Introduction
During my seventh months of ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia for a research project on the intersection of Muslim pilgrimage, gender, and consumption (e.g., Thimm Reference Thimm2023), I talked with my Malay Muslim respondent Osman about a particular form of pilgrimage: ziarah, especially the form of ziarah to keramat graves, i.e., according to my respondent’s vernacular wording, a grave of a person who had “super-power.”
Osman: Keramat graves belong to someone who is special. For example, to our previous leaders, they were very religious men. When we go there we recite the Qur’an for them [the dead person], to give them peace after their death. But some people misuse the keramat thing. They think ‘When there is a keramat [grave], there might be a magic thing there.’ These are mainly the Indians [Indian Malaysians], but all of them also go [people from other ethnic and religious backgrounds]. Sometimes they go there and ask for lottery numbers but those are some of spiritual activities against Islam. […] People are supposed to pray to God, not to pray to their leader or any Imam, right? Sometimes for ritual activities, they need a few things, right? Sometimes they need a candle, sometimes they need a lemon, sometimes they need a smelly stone, sometimes they need a coin. So that’s why they perform the activities there which in Islam is not actually allowed. We call it syirik [polytheism or, in this case, the association of humans with God].
Viola: So you mean other people from Malaysia, Indian, Malay, Chinese,
Christian, Hindu, all of them go there?
Osman: Ya. (17 May 2017)
This short vignette shows how Malaysian people from different religions deal with their venerating practices with the graves of saints or other meaningful people. From what I observed, the concrete discussions surrounding these graves in various locations across the Malaysian Peninsula were similar: no coins, candles, or flowers may be placed at the graves. According to Muslim hegemonic perspectives, the people who still place these items there are mainly Indian Malaysians. Orthodox Islamic understanding in Malaysia teaches that those people who “misuse the keramat thing”, as Osman said, are not considered to be on the right path. In the Malaysian context, this is argued mainly because of their traditions of worshipping several deities based on Hindu traditions.
All the graves that I visited in Malaysia could be approached freely. There were, in fact, mainly Indian Malaysians but also some Malay Malaysians visiting them. These conditions pinpoint many important elements when dealing with the “super-power” of these sites: rituals, the multicultural condition of religions, syncretism, interpretations of religious sources, religious restrictions, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and the movement to these localities or the prevention of it. These insights lead to the heart of this article: Multireligious practices at particular graves classified as “powerful” in Malaysia and the inter-religious and inter-ethnic negotiations of it in the context of Islamic ideologies surrounding them: Islamism, but also, to a lesser extent, Wahhabism.
From a social and cultural anthropological perspective, this article concerns the primary question of which meaning believers of various backgrounds and social and political statuses assign to syncretic traditions in the context of wider transnational processes of a politicisation of Islam. Meaning-making is understood here in its most original sense in social and cultural anthropology. Being a descriptive, theoretically oriented, and comparative cultural and social science whose research objective is to understand dynamic cultural and social processes, it has been anthropology’s most basic endeavour to understand the creation of meaning and contexts of action, especially from the perspective of the social actors. Meaning-making is the process by which people interpret situations, social relationships, or objects and things, based on their previous experiences and available socio-cultural resources. Thus, the anthropological approach of being interested in processes of meaning-making means to look at how people make sense of, adapt to, or transform everyday practices, but also broader socio-cultural and structural conditions. Following this principle of my discipline, the goal is to understand how Malaysians make sense of their and/or others’ ziarah practices against the background of wider socio-cultural and political processes.
On this ground, my enquiry is particularly guided by the following questions: (1) How do people from diverse religious backgrounds in Malaysia make sense of an assumed “super-power” surrounding the graves of former religious leaders or prophets? (2) How do Malaysian religious and state authorities classify the resulting spiritual practices of the manifold groups of people, and how do they canalise them towards an interpretation deemed Islamically compliant? (3) How do Muslim believers interact in this dynamic tension field of multireligiosity, syncretism, self-expression, and state regulations?
To anticipate, it will be shown that in Malaysia, manifold religious and ethnic groups believe in a “super-power” (keramat) that the dead person had. The religious leaders who are assumed to be blessed (barakah) with keramat were active during the last 300 – 500 years. Mainly Indian and Malay Malaysians feel attached to these previous leaders, but their social practices at the graves and the meaning they assign to it differ. While Indian Malaysians make sense of their worshipping practices through merging Hindu and Muslim elements, Muslim Malays indeed worship the religious leaders as well, but fear being affected by the syncretic practices of the Indian Malaysians, which they believe do not correspond to pure Islam, and avoid visiting the keramat graves at all. This believe and meaning-making of multireligious traditions is heavily influenced by religious state policies: State institutions classify certain spiritual practices undertaken at the graves of former religious leaders or prophets as superstitious (khurafat) and, consequently, unacceptable in Islam against the backdrop of politicising processes of their official religion, which is Sunni Islam with Shafi’i law school (fiqh).
This study is based on an ethnographic multi-sited (Marcus Reference Marcus1995, Reference Marcus, Coleman and von Hellermann2011) approach to fieldwork, data collection, and analysis. This multi-sited approach implied doing fieldwork in diverse but linked places – in this case, in Malaysia and in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman – between December 2013 and April 2018 for a total of 15 months. There are two reasons for the usefulness of this kind of multi-sited fieldwork: First, the contemporary transnational processes of Islamism and Wahhabism in Malaysia are directly connected to social dynamics happening on the Arabian Peninsula. Second, many of the keramat persons in Malaysia originated from the Arabian Peninsula. They settled in the Malay World after a long journey for trade and religious purposes hundreds of years ago. However, this paper will only focus the Malaysian case.
