ʿAbd al-Samad in Arabia: The Yemeni Years of a Shaykh from Sumatra

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the history of Islam in pre-modern Southeast Asia through the critical examination of previously under-utilized source material.1) In particular, it presents a translation and close examination of an excerpt from a work written in the tradition of Arabic dictionaries (tabaqat) that may serve to supplement the source bases traditionally consulted for the history of Islam in Southeast Asia and its inter-Asia connections in the eighteenth century.2) The discussion begins with the contexts in which the Sufi scholar discussed in the text was born, focusing on the Sumatran of Palembang and the Arab diaspora in the Indonesian Archi pelago. I will then introduce the main character of our story, ?Abd al-Samad al-Jawi al-Palimbani, with a focus on his scholarly pedigree, and the place of his work in the reconfiguration of Sufi thought and practice in Southeast Asia. From there the focus shifts to the site where his Arabic biography was composed, the scholars' city of Zabid in the Yemen-and thence to a close reading of the text that reveals ?Abd al-Samad's position in contemporary debates on Sufi thought and practice that established his place in the global scholarly networks that came together in Arabia during his lifetime.The article concludes with reflections on how documents like this tabaqat text might be approached by historians working on intellectual and cultural histories of early modern Southeast Asia. There attention turns to frameworks for the interpretation of such biographical texts of individual scholars, and how they might be read in relation to the magisterial macro-histories of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world produced by scholars like K. N. Chaudhuri (1990), Anthony Reid (1993; 1988), and Denys Lombard (1990). These works have helped us immensely in identifying some of the most significant broad historical patterns across the region during the early modern period. Moving back and forth between such oceanic perspectives and the individual focus presented by documents like this Arabic biographical text can, I argue, help us to better appreciate the specific character of inter-personal network linkages crucial to developing more nuanced understandings of the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Southeast Asia. For that, however, a brief introduction to this genre of Arabic biographical texts is first necessary.Arabic Biographical Dictionaries (Tabaqat)Tabaqat are collections of individual biographical entries in a more or less standardized format, and arranged in one of a number of ways, including alphabetically, by generation, or chronologically by one's year of death. Such works have long served historians of Muslim societies, particularly those focusing their work on the Arabicized Central Lands of Islam, as primary sources for intellectual and social history.3) Some scholars, though far fewer in number, have also turned to such texts as sources for the history of Islam in Southeast Asia.4) This paper presents a close reading of one such text with an eye to highlighting ways in which readings of works of this type may be integrated into discussions of various aspects of the history of early modern Southeast Asia. In doing this, however, I am not claiming that studies of such materials will completely solve the problem of sources facing historians working in this field. Rather I would like to more modestly suggest that their careful use may help us in glimpsing aspects of certain developments that feature less prominently, if at all, in contemporary documents in European and Southeast Asian languages from the early-modern period.5)The text upon which I will focus here is entitled, Al-Nafas al-Yamani (al-Rahman 1979), has yet to receive such treatment.6) It was compiled by ?Abd al-Rahman b. Sulayman al-Ahdal (d. 1250 H./1835 C.E.),7) a scholar who descended from a long line of South Arabian sayyids distinguished for their religious learning (Lofgren 1960 I, 255-256). …