Introduction
The articles in this special issue emerged from a 2016 workshop hosted by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Leiden Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). Their history, however, stretches further back—to a 2011 panel that several of our contributors initiated at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Hawaii. As we planned that first meeting, we identified our shared interest in histories that could recapture the nuances of the role and place of Islam in Southeast Asian politics. While recognising the vital importance of trade and cultural exchange in the career of “Muslim” politics in this region, we also wished to reconsider how Muslim mobilities, circulations, and notions of cosmopolitanism both shaped, and were shaped by, contestation, coercion, and the violence of both physical and discursive displacement. How much were such processes relevant to translocal, but confrontational, political movements led by Muslims, often those adapting to growing European colonial power in the region, and formed around Islamic grammars and worldviews?
As our conversations unfolded over the next few years, it became clear that our work spoke to thematic, methodological, and political shortcomings in wider scholarly domains, such as borderlands studies, “connected” histories, and inter-Asian histories. In particular, the practices and geographies of Muslim “mobility” have been counterposed to the terrestrial hegemony of colonial states, either positively, as an arena of anti-colonial resistance, or negatively, as a border-crossing threat to the imperial world order.Footnote 1 Yet, empires too encouraged myriad forms of movement, and in the process, mobility comprised an essential constitutive element of imperial states. Specifically, colonial actors sought to harness, exploit, and even produce mobility by Muslim peoples to advance their projects of territorialisation, including through practices of enclosure and displacement.Footnote 2 Such practices included violence or outright warfare and military action, but they also included “lawfare,” or the encroachment on preexisting relationships between people and places by European legal regimes for regulating space and territory. Other techniques of enclosure included the production of borders and boundaries—all while maintaining their selective permeability to suit the state's own purposes—and harnessing the imaginative power of cartography to promote new ways of seeing colonial territory.Footnote 3 All these techniques encouraged mobility by producing and enforcing displacement, therefore existing alongside a “larger spectrum of spatial-strategic fixations.”Footnote 4 In other words, this special issue argues the necessity of being mindful not just of how colonial states sought to curtail the movements of Muslims across borders, but also how states generated and engendered mobility to define those borders and territories.
To be fair, this point is not entirely or purposely occluded, and some scholars have been more sensitive than others to coerced mobility. A recent volume edited by historian Ronit Ricci has directly addressed the issue, focusing on exile and banishment as important instruments for states wishing to enforce some forms of movement, while abolishing or constricting others.Footnote 5 In addition, Ricci's work on rebel elites, convicts, slaves, and soldiers sent to Ceylon from Southeast Asia demonstrates clearly the connections between exile on the one hand and forging a new sense of connectedness on the other.Footnote 6 In relation to South Asian labour flows, older and more recent works by British historian Clare Anderson and Anand Yang have also recognised that convict transportation to Southeast Asia, in effect, comprised a form of enforced labour migration.Footnote 7
In this special issue, we seek to take the lead from this scholarship and chart a new direction in the study of mobility by highlighting the asymmetrical, particularly colonial, power structures in which Muslims have exercised spatial and political agency.Footnote 8 Within the social sciences, researchers have built upon the quick succession of “turns”—“spatial turn,” linguistic turn,” “cultural turn,” and now the “mobility turn”—to reevaluate phenomena such as migration. They have done so by repositioning mobility not only as a feature of immigration or long-term resettlement, but also as a function of relational space, showing how people constantly “circulate” and how their circulatory patterns constitute power across territory.Footnote 9 We are inspired by the call from anthropologists Nina Glick-Schiller and Noel Salazar for scholars to “move beyond the ready equation of mobility with freedom by examining not only movement as connection but also as an aspect of new confinements and modes of exploitation.”Footnote 10 Following this insight, we seek to develop here a more multidimensional framework for making sense of shifting connections, movements, and borders. Specifically, we aim to challenge the implicit polarity in many works of historiography between terrestrial states and the mobile flows of “cosmopolitan” border-crossers.
