THE LEGACY OF SHAIKH YUSUF IN SOUTH SULAWESI∗ Thomas Gibson, University of Rochester Shaikh Yusuf was perhaps the most famous Islamic Saint ever born in South Sulawesi. He was, however, only one of many Bugis and Makassarese who set sail across the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century in search of the source of ilmu, esoteric Islamic knowledge. In this paper I will treat his life as a prototype for this whole class of adventurers, and the kinds of Sufi knowledge he acquired as typical of the Islam that was implanted in the villages of South Sulawesi in the seventeenth century. The cosmopolitan consciousness induced by these trans-oceanic intellectual links remains in force to this day. My argument grows out of my attempt to comprehend the temporal and spatial horizons that frame the everyday lives of the boat builders and sailors of Ara and Bira, Makassarese villages in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Over the years, I have discovered that my ethnographic data make sense only when placed within a geographic context that includes the entire Indian Ocean and a temporal context that includes the entire period of state formation in the area, from the fourteenth century on. Members of these villages have been literate since at least the early sixteenth century and members of the global Islamic ummah since the early seventeenth century. ∗ Presented at the workshop on Traditions of Learning and Networks of Knowledge, in the series on The Indian Ocean: Trans-regional Creation of Societies and Cultures sponsored by the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University, 2930 September, 2001. The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 2 To say that their lives are framed by a broad spatial horizon is not to say that their perception of the world is equivalent to that of members of the same religious community on the western rim of the Indian Ocean. They live in the same world, but view it from their own local angle. Their social structure and the symbolic and ritual practices that reproduce it remain distinctly “Austronesian” in character. By this I mean that people belong to ranked, bilateral descent groups with a preference to marry cousins. Men devote much effort to marrying up within the system. One way to do so is to embark on journeys to distant lands in search of knowledge, wealth and military reputation. Local ambitions have helped to induce global cultural, economic and political flows for many centuries in the Indian Ocean, perhaps even millennia (cf. Bellwood, 1996). As local horizons have expanded over the centuries, village life has become ever more multilayered and complex. Global Islam in a local setting My first inkling that contemporary local village rituals were framed by an older and wider tradition came in 1989, when I photocopied several old manuscripts dealing with Islamic topics in the Makassarese village of Ara, South Sulawesi. The texts were all heavily thumbed and in a sad state of decomposition. One text was a Makassarese translation of Al-Durra Al-Fakhira, “The Precious Pearl” by al-Ghazzali of Tus (10581111) ( Smith, 1979). The first four chapters of the Ara manuscript had been so heavily used during funeral services they were falling to pieces. In Chapter 1, God assigns men to heaven or hell before their birth. Chapter 2 is a description of the process of death itself and the ascent of good souls into heaven. Chapter 3 concerns the fates of imperfect souls; the return of the soul to the place where its corpse is being washed; the interment The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 3 of the body; and the visits of the angels to the body in the grave. Chapter 4 concerns the interrogation of souls in the grave and the personification of their deed; instructions given by the dead to the living; and the visitation of tombs by the living. Two other texts were Makassarese translations of chapters from Khabar Akhirat dalam Hal Kiamat “Concerning the Hereafter and the Day of Judgement” by Nur al-Din al-Raniri (1595-1658) (Nuruddin ar-Raniri, 1983). These were Chapter 3, Maut dan sakarat al-maut, “Death and the Agony of Death” and Chapter 5, Hal-Ihwal Qiyamat, “Events of the Day of Judgement”. These chapters deal with the Islamic conception of the afterlife in a manner similar to the text by al-Ghazzali. This text was written by alRaniri in Malay in Aceh in 1642 at the behest of Sultan Safiat al-Din (Tudjimah, 1961: 17). It was first translated into Bugis no later than 1736 (Ricklefs and Voorhoeve, 1977: 32), and proved to be one of the most popular of his works throughout the archipelago. Until a generation ago, these texts concerning the immediate fate of the dead were read out over a corpse as it was being prepared for burial by the village Kali (from Arabic Qadi). From the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, the texts by alGhazzali and al-Raniri served as a template for funeral rituals. Death rituals were concerned with insuring the permanent separation of the soul (alusu) from the body of the deceased, from the surviving members of his or her household, and from the house itself. More recently, “modernist” Islamic doctrines which regard the ritual use of traditional texts as instances of bid’ah, illegitimate innovation, have led to their replacement by recitation of the Koran on many ritual occasions. Islam requires that the corpse be washed, wrapped in a shroud, prayed over in the mosque, and buried as quickly as possible. For the next three nights, friends and relatives The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 4 come to the house to a’mata, “keep their eyes open”, i.e. to maintain a state of alertness to protect the spirits of the mourners in their vulnerable condition. Books on the afterlife or the Koran are recited in the back room while male guests while away the time playing dominos, drinking coffee and eating cakes under the house or in the parlor. This is the period during which the anja, ghost of the recently dead, hovers around the house, peering in through the windows for one last look at its kinsmen. According to al-Raniri’s text, the anja then returns to view its body rotting in the grave. He provides a vivid description of its suffering as it observes the decomposition of its flesh. On the third night a small ritual called a’nyaboro bambang, “quenching the heat”, is performed. This is to neutralize the area in which the corpse was bathed, which is said to be “hot”. Water is poured over some coals, literally quenching them, and a raw egg is taken and thrown through the hole in the floor so that it smashes on the ground beneath. The smashing of the raw egg is symbolic of the releasing of a spirit from a material vessel, and is intended to ensure the final departure of the ghost. The anja then begins to roam back and forth between the house and the grave. On the seventh day, the text describes its reaction to the worms that are consuming its body. This period is brought to an end on the seventh day by a ritual in two parts. During the first part, a feast is sent to the other world where the ghost of the dead is waiting with the ghosts of other dead relatives. Al-Raniri’s text explains that we know this to be true because one of the Companions of the Prophet had a dream in which he saw a number of people who had died sitting around and feasting. One person was sitting off to the side, however, with nothing to eat. The Companion asked him why, and he said it was because his relatives had sent no food. The Companion reported his dream The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 5 when he awoke, and food was sent to the spirit by ritual means. He later dreamed again that the spirit was now content. Others told me that when a person first dies he or she is received by relatives in the other world with gifts. The spirit then waits with its relatives for the contributions of the living so that they can all feast together. To prepare the feast, one or two goats, or, if the family can afford it, buffalo, are sacrificed. They are tethered under the center of the house. They are purified for the spirit world by having their hair combed with oil and their faces rubbed with white powder. If a man has died a hat is held over the goat’s