The dissertation aims at reducing this gap in the literature on Islamic cultures, and provides its readers with ways of approaching and understanding Ramadan - and various different Islamic phenomena - in Indonesia and in other parts of the Muslim world. It is argued that we preferably may approach Islam from three different angles, that is, to discuss it from the normative, the written, and the lived perspectives respectively. In this study, thorough attention is thus directed not only to the classical and normative Islamic texts and the lived reality in Java, but also to the popular and contemporary Indonesian literature on Ramadan.