Saminism Movement

The Surontiko Samin's challenge is an Indonesian spirituality and social movement founded by Surontiko Samin in north-central Java, Indonesia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.^[1] Saminism rejected the capitalist views of the colonial Dutch, who predominately forced taxes upon the people of Indonesia, including the poor, and monopolized their free public forest lands;^[2] particularly land which contains precious teak forests used for trade. Samin people do not belong to the Muslim faith, and they do not practice many of the Islamic rituals such as fasting or praying. However they do focus on the spiritual aspect of all mainstream religions as well as good values, such as modesty, honesty, and simplicity.

Because Surontiko Samin was illiterate, and also his followers and other Saminist leaders, there is no written first-hand accounts of the Saminist movement.^[1] This has posed a problem for historians and social scientist because of the lack of written records from the Saminists themselves.

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the movement founded by Surontiko Samin, a Javanese peasant, is one of the longest-living social phenomena in modern Javanese history. It antedated by about two decades the general awakening of organizational activity which Indonesians have come to call their Kebangkitan Nasional despite an early eclipse, it managed to survive in its original locale (though barely ever spreading to adjacent areas for longer periods of time) throughout the colonial period. At its peak, when it probably counted some three thousand households, it disturbed the colonial bureaucracy with forebodings of massive peasant resistance, producing a flurry of attention out of all proportion (as some few contemporaries realized) to the occasion ; subsequently it dropped from view, provoking no more than a few lines in the annual surveys published by the Dutch authorities, yet already capturing the imagination of some Indonesian intellectuals who came to view it as a manifestation of indigenous socialism, peasant virtue, and patriotic resistance to colonialism. Saminism, in fact, has survived into the era of Indonesian independence. The sheer stubbornness, with which some Javanese in a rather remote part of the island have clung to the ideas of their long-dead founder, deserves careful attention. And the fact that it did not cease when colonial rule ended, the fact that civil servants serving the Indonesian Republic appear to be almost as perplexed by Saminism as were their Dutch predecessors also indicates that it cannot be simply subsumed under the broader heading of nationalism. Recent political developments of a far more radical-political form in the heartland of Saminism appear to us to have been distinctive and by no means directly related to Saminism.^[1]