Recent years have seen numerous efforts to digitise and preserve troves of documents across Asia, as with the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, putting often fragile personal and foundational deposits into dialogue with more established and richly-curated metropolitan reservoirs shaped by colonial imperatives including, in many cases, counter-insurgency research. Such were the origins of much of the bequest of Snouck Hurgronje to Leiden University in the twentieth century, containing numerous manuscripts copied from libraries of Muslim teachers in Java, or taken from those vanquished in Aceh. During his original travels in Indonesia from 1889, Snouck quickly saw collections of Sufi materials less as evidence of jihadist potential, but more as sources for the ongoing process of Islamisation in the archipelago, with the more readily shared tracts of the Shattariyya tariqa or Sufi path bearing witness to earlier moments of connection to the Holy Cities of Arabia, and the great scholars Ahmad Qushashi (d. 1661), Ibrahim al-Kurani (d. 1690) and Aceh's own ʿAbd al-Ra'uf of Singkel (d. 1693) in the seventeenth century. The key evidence for such connections lay in the reported sequence of transmissions from teacher to student, and then from student as teacher. Known as the silsila, from the Arabic word for chain, such sequences were often included in Sufi manuals.

Now we have the valuable addition of scholarship like that of Oman Fathurahman, who brings a knowledge of Arabic to bear onto his and his colleagues’ investigations in Acehnese, Malay, Javanese and the languages of the Southern Philippines, analysing some 33 manuscripts (or their images) to trace the people in between the afore-known greats and more recently remembered teachers whose lives are attested in other nineteenth and twentieth-century sources. While the resultant study is perforce a catalogue in some respects, with Fathurahman describing the hard to access or fragile physical sources and their contents, sometimes with necessary repetition, he lays bare important data for the reconstruction of the history of the Shattariyya across the archipelago. This was an order that originated in India, but whose true centre arguably became Medina in the hands of Qushashi and then even more so under al-Kurani and his descendants who bore the name Tahir. Further, in a compact final chapter, Fathurahman lays out sometimes surprising conclusions that might be missed by a reader not attuned to the older literature that struggled to link the greats of old to teachers like Hasan Maolani of Lengkong (d. 1874), who was exiled to Manado in 1842. In the first place his research backs up oral accounts that emphasise that, after the initial linkage of Qushashi and ʿAbd al-Rauf, later Jawi students sought the line associated with al-Kurani and what became, in effect, a family-dominated order in the eighteenth century that also spread to the Southern Philippines. Similarly, in parts of Java linked to the courts of Cirebon and Banten, there is evidence confirming the importance of figures like ʿAbd al-Muhyi Pamijahan, studied by Tommy Christomy, who thus becomes a more tangible historical figure. At the same time, though, there are lineages that are entirely separate where one would expect interconnection due to proximity, as with a set of figures with connections to Batavia, such as Khatib Saʿid (active from c.1810) and his later follower Encik Salihin.

Perhaps most striking, though, and despite Fathurahman's stated emphasis on the role of ‘commoners’ in various lineages into the twentieth century, is the frequent mention of key courtly women; namely Ratu Raja Fatimah and Nyimas Alimah of Cirebon, and Kanjeng Ratu Kadipaten of Yogyakarta (d. 1803), who were not merely pupils but transmitters in their own right. Indeed the latter was a famous inspiration to Pangeran Dipanagara. This also aligns with what I found for the older court of Mataram, once based at Kartasura, when trying to reconstruct the life of Sayyid ʿAlawi, an Arab Sufi teacher active there between 1737 and 1743. While I was unable to determine his Sufi affiliation, it was apparent that perhaps the most active proponent of his teachings was the reigning Pakubuwana II's queen, Ratu Kencana, whose untimely demise after childbirth in 1738 was briefly the cause of local Dutch satisfaction, thinking that the Arab's influence was at an end.

To be sure, Fathurahman has done scholars a great service in reconstructing important lineaments of mystical knowledge once binding the archipelago before the decline of the courts and the rise of orders like the Naqshbandiyya, and most especially its Khalidiyya variant in the nineteenth century. He is also right to note that believers could affiliate to more than one tariqa in their lives, and even maintain their teachings simultaneously, as with Kanjeng Ratu's teacher ʿAbdallah b. ʿAbd al-Qahhar of Cirebon who was a proponent of both the Shattariyya and Naqshbandiyya. Fathurahman offers useful correctives to some of my own work, and his reading of the name Khatib Saʿid is to be preferred to the ‘Hazib Saʿid’ I found copied in one silsila that went back, via Tegal, to the Tahir clan that I had thought based in Aceh rather than Medina. He also draws attention to scholars at the Zawiyah Tanoe Abee, Muhammad Salih al-Baghdadi (d. 1855?) and his son ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Baghdadi (d. 1894) whose names equate to or echo those of known emissaries of the Acehnese sultans to Ottoman Mecca and at a time when the Naqshbandiyya was rising in importance.

It is only to be regretted for the moment that some of the sources described by Fathurahman are not readily accessible, even in their digital form. However, we can certainly trust his analyses and expertise, making this work a valuable pointer in what is, with ever more scanning being undertaken, an ever larger corpus of knowledge placing people in a continuum of faith and praxis between Southeast Asia and the Holy Cities of Islam.