Slametan

The host invites the men of the neighbourhood, who sit cross-legged around the food. An appointed speaker states the purpose of the meal in refined Javanese — the ujub — a prayer is then recited in Arabic, and those present answer. Afterwards the food is divided and most of it carried home in the berkat; the gathering itself is short, often under half an hour.

What matters is not the quantity of food but that the neighbours came and took a portion home. The slametan states that something has happened and that the surrounding households know it; the person not invited knows that he was not invited. It therefore works as an announcement and as the maintenance of neighbourly relations, and not only as worship.

The slametan is the example most often used to explain the relation of Islam and custom in Java, and it is therefore a site of dispute. For some reformist scholars it is bid'ah, above all in the forms marking the 7th, 40th, 100th and 1000th day after a death, which have no basis in the law and are held to derive from pre-Islamic custom. For most of those who hold them it is almsgiving with prayer, which is enjoined.

The argument runs within Javanese Muslim society rather than between Islam and something outside it, and has done for more than a century. What changes is not the form but its justification: the same slametan can be explained as custom, as alms, or as both, and the explanation a host gives states his position in that argument.