Pilgrimage Stories at the turn of two eras (travel diaries by Shikhabuddin Marjani and Abdullah Munshi)

Abstract

The article deals with pilgrimage stories of two prominent Islamic figures, the Malay writer, publisher and teacher Abdullah Munshi (1796/7-1854) and the Tatar theologian and educator Shihabuddin Mardjani (1818-1889). Their Hajj travel diaries dating respectively from 1854 and 1880 allow us to reveal the kinship of their views and interests and the dissimilarity of the cultural and confessional contexts in which they lived and worked. For the Muslims of insular Southeast Asia, an equal problem was both comprehension of the subtleties of the Arabic language, understanding the meanings of the Koran - and mastery of the Malay literary language. There were no schools where both of these subjects would be taught, where religious preaching would go hand in hand with the study of secular disciplines and the achievements of modern science, just as it was practised in the so-called “new method” madrasahs of the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, the herald of which was Shihabuddin Mardjani. Until now, the situation in the Malay world has not changed: the “liberal” Islam is opposed to the “literal” Islam, with its inherent rigorism of the Middle Eastern type.