head, if a woman, a knot imitating a hair bun is tied in its tail. The goats are thus identified with the dead person. Then white cloths are placed on the animals’ backs, and baskets containing a variety of cakes and snacks are put on them. Two chickens are also killed. At the moment of slaughter, all these provisions are said to be conveyed to the dead. The one who performs the sacrifice takes the material substance of the cakes home: it may not be consumed by the family of the sponsors. The second part of the ritual is called a’pasono’ and is intended to provide the dead soul with everything it needs to set up a household in the other world. These include clothing, cooking and eating utensils, pots, a sleeping mat, and so on. All must be purchased new, and they are taken away by the Imam or Kali who conducts the prayer service. Usually, he will sell them again for cash. The gifts for the dead are laid out in front of the Imam along with two sets of food offerings, each containing four plates of rice, one dish of chicken and one of goat curry, two hands of bananas, a coconut and some cakes. The Kali recites a short prayer service and those in attendance share the cooked food. The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 6 The second part of the ritual consists in the recitation of the barasanji. The barasanji is a Maulid al-Nabi, Life of the Prophet Muhammad, written in the 1760s by the chief mufti of the Shafii school in Medina, Jaffar of Barzanj in Kurdistan. It was traditionally recited during almost every life cycle ritual. The barasanji is usually read by four men working in rotation. When it is read after an a’pasono ritual, an entirely new and equally elaborate array of cooked foods are set out after the first array has been cleared away. When they have finished, each reciter receives a small cash payment and then everyone eats from the offerings. This period of mourning ends when a group of young people sets off for the graveyard to sprinkle fragrant leaves and flowers over the grave and pour water over it. Feasts similar to the seventh day ritual only larger in scale may be held for deceased members of noble families forty and one hundred days after their death. The longer the time between the death and the feast, the greater the resources that can be mobilized to celebrate the dead person. Hence, these rituals play an even greater role in accentuating status differences within the village than does the burial ceremony. The seventh day ritual marks the end of the mourning period for all but a man's widow. Widows are expected to remain in deep mourning at least until the one hundredth day ritual is completed. During this time they must not put up their hair in a bun, wear only a sarong without a shirt, and bathe only in a spring in the forest under cover of darkness. Finally, they go down to the beach to bathe in the freshwater spring that comes up through the sand there, called Ere Labba, “the neutralizing waters”. The dead are then remembered on each subsequent Maulid (birthday of the Prophet) by having the barasanji read and pandanus leaves and flowers scattered on their graves. The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 7 Clearly these texts long ago entered deeply into local social and cultural life, fusing with many pre-Islamic rituals surrounding the life cycle. Al-Raniri’s central message concerning a dead person’s ethical responsibility for his or her individual actions during life coexists rather uneasily with a quite different view of the dead person as an ancestor in a typically Austronesian ranked, bilateral descent group. This dual view of the person as an individual whose worth is fixed by his or her moral choices and as a member of a social group whose worth is fixed by the rank of his or her ancestors, spouse and descendents runs through all Makassarese life cycle rituals. Rituals celebrating birth, circumcision, marriage and death all have two parts. One part is presided over by a sanro, an expert in local “custom”, adat. The other part is presided over by an Imam, an expert in Islamic ritual. When I collected the Islamic texts in 1989, the first set of questions that came to mind was how long they had been present in the village and how they had been transmitted down the generations. A second set of questions concerned the relationship of the sort of Islam they taught to other versions of Islam extent at the time of their introduction and at the time I was present in the village. This set of questions was particularly pressing to me as an ethnographer since the ritual use of such texts was highly contested in the village and caused considerable friction within kin groups each time a life cycle ceremony was held and I had to carefully negotiate my attendance at these rituals with each faction in the village. A third set of questions concerned how adherence to one or another version of Islam was related to changes in the political situation confronting individuals at different points in history. This set of questions was The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 8 of interest because many middle-aged villagers had spent their youths fighting to establish an Islamic republic in Indonesia and regarded the rituals inspired by these texts as examples of corrupt innovation, bid’ah. I got my answer to the questions concerning the introduction and transmission of these texts a decade later in June, 2000, when I obtained a silsilah, or spiritual genealogy, for the Tarekat Qadiriyah from a family of Kalis in the neighboring village of Bira. Kali is the Makassarese form of Qadi, but in South Sulawesi the Kali was not just a legal official but the chief Islamic expert in every village. According to this silsilah, it turned out that a Bugis student of al-Raniri had settled in Bira in the mid-seventeenth century, and that his descendents had provided most of the Kalis for both Bira and Ara since then. The religious texts in question had been passed down from one Kali to the next, usually from father to son, but quite often from father-in-law to son-in-law. At the very top of the silsilah is a series of concentric circles containing expressions of devotion to Allah. Beneath them is a column of four circles making reference to the descent of divine knowledge from Allah to the Angel Jibreel, to the Prophet Muhammad, to his son-in-law Ali. Beneath these circles, the document divides into three columns. On the left are a series of thirty two circles each containing the name of a link in the chain of spiritual descent from Husein (d.680), son of Ali, through the founders of the Tarekat Shattariyya, a Sufi order founded in Central Asia in the fourteenth century, to a certain Abd al-Rahman of Selayar, Indonesia, who was initiated into the Tarekat by Shaikh Ibrahim Barat, himself a student of Ibrahim al-Kurani al-Kurdi (b.1616, d.1690). It then records nine levels of pupils below Abd al-Rahman before leaving off. Ibrahim al-Kurani also intitiated the subject of this paper, Shaikh Yusuf the The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 9 Makassar, into the Tarekat Shattariyah. On the right there is a matching series of thirty two circles, each containing a name of a link in the chain of spiritual descent from Hasan of Basra (d.728) through the founder of the Tarekat Qadiriyah, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166), to Abdullah alAydarus (d.ca. 1550). This last six names in this column appear to be corrupt. The Qadiriyah silsilah continues at the bottom of the page in the center, where there are a further ten circles. The first of these is Amin Abdullah al-Aydarus (d.1610), grandson of the Abdullah al-Aydarus who died in about 1550. Running in between the two columns of circles is a list of forty names, which simply repeat the names in the circles on the right. It is the last ten names in the Qadiryah silsilah that are of most interest for the purposes of this paper, as they present clear evidence of the degree to which even remote corners of the Islamic world were tightly integrated into a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first five names in this series are: 1) Al-Saiyyid al-Shaikh Amin Abdullah al-Aydarus (d.1610, Son of Sayyid Shaikh ibn Abdullah al-Aydarus Sahib Ahmadabad, d.1582) 2) Jamal al-Din al-Sayyid Shaikh Muhammad b. Abdullah [al-Aydarus Sahib Surat] b.1561 in Tarim d.1620 in Gujarat, son of 1). 