For example, European empires seeking to subjugate Muslim Southeast Asia did not try to suppress all forms of motion by their colonial subjects. Instead, they pursued a symbiotic policy of disconnection and reconnection—of territories and people alike, who they displaced and re-emplaced within new geographies—to shape patterns of mobility favourable to imperial hegemony. British, Dutch, and Siamese “competing colonialisms”Footnote 11 promoted certain forms of connection and circulation at their “cosmopolitan” port city sites. They moved, or encouraged the movement of, labourers, shippers, and moneylenders, thereby refashioning long-standing, vernacular forms of mobility into hubs of nascent “globalisation.” However, such cities did not portend a halcyon new world order unbound by terrestrial emplacements. To the contrary, the work of establishing hubs of imperial globalisation was inextricably interwoven with colonial efforts to sever the external ties of existing polities and to disrupt old tributary relations that bound these kingdoms together.Footnote 12 In this way, venerable Southeast Asian polities were transformed into disadvantaged, “peripheral” borderlands dependent on new imperial regimes. By promoting certain urban hubs as networked motors of modernity while simultaneously relegating vernacular politics to the margins, empires aspired to privilege specific forms of mobility and thereby reconfigure colonial spaces.
Colonial and postcolonial Muslim Southeast Asia—the focus of this special issue—provides an illuminating case study of this dynamic of disconnection and reconnection, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. On the one hand, European empires frequently categorised Southeast Asian kingdoms which sought to retain their independence as “fanatical” and “violent,” a reflection of the racialised taxonomies of “The Muslim World” ascendant in the late colonial age.Footnote 13 This discursive framing of resistance in terms of an intrinsic civilisational disposition justified the disproportionate use of military force for colonial pacification efforts against “militant” Muslims. For example, it legitimised campaigns to peripheralise local kingdoms like Aceh that stood athwart imperial hegemony. On the other hand, even while empires simultaneously sought to regulate and discipline both space and mobility, they also sought to channel and even promote the travel of Muslim hajjis from Southeast Asia to Arabia.Footnote 14 Colonial officials funnelled an ever-growing cohort of working- and middle-class Muslim pilgrims through European shipping lines and prosperous hubs like Singapore; thus, even as they sought to surveil and control, they also promoted the hajj as a revenue-maker for colonial capitalism, contributing to the transformation of pilgrimage from a small elite activity to a mass phenomenon.Footnote 15 As the juxtaposition of war and pilgrimage thus illustrates, Muslim Southeast Asia emerged as a key arena for colonial projects of disconnection and reconnection.
The ascent of iconic capitalist “port cities” like Penang and Singapore thus entailed both the destruction of the connections that had for so long linked Islamic polities with one another and the creation of reconnections that placed Muslim networks under imperial hegemony.Footnote 16 As European powers carved up this portion of an imagined “Muslim world” into British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the “semi-colonised” buffer state of Siam, once powerful sultanates like Aceh, Banten, and Patani found themselves consigned to subordinate “borderland” status.Footnote 17 Likewise, new networks of Muslims, including not only pilgrims but also students, intellectuals, and religious reformers, not to mention religious businesspeople and merchants, flourished amid the colonial order. The destabilisation of old polities and the fusion of new ties through global hubs thus facilitated the production of colonial geo-bodies.
This colonial process of reconfiguring connections by emplacing boundaries and encouraging new nodal hubs did not, however, suppress or eliminate various forms of circulation or Islamic anti-colonialism that transgressed the imperial order; far from it. The articles in this special issue examine the persistence of Muslim agency—sometimes exercised tactically within coercive constraints—that emerged in response to the policies of colonial states in Southeast Asia. This agency is reflected in the mobility of the “re-connected” described above, including pilgrims, students, and intellectuals who pursued their own ambitions independently of colonial regimes. Indeed, these “re-connected” Muslims comprised the nucleus of revitalised Islamic anti-colonial networks by the 1920s and 1930s. This agency is also embodied by those Muslims who reacted more directly against the violence of imperialism, the figures of the exile, the rebel, and the refugee: the detached, the hunted, the banished, and the deported. Even as empires tried to harness or neutralise these mobile actors, Southeast Asian Muslims continued to reshape their networks and embrace newly burnished ideas of a global Muslim community, or umma. Yet mobile Muslims in search of self-consciously Islamic alternatives did not always travel to Mecca, Istanbul, or other distant centres beyond Southeast Asia. Just as for centuries, Javanese Muslims had travelled relatively short distances to pilgrimage sites like graves deemed holy and full of blessings,Footnote 18 displaced Muslims often sought nearby spaces of refuge beyond the reach of “oppressive” states. Such spaces included Southern Thailand or West Java, where the displaced could forge alternative Islamic projects and territorialities.
