Unexpectedly sacred: Islamic conversion narratives as sacred historiography in West Java

In the traditional historiography of Islamic South East Asia, conversion to Islam is portrayed not merely as a shift in belief but as a paradigmatic turning point heralding a new mode of being. If Islamic conversion is a watershed in history, how is this transition articulated to evoke its full significance? This article examines the narrative form of Islamic conversion tales gathered from eighteenth- to twentieth-century historical chronicles of Cirebon, West Java, Indonesia. It concentrates on the rhetorical strategies employed in the retelling of Islamization and investigates how conversion functions as a historiographical trope to sanctify the past for legitimation. Across these diverse accounts, a tendency to violate expectations prevails. Elements of unpredictability puncture these narratives, often involving episodes of dream visions and revelations, passages that play with contradictory opposites and extreme differentials of scale, and also moments of chance encounters involving disguised and mistaken identities. In each instance, narrative expectations are flouted, as if to elicit a new conception of being – one that demands a leap of faith, accounts for more-than-human worlds, transcending human reason and scale. It is within these miraculous moments of the absurd and the inexplicable that conversion narratives emerge as a form of sacred historiography.