The pesantren (or pondok, surau, dayah, as it is called elsewhere) is not the only institution of Muslim religious education, and the tradition it embodies is only one out of several tendencies within Indonesian Islam. In practice, however, the tradition appears to be much more flexible than the above sketch would suggest. The supposed rigidity of this tradition has come in for much criticism, both from unsympathetic foreign observers and from reformist and modernist Muslims themselves. Even radical reinterpretations of the classical texts are not acceptable. Although new works within the tradition continue to be written, these have to remain within strict boundaries and cannot pretend to offer more than summaries, explications or rearrangements of the same, unchangeable, body of knowledge. The corpus of classical texts accepted in the pesantren tradition is – in theory at least – conceptually closed the relevant knowledge is thought to be a finite and bounded body.

These works are collectively known, in Indonesia, as kitab kuning, “yellow books”, a name that they owe to the tinted paper on which the first Middle Eastern editions reaching Indonesia were printed. The raison d’être of these institutions is the transmission of traditional Islam as laid down in scripture, i.e., classical texts of the various Islamic disciplines, together with commentaries, glosses and supercommentaries on these basic texts written over the ages. One of Indonesia’s great traditions is that of Muslim religious learning as embodied in the Javanese pesantren and similar institutions in the outer islands and the Malay peninsula. Maintenance and continuation of a tradition of religious learning Oral and written traditions of Indonesia and the Malay world. Martin van Bruinessen, “Pesantren and kitab kuning: maintenance and continuation of a tradition of religious learning”, in: Wolfgang Marschall (ed.), Texts from the islands. Here is a great article by Martin Van Bruinessen on the traditional curriculum of Indonesia.

Ratib al attas latin pdf