This unstable cycle of contested mobility, of disconnection and reconnection, fuelled a wide variety of Muslim movements and disrupted the production of stable colonial territories. In particular, the papers in this special issue examine how Southeast Asian Muslims adjusted to coercive mobility within the shifting borderlands of three colonial geo-bodies—Malaya (later Malaysia), the Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia), and the southern Siamese possession of Patani (now Thailand). Through our cumulative research, we will demonstrate that despite the potency of coerced colonial mobilities, Southeast Asian Muslims nevertheless consistently threatened imperial spatial schemes with alternative frameworks for making sense of space and place. While these movements’ mobile responses can be framed as countering or “resisting” colonial power, this issue will argue it is nevertheless important to remember how such connections were stimulated in part by the purposeful actions of colonial states to exploit mobility.
Mobility and Connected Histories
In the past two decades, historians have meticulously documented the travels of mobile actors across landed and oceanic environments. Ever since historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam invoked “connected histories,” and the circulation of peoples, ideas, and “mental constructs,” the number of studies loosely grouped under the rubric “Asian connections” has proliferated.Footnote 19 Indian Ocean studies, for example, has arguably emerged at the vanguard of connected historiography, generating numerous methodological think-pieces, new institutional centres for research, and magisterial historical works such as Sugata Bose's A Hundred Horizons. Diasporic histories provided another pathway to realising connected histories. The study of Hadrami communities has experienced an ongoing boom, starting with Engseng Ho's ground-breaking study of genealogical mobility in The Graves of Tarim and continuing with more recent scholarship by Sumit Mandal, Nurfadzilah Yahaya, and Ismail Fajrie Alatas.Footnote 20 Meanwhile, Sunil Amrith has highlighted the importance of the Bay of Bengal as a site for Tamil migrant circulations.Footnote 21 More closely connected to our concerns in this special issue, scholarship on religious networks has emerged as another locus of connected histories, with Michael Laffan's important 2004 work Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia on Southeast Asians in Mecca, Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea's study Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, and Ronit Ricci's exploration of circulating Muslim texts in South and Southeast Asia in Islam Translated. This outpouring of research has erased any lingering understanding of various world “areas” as separate, self-contained entities.
Yet, while this innovative scholarship has advanced historians beyond the old containers of “nation” and “area,” too tight a focus on the lives and careers of particular networks could risk concealing as well as revealing details about Muslim mobilities. Indeed, while it is essential for historians of the Indian Ocean littoral to trace Muslim connections, it is equally important not to gloss over the asymmetries of power that provoked certain types of movement in the imperial age. Here, building on recent scholarship by Michael Laffan, Ronit Ricci, and Clare Anderson on exile,Footnote 22 we seek to challenge some of these unintended effects. In particular, we seek to do this by once again foregrounding aspects of history more recently shunted to the background, particularly the violent episodes that figured so prominently in our 2016 workshop—invasions, rebellions, and insurgencies. Instead of seeing such clashes as mere backdrops for stories of cosmopolitan people in motion, we hope to highlight how these violent upheavals were decisive in producing the shifting cycles of mobility that drove the production of spaces, states, and subjects—and their political responses to them.
This introductory article considers several questions that can help reassess concepts of connectedness in colonial and decolonising worlds defined by asymmetric power relations. We seek to develop approaches that are theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded in a specific set of Southeast Asian case studies, yet also flexible enough to speak to a wide array of area specialists, disciplines, and time periods. The five research articles in this volume by Francis Bradley, Joshua Gedacht, David Kloos, Chiara Formichi, and Amrita Malhi explore how displacement and exile in various forms helped empires constitute colonial space while also influencing the movement of Southeast Asian Muslim peoples. The first of these pieces by Bradley looks at the deliberate destruction of Patani, a precolonial Muslim sultanate, and the emergence of a geographically extensive diaspora in its aftermath. The two articles by Gedacht and Kloos examine Dutch colonial efforts to harness Muslim mobility as a means for integrating Aceh, the quintessential “rebellious region,” into their imperium. Finally, the two articles by Formichi and Malhi examine how Muslim separatists and insurgent groups exiled by states in the colonial period nevertheless managed to reconfigure networks in ways that would carry over into postcolonial politics.
