Thirteen years in the making, Miracles and material life is a study of the beliefs and practices surrounding Islamic miracle workers of the Malay Archipelago known as pawangs, or bomohs in present-day colloquial parlance. Temporally, it covers the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a thematic focus on sacral landscapes mediated by pawangs. Chief among these sacralised landscapes were the upland plots reclaimed from the forest known as ladang, where subsistence ‘dry rice’ was planted: ‘rice was no “ordinary article of commerce”, but the ancestral and religious product of a spirit-infused landscape’ (p. 84). With their ability to bridge the natural and supernatural, pawangs were essential intermediaries in the opening of ladang and even obstacles to the cultivation of wet-rice paddy (sawah). They were thus deeply imbricated in the economic transformations that Malaya underwent during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether as agricultural miracle workers or masters of the esoteric arts of ore-prospecting, gunsmithing, and elephant taming, pawangs were integral to the socio-economic structures of the Malay world. Pawangs were more than objects of anthropological interest; their abilities were widely acknowledged by even Chinese migrants and British administrators as essential to the political economy of colonial Malaya, and no economic history of the region would be complete without reference to them. Like the pawangs it studies, the genius of Sevea's monograph lies in its ability to traverse the material and immaterial, to connect the socio-economic with the spiritual.

The monograph's core sources are numerous Jawi manuscripts authored or transcribed by colonial scholars, munshis (imperial scriveners, translators, and native informants), and pawangs themselves. The range of manuscripts examined is the monograph's great strength, providing an expansive overview of pawang-centric beliefs and practices. These manuscripts were more than the inflated self-image that pawangs wished to project, for they often encoded oral traditions and were publicly recited aloud at agricultural festivals (p. 82). Moreover, Sevea goes beyond mere analysis of the manuscripts, supplementing his already rigorous approach to sources (which includes digging through dumpsters to rescue manuscript fragments from a demolished Sufi shrine) with ethnography. He befriended contemporary miracle workers like Wak Ali Janggut, Sharifah Lu'lu, and ‘Abas ‘Ali, many of whom helped him decipher the oft-esoteric manuscripts he studied. In doing so, Sevea successfully fleshes out the lived realities — both mundane and supernatural — of pawangs and the people who believed in their abilities. Indeed, these manuscripts offer numerous glimpses into the lived realities of Malay peasants during this period, including the adoption of new crops, the imposition of new political imperatives, and the impact of new technologies (p. 76). Combining ethnography and expert textual analysis, Sevea is able to provide in-depth descriptions of an elusive belief system that actively evades scrutiny today.

This densely-researched monograph is invaluable for any course on Malaysian history. By turns entertaining to the point of ludicrousness and tear-jerking as pawangs bemoan the inexorable constriction of their world, Miracles and material life is full of delicious anecdotes and surprising facts for both undergraduates and graduate students. One of the book's core strengths may be what it indirectly reveals about the patrons and adherents of pawangs, rather than the pawangs themselves. In part a subaltern social history of Malaysia, it allows students to viscerally experience the umwelt of the Malay peasantry and multi-ethnic working-class toiling in plantations and mines, where the pawang's power seemed very real indeed. Miracles and material life is also a subaltern history in the sense that the supernatural is rarely treated as coeval with the material, as Dipesh Chakrabarty noted in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (2000). Successfully welding the immaterial to the material world, Sevea fleshes out a fuller, more complete story of colonial Malaya than any traditional economic history could.

One of the most important arguments Sevea makes is that Malaya was a multilingual spiritual cosmopolis, in which pawangs commanded the respect and obedience of Muslims as well as adherents of other faiths. A whole host of actors paid pawangs for their expertise to ensure success in economic endeavours far beyond the clearing of ladang. In that sense, this book is evocative of Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and ecological thought in the medieval ruins of Delhi (2017), demonstrating how our instinctive assumptions about the conceptual clarity of religious categories in general, and the unambiguous ‘Islamicity’ of certain phenomena, are likely misleading. Sevea convincingly shows that Malaya was not a syncretistic backwater on the margins of the Islamic world, but fundamentally connected to the Indian Ocean littoral both economically as well as imaginatively (p. 35). Islam was part of the supernatural without delimiting it: the supernatural world of the Malays (alam ghaib) took inspiration from the supernatural worlds of both Islamic and non-Islamic societies. Furthermore, Malay-Muslims were not the only people to find this unconstrained conception of the supernatural compelling, and the pawangs efficacious in mediating it.

A related and equally important contribution is Sevea's willingness to take up the challenge that Shahab Ahmed posed in What is Islam? The importance of being Islamic (2015), on reconciling the many contradictions inherent in ‘Islamic’ praxis. Sevea studies pawangs in their full political, economic, social contexts instead of merely analysing the phenomena of Islamic magic. In doing so, he elegantly shows how the animism and accommodative polytheism of the pre-colonial, pre-industrial world continues to survive. Rather than masking itself with a thin veneer of Islam, or any other ‘rationalised’ religion, the old polytheism has symbiotically assimilated itself into ‘modern’ religions, existing in concert with the ecumene, much like the billions of micro-organisms humans carry in their bodies. All the pawangs Sevea spoke to found it an ‘unnecessary tautology’ to specify that they were Islamic (p. 210). The European empiricism which inflects academic scholarship makes this synthesis jarring for readers, but Miracles and material life serves as an important reminder that there are many, more flexible ways of understanding the world and humanity's place in it. Those alternate worldviews, less ‘rational’ and ‘empirical’, more accommodating and adaptive, are with us still, coexisting within and alongside organised religion without insisting on their primacy or even recognising contradiction.