ISLAMIC ELEMENTS IN TRADITIONAL INDONESIAN AND MALAY THEATRE

From the earliest times, traditional theatre in Southeast Asia has been shaped by a wide range of religious and cultural influences—those deriving from animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, as well as from Chinese and western traditions. The overwhelming influences, especially of Hinduism, have had the tendency to obscure contributions from the Middle- and Near-East. The view that Islam, with rare exceptions, prohibits performing arts has resulted in a negligence of these arts forms in Muslim societies with the possible exception of Indonesia. This paper highlights significant elements of Islamic culture that have shaped Indonesian and Malay traditional theatre through the adaptation of borrowed genres such as taziya, as well as locally created styles of shadow play (wayang kulit) and the doll-puppet theatre (wayang golek); the use of important themes from Islamic literature, in particular those derived from Hikayat Amir Hamza; as well as esoteric interpretations of certain episodes originally derived from pre-Islamic sources, including the Mahabharata, in terms of Sufism to make them both highly meaningful and acceptable to Muslim audiences.