223 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18860/eh.v22i2.9021 THE CULTURED ISLAM: THE BOUNDARY OF ISLAMIC IDENTITY BETWEEN THE MINANGKABAU AND MANDAILING ETHNICS Muhiddinur Kamal and Syafwan Rozi Institut Agama Islam Negeri (IAIN) Bukittinggi Email: muhiddinurkamal@iainbukittinggi.ac.id Abstract The relationship between Islam and culture was compatible and not antonym. Islam was a dynamic product and a long-term process of giving and receiving its people’s dynamics and social interaction. The contradiction between the ideal demands of religion and the demands of tradition and society’s social reality was a crucial problem faced by any religion in the world, but adjustments to social reality always occurred. The Islamic society in the Minangkabau border area was a cultural community that had and continued to confirm genuinely and became accommodative openness in resolving the contradictions of adat and Islam which were in principle very apparent in their cultural systems. Through ethnographic research, this article revealed that conflict and contradictions between the normative concepts of Islam and adat (custom) always occurred in societies of Minangkabau and Mandailing ethnics, especially related to marriage, kinship, inheritance system, and communal property ownership. However, the process always ran elegantly and attractively through the dialectics and the dynamics of the people. Thus, Islam was culturally acculturated with Minangkabau and Mandailing, and formed a distinctive cultural Islamic identity in the border area. Relasi Islam dengan kebudayaan adalah sesuatu yang selaras dan bukan antonim. Islam adalah produk dinamis dan proses dalam jangka panjang, yang saling memberi dan menerima dalam dinamika dan interaksi sosial masyarakatnya. Kontradiksi antara tuntutan ideal agama dan tuntutan tradisi serta realitas sosial masyarakat merupakan persoalan krusial yang dihadapi agama apapun