Traders Teaching Islam: Comments on the Islamic Religious Literature Used in Southeast Asia

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Southeast Asian Islam in widely known for its syncretism. If we examine it more closely, however, we find that it is based on writings very rarely considered to be unorthodox. The Southeast Asian tradition of examining books on Islamic law and Sufism to establish which among them are considered to be important works in the Middle East too is deeply rooted on the islands. On the other hand, if we take another look on the corpus of such books, we will find that many important works are missing. The reason for this is to be found in the type of people who spread Islam in the archipelago centuries ago. Most of them were traders and not Islamic scholars, and they used the advantage of their prestigious Middle Eastern origins to grab important positions at local courts, spreading their teachings during the process. These, however, were not the teachings of learned religious experts, but mainly the practical knowledge of religion of the average Muslim trader. This also shaped the corpus of the so-called kitab kuning – normative books about Islam – that would be taught and studied in religious schools and at courts. The present essay surveys Muslim traders’ activity in the Southeast Asian archipelago and examines how their involvement shaped the corpus of Islamic books used there.