Sunan Kalijaga

Sunan Kalijaga is the most frequently named of the Wali Sanga in Javanese telling, and at the same time the least supported by contemporary sources. No inscription, charter or foreign record names him; what exists is babad written centuries later, genealogies compiled by parties with an interest in them, and living oral account.

The same holds for nearly all the Wali Sanga, and even the list of nine names differs between sources: some carry names absent from others, and “nine” appears to be a fixed number whose contents vary. This entry states that at the outset, because a reader seeking a life will find that what is available is the history of an account.

What can be stated on firmer ground is that Islam spread along Java's north coast between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, that it spread with trade and marriage and through the port cities, and that the form which took hold in Java carried elements already present. The telling about Sunan Kalijaga is how Javanese society explains that situation to itself.

The most widely circulated account has Sunan Kalijaga using wayang, gamelan and local ceremony as means of propagation, with performances whose admission was the utterance of the confession of faith. The account is used to this day as a ground for defending Javanese arts against religious objection, and for that very reason it deserves examination rather than repetition.

Evidence of wayang performance predates the period described: ninth-century inscriptions already name mawayang performances, long before Islam. What is described is therefore not invention but reuse, and some elements attributed to Sunan Kalijaga — the form of the puppets far removed from human likeness, particular repertoires, particular pieces — may date from later than the figure himself.

This encyclopedia does not conclude that the account is false. What it states is that the account does work — it says that Javanese art and Javanese Islam are not opposed — and that the work proceeds regardless of the accuracy of its historical detail. The standing of an account as a reason people use is information an encyclopedia should record, as much as a date.