Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia

3. CIRCULATING ISLAM: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar and Nusantara

48 3 CIRCULATING ISLAM Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar and Nusantara Torsten Tschacher I praise our father, esteemed in all directions, In Bengal and China, Malacca and Arabia. Sam Shihab al-Din b. Sulayman, Rasul Malai, 1011 When the Muslim scholar Sam Shihab al-Din b. Sulayman composed these lines in his native Tamil language sometime in the late seventeenth century, there was more than mere hyperbole to the list of countries where his father, the scholar and Sufi Sulayman b. Sadaq, was allegedly honoured. The coastal regions of southeastern India where Shihab al-Din’s hometown of Kayalpattinam is located were connected through networks of trade and pilgrimage to all the countries mentioned, showing the poet’s deep awareness of the wider world inhabited by Muslim communities. His own native land was known to early Arab geographers as Ma‘bar or “Crossing Point”, referring to the country along the coast eastward from either Quilon or Cape Comorin, that is, roughly the area of the modern Indian state ofTamil Nadu.2 In contrast to its western neighbour Malabar, Ma‘bar has received little attention from Circulating Islam 49 scholars of Islam, its Islamic traditions appearing too “localized” to be of much interest for the history of the wider Islamic world. The main exception to this trend has been the interest shown in the Tamil-speaking Muslim communities of South India and Ceylon by students of Southeast Asian Islam. Already in the late nineteenth century, South Indian origins for Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago had been considered by some scholars. Later, scholars such as G.E. Marrison and G.W.J. Drewes specifically pointed to Ma‘bar as the region from which Islam had spread to Nusantara.3 They called for a closer study of Islamic traditions in Ma‘bar, but their call was largely left unheeded, partly due to the fact that the few scholars who did research on Ma‘bari Islamic traditions were much keener to stress their localized, “Tamil” character, than to place them in the wider context of transnational Islamic cultural and religious networks. When the search for the supposed single place of origin of Southeast Asian Islam was abandoned as most scholars recognized it to be based on faulty assumptions, interest in the Islamic traditions of Ma‘bar similarly receded. As a result, up to now, the large-scale presence of Tamil-speaking Muslim traders in the ports of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula in the last five centuries has largely been seen as inconsequential to the history of Islam in Southeast Asia. The aim of this chapter is not to review the arguments for or against a South Indian “origin” of Southeast Asian Islam. On the contrary, its main aim is to refocus scholarship from the preoccupation with “origins” and the underlying diffusionist discourse, to a more nuanced understanding of the “connected history”, to use a term suggested by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, of Islamic traditions in Ma‘bar and Nusantara.4 This chapter argues that “circulation” is a term better suited to understand Islamic traditions in South India and Southeast Asia than “diffusion” or even “transmission”. “Circulation” does not imply a single diffusion of a ready-made cultural formation, but the movement back and forth of people, goods, and ideas across space and time. In the process of circulation, the circulated entities may get transformed and become the agents of still further transformation, leading to peculiar patterns of convergence and divergence within a “circulatory regime”. As this chapter will show, Islamic traditions were part of just such a circulatory regime that has linked Ma‘bar and Nusantara since at least the fifteenth century.5 SHARED WORLDS: ISLAM IN MALAYO-TAMIL NETWORKS Despite the almost contemporary development of Muslim societies on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, there is as yet no evidence for links between the 50 Torsten Tschacher Muslim communities of Ma‘bar and Nusantara dating before the fifteenth century. A Sumatran grave of a certain Na’ina Husam al-Din b. Na’ina Amin dating to 1420 is the first tangible evidence for the presence of Tamil-speaking Muslims in Southeast Asia.6 From that time onwards, the evidence for the presence of Ma‘bari Muslims in Nusantara grows steadily, peaking between 1650 and 1850. Yet linkages between both regions were no one-way roads. Muslim soldiers, convicts, exiles, and slaves from Nusantara were present...