We have identified several thematic questions that can help reframe “connected histories” in terms of disconnection, reconnection, and asymmetrical power structures:
1. How have various states deployed coercive techniques of displacement, disconnection, and de-territorialisation against Muslim populations in Southeast Asia to harness mobility for their own purposes? Could empires use coerced mobility to produce peripheral “borderlands,” thus consolidating their territorial geo-bodies?
2. How did colonial and postcolonial powers seek to “re-territorialise” areas that had been subject to extensive warfare and conflict? Could empires succeed at fashioning affective ties with new colonial spatial orders, or would these efforts usually unravel?
3. How did coercive state activities, conversely, provide unintended opportunities for local Muslim subjects to reconnect by forging counter-networks, beliefs, and selves across space? How did coercive projects of disconnection, in other words, backfire and galvanise alternative mobilities and spatial configurations beyond that of dominant state maps?
4. How did contests over the direction and meaning of mobility interact with oceanic currents of Islamic anti-colonial resistance? More broadly, how did this contest shape specifically Muslim identities, religious ideas, worldviews, practices, affects, politics, and ideologies in Southeast Asia and beyond?
5. Did the struggle over disconnection and reconnection across Muslim Southeast Asia contribute to fluid imaginaries of “local” versus “global,” “core” versus “periphery,” urban “hub” versus “borderland,” and “home” versus “foreign”?
Disconnections and Colonial Re-territorialisation
This special issue especially strives to juxtapose processes of “disconnection” alongside “connections” in world history. In doing so, it echoes the call in a recent article by Sujit Sivasundaram to move towards a “critical history of connection,” to “join linkage with boundedness,” and search for the acts of “displacement and evacuation” that accompany the sometimes irresistible narratives of peoples, goods, and ideas in motion.Footnote 23 Josiah Heyman and Howard Campbell's vision of “reterritorialization,” similarly, can help explain how these important realities of displacement, evacuation, and other forms of coerced mobility contributed to new configurations of space and territory. Heyman and Campbell define “reterritorialization” as a “processual geography” in which states encourage “flows to reinforce . . . even seemingly static territories of international borderlines.” Footnote 24 By banishing, exiling, or forcing the displacement of people through violent warfare, colonial states did not simply seek to restrict movement, but also to channel it for the production of new borders. The articles in this special issue will examine how mobile actors not only displayed individual agency or new, “cosmopolitan,” cultural orientations, but also responded to the coercive realities of evacuation and displacement inherent to the colonial age.
The imperative to create disconnection as a territorial strategy often manifested itself in massive military force. The impulse to obliterate rival states or political competitors, moreover, surfaced before the advent of European colonisation, including in a seemingly preemptive strike by the Siamese state against imminent European intervention. In the first article of this special issue, Francis Bradley examines how a series of invasions undertaken by Siam (the predecessor state to modern-day Thailand) against Patani, a Malay Muslim tributary sultanate to its south, resulted in widespread displacement. Bradley presents an evocative picture of how five wars between 1786 and 1838 left Patani's capital “city and its environs devastated, thousands of captives destined for slavery in Bangkok, and an additional wave of refugees forced to resettle in neighbouring Malay states or Mecca.” Gedacht and Kloos, similarly, examine the aftermath of four-decade-long Dutch war in the Aceh region of what is today the far northwest of Indonesia, a protracted conflict that contributed to pervasive dislocation and the death of nearly fifteen percent of the local population.Footnote 25 Formichi discusses how widespread clashes between Dutch colonial troops and Indonesian revolutionary forces engendered successive remappings of Indies and Indonesian territory. Malhi's article discusses the Malayan Emergency as a militarised reinscription of racial and religious boundaries over Malayan territory and society, achieved by evacuating not only ethnic Chinese communists from the Malayan geo-body, but the Malay Muslim Left as well.