3) Al-Sayyid Shaikh Hasanji [b. Muhammad Hamid al-Raniri] 4) Sayyid [Abu Hafs] Umar b. Abdullah b. Abd al-Rahman [Ba Shayban al- Tarimi al-Hadrami al-Burhanpuri] (d. 1656 in Bilgram, India) 5) Al-Shaikh Nur al-Din Muhammad b. Ali b. Hasanji b. Muhammad Hamid al-Raniri (b.ca. 1590, hajji 1620, Aceh 1637-43, d.1658] The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 10 All these men were members of mixed Hadrami and Indian descent who spent their lives criss-crossing the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. They taught a “sober” version of Ibn al-Arabi’s doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, the Unity of Being, i.e. one in which the ultimate experience of unity with the Godhead achieved by pursuing the mystical path in no way obviated the need to observer the shariah law in all details. The last five names in this series, and the last names in the original silsilah are the names of local Bugis who studied under the Indo-Hadramis: 6) Haji Al-Shaikh al-Julaij Ahmad b. Abdullah al-Bugisiya [Panre Lohe] 7) Al-Shaikh Abd al-Rahman b. Abdullah Lamatti [Panre Keke] 8) Shaikh Abd al-Jalil b. Abdullah Bulo-Bulo [Guru Toaya] 9) Shaikh Abd al-Basir b. Abd al-Jalil al-Bira wal-Bugisiya [Zainal Abidin Tu ri Masigi’na] 10) Shaikh Abd al-Fattah al-Hidayattullah Sharmallahu Tu ri Mimbara’na [To Daba] Numbers 6 and 7 came from Lamatti and Bulo-Bulo, respectively. These kingdoms lay on the south bank of the lying of the Tangka river, a river which served as the southern boundary of the Bugis Empire of Bone from 1565 to 1790. Bira was a vassal of the Makassarese Empire of Goa from 1565 until 1667. During that period, local rulers acquired legitimacy by being confirmed in office by the Emperor. After the conversion of the Emperor to Islam in 1605, local political legitimacy was reinforced by cosmopolitan Islamic definitions of just rule. In 1667, however, Ara and Bira passed by right of conquest to the Dutch United East India Company, the VOC. The rulers of Ara and Bira no longer owed fealty to an Islamic Sultan but to an infidel The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 11 trading company. It is perhaps for this reason that they sought a new source of legitimacy by intermarrying with the descendents of Haji Ahmad who were the guardians of sacred texts written by Arabs and Indians. Number 8, Abd al-Jalil, was born between 1650 and 1675. He is the first Kali to appear on local royal genealogies as having married the daughter of the ruler of Bira. Abd al-Jalil’s son by the Karaeng’s daughter was Abd al-Basir, known as Tu ri Masigi’na, “He Who Adhered to the Mesjid”. This epithet distinguished him from his first cousin, Abd al-Haris, known as Pua’ Janggo “The Bearded One” who taught an antinomian type of mysticism. According to local tradition, Abd al-Basir was directed by a vision to find a number of Islamic objects floating in the sea, including a Koran. These objects became part of the lineage’s collection of sacred heirlooms. My best guess is that it was Abd al-Basir’s son, Abd al-Fattah, who originally composed the silsilah, since his is the last name to appear on it in the same hand. He would have done so at the height of the VOC’s power in the area, some time between 1750 and 1775. The silsilah may thus have been intended to help the local political and religious elite establish a source of authority separate from that of the colonial power. After its original composition, a further eight generations of Kali continued to add their names to the silsilah, bringing it down to the present. The silsilah answered my first questions concerning the antiquity of the texts and their transmission from one generation to the next. My other questions concerning the relationship between the religious and political commitments of social actors are best explored through an exploration of the life Shaikh Yusuf, a fellow student of Haji Ahmad the Bugis. Yusuf’s life is so well documented that we can retrace his journeys around the The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 12 Indian Ocean between 1644 and 1705 in great detail. The most important of the different teachers he encountered on the way was the same teacher who inducted Haji Ahamd into the Tarekat Qadiryah, Nur al-Din al-Raniri. Islam and the VOC in Southeast Asia (1602-1629) The violent Portuguese incursion into the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the sixteenth century severely disrupted traditional trade routes for half a century. The fall of the Sultanate of Melaka in 1511 was especially disruptive to trade at the eastern end of the Ocean, but by 1550 the successor Sultanates like Aceh and Banten had recovered from the initial shock of the Portuguese incursion into the Indian Ocean. When they converted to Islam between 1603 and 1611, the rulers of South Sulawesi were thereby joining a resurgent Islamic culture increasingly modeled on the Mughal court of Akbar. The local purveyor of this culture in Island Southeast Asia was the Sultanate of Aceh. Aceh was the jumping off point for pilgrims crossing the Indian Ocean to Mecca from the 1520s when it took the place of Melaka as the leading Sultanate in the Straits of Melaka. The ideological basis of the Sultanate of Aceh between 1589 and 1636 was provided by the theosophical system developed by two local Sufis, Hamzah Fansuri and Shams al-Din. Very little is known of Hamzah’s life, not even the dates of his birth and death. He seems to have traveled widely in Java, the Middle East, and Persia, and spoke Malay, Arabic and Persian fluently. It was once widely assumed that he died between 1580 and 1600, but according to a recent discovery, it seems he may have died as early as 1527 (Guillot and Kalus, 2000). Basing himself on a host of Sufi masters from alBistami (d. 874) to Ibn al-Arabi (d.1240), al-Jili (d.ca.1420) and Jami (d. 1492), Hamzah put forth one of the most systematic compendia of mystical Islam in the Malay world. If The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 13 the new death date is correct, he may even have studied directly under Jami. Hamzah’s relevance to the task of legitimating political rule is made clear by his views on the place of the Sultan in the cosmos. He regarded the current Sultan of Aceh, perhaps Ali Mughayat Shah (r.1520-1530), as an exemplary Saint and Perfect Man in the same way Akbar’s courtiers later regarded him. This is his panegyric on the Sultan: Shah ‘alam, Raja yang Adil, World Ruler, the King who is Just, Raja Qutub yang sampurna kamil Axis King who is completely perfect Wali Allah sampurna wasil Friend of God, in complete union Raja Arif lagi Mukammil Gnostic king, also most Excellent (al-Attas, 1970: 12) This passage was later echoed by the Malay scribe who wrote an account of the victory of the Dutch over Sultan Abdullah’s grandson, Sultan Hasan al-Din, in 1667: Shahi ‘alam, raja yang ‘adil World Ruler, the Just King Raja khalifah, sampurna kamil King Deputy of God, completely perfect Wali Allah, sampurna wasil Friend of God, in complete union Lagi ‘arif, lagi mukamil Also a Gnostic, also most Excellent (Skinner, 1963: 112-113) Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607-1636) established a form of Islamic absolutism in Aceh. The ideological basis of Iskandar Muda’s reign was closely modeled on that of the Mughal Empire under Akbar. This can be inferred from the Hikayat Aceh, a chronicle composed under his patronage. According to Lombard: It is strongly probable in effect that the biography of Akbar, begun in 1596 by Abu’l Fazl and interrupted by the death of that author in 1602, was known in The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 14 Aceh in the time of Iskandar Muda and a constant parallelism in the structure of the two works seems to justify the hypothesis of a relation. (Lombard, 1967: 158, my translation) According to local legend, the conversion of South Sulawesi happened as follows. Three Sumatran missionaries arrived in South Sulawesi in 1603 and first set about converting the ruler of the Bugis Kingdom of Luwu’. Luwu’ enjoyed a certain precedence among all the kingdoms on the peninsula as the site where divine