6 - Popular Sites of Prayer, Transoceanic Migration, and Cultural Diversity: Exploring the significance of keramat in Southeast Asia

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores keramat, or the venerated graves of notable figures, as a location of socially and culturally diverse practices in the history of Muslim Southeast Asia (also referred to as the ‘Malay world’ here). While these sites comprise the graves of people of a variety of ethnic backgrounds, histories, and faiths, they are usually associated with Muslims, and frequently with Hadramis. In the course of studying Hadrami migrations to Java, I was struck by the observations of keramat made by the colonial scholar-bureaucrats C. Snouck Hurgronje and L. W. C. van den Berg. Both men noted the high stature of the keramat of a Hadrami scholar in Luar Batang, Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), as well as the multi-ethnic following it had in the late nineteenth century. In this chapter, I revisit keramat with the hope of gaining further insight into the dynamics of cultural and social diversity in the modern history of Muslim Southeast Asia.

This chapter draws together two areas of interest to me. The first is the significance of ubiquitous popular shrines—often intimately tied to the land—to the contemporary societies of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The second is the study of Hadramis and Islam in Southeast Asia. The latter is a long-standing area of research for me and hence a subject that I approach with some surefootedness. The former is a more recent interest about which my knowledge is still at a formative stage.