Bandit Saints of Java

This is the most entertaining book in English on the mystery and magic of Indonesia since Elizabeth Pisani’s “Indonesia Etc.”.–Duncan Graham “The Jakarta Post”A brilliant book–one of the most engaging, memorable and genuinely insightful works on Indonesia published in recent years: a perfect model for what popular scholarship can achieve in terms of accessibility. It deserves a wide readership.–Tim Hannigan, Author “Asian Review Of Books”Bandit Saints of Java paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it’s actually practiced today by many of Java’s 130 million people. The author is a superb, witty and entertaining writer who vividly records what he saw and felt close-up on the ground. The book’s most vital contribution in my mind is that it gives one faith that Indonesia’s lovely, animist native kajawen beliefs will endure in the end under the onslaught of the harsh tenets of hardline Islamist Wahhabism imported from Saudi Arabia. This erudite and well-researched study gives us the hope that Java will continue to hold dear its own soft, Sufi-inspired interpretation of Islam.–Bill Dalton “Bali Advertiser”

George Quinn holds a BA from Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia) and a PhD from the University of Sydney. Between 2001 and retirement in 2008 he was Head of the Southeast Asia Centre in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University. He has a native-speaker level command of Indonesian and Javanese. He is the author of The Novel in Javanese (KITLV Press, 1991) and The Learner’s Dictionary of Today’s Indonesian (Allen & Unwin, 2001), plus many scholarly papers and an English translation of the Indonesian-language novel The Rape of Sukreni (Lontar, 2003).