royal ancestors had first descended from heaven to establish local dynasties. Next they turned to the conversion of the most powerful state in the area, the Empire of Gowa. But before the missionary chosen to convert Gowa even landed in 1605, the Chief Minister of the Makassar Empire of Gowa, Karaeng Matoaya of Tallo’, received a visitation from the Prophet Muhammad and his four Companions. By the time he met the Sumatran missionary on the beach, he had already converted, taking the title of Sultan Abdullah Awwal al-Islam, First in Islam. Abdullah persuaded his younger cousin, the Emperor of Gowa, I Mangngarangi, to convert to Islam on the same day. The latter took the title Sultan Ala al-Din. Two years later, in 1607, the nine-member Hadat, or Council of Electors of Gowa, converted and the Empire became officially a Sultanate. As the effective ruler of the mightiest state in South Sulawesi, it fell to Sultan Abdullah to persuade all other rulers on the peninsula to convert to Islam, either voluntarily or by force. This goal was achieved by 1611. Within six years of his own conversion, Sultan Abdullah of Tallo’ was acknowledged by the whole of South Sulawesi as the “First in Islam”. He is treated in the Chronicle of Tallo’ as a master of both shariah law and Sufi wisdom. The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 15 Shaikh Yusuf’s early life (1626-1670) Within one generation of the conversion of South Sulawesi to Islam, young men like Shaikh Yusuf the Makassar and Haji Ahmad the Bugis were sailing west to study under Indian, Arabian and, somewhat later, Kurdish masters in schools located all around the Indian Ocean, including Aceh in northern Sumatra, Bijapur in western India, Yemen in southern Arabia, and, above all, in Mecca and Medina. There they encountered a version of Islam that had grown up on the maritime fringes of the great inland “Gunpowder Empires” of Safavid Iran and Mughal India. The Islam of the Indian Ocean littoral assigned a far more humble role to the Sultan than did the Islam of Akbar. As it happened, this version of Islam was better suited to the realities of eighteenth century Indonesia than the absolutist version to which the Emperor of Gowa had originally converted at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Local Makassarese tradition holds that Yusuf was born in 1626 to a woman from the village of Moncong Loe. The identity of his father is shrouded in mystery. Most traditions hold that his father was a Gallarrang, or village chief of low rank, but others give him a more mysterious origin, even identifying him with the immortal Prophet al-Khidr. In any event, his mother is said to have been taken as a wife by the Emperor of Gowa when she was already pregnant with Yusuf. This was during the reign of the first Islamic Sultan of Gowa, Ala al-Din (b. 1588, r. 1595-1639, converted 1605). As a youth, Yusuf studied the Quran under Daeng ri Tasammang and moved on to Arabic language, fiqh, tauhid and tasawwuf under an Arab preacher who lived in Bontoala, Sayyid Ba Alwi b. Abdullah al-Allamah al-Tahir (Azra, 1992: 417). At the age of fifteen, in 1641, he went to Cikoang to The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 16 study under Jalal al-Din al-Aidid whose teachings reflect the influence of Hamzah Fansuri and al-Raniri more than they do the Shi’ism they are claimed to embody (Hamonic, 1985). Gowa and Bone became bitter enemies in the 1640s due to a series of wars over the proper application of Islamic law. In 1640, the ruler of Bone La Madarammeng suddenly introduced a new, more rigorous form of Islam, one “forbidding anyone in his kingdom to keep or use slaves who were not born into slavery. All non-hereditary slaves were ordered freed or given wages for their labor.” (Andaya, 1981: 39). Gowa formed an army and attacked Bone with the support of Wajo’ and Soppeng. By 1643, Bone had been utterly crushed and was placed under a regent appointed by the Sultan of Gowa. In the wake of these religious wars, Yusuf resolved to seek the source of true religious knowledge in Mecca. In 1644, his stepbrother Sultan Malik al-Said of Gowa (b.1607, r.1639-1653) gave Yusuf permission to go on hajj. Yusuf set sail at the age of 18 with Banten as his first destination. Banten was in regular communication with Gujarat and the Hejaz at the time of Yusuf’s arrival. Its ruler had requested and received the title of Sultan from the Grand Sharif of Mecca six years previously. Yusuf became friends at this time with the Crown Prince and future Sultan Ageng. Yusuf’s next stop was Aceh which was in the middle of an intense ideological struggle over the correct interpretation of the doctrine of the Unity of Being and of the role of the ruler in Islam. As we have seen, the version of Islam dominant in Aceh until 1636 was one closely modeled on Akbar’s claim that the Sultan played a pivotal role in the religious life of the Empire. Other views of Islamic orthodoxy had long been present in Southeast Asia, however. One competing view was propagated by a clan of Yemenis The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 17 from Aidarus who began to settle along the west coast of India around 1550. They often married local women but sent their sons home to study in Yemen. In 1580 one of these Indo-Arabians called Muhammad Jilani al-Raniri also arrived in Aceh intending to teach logic, rhetoric, ethics and jurisprudence. He could evoke little interest in these subjects in a population which far preferred the mystical disciplines. After another vain effort to acquire students in 1583, he left for Mecca to study mysticism. He returned to teach mysticism in the 1590s with more success, helping to resolve a long-standing local confusion over the concept of the Permanent Archetypes. Meanwhile, Muhammad Jilani’s brother Ali married a Malay woman in Gujarat. Their son, Nur al-Din al-Raniri, probably completed his education back in Southern Arabia. In 1620/21 he went to Mecca to perform the Hajj, and some time after that set sail for Southeast Asia. He may well have been brought up for this mission by his uncle, for he arrived in Sumatra fully versed in the subtleties of the wahdat al-wujud. His precise whereabouts between 1621 and 1637 are unknown, but al-Attas reasons that he must have spent a good deal of this period in Pahang or Aceh learning Malay well enough to engage in metaphysical debate. He may have made the acquaintance of Tun Seri Lanang, the author of the Sejarah Melayu, during this period (al-Attas, 1986: 7). He wrote two works in Malay during this time and began a third. Aceh conquered Pahang in 1617. Sultan Iskandar Muda brought a young prince back with him to Aceh, married him to his daughter and made him his heir. When this prince came to throne of Aceh in 1637 as Iskandar Thani II, he made al-Raniri his Shaikh al-Islam, the highest religious office in the realm. He commissioned him to write an encyclopedic work in Malay on universal history, the Bustan al-Salatin. According to al- The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 18 Attas, it is the longest work ever written in Malay. al-Attas lists fifteen other works alRaniri wrote during his seven year stay as Shaikh al-Islam in Aceh. They included basic texts on the rules and regulations applying to worship, and laws on marriage and divorce which were sent to Kedah in 1640 for the correction of the people who had “lapsed into infidelity and paganism” (al-Attas, 1986: 11). Between 1638 and 1641 he wrote The Proof of the Truthful in the Refutation of the Heretics, a polemical attack on the works of Hamzah Fansuri (d.1527?, see Guillot and Kalus, 2000) and Shams al-Din (d.1630). With the backing of the Sultan, he undertook to cleanse the realm of what he viewed as a pantheistic interpretation of Ibn alArabi’s doctrine wahdat al-wujud, “unity of being”. He burned their books and persecuted their followers. Al-Raniri’s patron, Sultan Iskandar Thani, died in February, 1641 and was succeeded by his wife, the daughter of the last Sultan. At first, al-Raniri retained his influence over the Sultana. He wrote one of his most popular works in 1642, the text on “The Afterlife and the Day of Judgment”, Akbar al-Akhirah fi Ahwal al-Qiyamah, desribed at the beginning of this paper (al-Attas, 1986: 