From Itinerant Preaching to Religious Infrastructure: Kyai Muhammad Otong and the Institutionalization of Islam in Cibogo, 1968–1992

Abstract

This article examines how Kyai Muhammad Otong developed locally grounded religious authority into an Islamic institutional infrastructure in Cibogo, Lembang, between 1968 and 1992. Existing histories of Islam in West Java have explained regional Islamization, pesantren networks, or the relationship between Islam and local belief, but the studies reviewed here do not reconstruct the institutional work of a village kyai across the connected domains of worship, education, preaching, and communal mediation. Using the historical method, the study draws on family and institutional archives, photographs, administrative records, contemporary foundation documents, and retrospective oral testimony from relatives, pupils, fellow preachers, and community figures. Documentary milestones are distinguished from activities reconstructed through memory. The evidence was subjected to external and internal criticism before chronological and thematic interpretation. The reconstruction suggests that Otong’s influence did not rest principally on preaching from the pulpit. It emerged through a sequence of linked interventions: establishing teaching at Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Al Islam Nyalindung, dated to 1968 in local accounts, expanding Nurul Huda from a modest tajug into a congregational mosque, organizing rotating study circles, using Sundanese nadham as vernacular pedagogy, formalizing education through the Nurul Huda Islamic Education Foundation in 1990, and encouraging the development of teachers, preachers, and khatib. Witnesses describe his relations with adherents of local belief as gradual and cooperative. The article argues that Islamization in Cibogo is best understood as negotiated institutionalization. The evidence links personal authority, kinship, state employment, and communal labor to arrangements for continuing religious education and leadership. It does not establish uniform community acceptance or independently date every stage of succession. This microhistorical perspective adds local agency, intercommunal cooperation, and institutional continuity to the historiography of Islam in West Java.