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  • From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia ed. by A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop
  • Robert W. Hefner (bio)
A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, eds. From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia. Published for the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 348 pp.

In written literature and oral poetry, and in commerce and diplomatic intrigue, the Ottoman empire and Caliphate have long loomed large in the social imaginaries of Southeast Asian Muslims. As early as the fourteenth century (which is to say, in pre-Ottoman times), Malay epics made numerous references to Istanbul, “Turks,” and “Rum” (the term later used for the Ottoman empire). In the mid-sixteenth century, the Sultanate of Aceh established a short-lived embassy in Istanbul. Although few made the long trek from Anatolia to the archipelago, several Ottoman scholars, like the Medina-based Kurdish Naqshbandi, Ibrahim Kurani (1616–90), exercised influence in maritime Southeast Asia. Although the Ottoman engagement with Southeast Asia appears to have slackened in the eighteenth century, commercial, diplomatic, and religious ties revived in the nineteenth. An 1824 letter from the Sultan of Kedah to Istanbul describes ships sailing annually to Penang from Egypt; in the same year, the Kedah sultan appealed to the Ottoman ruler for help against the Siamese (the plea appears to have been ignored). Prince Dipanagara of Java laid claim to an Ottoman-inspired name among his varied titles, and organized his army using Turkish-based terminology. In the late-nineteenth century, mosque preachers in several parts of the Dutch East Indies recited the name of the Ottoman sultan when introducing their sermons. In these and other respects, the allure of the Ottomans across Muslim Southeast Asia has long been real, even if, as the editors of this fine volume make clear, “influences were largely one-way, from the Ottoman lands to Southeast Asia” (17).

From Anatolia to Aceh is the product of an international project sponsored by the British Academy, which culminated in a conference held in Banda, Aceh, in January 2012. Although specialists of Muslim Southeast Asia have long been aware of the Ottoman connection, the fact that archival and literary materials for investigating the relationship are dispersed around the world and written in a dizzying array of languages has stood in the way of any systematic investigation of this important feature of global Muslim history. Investigation has also been impeded by the fact that “scholars of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey … have concentrated almost entirely on Istanbul’s relations with Europe and neighboring Muslim states” (5). From this comparative perspective, the fourteen chapters in this volume represent a welcome and, in fact, unparalleled contribution to the state of our knowledge, as well as providing us with signposts as to where more work needs to be done.

A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop open the volume with a succinct but masterful overview, not just of the book’s chapters, but the state of the field with regard to Ottoman-Southeast Asian ties. The authors point out that previous studies [End Page 135] explored the relationship between the Middle East and Southeast Asia by focusing either on religious links, in particular with regards to the spread of Islam, or the influence of Hadhrami Arabs in Southeast Asia. In both cases priority has been given to Arab populations, to the neglect of the Ottoman rulers that governed most of the Arab Middle East from 1517–1918. Peacock and Teh Gallop show that the sixteenth century was the peak of commercial and diplomatic contacts in the early modern period, giving way to a less sustained engagement until the renewal of commercial, diplomatic, and religious relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In chapter two, Anthony Reid, a pioneer of historical research on Ottoman-Southeast Asian ties, revisits the relationship “between the two great hinges of Eurasian maritime commerce” (25), the Ottoman Middle East and Southeast Asia. He pays particular attention to the uses made of the real and imagined relationship between the two regions by Turkish, European, and indigenous Southeast Asian writers. Reid also provides a fascinatingly personal perspective on his own efforts to forge...

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