The original study concerns pilgrimage, gender and consumption issues in more general terms (e.g. Thimm Reference Thimm2018, Reference Thimm2021a, Reference Thimm, Buitelaar, Stephan-Emmrich and Thimm2021b, Reference Thimm2023), and the data collected for this article is a distinct part of this broader research. In sum, 277 qualitative interviews, discussions and conversations in various forms and lengths about Muslims’ pilgrimage practices and beyond were conducted with 217 people. However, not all of these interviews focused on the local pilgrimage (ziarah) to keramat graves and the social and religious practices undertaken there.
Participant observation and different forms of qualitative interviews were conducted at 18 keramat sites that I visited in Malaysia, the UAE and Oman. Since this study deals with the context of Malaysia only, I would like to specify that I went to eight graves in that particular nation-state in total: To those of Hang Jebat, Hang Kasturi, and Symasudin Al-Sumatrani in the town of Melaka, to those of Sultan Al-Ariffin and Syarifah, Tok Putih, Tok Janggut on the island of Pulau Besar off the Melakan coast, and to the graves of Tok Kenali in Kubang Kerian and Tok Janggut at Pasir Pekan Hilir, Tumpat, both in Kelantan. I usually encountered people at the sites, often worshipping, and these were opportunities to observe and interview the believers directly. Other interviews regarding the understanding and conception of the lived practices at the keramat graves were conducted just anywhere where I accompanied and met my respondents. Interviews were primarily open and narrative and all of them were transcribed. Some of these interviews were recorded, some were not. In the latter cases, I took notes of verbatim statements by my respondents. Interviews were conducted either in Bahasa Melayu (Malay), English or local Manglish (a mixture between the two languages that people speak especially in urban areas).
In what follows, I will first discuss the characteristics of keramat graves in the Malay Archipelago. Subsequently, an ethnographic account of the religious and syncretic practices at the keramat graves in Malaysia, especially those at the grave of Tok Kenali, will give further insights. By mapping the perceptions of and practices by predominantly Malay and Indian Malaysians, I will, furthermore, discuss the disciplining practices by the Malaysian state and religious authorities targeting the diversity of religious and spiritual practices given the multiethnic community visiting these graves. To carve out the meaning-making processes surrounding the Malaysian graves more deeply, the disciplining acts will be embedded in broader processes of Islamism in Malaysia.
Mapping Malaysian keramat Transregionally
A body of work exists on visitation of saints’ shrines and its tensions with Islamic doctrine, for example for the contexts of Iran (Rahbari Reference Rahbari, Buitelaar, Stephan-Emmrich and Thimm2021), Egypt (Mittermaier Reference Mittermaier, Stauth and Schielke2008), Pakistan (McClintock Reference McClintock1991, Adamson Sijapati Reference Adamson Sijapati2018), Turkey (Tapper Reference Tapper, Eickelman and Piscatori1990) and the Maghreb and Western Asia in broader terms (Boissevain Reference Boissevain2017). However, the Malaysian contemporary case remains a blind spot in scholarship. This is striking because keramat graves (kubur keramat) are found in many parts of maritime Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia – which has been described only more than 100 years ago (Skeat Reference Skeat1900) –, but also in Singapore (Muhammad Faisal Reference Muhammad Faisal2018, Zuraihan Reference bte Isahak1995), Indonesia (Mandal Reference Mandal2012, Woodward Reference Woodward1989) and Brunei (Müller Reference Müller2017). Many of these include graves of Malay people who were former Muslim and/or political leaders or even deemed holy. Similar graves are spread over the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of the Arab World. These graves are usually considered to be prophet’s graves. The Malay word keramat denotes a place (tempat keramat) or a thing regarded as sacred and that can potentially bring magical blessings. It can also refer to people who are considered to be blessed with magical power by Allah due to their outstanding spiritual piety or religious accomplishments. The word keramat is used when a saint-like (usually male) figure (wali, plural awliya) (Chambert-Loir Reference Chambert-Loir, Chambert-Loir and Reid2002, Sevea Reference Sevea2018) performs something magical based on super-natural powers endowed by God: The origin of the word “wali” derives from the Arabic “walla yu walli,” meaning “to provide power.” In this respect, a wali is a person beloved by God; someone to whom power is given by God. A wali was a very religious person and, consequently, a leader among people. Keramat refers to both people and their burial sites. An acknowledgement or even veneration of the wali is bound to the place (here: the grave) and is not undertaken at home or any other place, “hence the phenomenon [of keramat] is local, tied to the landscape, and not transportable” (Mandal Reference Mandal2012: 359).
The architecture and significance of the keramat graves and social and ritual practices at these sites in Malaysia and on the Arabian Peninsula are linked to one another based on historical and contemporary connections between the two regions. Sumit Mandal (Reference Mandal2012, Reference Mandal2013) points out that keramat graves in the Malay Archipelago derive from exchange with the Hadramawt and neighbouring parts of the Arab Peninsula, stretching from the 15th to the 18th century.
“Hadhramis, specifically sayyid, or people descended from the Prophet Muhammad, arrived on ships plying the coastal route along the northern rim of the Indian Ocean, travelling over a period of months to get from the southern Arabian coast to Indian ports, before advancing to the Malay world.” (Mandal Reference Mandal2013: 6)
The exchange network that developed from there comprised Islamic scholars, traders and statesmen who were highly esteemed. Hadramis became advisors for the royal courts and ruling families and sometimes even became rulers after several generations. One example is Sitti Malangkik, a Bugis queen who was said to be a descendant of Balqis, the queen of Sheba in today’s UAE. Thus, many of the Hadramis settled in the Malay Archipelago, built their families there, passed away, and were buried there (Mandal Reference Mandal2013: 6f.).