Beyond the onslaught of military conquest, invading states also pursued other more targeted measures to disconnect rival entities, foremost among them exile. As mentioned earlier, Ronit Ricci provided a sweeping overview of the practice and process of exile in a recent edited volume, arguing that many states deployed banishment as a tool to remove recalcitrant royals, rebels, or aristocrats and thereby to coerce compliance from elite populations.Footnote 26 Charismatic Muslim religious leaders also fell victim to such tactics. In one famous example, Kerry Ward recounted the decision of the Dutch East Indies Company to exile a prominent Muslim scholar, Sufi, and hajji named Shaykh Yusuf, who was “revered by many of the Muslims” of Java as a saint, to the distant coast of South Africa.Footnote 27
The practice of exile, moreover, persisted deep into the high colonial period. For instance, Gedacht illustrates that Dutch military forces routinely employed exile as a complement to their military activities, expelling prominent political rebels and functionaries of the Acehnese royal court to distant parts of Java. Gedacht argues that by reorienting Acehnese away from trading hubs in Penang, Singapore, and the wider world, Dutch colonial officials reinscribed Aceh within the territorial boundaries of the Netherlands East Indies. In doing so, Dutch officials sought to redirect the geography of Acehnese mobility around the new colonial political centre in Java.
If colonial regimes sometimes initiated exile by banishing individuals, in other circumstances military conflict in postcolonial transitions could induce charismatic leaders to leave on their own, in self-imposed exile. When Dutch armed forces returned to Indonesia to reclaim their colony in the aftermath of World War II, they prompted a four-year nationalist revolution. Yet not all Indonesians agreed with the direction of the new independent government in the making. Formichi examines how a notable Muslim leader from Java, S. M. Kartosuwiryo, fled Yogyakarta, the capital of the nascent Indonesian Republic, for West Java, an area still under the control of Dutch armed forces. By retreating to an area under colonial authority, paradoxically, Kartosuwiryo could escape from political rivals who espoused the importance of “freedom of religion.” Instead, he could promote a “divergent political path to independence,” this time focused on his “Islamist aspirations” for Indonesia.
Malayans, too, were not all on board with the path to independence laid out for them by the alliance of British colonialists and Malay Muslim elites. This alliance coalesced in the years after Japan's surrender in the Second World War, followed by Britain's reoccupation of Malaya until 1957. Malhi discusses the purge of the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan National Liberation Army—a group founded by Malay Muslim cadres in the Malayan Communist Party after the Emergency Declaration of 1948. In the early 1950s, the Regiment was driven, and fled, northwards from its bases in safe areas around the Malayan hinterland across the border into Southern Thailand. Its cadres’ decision to found the Tenth Regiment and join a new phase of underground armed struggle was in itself an acceptance of their forced displacement. They opted for a life of guerrilla combat in Malaya's forested interior as an alternative to prison. Yet, owing to colonial forces’ effective tactics, which ranged from military pursuit to depopulating the hinterland to cut off all support to the communists, they were effectively banished altogether from the Malayan geo-body. Their attempts to engender a cosmopolitan Islamic multiracialism ran against the grain of Malaya's racial politics and failed as a result. Their vision for a new, anti-colonial Islamism ended up permanently displaced from the arena of legitimate national politics, into the realm of nostalgia.
While military campaigns and exile comprised two profoundly physical acts of disconnection, state powers also pursued complementary frameworks of epistemic displacement. Death, destruction, and physical relocation did not guarantee the subjectivisation of local populations. Achieving this outcome required follow-up efforts, aimed at reorienting the intellectual and spatial imaginaries of Muslim Southeast Asians. As David Kloos demonstrates in his contribution to this special issue, the Dutch colonial government sought to complete its conquest of one of the last unpacified areas of the West Acehnese coast through an act of spatial transformation, by erasing its history as a connected, mobile, and diverse zone of interaction and recasting the area as one of marginal “isolation.” Kloos notes that soldiers, scholars, and administrators persistently designated this area “the isolated coast.” Through this “geography of knowledge/ignorance,” Kloos argues, Dutch authorities could disconnect West Aceh from its long history of Indian Ocean interactions and instead configure it as “a double periphery, a remote corner of Aceh ‘province’ and the Netherlands Indies.” With this imaginary act of spatial disconnection, Dutch authorities transformed Aceh into a subordinate periphery.