27). Then, on August 8, 1643, a Minangkabau scholar named Saif al-Rijal returned from his studies in Surat. He was a student of an Acehnese scholar, Shaikh Jamal al-Din, who had been executed at the behest of al-Raniri. Supported by the Sultana’s consort, alRaniri denounced Saif al-Rijal as a heretic. Saif al-Rijal gained the backing of the Maharajalela, however, who presided over the State Council. By August 27, 1643, Saif al-Rijal had won the contest. A V.O.C. Commissioner present at the time wrote: The new Bishop of the Moors, Saifurrijal by name, summoned to the Court by The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 19 Her Majesty, was paid regal honours by the notables, so that it is to be expected that the former (Bishop) Shaikh Nuruddin’s high spiritual status will be irretrievably lost. (Ito, 1978: 491). Al-Raniri returned to Rander in Gujarat where he died in 1658 with his major work on Sufism unfinished, the Jawahir al-Ulam fi Kashf al-Ma’lum. A young Sumatran follower of al-Raniri by the name of Abd al-Rauf also left Aceh in 1643. He spent the next 18 years in Mecca as a student of Ahmad Qushashi. Upon the latter’s death in 1661, Abd al-Rauf returned to Aceh where he restored al-Raniri’s teachings to preeminence. al-Raniri’s Jawahir al-Ulam was finally completed by one of his students in 1665 (al-Attas, 1986: 16-21). This then, was the situation Shaikh Yusuf encountered when he landed in Aceh in 1645. The fierce ideological struggle between the older system of Hamzah Fansuri and the newly introduced teachings of al-Raniri that had broken out in 1636 and continued until 1661 was at its height. We know that Sultan Abd al-Qadir of Banten consulted Nur al-Din al-Raniri after the latter had been expelled from Aceh in 1643. One of only three works known to have been written by al-Raniri in Gujarat between 1644 and 1656 was composed in response to further questions by Sultan Abd al-Qadir on the teachings of Hamzah Fansuri (van Bruinessen, 1995: 194 n13; al-Attas, 1986: 28). Since we also know that Shaikh Yusuf was initiated by al-Raniri into the Qadiriyah Tarekat in Gujarat in this same period, it is not impossible that Yusuf accompanied the expedition sent by the Sultan of Banten to obtain al-Raniri’s views on Hamzah. While in Gujarat, Yusuf also studied under al-Raniri’s teacher, Sayyid Abu Hafs Ba Shayban. Ba Shayban was another typical product of the Indo-Arabian milieu. His family was originally from Tarim in The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 20 Hadramawt, but he was born in Surat in India. He was sent to study in Arabia before returning to India to settle at the court of Bijapur. He died in 1656 in Bilgram (al-Attas, 1986: 13-15). From Gujarat, Yusuf sailed for Yemen, where he was initiated in Nuhita by Muhammad Abd al-Baqi al-Mizjaji into a branch of the Tarekat Naqshabandiyah that strongly supported Ibn al-Arabi’s doctrine of the Unity of Being (van Bruinessen, 1991: 255). Yusuf was also initiated by Sayyid Ali into the Tarekat Ba’alawiyya, an order largely confined to the Hadramawt. In Medina, Yusuf was initiated into the Tarekat Shattariyah by Shaikh Ibrahim alKurani, who was also a teacher of Abd al-Rauf of Aceh. Shaikh Ibrahim engaged in fierce polemics in defense of the Ibn al-Arabi’s doctrines against the followers of the Indian reformer Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624, see Rizvi, 1983, Vol. II: 319-347). Two manuscripts of al-Jami’s al-Durrah al-Fakhira copied by Yusuf while studying under Ibrahim al-Kurani in Medina survive. They were written in 1066 A.H (1657?) and 1075 A.H. (1665?), so we know that he was engaged in at least eight years of intensive study of mysticism in Medina (Heer, 1979: 13, 15). Given the emphasis of all his teachers on the doctrines of Ibn al-Arabi, it is not surprising that Yusuf went on to visit his shrine in Damascus. There he was initiated into the Tarekat Khalwatiyah by the Imam and Khatib of the mosque associated with the shrine, Abu Barakat Ayyub al-Khalwati al-Quraishi. In South Sulawesi, Yusuf is most strongly associated with the Khalwatiyah and is commonly known as Yusuf al-Taj alKhalwati, even though his writings draw mostly on Naqshabandiyah sources (van Bruinessen, 1990: 256). The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 21 The fall of Gowa 1641-1677 Yusuf returned from the Middle East in about 1670 to find his homeland in ruins. The respite from Christian power enjoyed by the Islamic states of the Indian Ocean in the second half of the sixteenth century came to an end with the entry of north Europeans into the area. In 1600 the English East India Company received a charter from Elizabeth I, and in 1602 competing Dutch trading companies formed the United East India Company, or VOC, better known in Indonesia simply as the Kompeni. The Dutch set out to establish a monopoly on the supply of spices from Maluku, dislodging the Portuguese from Ambon in 1605. In 1619 Coen established Batavia as the headquarters of the VOC’s Asian operations. In 1621 Coen conquered the five islands of Banda, prime source of the world’s nutmeg, and eliminated its native population through massacre, enslavement and exile. Many Bandanese fled to Gowa for protection. In 1629, the last in a series of attempts by the East Javanese empire of Mataram to dislodge the Dutch from Java failed. Also in 1629, the last major attempt by Acehnese forces to dislodge the Portuguese from Melaka failed. There was little effective opposition to Dutch hegemony on the seas after this. After crushing of Bone in 1644 Gowa began to take a more active interest in developments in Maluku. At about the same time, the Dutch conquest of Portuguese Melaka freed up Dutch forces to deal with growing resistance to their spice monopoly in Maluku. Between 1643 and 1646 they fought the Hituese in Ambon and Ternateans based in Seram. Increasingly the Dutch found themselves confronting Makassarese fighting alongside local Malukuans. Between 1650 and 1658 the Gowa and the VOC were on opposite sides of a dispute over the throne of Ternate which the Dutch candidate The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 22 eventually won. After an attack on Gowa itself by a thousand Dutch soldiers and 1,700 Indonesian auxiliaries in 1660, Sultan Hasan al-Din signed the Treaty of Batavia with the VOC. He agreed not to trade with Maluku, to expel the Portuguese and to allow the VOC to build a Fort at Panakukkang. Gowa then knew it was only a matter of time before the VOC attacked again and began feverish preparations for war. The Sultan of Gowa ordered the regent of Bone, To Bala’, to conscript 10,000 laborers to build defensive works against the threat of Dutch attack. To guard against desertions, Bugis nobles were made to work alongside the conscripts and held responsible for their work. Although he was a youth of no more than 17 at this point, Arung Palakka helped lead a rebellion among the workers, and managed to escape to Bone. There they raised an army which Gowa easily defeated. Arung Palakka fled to Butung with his family and a few followers. They were soon forced to flee again to Batavia where they awaited an opportunity to return. Arung Palakka and his men finally got the chance to avenge themselves in 1666 when a punitive expedition was sent against Gowa under Speelman. After sacking Bantaeng, the force landed in Buton, where they attacked a Makassarese force of 15,000 that had been besieging the ruler of Buton. Some 5,000 of these troops proved to be Bugis conscripts who went over to Arung Palakka. After defeating the remainder, some 5,000 Makassars were left to die on a desert island following the pattern established during the Malukan wars. Fearing a rising in Bone, Gowa restored La Ma’darammeng to the throne. While Speelman was away in Ternate soliciting help, Arung Palakka sent men into Bone. The army they raised was again defeated by Gowanese troops, and the Bone nobility fled to The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 23 Luwu. La Ma’daremmeng changed sides and fled with them. The combined Dutch and Bugis forces defeated Goa in 1667 and forced on them the Treaty of Bungaya. According to the Treaty, all the former vassal states of Gowa became vassals of the VOC by right of conquest. Instead of