The exchange between both areas is materialised in the distinct sizes of the graves. When I was studying sociocultural and ritual practices at keramat graves in Malaysia, I was struck by the architecture of these graves. They usually comprise three characteristic elements: firstly, an exterior construction around the grave (dapur-dapur kubur), which is generally a hut of rectangular shape. It can be lavish, including calligraphy, or modest. Secondly, a (Malay) Muslim form of a paired gravestone (batu nisan) that marks the grave as such and indicates the gender of the dead person. The batu nisan of females are flat, those of males are round. Thirdly, inscriptions and calligraphy that show either information about the wali or Qur’anic verses. However, there is one additional element that is only distinct to keramat graves: they are typically more than two meters long, sometimes even up to five or six meters. To be precise, what is seen are only grave markers, i.e., cenotaphs, the actual grave is two to three meters underneath. However, since the cenotaphs are taken for the actual graves by the local populations, my Muslim Malay respondent Ramli, for example, had an explanation for their length and, therewith, the assumed tallness of the dead person, that was absolutely reasonable to him: “Well, in the past there used to be dinosaurs, right? And the animals have been getting smaller ever since. It’s the same with humans: They used to be much taller in general and have been getting smaller ever since.” He shows a picture on his smartphone of how huge the prophets were and how tiny people are today in comparison. Next to the picture is a Hadith [collection of deeds and sayings of Prophet Muhammad] telling that Allah created one of the prophets as 60 feet tall. He commented laughing: “Logically, I cannot believe it, but I must believe it, because it’s in the Hadith!” (14 July 2017).
Strikingly, this unusual length is valid for these type of graves in parts of the Arabian Peninsula as well. The fact that wali’s or prophet’s graves are that large is something unique only to Malaysia, the Hadramawt, and the UAE, and shows the transregional connections between these regions. Ben, the state archaeologist of Ras al-Khaimah, a northern state in the UAE, who has been working there since the 1980s but also excavated in many other parts of the Arab world, explained in April 2018 about the local prophet’s graves: “The long graves of the saints only exist in Salalah [South-Western part of Oman]. In Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, where I also worked, the graves are always about two meters long.” Viola: “Long graves also exist in Malaysia.” That surprised him because he had never heard that before. However, he then commented that Islam in Malaysia was brought there by the Yemenis and Omanis, and that the resulting exchange between the two regions is visible in the Wadi Hadramawt, a valley east of Aden with houses in the Southeast Asian style. What he obviously was unaware of was the length of the grave in Malaysia.
Keramat Graves in the Context of the Islamic Revival in Malaysia
Malaysia is a multicultural society where 69.3 % of the citizens are classified as Bumiputera (Malays and native people, such as Orang Asli or Kadazandusun), 22.8 % of Chinese ancestry and 6.9 % of Indian origin (Department of Statistics, Malaysia 2019). According to the Malaysian Constitution, affirmative action is given in favour of the Malays (article 153 [1]), yet, with certain limitations. Furthermore, the Constitution stipulates Sunni Islam with the Shafi’i school (mazhab) of jurisprudence (fiqh) as the religion of the state and the compulsory religion for all Malays (article 3 [1]; 160). Consequently, Islam was established with special protection as the religion for the majority society, which has been retained by the government until today.
State Islamisation policies and a revivalist movement (dakwah, literally “salvation” or “invitation”) in the 1970s were a pivotal turning point in Malaysia’s development of Islam. The Islamic self-confidence in Malaysia emerged due to internal and external policies and politics, such as the Iranian Revolution in 1979. In the context of an evolving national consciousness, urban middle-class Malay Malaysians, especially university students, founded various groups and movements. Some of them were highly conservative and orthodox, such as The Islamic Party of Malaysia (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, PAS) (see Müller Reference Müller2014), which has been very influential in the northern states of the country, for example, in Kelantan, where the below discussed grave of Tok Kenali is located. Some of these groups and movements aim for an Islamic state and partly want to implement religious-orthodox principles. One of them is hudud, i.e., punishments which are mandated under Islamic law (syariah). The dakwah movement was not only supported by PAS, but by many other Muslim organisations as well, such as the Muslim Youth Movement (ABIM) and the now illegal Sufi revivalist group, the group Darul Arqam. Given these Islamic revivalist dynamics “on the ground”, the Malay-led Malaysian government under the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) established its own, top-down campaign of revitalising Islam (Petru 2015: 18)
The conservative shift of the 1970s and 1980s was connected to similar processes in the neighboring countries Indonesia and Brunei Darussalam, the other two Muslim-majority countries in Southeast Asia. However, one crucial difference to related dynamics in Indonesia, for instance, is that the intensified processes of Islamism in Malaysia are more closely linked to state policies. Another distinction is that, unlike their Indonesian counterparts, the Malaysian Muslim elite has examined and embraced models of Islamic governance and religious leadership from the Arabian Peninsula with greater scrutiny and willingness. While it is not feasible to fully “Islamise” the country due to Malaysia’s strongly multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature, Muslim leaders in Malaysia have tried to emulate Arab models while relying on financial support from the Gulf States to promote religious education throughout the country (Petru 2015: 18). In fact, Malaysia has undergone a transformative shift on the discursive level by founding Islamic universities (such as the Islamic International University) and Islamising knowledge in more general terms. University programs integrated modules on Islamisation of modern science into their curricula. This principle was eventually brought to Indonesia as well (Saat 2020: 5). The creation of more Islamic institutions furthermore implied establishing an Islamic finance and insurance system (Thimm Reference Thimm2023) and strengthening the Syariah Court system alongside the civil court system. This top-down process of Islamisation has resulted in a general transformation within Malaysian society – and it is still ongoing due to the Islamisation competition between the ruling party UMNO and the orthodox or fundamentalist opposition party, PAS (Petru 2015: 19).
