From saints to superheroes: The Wali Songo myth in contemporary Indonesia’s popular genres
Ermita Soenarto, a Singaporean undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, published this Mubin Sheppard Memorial Prize–winning essay in JMBRAS Vol. 78 (2005). Set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s contemporary dakwah (Islamic reformist) movement, the article argues that the Wali Songo—the Nine Saints credited with Islamizing Java in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—have been textually transformed from mystical Sufi figures in traditional babad literature into sharia-centred “dakwah warriors” in modern comics, films, and cartoon storybooks, a shift that reveals changing Javanese popular perceptions of the relationship between adat (custom) and sharia (Islamic law).
Summary
Soenarto’s central concern is the textual metamorphosis of the Wali Songo myth as it passes from babad chronicles—where the saints appear as supernatural Sufi teachers embedded in aristocratic genealogies and court intrigue—into mass-produced popular genres that cater to a Javanese audience increasingly shaped by reformist Islam. The primary sources, a film (Sembilan Wali, 1985), two sets of comics, and three sets of cartoon storybooks, are analysed as a unified corpus because they share dakwah warrior imagery, storylines, and a didactic orientation toward sharia observance. The author demonstrates that this transformation is not the handiwork of religious adepts but the product of independent art studios and publishing houses whose works are nonetheless shaped by the broader religious mood of the dakwah movement, which targets abangan (nominal) Javanese Muslims for deeper piety rather than new conversion (pp. 36–37).
The article identifies three interlocking mechanisms driving the transformation: form, context, and language. Visually, the saints are rendered through a hybrid of Chinese kung fu, American superhero, and Japanese manga styles that inflate their superheroic qualities while retaining Javanese spiritual attributes such as wahyu (divine light) and halus (emotional restraint) (pp. 45–47). Contextually, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom is vilified as the embodiment of tyrannical, exploitative adat, creating a clean binary against the saints’ sharia-centred Islam—a simplification that scholars have debunked but that resonates with popular anxieties about cultural “backwardness” (pp. 57–61). Linguistically, the narratives deploy revolutionary vocabulary (perjuangan, rakyat) borrowed from Indonesian independence rhetoric, recasting the saints’ missionary work as a populist struggle to liberate the masses (pp. 50–52).
The most analytically rich section is the case study of Seh Siti Jenar, the tenth saint and Sufi mystic who was executed for claiming to be Allah. In babad literature, his doctrines of wahdatul wujud (unity with God) and fana (annihilation of self) represent a complex esoteric complement to the sharia-focused lahir (outer) practice of the Nine Saints. In the popular genres, however, his mystical emphasis is reinterpreted as ilmu sihir (black magic) of pre-Islamic Hindu origin, and his story becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of neglecting sharia obligations (pp. 63–74). Soenarto argues that this misrepresentation stems from the inability of popular visual media to render the philosophical ambiguity of Sufi thought, and from the dakwah movement’s own unresolved internal debates about where sharia ends and adat begins. The result is a flattening of Javanese religious complexity into a moral binary that serves the reformist agenda but distorts the Sufi tradition (pp. 73–75).
Key Findings
- The film Sembilan Wali (1985), directed by Guruh Soekarno Putra and K.H. Yusuf Hasyim, is the earliest of the popular works analysed; the comic series by M.B. Rahimsyah is postulated to date from the late 1970s to 1980s; Arman Arroisi’s cartoon set (Cartoons C) has been reprinted eight times since 1993 (pp. 40–44).
- Solichin Salam’s Sekitar Wali Sanga (1960) is credited by James J. Fox with “consolidating the contemporary tradition of the Nine Wali” and is frequently quoted as a source within the comic and storybook genres, establishing the canonical list of saints and their linear narrative (p. 38).
- The post-1965 political climate, in which mass killings of communist abangan Muslims led some Javanese to abandon Islam entirely or become “Islam KTP” (identity-card Muslims), explains why violent aspects of the saints’ missionary adventures from babad literature have been systematically omitted in favour of peaceful, gradualist dakwah strategies (p. 54).
- The Javanese acronym “MOLIMO” (drinking, gambling, drugs, robbery, cheating), attributed to Sunan Ampel, functions as a recurring didactic device in the popular texts to demarcate sharia prohibitions against adat practices (p. 59).
- The Babad Jaka Tingkir episode in which Siti Jenar’s soul returns after death to admonish the Wali Songo for neglecting “Essential Knowledge” (mystical contemplation) in favour of sharia law has been entirely excised from the popular genres because its ambivalence cannot be resolved within the dakwah warrior schema (pp. 73–74).
- The author coins the term “dakwah warrior” to describe the overarching motif of the saints as fighting, sharia-preaching heroes, a category that does not fit existing scholarly labels such as “silat warrior” or “epic legend” (p. 39).
Conclusion
Soenarto concludes that the metamorphosis of the Wali Songo into dakwah warriors is a natural response to the displacement of traditional storytelling media (babad recitation, wayang, juru kuncis custodianship) by modern mass media, and that this transformation allows Javanese mythology to continue fulfilling its core function of informing the Javanese about their identity. The popular genres integrate secular foreign storytelling forms into Javanese culture while simultaneously redrawing the myth within the moral framework of sharia-centred reformism, thereby propagating widespread veneration of the Nine Saints among younger generations even as they flatten the religious and philosophical complexities of the original tradition.
Context
- Primary sources consist of a 1985 feature film, two comic book series, and three cartoon storybook sets collected from Jakarta, Surabaya, and Batam; no institutional archives were consulted, and the study relies on the physical texts themselves as its evidential base.
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in being the first systematic study of the Wali Songo in Indonesian popular genres, and in demonstrating how popular culture mediates between traditional babad literature and contemporary Islamic reformism—a nexus previously unexamined in the Javanese Islamization literature dominated by Geertz, Woodward, and Hefner.