O “Oriente” no “Ocidente”: observando o islã no Suriname

Abstract

This essay is about the Surinamese Islam of Javanese origin, distant (not only geographically) from the Islamic-Arab irradiating center. Suriname, a South American and Caribbean country, shelters a considerable Muslim community, the biggest out of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe in terms of percentage. In it, the opposition is current between the reformism and the traditionalism within the Islam. The reformist tendency values highly more for an Arab puritanical and universalist Islam, stressing its moral values; the traditional one values the Javanese local community and the Muslim tradition originating from Java. The inquiry involved discussions about the construction of the identity; the memory to which the groups are linked; and the “negotiations” between belonging to the Javanese ethnic group and belonging to religion. An aspect that surfaces along the work is the diversity of the Islam. In Suriname, Islamic similar ceremonies are practiced to the described ones by Clifford Geertz in his inquiries carried out in Java, in decade of 1950, as the slametan, a rite of passage after death that express the moment of transition between the world of the living creatures and the one of the dead men.