Under the Islamising power of the state, various religious and spiritual practices have been deemed “un-Islamised” and, therewith, disciplined or even banned. Each of the 13 states in Malaysia (negeri) and three federal territories (Wilayah Persekutuan) handles Islamic rules and regulations separately. In Melaka, for instance, the Majlis Agama Islam (Islamic Religious Council) destroyed seven keramat graves due to “superstitious deviance” in 2011 (Muhammad Faisal Reference Muhammad Faisal2018: 15). However, social and religious practices in other states can be performed more openly. The Sufi-based tradition of worshipping at keramat graves was common throughout the Malay Archipelago in the 19th and early 20th century (Skeat Reference Skeat1900). Yet, the state institutions as well as a large number of the Malay population consider it nowadays as syirik (sinful), khurafat (superstitious), and bidaah (“innovative” to Islam) as it is supposed to be embedded in Hindu, pre-Islamic traditions. In fact, Walter Skeat (Reference Skeat1900: 85) noted as early as 1900 in his encompassing work Malay Magic that “the greater gods of the Malay Pantheon, though modified in some respects by Malay ideas, were really borrowed Hindu divinities, and that only the lesser gods and spirits are native to the Malay religious system.”
In contemporary times, the worshipping practices at the graves are usually not banned by law, but, in many cases, the state institutions discourage people to ziarah such graves by building a fence around the site and putting up highly restrictive signboards that indicate everything forbidden to do at these graves. However, there are no Islamic writings or doctrine in Islam on how to approach keramat graves. Without these regulated instructions, worshippers from diverse backgrounds perform their practices, in fact, very differently at the graves and, as a consequence, assign differing meanings to them.
Muslim Malay Approaches to keramat
Based on my research interest in Muslim pilgrimage practices in Malaysia, I wanted to visit the grave of Tok Kenali (1868–1933) (makam Tok Kenali) in Kubang Kerian in the state of Kelantan. I asked my Malay friends Masjaliza and her husband Ramli whether they want to join me because they originate from Kelantan. They were interested since they had not visited this grave before. However, they gave their final agreement only after having asked Masjaliza’s mother, an Islamic scholar, for her consent. We planned our trip in a fruit stall (kedai buah) in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, in June 2017, coincidentally located in a neighbourhood called Datuk Keramat.Footnote 1 Masjaliza explained over her fruit juice that the wali Tok Kenali was indeed a keramat person. Keramat, according to her understanding, means “help from Allah to selected people for their piety or to reward their piety. Keramat is the power which is a hadiah [gift] by Allah.” In an almost incredulous tone of voice, she instantly started narrating about his miracles. She said that Tok Kenali studied in Mecca for 20 years with only 2 Ringgit [Malaysian Ringgit, the local currency]. During the time Tok Kenali was living in Kelantan in Malaysia, however, it is said that he had travelled to Mecca and back in one day only, without flying there and back.Footnote 2 People who know him have seen him in Mecca, Masjaliza stated. When they came back, however, they were told by people in Tok Kenali’s Kelantanese neighbourhood that he had not left the place at all during this time. Ramli said he firmly believes in this story because his paternal grandfather had seen Tok Kenali in Mecca himself, and after coming back, he was told that Tok Kenali had not left at all. Masjaliza moved on by narrating another story about his “super-power”:
“Back then there was still a lot of cockfighting happening, but it was haram [forbidden according to syariah law] because it was a form of gambling. You just bet on the roosters. Furthermore, one should not enjoy the suffering of the poor roosters, as this is also against Islam. Tok Kenali said to the cockfighters that they should not be entertained by the poor roosters and should not laugh at them. He said: ‘You are making a noise as loud as a burning house!’ And then shortly afterwards, the cockfight organiser’s house was on fire! He had a mulut masin [literary ‘salty mouth’], which, in this context, means that what he says comes true. What he says will be rewarded by Allah on the spot. Allah will make it real what he says. That’s why keramat people don’t talk nonsense. Because everything they say is immediately answered, received and realised by Allah.” (2 June 2017).
