Manuscripts and the Literary Tradition of Indonesian Pesantren in the Formation of Sundanese Islamic Identity
The vernacularisation of Islam in the Sundanese-language area of West Java, Indonesia, has received little scholarly attention, long overshadowed by studies of the island’s Javanese-speaking regions. To trace the development of a distinctive Sundanese Islamic identity, my dissertation examines manuscripts and poetic Islamic literature from Indonesian Islamic educational institutions (pesantren). It centres on Kuningan, a region historiographically marginalised by Cirebon’s dominance in the Islamisation of Java and brings to light a hitherto neglected corpus by Kiai Hasan Mughni (1913–1978), a local poet-kiai whose work runs to thousands of stanzas and whose poetic method articulated a “formative-spiritualist” mode of expression amid Javanese cultural-linguistic hegemony.
Methodologically, the study employs philology, history, and literary studies. It reads the pesantren archive through close textual analysis and historical contextualisation, attending to poetic genealogy, pedagogy, and practices of copying, printing, performance, and recitation within local intellectual networks. The poems are examined as vernacular works mediating between the authoritative Arabic literary tradition and local Sundanese cultural expression.
The thesis argues that poetic vernacularisation functioned as an instrument of Islamic “Sunda-nisation.” It is not imitation, but creative appropriation, enabling linguistic and cultural identity formation. By repositioning Kuningan within West Javanese and wider archipelagic contexts, the project reframes Islamisation beyond Javanese-centric narratives and, as the first sustained study of Kiai Hasan Mughni and several unstudied texts, clarifies how pesantren literature shaped a Sundanese Islamic identity.
This doctoral project is fully funded by the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education Agency (LPDP).