Such processes of spatial subordination in many senses comprised the culmination of multiple threads of disconnection, de-territorialisation, and re-territorialisation that together are often referred to as “enclosure.” Thanks to work performed by critical scholars, this term has expanded in its definitional flexibility from indicating the privatisation of common land and production of landless workers,Footnote 28 to include the establishment of metaphorical or social boundaries through which “knowledge of and power over any given [and bounded] domain” was produced.Footnote 29 Cunningham and Heyman have referred to enclosure as “processes that delimit and restrict the movement of specific goods, people and ideas” which counteract mobilities, or “processes that enable and induce such movements.”Footnote 30 They have posited the “mobilities–enclosures continuum” as a useful framework for structuring understandings of movement, including those that might be permitted, harnessed, or coerced by states through specific channels of mobility they establish and prescribe. Footnote 31 Such an understanding of movement permits us to assign a central analytical place to mobilities that are not freely undertaken by agents actively seeking cosmopolitan interaction. This structuring dialectic has also been used by O'Reilly in a study of contemporary migration for precisely this reason.Footnote 32 Indeed, the various projects of banishment or dislocation described before provided a way for colonial power to distinguish between the empire's “interior” and “exterior” locations, while also assigning disciplinary power to the act of placing actors outside of colonial society. This special issue is an attempt to demonstrate how affected people responded to these enclosures, in this case in Islamic and Islamist terms.
The process of disconnection and epistemic enclosure enacted on regions such as Patani, Aceh, West Java, and the Thai-Malayan border area reflected an effort to transform erstwhile political “cores” into new “peripheries” and “borderlands.” But how successful would such efforts really prove? Anthropologists such as Till Mostowlansky have argued that areas on contemporary borderlands or other kinds of peripheries often oscillated between “centrality and marginality” in larger political spaces, with historical forces sometimes placing locations and people “both in the centre and at the margins, sometimes on different scales and at different historical junctures.”Footnote 33 In other words, the position of some geographical coordinates as “marginal” or “central” depended on ever-changing relational bonds.”Footnote 34 Colonial efforts to deploy coercive forms of mobility and enclosure represented an effort to constitute centrality/marginality in a way favourable to imperial regimes. Yet, could such physical and epistemic violence also displace affective bonds onto alternative centres such as Mecca, Maoist China, or new royal “capitals” for other rebels that could stand as bulwarks against imperial hegemony? The works of Joshua Gedacht, Chiara Formichi, and Amrita Malhi all demonstrate how violent displacement could at times undermine colonial ambitions, as a range of Muslim actors took advantage of the chaos of warfare on putative colonial “peripheries” to try to forge alternative postcolonial “centres.” The Sultan of Aceh sought to revive his kingdom in upland areas, Kartosuwiryo attempted to forge an “Islamic State of Indonesia” on the outskirts of West Java, and Abdullah CD laboured to create a cosmopolitan Muslim socialist movement on the borderlands of Southern Thailand—all underscoring the fluidity of political “centrality” and “marginality” even in the face of displacement and violence.
