<![CDATA[The eighteenth-century crisis of political legitimacy in the Mataram Sultanate intensified the strategic role of religious authority in sustaining state power, making religious disputes inseparable from broader processes of political consolidation. Within this historical context, Serat Cebolek represents not merely a theological controversy but a narrative arena in which competing claims to religious authority are constructed, negotiated, and legitimized. This article examines how the text narratively configures the contestation between Kiai Mutamakkin and Ketib Anom as a mechanism for producing political legitimacy. Employing a qualitative textual approach, the study applies Paul Ricoeur's narrative hermeneutics through the three stages of mimesis as its principal analytical framework, while Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the religious field and Michel Foucault's notion of discourse and power/knowledge are employed as subsidiary analytical tools. The findings reveal that Serat Cebolek constructs two competing models of religious authority: institutional authority represented by Ketib Anom and culturally grounded authority represented by Kiai Mutamakkin. Rather than depicting a purely theological dispute, the narrative configures religious conflict into a mechanism through which political legitimacy is produced and stabilized. This study proposes a narrative-political model of religious legitimacy, demonstrating that religious literary texts function not merely as representations of historical religious conflicts but as sites where religious authority and political legitimacy are narratively produced, negotiated, and reconfigured across historical context.]]>
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