms sought to include much of the academic and more, if not Muslims and elements of Islam in most, popular writing about Balinese scared narratives and geographies. Two religion and culture. Bali is often seen distinct theoretical approaches are used as a Hindu island in a sea of Islam and in this analysis: the structural approach as a fossilized version of what Java, to indigenous Southeast Asian states and much of the rest of Indonesia, pioneered by Robert Heine-Geldern 1 Boone, J.