6 - Nabi Adam: The Paradigmatic Exile

Summary

This chapter takes a foundational Muslim tradition known from early Arab sources and widespread in Muslim Southeast Asia, namely Adam’s banishment from paradise and his landing in Sarandib (the Arabic name for Sri Lanka), as a starting point to ask whether Adam’s fall to earth in this particular site mattered to, or shaped in some way, Malay perceptions of exile to colonial Ceylon, and if so, how? Based on references to Adam and his plight found in Malay sources from Sri Lanka, Arabic sources, among them Ibn Battuta’s Travels, and the Javanese Serat Menak Serandhil (a volume of Menak tales narrating the life of the Prophet’s uncle Menak Amir Hamza, which unfolds in Sarandib), the chapter argues that the ancient story of Adam’s banishment from paradise to earth, a paradigm for all future banishments, was deployed to frame and partially give meaning to exile to Ceylon. Recalling Adam’s fall shifted the temporal frame of political exile under colonial domination and located contemporary, worldly events within a divinely determined chronology.