Conclusion: Coerced Mobility and the Resilience of Muslim Agency
These colonial struggles to coerce mobility, alongside the resilience of Muslim agency, all speak to the wider question: did the various technologies of enclosure really succeed at harnessing mobility and creating a totalising geographic framework of colonial control? The articles here show that colonial efforts to use exile as a tool for reconnecting new political centres and territorial configurations did not constitute the end of the story. In fact, Muslim rebels and exiles could also galvanise countervailing networks and alternative centres that would undermine imperial spatialities. Scholars such as Kerry Ward have argued that even when European entities tried to displace recalcitrant Muslims to their most “secure nodes,” such people “nevertheless intersected with indigenous Indian Ocean networks of religion, culture, and communication [that] the Company could not control.” In the case of Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar, exile to the Cape of Good Hope of South Africa actually contributed to the “political and religious opposition to the Company” in faraway Java in the late seventeenth century. Such dynamics persisted well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 35 Further, in her recent book, Muslim Cosmopolitanism, Seema Alavi compellingly demonstrates how in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, Muslim fugitives fled South Asia and took refuge from the British colonial government in nodal centres of the Islamic world such as Mecca and Istanbul. In doing so, they played a leading role in conceptualising a “Muslim cosmopolis as an intellectual and civilizational zone that transcended political borders, territorial confines, and cultural particularities”—thus offering a stark alternative to the colonial territoriality of British India.Footnote 36
Several articles in this special issue also tell the story of how displaced Muslims forged countervailing networks and centres that at least hinted at the possibility of alternative spatial configurations besides dominant state maps. In the precolonial period, for example, Francis Bradley notes that war generated an unprecedented number of displaced female Muslim travellers from Patani. In addition to the majority who fled to nearby regions of the northern Malay Peninsula, significant numbers of women began to make the journey along the gendered, mostly male path to the holy city of Mecca as part of refugee families. Other women, meanwhile, fell victim to invading armies and a life of captivity that took them to the Siamese capital of Bangkok. Although most of these female refugees suffered considerable privation and physical hardship, Bradley argues, dislocation also provided them opportunities to negotiate new gender roles in matters of inheritance and work, gift-giving and marriage, a process that played a key role in the transformation of the “spatial geography of the community” of Patani. The geographic expansion of the Patani community facilitated by female refugees did not pose a serious challenge to Siamese conquest in the eighteenth century. It did, however, establish a template for an enduring diaspora stretching from Malaysia to Egypt to Mecca, one that laid the groundwork for rebel movements like that of the Patani United Liberation Organization in the twentieth century.
Just as Patani refugee networks stretching from Mecca to Bangkok perpetuated alternative geographies to Siamese conquest in the early 1800s, other exiled rebels persisted in trying to forge countervailing networks and spatial centres. David Kloos, for example, uses Acehnese perspectives gleaned from the poetic Hikayat Teungku di Meuké (“The Story of Teungku Meuké”) to show that Dutch efforts to efface extant Acehnese notions of connection with places like neighbouring West Sumatra never entirely succeeded. Likewise, Formichi explains that the decision of the Muslim leader S. M. Kartosuwiryo to flee from Yogyakarta to the outlying area of West Java did not simply comprise a coerced move “from a position of political centrality to one of marginality and opposition.” The organisation started by Kartosuwiryo, Darul Islam, did not merely reflect a violent “separatist” impulse at the margins of Indonesia. Instead, physical relocation constituted an effort to articulate an alternative vision to the emerging “secular nationalism” of the Indonesian state grounded in Islam. By moving from “centre” to “periphery,” Formichi reminds us that Kartosuwiryo hoped to reconstitute the nation as the Islamic State of Indonesia and thus reclaim a new “wholeness and centrality for its institutions, followers, and leaders.” In contrast with Kartosuwiryo, Amrita Malhi's piece discusses how the Tenth Regiment's banishment removed them from a position of influence over the emerging direction of postcolonial Malaya. With no possibility of return, the Regiment's post-banishment writings circled around its leaders’ experience of loss and betrayal of a nonaligned and multiracial postcolonial future. At the same time, however, they begin to imagine a new geography of postcolonial liberation centred on China, but encompassing the rest of the colonised world, including other Muslim lands.
In conclusion, this special issue promotes emerging scholarship that can deepen some of the analytical approaches pursued by the recent “mobilities turn” while simultaneously pointing forward towards flexible paradigms of disconnection and reconnection for future research. The articles found here challenge the notion that world history can proceed simply by tracing the accelerating movement of peoples, commodities, and ideas across borders. Although connected histories provide a necessary corrective to the nationalist historiographies of the past, such approaches can also unwittingly entrench celebratory narratives of globalisation, capitalism, and transnational empire. By instead reframing “connection” as a constant contest over disconnection and reconnection, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, it becomes possible to recapture a sense of how coercion, state-making, and space-making all factor into a world of simultaneously accelerating and decelerating mobility. Indeed, such a framework can help us understand the contingent, complex relationship of territoriality and mobility; and of how at certain junctures mobility reinforced projects of territorial control, while at others, it could undermine them. The cases here, drawn from a relatively small subset of experience involving Southeast Asian Muslims, cannot provide a comprehensive answer to the relationship between mobility and territoriality in the violent colonial or postcolonial age. However, they do provide a flexible framework for moving past “connected histories” for connected histories sake, a heuristic device of sorts, for understanding how contests over coerced mobility shaped ever-shifting geographic imaginaries.
