Stanley Khu, Izmy Khumairoh
This article examines how Muslim meditation practitioners in Indonesia understand and apply Buddhist meditative practices. Focusing on the narrative of one such practitioner, we highlight the often-overlooked role that meditation plays in the everyday life of a Muslim. We pay special attention to how three meditation-related themes are entwined with the performance of the Islamic obligatory daily prayers to open up a space for contemplating and reconceiving a relationship with God as our interlocutor attempts to make sense of life with God as the ultimate referent. While at first glance the act of combining meditation with Islamic daily prayers may appear incompatible with the formalistic view of Islam, we seek to demonstrate that the labelling of meditation as ‘cultural’ and ‘scientific’ allows our interlocutor to build a narrative that inserts the importance of being mindful in the effort of moral striving. © 2026 SEAS - Society for South-East Asian Studies. All rights reserved.
Department of Pancasila and Civic Education, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia; Department of Social Anthropology, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia
