This article studies the exilic journeys and lives of a series of Mughals and Muslims in Burma between the 1850s and 1920s. It presents a microhistory of exiles and sojourners from north India and Europe, including that of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The stories of the men and women introduced here are microcosms of the porous borders they crossed. And Rangoon, the hub of Mughal prisoners, convicted saints, merchants, labourers and internationalists, emerged as a ‘junction box’ of Indian Ocean Islam. The article traces Zafar’s life under house arrest in Burma, and then turns to the other Mughals who had accompanied him into exile, describing their confinement, struggles, petitions and mobility extending to marriage matches. From stories of exiled Mughals, this article introduces the story of Islamic anti-imperialists of Kashmiri and Scottish origins who came together in Rangoon to memorialise Zafar. Their efforts to embellish Zafar’s majesty gradually resulted in a tomb establishing Rangoon’s leading Sufi. Rangoon’s Islamic landscape and Zafar’s Sufi afterlife will be experienced and recounted for decades to come by travellers including a Sikh woman suspected of opium smuggling, and this article begins with her observations. Together, the journeys of all these figures, minor and major, misremembered or forgotten, illuminate a porous and multi-ethnic Rangoon, and unsettle presentist imaginings of a homogeneous Myanmar.
No abstract
convenient moment to finally recognize Alatas as a man of our time, who was also an early pioneer of what became postcolonial studies, and to recognize him as a scholar who deserves comparison with our other intellectual heroes, such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In this reassessment, one will come to question the legacy of colonialism, Raffles, and Alatas, perhaps by starting with the question of whether the inscription on Raffles' plinth could have been written quite differently, along the lines of: 'His was the typical philosophy of the empire builder, the 19th-century chauvinist, the Machiavellian imperialist' (p. 72).
This article examines stories, hagiographies, fatwas, and treatises related to the grave of a sayyid miracle worker (keramat) buried in North Jakarta. It is a product of research that began in 2008 when I first visited the Sufi shrine of the eminent keramat, Habib Hussein al-ʿAydarus (d. 1169/1756), in the village of Luar Batang. Herefrom, I enjoyed access to a series of documents, oral traditions and miracle stories, along with invaluable information via conversations with Sufi elders, devotees, and Habib Hussein’s kinsmen. This article begins by introducing the Luar Batang shrine and stories of the keramat’s apparitions that continue to be told in the village. It discusses a twenty-first century moment when the keramat was seen by some to resist urban redevelopment and collude with controversial Islamists and Sunni vigilantes. His apparitions and miracle stories reminded votaries of his immortal history of resisting colonialism, secularism, Islamophobia and ‘Christianisation’. From this contemporary moment, the article turns its attention towards hagiographies produced in twentieth-century Java by the historians of Sufi networks, before analysing fatwas on the keramat produced in the late nineteenth century by Islamic scholars (ulama) from Yemen, Mecca, Medina and Java concerning revenue, inheritance, and the legality of customs at the Luar Batang shrine. The article works backwards from a contemporary moment in order to introduce readers to the keramat, village and grave and his historical and peripatetic life in Gujarat, Hadramaut and Java, before highlighting how the shrine of a seemingly peripheral village in Jakarta has been a key concern for authorities across the Islamic world and an Indian Ocean-wide devotional community. Miracle stories and hagiographies praising the keramat as the exemplar of Sunnism and Shafiʿism, as well as fatwas defending the customs of his shrine as being inviolable ones, encourage us to discard the still-regnant academic divisions of Sharia/Custom and Sufis/Ulama. Together, they tell a story of miraculous narratives, devotional cultures, social memories and sacral places that are often pushed to the margins of religious studies but refuse to fade into oblivion.
This article unearths two Jawi manuscripts pertaining to Muslim miracle-workers, orpawangs, who were key intermediaries of agrarian change in the interior of modern Malaya. These compendia of frontier patois are analysed to recount a history of rice worlds and environments wherein forest clearing and rice cultivation were directly associated with the Islamic esoteric science (ilmu) ofpawangs. As professional miracle-workers,pawangswere employed to spearhead a broad range of socio-economic activities in western Malaya. As pivots of cults joined by Malay peasants,pawangswere venerated as heirs of agrarian prophets and saints from earlier Islamic periods, and esteemed for their fertility rituals and miracles in contemporary forests and ricefields. This article analyses the elaborate Islamic genealogies ofpawangsand popular historical traditions that were recorded in these texts, and investigates how these documents were informative about the religio-economic sensibilities of cultivators. This article also pays particular attention to howpawangsnegotiated with a variety of Islamic and African spirits in Malayan forests, to lead forest clearing and rice production and to mobilize labourers. It further presents explorations into the social and spiritual cosmopolitanism ofpawangsand peasants upon the modern Malay frontier, whose labour and connected histories are yet to be written.
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