One month later, we set off from Kuala Lumpur in order to visit the graveyard in which Tok Kenali’s grave was located. It was never an issue before we went there but, interestingly, from the moment we approached the place onwards, the whole affair became incredibly complicated and charged. While still in the car, Ramli said that
“people face a lot of karut [misbelieve of Islam]. They believe that someone can fly, can walk on the water […] We also believe in Tok Kenali, but we cannot get his power, the keramat. People believe they can get it from the grave. This is some sense of Hinduism, the buja [to adore the grave and to believe that it can give them strength] comes from Hinduism and it is against Islamic law.” (17 July 2017)
By referencing Hinduism, Ramli indirectly talks about the Indian population that has comprised parts of the Malay(si)an society for hundreds of years due to immigration especially during British colonialism (Thimm Reference Thimm2014). In fact, a conflation of Hinduism and Islam is a far more common practice in South Asia than it is in Malaysia. For instance, Indian-American journalist Asra Nomani performed a Hindu pilgrimage in January 2001 and later on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, in 2003 (Buitelaar Reference Buitelaar, Buitelaar, Stephan-Emmrich and Thimm2021), thereby embracing both religions simultaneously. Similarly, Adamson Sijapati (Reference Adamson Sijapati2018) discusses practices of Muslim pilgrimage in relation to Hindu traditions in South Asia, in this case Nepal. This entangled religious and spiritual tradition is obviously something that my Muslim respondents want to distance themselves from. After Ramli clarified his attitude in this regard by referencing buja, I asked him and Masjaliza what they intended to do at Tok Kenali’s grave. Masjaliza explained:
“To give sedekah [donation] but in this case not in a material sense but in the form of giving a smile and a salam [greeting] to Tok Kenali and also reciting al-Fatihah [opening verse of the Qur’an] for him. We give him one Fatihah and we will get back 10 [pahala, rewards Muslims believe to get for good deeds and will be judged for by Allah on judgement day].” (17 July 2017)
We arrived at the graveyard and could see Tok Kenali’s grave from afar, visible through the dapur-dapur kubur around and above the grave and a signboard. Instead of the typical batu nisan, it had two big yellow stones on both ends. As a self-disciplining act, Ramli was very worried about me entering the grave as a non-Muslim. Before we entered, he wanted to ask the people who live next to the graveyard whether we could just go to the grave, especially me. In the meantime, three other men from the state of Pahang arrived by car. One of them touched one of the yellow stones for a couple of minutes. Ramli could not find anyone and, therefore, wanted to look for Tok Kenali’s pondok [Islamic school] to ask whether we could enter the graveyard. Two minutes away by car, we found his pondok “Masjid Tok Kenali” (Tok Kenali Mosque), which he himself founded. Tok Kenali’s great-grandson, a young man in jeans, shirt, and a kopiah [skull cap worn by Muslim males] in his mid-20s, approached us. He worked at the mosque teaching English. His father and cousin also had positions there. We explained to him that we wanted to visit kubur Tok Kenali and that Ramli was unsure about whether or not I would be allowed to enter the graveyard. He gave his permission by saying that this was not an issue as long as my intention (niat) was good and I did not show my aurat (the body parts one should cover regarding the opposite gender when not being in a relationship that excludes marriage). Wearing an ankle-length skirt and a shirt with three-quarter length sleeves, he commented that I had already covered my aurat sufficiently. For him, my visit to the graveyard seemed to be absolutely unproblematic. With his authority as a descendant of Tok Kenali, we were finally ready to visit the grave. However, after all this had lasted for so long, we eventually no longer had enough time to go there.
Ramli’s general discomfort when trying to make the grave visit concrete and the meaning-making processes surrounding a visit of a keramat grave by pious believers (Masjaliza and Ramli) together with a Westener (me) stems from the discourse surrounding a revitalisation of Islam and Islamism in the country, that he, Masjaliza and many other Malay Muslims have appropriated and integrated into their lives. His uneasiness about doing something that would contradict Islamic principles went so far that eventually the visit to Tok Kenali’s grave never happened. This fact seemed to be an outcome of preferring to do something absolutely halal rather than having a new experience in terms of one’s worshipping practices.
Within this Islamicising context, two concrete conditions led to Ramli’s, and also Masjaliza’s, uncertainties. On the one hand, the potential confrontation with spiritual practices that are considered to be of religious influences other than Islam (especially Hinduism), and, on the other hand, those are of secular origin. When reflecting a couple of months later on our visit that did not materialise, Masjaliza stated:
“If you want Tok Kenali’s knowledge or spirit, it’s not sunnat [recommended according to Islamic understanding] to rub or touch the stone there, you cannot get his spirit, you cannot do that! In the grave is just dust, you are physically nothing after death except after qiamat [judgement day]. There is no spirit from the grave! To believe so is a misconception of Islam and a mixture with other beliefs and I also think it’s a secular influence.” (16 October 2017)
By “rubbing the stone” Masjaliza referred to the practice by one of the three visitors from Pahang we observed at Tok Kenali’s grave. The “secular influence” is obviously related to myself being a non-Muslim and atheist, and this is the reason why Ramli was so concerned about bringing me to the site desired.
The refusal to visit a keramat grave was a common threat amongst all my closer respondents. I spent a weekend at Suriawati’s house in Seri Iskandar, Perak, in June 2017. When I mentioned to her that I planned to go to Tok Kenali’s grave soon, she instantly commented that she and her family would never do that because it is haram [forbidden according to syariah law] for Muslims. The reason is that people gamble there with lottery numbers [nombor ekor, literally “tail number”] because they hope to get inspiration for the correct number. “Only people who don’t have a strong iman [belief] do such things,” she added.
“Most of the people who go there are Indians or, in the case of Indonesia, Christians. They go there because they think they will get the power from the grave or from the trees. We don’t go there because we only believe in Allah and that Mohammad is his prophet. We cannot go and pray there at the grave because we only pray to Allah.” (19 June 2017)
Suriawati added other layers to the syncretic traditions conflating Muslim and Hindu origins that surrounded practices at keramat graves by referring to not only Christianity, but also the power of trees. This is rooted in the Malay folk belief of semangat, a soul substance of nature, including plants such as rice (semangat padi) and trees. This animistic approach was widely believed in the past. As Skeat (Reference Skeat1900: 63ff.) indicated, trees were considered to have keramat that can bring blessings and miracles (see Endicott Reference Endicott1970). Some trees were supposed sacred as they were perceived to be the home of spirits and ghosts.