tearing down their own remaining fortifications as required by the Treaty of Bungaya, the Gowanese began to reinforce them. This led to a second battle in 1669, when the fort at Somba Opu at the mouth of the Garassi’/Jeneberang river was sacked. Sultan Hasanuddin was forced to abdicate. It was at this point that Shaikh Yusuf returned from the Hejaz after a twenty-five year absence. Instead of returning to Gowa, he settled in Banten, which was still undefeated by the Dutch. There he married a daughter of his old friend, who had been in power since 1651 as Sultan Ageng. Like his predecessor, Ageng had requested and received the title of Sultan from the Sharif of Mecca. Under Yusuf’s guidance, Sultan Ageng’s son was sent on the hajj and spent a year traveling in the Hejaz and even as far as Istanbul. He returned with the title Abu al-Nasir Abd al-Qahhar. Upon his return in 1672 a VOC official, Caeff, wrote that “the young Sultan stands by his intention to become a pope (paep) and is having himself instructed in the Quran by a Makassarese pope who has been in Mecca” (de Haan, 1912: 239). Abu al-Nasir spent another two years in Mecca from 1674-1676. Beginning in August 1671 over 1,000 Makassarese arrived in Banten at the invitation of the Sultan. In 1674 the Makassarese tried to get arms from Banten to avenge an insult from the Sultan of Bima. Sultan Ageng refused his aid and by 1675 most Makassars had left Banten. Yusuf stayed on as Sultan Ageng’s Shaikh al-Islam, surrounded by a small retinue of Makassars whom he initiated into the Tarekat The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 24 Khalwatiyah. There is no evidence that he initiated many Bantenese. None of the later Sufi masters in Banten traced their spiritual genealogies back through Yusuf (van Bruinessen, 1995: 182). Tuan Rappang’s orthodoxy in Gowa 1677-1683 Meanwhile, back in Gowa, Sultan Hasanuddin had been succeeded by three of his sons in succession. In 1674 the first of these, Sultan Amir Hamza, died at the age of 19 and was succeeded by his brother, Sultan Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali refused to acknowledge the primacy Bone had achieved under Arung Palakka. In 1676 skirmishes broke out between the Bone forces based in Bontoala and the Gowanese based in the last remaining Makassar fortification at Kale Gowa. Finally, in 1677 the Dutch and Bone forces attacked and destroyed Kale Gowa. Muhammad Ali was forced to abdicate and his brother, Abd al-Jalil, was placed on the throne. Muhammad Ali was exiled to Batavia, where he died in 1681 an unrepentant antagonist of the Dutch. Abd al-Jalil thus began his reign in 1677 as a universally despised puppet of the VOC. One of his first actions was to write to Shaikh Yusuf in Banten, begging him to return to his homeland and serve as tutor to the crown prince. Yusuf refused, but sent in his stead a blind Makassarese he had met in the Hejaz and brought back with him to Java. His name was Abu al-Fath Abd al-Basir al-Darir, better known after his place of burial as Tuan Rappang. In 1885, Matthes published the following tradition about the appointment of Tuan Rappang: When the two walis (Shaikh Yusuf and Tuan Rappang) had lived together for quite a while in Banten, Shaikh Yusuf received an urgent invitation from the King of Gowa, to return to his fatherland in order to give the royal family religious The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 25 instruction. But Sehe Yusupu was not agreeable to this and sent in his place his friend Tuang Rappang. When the King of Gowa saw this blind man come, his first thought was to mock him. For that reason he asked him whether he would be in a state to kill a deer on the hunt. This was certainly still quite characteristic, since the rulers of South Celebes as a rule know of nothing better than to engage in cockfighting and deer hunting. The other answered simply that he would indeed attempt it, if one only informed him at the right moment of the vicinity of the beast. And with that he mounted a horse armed with a lance and a noose. To cut a long story short, he came at once to a tree which was fallen over, but not yet so far that the top touched the ground. A deer could thus run under it with ease but for a man on a horse this was impossible. At the foot of the tree stood a man who told him to jump over it with his horse. But at the crown of the tree there was another man who on the contrary advised him that the tree threatened to rise upright, so that it would be better for him to crawl under it. Tuang Rappang understood immediately the situation and cast his noose over the tree, whereby he was just in time to catch hold of a deer which was already on the other side. “A man, who even though he is blind, can capture a deer in such difficult circumstances, is indeed be a clever wali!” So thought the King of Gowa to himself, and he naturally hesitated not one moment in charging Tuang Rappang in place of Shaikh Yusuf with the instruction of his children. (Matthes, 1885: 391) We are fortunate to have an eyewitness account of conditions in Gosa during the era of Tuan Rappang as seen through the eyes of two young Makassar princes. The father The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 26 of these princes was a certain Daeng Mangalle. According to one source, Daeng Mangalle was the nephew of the Tallo’ prince, Karaeng Karunrung, who pursued a determinedly anti-Dutch policy during his time as Chief Minister (Tumabicara Buttaya) from 1654-1687. Daeng Mangalle left Gowa for Java with a retinue of 250 disgruntled Makassars in 1661 after Sultan Hasan al-Din signed the Treaty of Batavia with the VOC. In 1664 the Makassar were allowed to settle in Siam by King Narai (r. 1657-1688). Early in his reign, King Narai had come under Persian Shia influence. Daeng Mangalle had two sons in Siam. Daeng Ruru was born in 1669 and Daeng Tulolo in 1675. The two of them were probably sent back around 1680 to serve as pages in the Gosanese court. In 1682, a Persian mission failed to convert the King Narai to Islam. Daeng Mangalle feared that the influence of the French Jesuits was growing so great under his Greek Christian Prime Minister, that the King was in danger of converting to Catholicism. In 1685 Daeng Mangalle’s sons returned from Gowa. The following year, Daeng Mangalle led an uprising of Muslim Makassarese and Malays wheich was crushed after great loss of life on both sides. All adult Makassar men were killed in battle or executed. Daeng Mangalle’s 17 and 11 year old sons were spared, but sent back to the court of Louis XIV, where they were placed in the care of Gervaise, who could converse with them in Thai. They were later enrolled in the prestigious Jesuit College de Clermont and the naval academy in Brest. Upon graduation, they were granted royal pensions and received commissions in the royal navy. Daeng Ruru died at the age of 39 in Havana in 1708, having achieved the rank of Lieutenant at the age of 24 , equivalent to Captain in the army. Daeng Tulolo died in 1736 at the age of 61. The information these two princes provided Gervaise in 1686 casts an interesting The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 27 light on the state of Islam at the time of Tuan Rappang, at least as it was viewed by the anti-Dutch nobility allied with Karaeng Karunrung. As a Jesuit, Gervaise took a particular interest in the Muslim clergy in Goa. He distinguished three “orders” of “Agguy”, probably a corruption of Makassarese Kali. The first order he calls labes, probably a corruption of bilal, the Makassarese term for the muezzin (Arabic), or mosque official in charge of the call to prayer. The second order he calls santari, or religious students, who he said were celibate officials who lived inside the mosque and were in charge of the maintaining the mosque and its library. They shaved their heads, wore a plain sarong of white linen and subsisted on daily donations of alms. The third order he called tuans, lords. He wrote that this rank was conferred by the Grand Mufti in Mecca, and that the Tuan who is closest to the king is “the Patriarch and Primate of the Kingdom; nor does he acknowledge any one above him, but the Grand Mufti of Mecca” (Gervaise, 1701: 155). The preeminent Tuan must have been none other than