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The epigraph is quoted in E. Francis, “Korte Beschrijving van het Nederlandsch Grondgebied ter Westkust Sumatra, 1837,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 2, no. 1 (1839): 113–14. 1. The best study of the war is Christine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784–1847 (London and Malmö: Curzon Press, 1983). On the war as jihad, see Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern GUlamaH in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i ONE Contention Unending Adat basandi syarak dan syarak basandi adat. Custom is based on Islamic law and Islamic law is based on custom. Minangkabau aphorism In 2001, the Indonesian National Bank issued a note featuring a portrait of a stern man with a long beard, wearing a turban and a white robe thrown back over his left shoulder (figure 1.1). Tuanku Imam Bondjol was the formal title given to this man, whose name was Muhamad Sahab and who as a young adult had been called Peto Syarif; he was born in the Minangkabau region of West Sumatra about 1772 and died outside of the city of Manado in North Sulawesi in 1854. Tuanku was a title given to high-ranking ulama in West Sumatra. Imam, religious leader, usually refers to some individual characteristic of the ulama. Of the (at least) fifty tuanku who were contemporaries of Tuanku Imam Bondjol, we find Bachelor Tuanku, Little Tuanku, Fat Tuanku, Black Tuanku, Old Tuanku , and so forth. Bondjol is the old spelling of the town of Bonjol, where the Tuanku Imam established his fortress and from 1833 to 1837 led the fight against Dutch annexation of the Minangkabau highlands. I follow Indonesian convention and use the old spelling of Bondjol for the man and Bonjol for the village. Like Agus Salim, Hatta, Sjahrir, and others, Tuanku Imam Bondjol is an of- ficial Minangkabau national hero but from a prenational era. He is also a putative Wahhabi and leader of the Padri War, which is described as the first Muslim-against-Muslim jihad in Southeast Asia.1 My understanding of the war is based first on the memoir of Tuanku Imam Bondjol himself. The other major Minangkabau source for the history of the Padri War is an autobiographical note by the moderate religious scholar Syekh Jalaluddin, written at the request of the colonial administration in the late 1820s.2 Jalaluddin was persecuted by the Padri, and his text provides the history of Islamic reform in the late eighteenth century as well as a critique of the Padri from within the reformist movement. Along with this clarification by Syekh Jalaluddin, Imam Bondjol’s memoir stands as one of the first modern Malay autobiographies.3 In their memoirs, Jalaluddin and Imam Bondjol are the textual ancestors of the schoolschrift writers. The texts exhibit an emotional resonance that comes perhaps from being written simultaneously for a Dutch contemporary audience and for Minangkabau posterity, from the perspective of a villager, not a Muslims and Matriarchs 18 Press, 2004), 146–47. In the Malay world, a jihad was more often referred to as a perang sabilillah (holy war); see E. Ulrich Kratz and Adriyetti Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin Karangan Fakih Saghir (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2002), 18, 20. The name Padri has been the cause of much speculation. It is most likely that Padri is a modification of the word Padre and referred (usually ) disdainfully to priestly zealots of all faiths. J. Kathirithamby-Wells, “The Origin of the Term Padri: Some Historical Evidence,” Indonesia Circle 41 (November 1986). For a full analysis of the place of Tuanku Imam Bondjol in Indonesian historiography, see Jeffrey Hadler, “A Historiography of Violence and the Secular State in Indonesia: Tuanku Imam Bondjol and the Uses of History,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3 (August 2008). 2. Djilâl-Eddîn, “Surat Keterangan dari pada Saya Fakih Saghir gUlamiah Tuanku Samiang Syekh Jalaluddin Ahmad Koto Tuo,” in Verhaal van den Aanvang der Padri-Onlusten op Sumatra, door Sjech Djilâl Eddîn, ed. J. J. de Hollander (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1857); Kratz and Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin . 3. Kratz argues in his introduction to the transliterated text and in his essay that Jalaluddin’s memoir is idiomatically novel; E. Ulrich Kratz, “Surat Keterangan Syekh Jalaluddin,” Indonesia Circle 57 (1992). Figure 1.1. Tuanku Imam Bondjol, as depicted on the 5,000-rupiah banknote. [3.143.17...

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