State Islamic Disciplining: Islamism in Malaysia
The Hindu, secular, and animistic traditions that form an amalgamation with Islam at the keramat graves in Malaysia led to state and institutional interventions into the material character and the socioreligious practices at these sites. My respondents are well aware of this sort of disciplining. My 49-year-old respondent, Farrah, stated once:
“If a cultural practice contradicts, so that it’s bidaah [‘innovative’ to Sunnah, the lifestyle of Prophet Mohammad] or khurafat [superstitious] and it contradicts the religion, then I think the government will try to avoid that. For example, when people glorify a syeikh [religious master] more than they are supposed to, like the things they do at the graves. They make du’a [supplication] to the syeikh so that the syeikh will tell God, as if the syeikh becomes a mediator between you and God. I think that’s why there are certain graves and shrines where the government just closed or just gated them so that people don’t go throwing coins and khurafat [superstitious] stuff like that. (1 June 2017)
In a similar vein, Masjaliza narrated that Islamic Councils had closed some keramat graves for the public as people sometimes mixed the soil of the grave with water and drank it in the hope to get the wali’s power. Since this practice implies venerating the dead person and, thus, venerating someone other than Allah, it is considered to be khurafat instead of just acknowledging (memuja) them. To memuja a dead person, however, does not entail any action but primarily denotes that one recognises and honours the grave of a saint. Given the khurafat status of what many people perform at the graves, governmental bodies try to prevent Muslim believers from visiting (ziarah) such sites at all.
This is valid primarily for the past few decades, i.e., since Islamism evolved. Many of my elder respondents told me that during their childhood, they themselves, their family members, or neighbours frequently visited keramat graves. This decline since the 1980s has gained pace within the past few years. A local discourse that appropriates Islamic doctrines from the Arabian Peninsula and equates “Arabic culture” with an “authentic” and “true Islam” developed under the keyword of “Arabisation” in 2016/2017. Without being prompted, my respondent, Fatimah, a Malay Malaysian in her late thirties, narrated about Arabisation in Malaysia as follows:
Fatimah: “Arabisation of the Malays has been going on since the last couple of years, I think since two years ago. People associate you wearing Arab garments, for example, as being more Muslim than others.”
Viola: “You have just mentioned the term ‘Arabisation’. What do you mean by that?”
Fatimah: “We have a lot of Arabs being in the country and these people bring their culture … and people take Arabs as a symbol of Islam which is actually wrong. This is what I mean by Arabisation. People see Arabs being the true Muslim, which is not even specifically mentioned in the Qur’an. (…) So when it comes to Arabisation in Malaysia, what I have noticed is the new understanding that if you have some Arabic elements either in your dressing, in your house or in your office, that means you are a Muslim. It’s Islam. Arabisation is that we as Malays have to have Arabic elements to signify that we are Muslim. (25 May 2017)
In a similar vein, my 36-year old respondent Haneefah, a Malay Malaysian who grew up in Saudi Arabia, spoke about these processes as follows:
Viola: “What do you think about this term ‘Arabisation’ some journalists or scholars have started to use only recently? Is it an appropriate term?”
Haneefah: “Yes, because they [Malays] try to follow the Arabic culture. I don’t think that it’s a good thing to have Arabisation or being affected by Arab culture. Because culture is your identity. Why to give up your own identity? (…) Those [Malaysians] who are supporting religion adore Arabs. There are those who are strictly practising [Islam], [these are] those like who probably studied over there in Jeddah, in Cairo…” (13 July 2017)
Fatimah and Haneefah understood “Arabisation” as a perception among Malays that appropriating Arabic elements is a way to become more religious, yet both criticised this way of thinking. The negative stance towards this attitude was introduced by sociologist Syed Farid al-Attas in a public panel discussion on ‘Arabisation’ in May 2016 in Kuala Lumpur. He focused on a hierarchical notion between Malay Malaysians and Arabs in this regard: “For some reason, the Malays often feel very low about themselves. So when they ape the Arabs they believe they are the more authentic (Muslims)” (Syed Jaymal 2019).
This emic perspective of a dynamic of “Arabisation” in Malaysia that certainly frames the local perceptions of and practices at keramat graves is, from my perspective, misleading. While in fact many more Arabic elements and also Arabic people have been present in Malaysia for the past 12-15 years (Thimm Reference Thimm2023), the framing of this development as “Arabisation” is, to a certain extent, essentialising the Arab World (see van Bruinessen Reference van Bruinessen, Miichi and Farouk2014). Going beyond the regional context of Malaysia and in more general, analytic terms, “Arabisation” is an extensive term that not only denotes processes related to Islam, as my respondents understand it, but also other Abrahamic religions, such as Christianity and Judaism, and other non-religious traditions existing in the Arab world as well. Thus, the term “Arabisation” cannot fully grasp the developments in Malaysia. In this regional context, predominantly Wahhabism (as a movement within Sunni Islam) can be identified as a driving factor to prevent Malaysians from venerating saints and visiting their graves, but not any other religious or spiritual references that form social reality in the Arab World as well. Martin van Bruinessen (Reference van Bruinessen, Miichi and Farouk2014: 18) observes similar tendencies of glossing over the diverse religious expressions in Arab countries in Indonesia and concludes, “[t]he talk of Arabization (…) implicitly assumes an essentialized, homogenized Arab world.”
