Entering the Mind as a Way of Approaching God

This article explores the ways in which Muslim meditation practitioners in Indonesia understand and utilize Buddhist meditative practice. Focusing on the narrative of one such practitioner, we draw out the little-known role that meditation plays in the everyday life of being 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 interlocutors attempt 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 interlocutors to build a narrative that inserts the importance of being mindful in their effort of moral striving.