REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA -- Australian researcher, Merle Calvin Ricklefs writes a history of Javanese Islamic since colonial era to the post-reform entitled ''Islamization and its opponents in Java: A political, social, cultural and religious history since 1930 to the present.'

"In this book, I tried to describe how study of Java community has implications at global level as part of universal development, namely resurgence of the influence of religion in one's life," Ricklefs said recently.

In his introduction, the retired professor of Southeast Asian History at National University of Singapore explained that the 887 page book was a translation book from series of last volume of his book, which discussed the history of Islamization in Javanese society.

To discuss the Islamization in Java, Ricklefs also raised linkage between religion and politics, relationship between knowledge and power, as well as those who hold authority, knowledge or power. The final chapter of this volume explored a wide topics and universal.

The author of 'Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries' said that history of Islam in Java had significant impact to the world. In 1960s, there were many opinions that modernization means secularization and it must not be true. Now, modernization is in line with intensification of religion, which is something that lives within its own and not as a cultural or social identity, except in Western Europe and another place. 

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