Instead, framing the dynamics in Malaysia as “Islamism” seems to be more appropriate. I do not understand this term and concept in the populist sense of discourses ongoing in my home society in which “Islamism” primarily means “anti-Muslim”. Those who feed these discourses constantly frame their racism around what they call “Islamism”. However, I follow Salwa Ismail (Reference Ismail2006: 2) here who uses the term “Islamism” to encompass both Islamist (violent) politics as well as re-Islamisation, the process by which various domains of social life become imbued with signs and symbols associated with Islamic traditions. In short, Islamism is not only an expression of a political project, but it also covers the invocation of frames with an Islamic referent in social and cultural spheres; and therefore, this is exactly what many Malaysian political parties are promoting (the political aspects of Islamism – and why some of them can be in fact identified as Islamists) and what many Malays are aspire to (re-Islamisation, i.e. a return to Qur’an and Sunnah or partially applying Wahhabism).
One main reason why my respondents understand contemporary processes in Malaysia as “Arabisation” (and not “Islamism” or “influences of Wahhabism”) and that particularly the “Malays often feel very low about themselves”, as Syed Farid al-Attas put it, is related to notions of Muslim landscaping in which world regions are mapped based on grades of Islamic authenticity. This authenticity is grounded in an understanding of the whole Gulf region, and particularly the Hejaz,Footnote 3 as the cradle of Islam. It is based in an entangled web comprising a perception of Mecca as the centre of the world, incidents in pre-Islamic Arabia that testify to the early spread of Islam – materialised in the prophet’s graves that are subject to this research – and the peak phase of the Islamic empires that are located throughout the whole region (see King Reference King, Abed and Hellyer2001). Within these sacred landscapes, Muslims in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, are positioned (and position themselves) on the margins (Abaza Reference Abaza, Mutalib and ul-Islam Hashmi1996, Reference Abaza, Hessling, Nökel and Werner1999, Reference Abaza2007, Reference Abaza, Bustamam-Ahmad and Jory2011).
This perception is equally prevalent on the Arabian Peninsula itself. Based on my fieldwork observations in the UAE and Oman, normative narratives stress notions of Arabic Islam as “authentic.” In the Etihad Museum in Dubai, for example, visitors can read on a panel under the keyword “Identity”: “The Emirati identity is an Arab Islamic identity that is deeply rooted within the history of the Arab and Islamic world.”
Beyond this form of Muslim landscaping that considers the Arabian Peninsula as “true region of Islam”, there is also a contemporary ideological element that comes into the “Arabisation” scene. The engagement with this issue was clearly pinpointed as politically driven by some of my respondents directly in the region perceived as “authentic”: When I talked with my 59-year-old Emirati respondent Parigul together with her Emirati colleague Huda, who is around 17 years younger than Parigul, in a library near Dubai, they said: Huda: “It never came to my mind, Arab culture is expanding to Southeast Asia and that they [Southeast Asians] talk about ‘Arabisation’.” Parigul: “Ya, they say ‘Arabisation’ but maybe they are afraid of Wahhabi influence.” (19 January 2018). Grounded in Wahhabi ideology, venerating practices at graves in Malaysia are even more prevented through state actions in most parts.
Wahhabism is a branch of Sunni Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. The Wahhabi influence from Saudi Arabia plays a strong role in the Gulf region and becomes increasingly influential in Malaysia, as Parigul and Haneefah indicated. This influence becomes evident in the Wahhabi’s treatment of saints’ graves that have been destroyed. From their ideological perspective, no one is allowed to know where a Muslim ruler or leader is buried to avoid a cult around the grave. Followers of the Wahhabi strand of Islam advocate for a purification of Islam, reject Islamic theology and philosophy developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (Salafism), and call for a strict adherence to the Qur’an and Hadith. Consequently, official state authorities and Islamist movements in recent decades have demolished several burial sites that are associated with the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, and many of the founding figures of early Islamic history (Taylor 2012).
This has been the case in various parts of the Islamic world, not just in Saudi Arabia, but also in the UAE, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Malaysia, as shown above with the seven destroyed keramat graves in Melaka. The reason for the destruction is the Wahhabi-Salafi interpretation that levelling a grave (taswiyat al-qubur) is a religious duty, mainly when they are used as places of worship. Venerating practices at graves are based on the condition that people attribute miraculous powers to the saints, believing that they are closest to Allah and, thus, in a position to transfer God’s blessing (baraka) to ordinary people (Bunzel 2023). According to Beránek and Ťupek (2018), even the temptation to worship and venerate graves (fitnat al-qubur) justifies their removal according to Wahhabi understanding. Similar to the orthodox understanding in Malaysia, worshipping a human being, dead or alive, is considered to be a form of polytheism and, therefore, believed to be shirk and a disagreeable heresy (bid’a) (Bunzel 2023).
As Haneefah mentioned, more Malay Malaysians study or do business activities in the Arab region. Against the background of Muslim landscaping, many of them bring ideological elements back to their home country, Malaysia, afterwards. Thus, the revitalisation of Islam in Malaysia, which has been ongoing since the 1970s, has recently gained pace through an increased connection with the Arab World and the social and ideological dynamics happening there. This form of Islamism entails elements of a spread of Wahhabism. The complexity of the politisation of Islam in its different forms and stages ever since the 1970s eventually materialises in the Malaysian state’s treatment of saints’ graves and this, in turn, heavily influences the meaning-making processes surrounding these graves by those who believe in the saints’ power.
Conclusion
This article has shown meaning-making processes and the handling of Muslim saints’ graves in Malaysia. Due to multireligious, multicultural, and syncretic traditions conflating especially Islam and Hinduism, believers with often contradictory interpretations of venerating practices at the graves of people with keramat – an attached “super-power” that is still deemed present at the sites – negotiate and challenge the different interpretations of the Islamic religion.