Tuan Rappang. According to Gervaise, the Tuans dressed in the Turkish style with long white robes, and wore turbans when leading prayers. As to the general piety of the population, Gervaise had this to say: And now it is not to be imagin’d, with what exactness the Macasarians acquit themselves of the Duties enjoyn’d by their new Religion: they would not miss of the meanest Holydays which it prescribes, without signalizing their Devotion, every one in particular, by some Good Work or other, of Supererogation; the neglect of a Bow, or any slight Washing, is look’d upon by them as a considerable Crime. Some of them, out of a meer sentiment of Repentence, abstained all their Lives from drinking Palm-Wine, tho’ it be not forbidden by the Law. And some The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 28 there are, that will rather dye for Thirst, than Drink so much as a Glass of Water, from Sun-rising to Sun-setting, during the whole time of their Lent. More that this, they are far more devout that all the other Mahometans; for they observe an infinite number of Ceremonies that are not in use among the Turks, nor among the Indian Mahometans; because they believe them to be practis’d at Mecca, which they look upon as the Center of their Religion, and the Pattern which they ought to follow. (Gervaise, 1701:133) It is clear that by the 1680s the attempt to treat Islam as the product of local revelations and sources of power had lost ground to a fervent cosmopolitanism, in which Mecca was the source of legitimacy for all the leading religious authorities and for correct religious practice. Yusuf’s exile and Jihad in Indonesia 1682-1700 Meanwhile, in Banten, Yusuf continued to minister to the Makassarese community and to the Sultan. He wrote a series of works, mostly on mystical topics, to serve as spiritual guides for the growing number of followers of his version of the Tarekat Khalwatiyah. Inspired by Yusuf, Sultan Ageng increasingly threw his support behind anti-Dutch movements wherever they appeared. He supported a rebellion of Minangkabau living near Melaka in 1677, an insurrection in Ambon in 1680, and an uprising in west Sumatra in 1681. But the Sultanate began to weaken from within. After Sultan Ageng’s son Abu al-Nasir returned from his second trip to Mecca in 1676, power in Banten was increasingly divided between the “Old Sultan”, Ageng, and the “Young Sultan”, now known as Sultan Haji, who had by then spent several years in the Hejaz. Sultan Ageng favored British and Danish traders as a counter to the VOC, and the VOC The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 29 began to support Sultan Haji. Tensions between father and son rose, and in 1682 VOC forces marched on Banten to relieve the besieged Sultan Haji. Ageng fled into the interior with his favored son, Purbaya, and Yusuf. They eluded the VOC forces for almost a year. They were finally tracked down with the help of a gang of escaped slaves under the leadership of Surapati. Sultan Ageng was imprisoned by his son. Yusuf was sent first to Batavia, but his archipelago-wide fame was so great he was soon sent on to Ceylon along with some of his family and retinue. Most of his followers were repatriated to Goa, however, including two of his sons called Kare Mamo and Kare Mami in the Diary of the Kings of Gowa (Ligtvoet, 1880: at 1714 and 1715). There they settled in Maros and set about spreading his teachings. They settled quite near where the deposed King of Bone La Madarammeng (d. 1678) had founded his own Islamic school in the 1640s. With the fall of Banten, the exile of Yusuf and the return of his followers to Goa, there was no longer any effective Islamic state opposing the Dutch. A series of charismatic leaders arose in the 1680s to challenge Dutch power in the name of Islam. Among the most successful of these was a Minangkabau called Ahmad Shah ibn Iskandar. In 1685 he declared a Holy War against the Dutch and assembled a fleet of 300 vessels and 4,000 Makassarese, Minangkabau and Malay mujahiddin. In 1686, the former slave and erstwhile lieutenant in the Dutch army Surapati came under Ahmad Shah’s influence and led a separate uprising in east Java. In 1687 a Gujarati emissary of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb was arrested for inciting rebellion in Ambon. In 1687 the British in Bengkulen began to support Ahmad Shah’s movement. For the next nine years Ahmad Shah fought a successful guerrilla campaign in Sumatra against the Dutch The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 30 and their Bantenese allies (Kathirithamby-Wells, 1970). The Dutch had some reason to fear an Islamic resistance movement spanning the Indian Ocean. The growing Islamic resistance movement in the1680s, made local rulers who had signed treaties with the Dutch fearful of their own legitimacy. The legitimacy of Sultan Abd al-Jalil was particularly precarious because the Dutch themselves had placed on the throne of Gowa in 1683. Abd al-Jalil only managed to secure the recognition of Gowa’s traditional Council of Nine Electors in 1689. Hoping to secure further legitimacy by associating himself with the renowned Shaikh Yusuf, he sent his first official request to have Shaikh Yusuf released from exile in Ceylon and returned to Gowa. The local Dutch Governor in Makassar, Hartsink agreed to their request. He was over-ruled by a special commissioner sent from Batavia, Dirk de Haas, who noted that their ally, the Emperor of Bone Arung Palakka, was steadfastly opposed to the return of such a prestigious Gowanese, since he might might become the focus of opposition to his own hegemony in South Sulawesi. Yusuf continued to compose mystical works in his Ceylonese exile and to correspond with his followers in Indonesia (Voorhoeve, 1980: 41, 52, 82, 129, 148, 203, 246, 279, 341, 347, 354, 408, 461, 463, 467). In Ceylon, he appears to have abandoned the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud favored by most of his earlier teachers and to have gone over to Sirhindi’s doctrine of “unity of witness”, wahdat al-shuhud, which was currently in vogue in the Mughal court of Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) (Abu Hamid, 1994). Aurangzeb is reported by Hamka to have taken notice of Yusuf’s presence on the island, and to have warned the Dutch to treat him well (Hamka, 1963: 46-47). While Azra could find no confirmation of this in Indian or Dutch sources, he does note that Yusuf was in The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 31 close contact with Indian Sufis in Ceylon, including Sidi Mailaya, Abu al-Ma’anni Ibrahim Minhan and Abd al-Siddiq b. Muhammad Sadiq (Azra, 1992: 440, 450). The Governor General in Batavia decided in 1693 to move Yusuf to their even more distant outpost at the Cape of Good Hope, where he died in 1699. This was not the end of Yusuf’s travels. After his death, Sultan Abd al-Jalil began to have recurrent dreams about him, which were carefully noted in the royal diaries. In 1703, Abd al-Jalil requested the return of Yusuf’s body. This request was granted, and on April 5, 1705 Yusuf was re-entombed in Lakiung near the ancient graveyard of the Kings of Goa. A state cult thus developed around Shaikh Yusuf in the early eighteenth century. During the eighteenth century, the pattern of having a separate line of Kali intermarried with the line of rulers spread throughout the sphere of Goanese influence. The intermarriage between the rulers of Bira and the descendents of Haji Ahmad described in the first part of the paper may have been modelled on the royal court of Gowa. In 1706 Sultan Ismail, the future ruler of Gowa (r.1709-1712) and of Bone (r.1720-1724), married Sitti Habiba, a daughter of Yusuf, providing future rulers of Bone with a genealogical tie to this Saint. Sultan Najm al-Din of Tallo’ was in turn betrothed to Zainab, the daughter of Habibah and Sultan Ismail, in 1721, and married to her in 1724. At some point, Yusuf’s delegate to Gowa Tuan Rappang left to settle in Rappang in the far north of South Sulawesi, perhaps after the death of his patron Sultan Abd alJalil in 1709, or to elude the heavy-handed rule of the VOC. He died there in 1723 and his body was brought back to Gowa to buried beside that of Yusuf in Lakiung. Matthes writes of this event: