Tarekat and tarekat teachers in Madurese society

Abstract

The tarekat, Muslim mystical brotherhoods, have played an important but almost undocumented part in Madurese society. The information in the pre-independence Dutch literature hardly does more than mention their names (Schrieke 1919, 1920), while recent ethnographic studies (Jordaan 1985, Mansurnoor 1990, de Jonge 1988, Touwen-Bouwsma 1988) give us no more than tantalizing glimpses of the existence and possibly still increasing importance of the tarekat. There is also a dearth of other written sources on the subject.