The original influence of Islam in the Malay Archipelago comes from the Hadramawt and the region that today forms the UAE. The Hadramawt is a region on the Arabian Peninsula comprising eastern Yemen, parts of western Oman, and southern Saudi Arabia. The exchange between the Arabian Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago, which evolved based on the Hadramis, who had traveled initially east for trade and to spread Islam, can be seen materialised in the distinct size of the graves in only these two regions, among other things. This size and the assumed tallness of the dead person in the grave is, according to the believers, a miracle in itself.
Syncretic traditions in Malaysia lead to the situation that non-Malays, mainly Indian Malaysians, believe that they can invoke the super-power for their own benefit, for example, getting pregnant or winning the lottery. These social actors make sense of their worship practices based on the conflation between Hindu and Islamic elements: While they are Hindu believers themselves, they adore certain deceased Islamic scholars. The dominant Muslim Malays, however, who esteem the dead religious leaders due to the marvels that apply to them, consider this to be against the Islamic sources (Qur’an and Hadith) and as such “innovative” to Islam (bidaah).
Muslim Malay-led state institutions heavily discourage the Muslim Malay population from visiting (ziarah) such graves. Meaning-making processes in Muslim Malay environments are grounded in developments of Islamism, which have been ongoing since the 1970s and which have been intensified for the past 15 years. Malay Malaysians have internalised these repressive attitudes to such an extent that they limit themselves in the practices concerning the keramat graves: While many were still worshipping there until the early 1980s, they nowadays refrain from it to avoid coming into contact with “wrong” superstitious (khurafat) practices of other religions. Thus, the meaning Muslim Malay Malaysians assign to visiting keramat graves and practising rites at these places is characterised by an ambiguity that is reflected in the respect and adoration of the Islamic scholars and the simultaneous refusal to show it. As the fear of doing something wrong, i.e., something bida’ah or khurafat, is too overwhelming, not least because of the Islamisation and most recent Arabisation processes, they nowadays usually do not consider ziarah a keramat grave at all.
The multicultural, multireligious, and syncretic traditions in Malaysia are strong and powerful themselves and challenge the hegemonic and official handling of keramat graves. However, this does not take place in an arena of (open) debate or discussion. Yet challenging hegemonic orders through certain veneration practices at graves is something that happens more quietly, which is predominantly through factual acts. It is nothing ideologically or politically performed but is put into practice just through what people do, i.e., through following one’s interpretation of religion, spirituality, and culture instead of following official doctrines (entirely). Challenging these quietly results from the condition that these practices raise anxieties that people seek to cover over in cases where questions of jurisprudence intersect with long-lasting syncretic traditions in Malaysia. None of the different veneration practices in the various spaces and places seems to come into “conflict” in any lasting or powerful way with the differences in state powers and jurisprudential schools. Yet they seem to exist as open or concealed secrets.
There is no evidence that worshipping practices considered to be sinful to Islam will stop in the future. In fact, in Indonesia, for example, where the keramat graves of the Wali Songo (Nine Saints) and other wali have been visited for centuries and venerated to gain barakah (see, e.g. Chambert-Loir Reference Chambert-Loir, Chambert-Loir and Reid2002), new forms of keramat perceptions and practices only emerged recently. The grave of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, a revolutionary and fighter for independence who died in 1970, has evolved into a keramat grave, primarily associated with his political leadership. This development shows that the emergence of recently established burial sites is practiced in some parts of the Muslim world and leads to the question of how graves with “super-power” will be treated in the future. If new keramat places emerge in Malaysia, they may warrant further research to understand how local populations will treat them. Furthermore, it will also be of interest whether these sites are understood as religious and spiritual pilgrimage sites (only) or whether they transform in more commercialised and touristic places, for instance.
Also, the transregional connections between Malaysia and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as South Asia, can be made fruitful in a new direction of future research. Embedded in the most recent dynamics of Islamism in Malaysia, scholarship might consider the connection between the institutional repression and the internalised self-disciplining acts at the keramat graves in Malaysia, on the one hand, and the strong desire amongst the majority of the Malay Malaysians to follow correct Islamic principles, on the other. These principles are associated with Islamic doctrines and practices on the Arabian Peninsula. Due to strong links with Saudi Arabia, Malaysian authorities could presumably orient themselves even more towards Wahhabi practices and discourses surrounding karamah graves. On the social scale, particularly middle-class Malay Malaysians have been bringing back elements of discourses located in the Arab World more broadly for only a few decades. The Islamised situation, along with an economic rise in the country, has led to an increase in the number of Malaysians studying in the Arab World (especially at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo or in Saudi Arabia directly) or engaging in business relations more than before.
Likewise, more attention needs to be paid to flows between areas, thinking of networks of Islamic knowledge between regions connected by the routes discussed, not just conceptualised as a linear progression (or regression) from the Arabian peninsula. Given the condition of conflated Hindu and Muslim traditions in Malaysia that are mainly practiced by the Indian Malaysian population, more emphasis on relationships between South and Southeast Asia would contribute a more critical perspective to this literature in general. Whether these different transregional conditions will affect practices concerning burial sites associated with “magic” and “super-power,” however, remains to be studied.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under Grant TH 1995/2-1, by the Olympia Morata Programme in support of young female professors, and by the ‘Initiative for young scholars” (Nachwuchsinitiative Universität Hamburg). I deeply thank Guido Sprenger and Sarah J. Mahler for their continued mentorship and feedback on this project. I am also grateful to Sumit Mandal, Dominik Müller, Shamsul AB, Yeoh Seng-Guan, and Mirjam Lücking for their discussions and comments on this research.
