Teren Sevea's book Miracles and Material Life is a magical work. Mining deliberately obscure texts produced by generations of mystical space-clearers known to Malay speakers as pawang, or as bomoh, guru, pir, tabib, or shaykh, Sevea offers a glimpse into worlds that have receded to the edges of pious consciousness since colonization and nationalism. These are liminal spaces indeed, populated by gnomes, jinn, sprites, and insects among a host of life forms that alternately concealed or revealed precious and vivacious ores, blighted or blessed gleaming crops, and consumed stimulants forbidden to the common believers whose presence they barely tolerated. Such entities paradoxically policed Muslim mores and yet begrudged the very mention of God and His Prophet in the domains they guarded, threatening death or disease for the slightest infraction.
Rather than dive straight into the forest or open-cut mine, Sevea begins in the modern city of Kuala Lumpur, framing his story with the public antics of one Ibrahim Mat Zin. Scanning sky and sea with bamboo binoculars, the media-savvy Mat Zin claimed the mantle of Chief Miracle Worker to the nation and the ability to discern the location of the lost flight MH370. Forced to curtail his activities, the chastened miracle worker was momentarily obliged to join the suppressed ranks of many of Sevea's interpreters, without whom he admits that he would have been unable to comprehend the content of their texts, some saved from the bulldozers that destroyed the tombs of their authors or addressees.
To be sure, many of their claims now lie in ruins or beggar belief. As Sevea reminds us, pawangs were once routinely required to open land for agriculture and forestry by enacting the berpuar ritual, in which cardomum-infused darts were rammed into the earth to expel goblin pests to the cacophonic sound of gongs and waving of banners. At other times, they would determine the best way to fell a forest by making the first cut; to divine the presence of tin, silver, and gold beneath the soil; to trap prestigious elephants and acquire captives; or to defy time and logic by emulating the marksmanship of the Prophet or the sainted Abd al-Qadir Jilani.
By contrast, today such men and women are often reduced to selling amulets and stones, promising luck in love and fate in furtive meetings online or at wayside cafés. In this unlocking of past worlds, and indeed a disappearing Malaya and its environs, Sevea is mindful of their fate and the disenchantment of the land, which was already being marked by the British officials to whom some of the copies were once entrusted. Something of a scholarly miracle worker himself, Sevea's research is the mature fruit of his engagement with both these modern wayfarers and the texts offered by their forebears to William E. Maxwell, who became apprised of the existence of an ancestral farmer who taught Muhammad how to cultivate rice, of the Islamic domestication of the once Indic Arjuna and Bhima, and of Afro-Asian (Zanggi) ghosts with such outlandish names as Jinn Ghai Zanggi Perkasa Tuha, rendered by Sevea as Old Gallant Zanggi Forest Banshee.
The five constituent chapters—on agrarian knowledge maintained by pawangs, on rice in particular, on ores and mining, on the violent taming of elephants, and on hunting and gunnery—are intriguing, even confounding, in their detail. We get a taste of this by way of Sevea's enthusiastic and sometimes repetitive listings of the legion of the unseen and their reputed powers. We also have his perhaps garrulous characterization of their scribes as “meticulous” keepers of “stanniferous” or “caliginous” lore (to which one might add the “pachydermic”). There are also times when one might have wanted a discussion of their claims to orthodoxy anchored in broader scholarship of the Indian Ocean World. This is most apparent in the shorthand acceptance that the shaykhs of the unseen also regarded themselves as exemplars of Sufi traditions often assembled in specific lineages of praxis. While Sevea tends to lump together adherents of the Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Shattari lines of the late nineteenth century as hostile “reformists” anticipating the more antagonistic modernists, and Salafis of the twentieth century as vocal opponents of the more outlandish rituals such as the berpuar, he offers little direct quotation of their critiques. Such was to be found in the Minangkabau lands of neighboring Sumatra in the early 1900s, and certainly preceded that offered in print by the ethnically Minang Undang of Rembau in the 1920s and 30s, whom Sevea does discuss. By the same token, many a bomoh was (and perhaps still is) to be found among Shattaris and populist Khalidi lines of the Naqshbandiyya or those of the now essentially nationalized Indonesian order the Qadiriyya wa-Naqshbaniyya, whom Sevea notes were regarded in Kelantan as descendants of “the eminent Sufi shooter” Abd al-Qadir Jilani.
Equally, Sevea might have reflected further on the woeful onflows of such mystical lore supposedly imparted by the saints of the Middle East for the hunting of human quarry to equal his consideration of the brutal, and sometimes fatal, methods for training elephants in Southeast Asia. Perhaps this is an unfair request in light of the weight accorded to such matters in the collections he has worked with in Jawi and Roman script. While valued, the enslaved were once ubiquitous in the Malay world, and seldom of equal worth to an elephant, which could tear yet more plant matter from an appropriately cleared and thus spiritually vacant forest, or convey a king from place to place, with his trusty pawang (and once enslaved bondsmen) in tow. The home city of the Prophet, while universally regarded, was once a long way away, and the environment of Arabia unimaginable to the majority of those laboring in verdant, but hardly easy, Asia.
In short, Sevea opens our eyes to the spaces away from the formalized faith of court and mosque, to the vital domains of the people who forcefully cut their way into a hostile environment that they saw as the natural domain of the unseen. As such, his book will provide a visceral set of readings for any student of traditional Muslim worlds well beyond the Arabian peninsula that should be paired with works on modernizing Bombay, Cairo, and Aden for good measure.
