Contexts - The Rough Guide to Bali and Lombok - page 466

and ensures that he comes down immediately to enjoy it. Once the essence has been extrac-
ted, the canang loses its holiness and is left to rot.
In the run-up to festivals and celebrations, the women of each banjar band together to create
great towers of fruit and rice cakes, tiny rice-dough figurines and banners woven from palm
fronds. The most dramatic of these are the magnificent banten , built up around the trunk of
a young banana tree, up to 3m high. Banten cannot be reused, but once they've done service
at the temple they can be dismantled and eaten by the families who donated them.
On the occasion of major island-wide festivals, such as Galungan-Kuningan, or at the
Balinese New Year, Nyepi, Bali's villages get decked out with special banners and ornament-
al poles, designed to attract the attention of the deities living on Gunung Agung and to invite
them onto the local streets. The banners, known as lamak , are amazing ornamental mats, of-
ten up to 3m long and woven in bold symbolic patterns from fresh green banana leaves. The
most common design centres round the cili motif, a stylized female figure thought to repres-
ent the rice goddess Dewi Sri, with a body formed of simple geometric shapes and wearing a
spiky headdress. Seven days before the great Galungan festival begins, special bamboo poles,
or penyor , are erected along the streets of every village, each one bowed down with intric-
ately woven garlands of dried flowers and palm leaves, which arch gracefully over the road-
way. Attached to the penyor are symbolic leafy tassels, and offerings of dried paddy sheaves
and coconut shells.
Lombok and Islam
Indonesia is the largest Muslim nation in the world, and almost ninety percent of its popu-
lation follow the faith. On Lombok, 85 percent of the islanders are Muslim, and most of the
remainder are Balinese Hindus. A tiny minority of Lombok's Muslims adhere to Wetu Telu
but as it is not officially recognized, numbers of followers are unknown.
On Lombok, the women dress modestly, but are not strictly veiled; the centre and east of
the island are the most devout, but even here you'll see some women without head-coverings
and relatively few with their entire body covered. The mosque is the centre of the Muslim
faith, and prayers on Friday at noon pretty much empties the villages. Those planning to visit
a mosque should be aware of the expected etiquette . Many new, extremely grand mosques
are under construction throughout the island and driving around the interior you'll often be
stopped by bucket-shakers asking for donations for mosque renovations. Thousands of is-
landers every year manage to afford the millions of rupiah needed for a pilgrimage to Mecca.
It is still unclear exactly how Islam came to Indonesia , but it seems likely that it spread
along trade routes, probably via traders from Gujarat in India who had converted to Islam in
the mid-thirteenth century, and by the sixteenth century had reached Lombok. Traditionally,
the arrival of Islam in Java is thought to have more exotic roots, brought by nine Islamic