The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 32 One finds at Lakiung beside the grave of Sehe Yusupu that of Tuang Rappang, whose material remains must have made in the same way a great and certainly no less adventurous journey. When the body of Tuan Rappang was placed in the soil of his birthplace, it was transferred at the order of the King of the Makassars to Gowa. Along the way the numerous funeral procession that was carrying him was struck with a fearsome thirst and unfortunately there was no water to be found in the vicinity; then one perceived within the coffin a sound like the rushing of a waterfall. Immediately a hole was made in the coffin, and from it there streamed for a long time delicious water so that the thirst of everyone was fully assuaged. It is still customary today to preserve some of that precious water in a flask, and to make use of it on certain occasions for healing. Fortunately, it does not lose its power, if one adds a little fresh spring water to it during the month of fasting. (Matthes, 1885: 392) With the decline of prestige that followed vassalage to the VOC, the genealogies of Kali sometimes became even more important than those of the Karaengs. If military and political power had shifted to an illegitimate foreign overlord who could not participate in the customary forms of ritual and marriage alliance, then a second “apolitical” source of legitimacy had to be created in the form of holy men, their tombs and their descendants. The Riwayat Shaikh Yusuf We may now turn to an examination of the meaning given to Yusuf’s life by the Court of Gowa through an analysis of the Riwayat Shaikh Yusuf. This text was originally published in 1933 from a manuscript in the possession of the Kali of Gowa, Haji Ibrahim The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 33 Daeng Pabe (Nuruddin Daeng Magassing, 1981 [1933]: 105).1 The Riwayat describes Yusuf’s mother as a woman from the lesser nobility (Gallarrang rank), who married a mysterious old man. The old man gives his pregnant wife to the King and disappears. Yusuf is born in the palace at the same time the Queen gives birth to a daughter, Daeng Nisanga. Although they have different biological mothers and fathers, they are born at the same time and place to the same legal father, making them step-twins after a fashion. Later, they enter Islam through circumcision at the same time. Reflecting a pervasive theme in Indonesian myth, as pseudo-twins Yusuf and Daeng Nisanga are irresistibly drawn to one another. In the Bugis epic, the I La Galigo, Sawerigading is drawn to his twin sister, We Tenriabeng, but is forbidden to marry her. After a life-long search, his conflict is resolved when he marries We Cudai. She is the daughter of his mother’s twin sister, who has the same name as his own twin sister We Tenriabeng. The La Galigo myth resolves the issue of incest by substituting the most closely related woman possible (Pelras, 1996: 88-89). The Riwayat Shaikh Yusuf raises and resolves a similar issue by making Daeng Nisanga not an actual twin, but a step sister of Yusuf. Yusuf is rejected by the King as a suitable groom for his daughter because of his mother’s low rank. Out of shame, he swears never to set foot in Gowa again, until his Sufism is perfected (in death). In addition to reading this enforced separation from his twin as a reworking of an old Austronesian motif, we may see this sundering of the hero from his Beloved as a Sufi allegory. In much mystical poetry, separation from the Beloved is a metaphor for the sundering of the Creature from his Creator. Yusuf’s departure from Goa in his youth is an allegory for the descent of the Creature into the The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 34 material world. His ultimate return to Goa and reunification with his Beloved can occur only after a lifetime of seeking Islamic knowledge. Another trope peculiar to Indonesia is the notion that hereditary rank can be trumped by knowledge, wealth and power acquired from travels to distant lands. One attraction of Islam derives from its promise to allow an individual to escape the confines of a theoretically fixed social hierarchy, to move up and down the ladder of power, wealth and prestige at will. The contrast between Yusuf’s origins and that of the Sultan of Goa could not be greater. The latter has a royal pedigree stretching back to the founding of the kingdom by a heavenly being in the thirteenth century. Yusuf is born of a low ranking mother by a father of unknown origin. Yet he is clearly endowed with supernatural powers deriving from Islamic sources even before his birth. Yusuf’s quest originates in the King’s ignorance of the fact that high rank can be achieved through knowledge, bravery and wealth. When he realizes his error, it is too late, for Yusuf has renounced Daeng Nisanga until he shall have achieved perfect unity with God by mastering Sufism. Yusuf travels to the Hejaz where he is acknowledged as among the chief of the Saints, and eventually returns to Southeast Asia where he ultimately marries princesses, fathers children and is buried in four separate places: Banten, Sri Lanka, Cape Town and, finally, Gowa. The Knowledge he gains during his travels gives him the power to conquer space and time, life and death. All kings are ultimately forced to acknowledge his superiority. Indeed, by the end of his life, Yusuf’s mastery of mysticism has enabled him to transcend not just the cultural distinctions made by members of his own ethnic group, but by human beings of all times and places. And that is not all, for just as he The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 35 overcomes all cultural boundaries, he overcomes all natural distinctions as well, moving instantaneously back and forth between life and death and from one side of the globe to the other. It is only after his fourth and final burial in Gowa that Yusuf impregnates his stepsister, Daeng Nisanga, from beyond the grave. The original unity and equality experienced by opposite-sex siblings in the womb is recoverable only after a radical separation in life, and is perfected only in the tomb. It is important to note that it is not just the tomb of Shaikh Yusuf that is an object of veneration in South Sulawesi today. It is the joint tomb of Yusuf and his “sister”/wife, Daeng Nisanga, that is the object of pilgrimage today, especially by newly-weds desirous of obtaining fertility. In a manner that recalls the Merina of Madagascar as analyzed by Bloch, the bisexual tomb of the ancestors replaces the house of the living as the source of blessing and fertility (Bloch, 1971, 1986). But the tombs of Shaikh Yusuf and Daeng Nisanga are objects of veneration not just for their own descendents, but for an entire ethnic group. Indeed, in the case of Shaikh Yusuf, his four tombs in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Java and Sulawesi provide blessings to the entire Islamic community spanning the Indian Ocean. The merging of Austronesian with Islamic symbols of the unity and equality of all humans in the afterlife has transformed the ancestors of a localized bilateral descent group into the Saints of the ummah. Yusuf took care that his tombs, disciples and children are left behind in every corner of the Islamic world, from the Cape of Good Hope to his land of origin, Gowa (cf. Zwemmer, 1925). Cosmopolitan Islam and anti-colonial resistance I began this paper by referring to the way an Islamic conception of the person as The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 36 an ethical individual is juxtaposed to an Austronesian conception of the person as a member of a descent group in life cycle rituals. During the colonial period, the esoteric religious knowledge men acquired by wandering around the perimeter of the Indian Ocean functioned as a sort of wild card in an increasingly hierarchical social order. Men of unknown origin could travel outside the bounds of familiar social space and return to claim a new place at the top of society. In conclusion, I want to indicate the implications of this dual consciousness for political activity. The fluidity of their social identity allowed some Islamic Saints to serve as foci of resistance to European rule, as they brought to bear the global prestige of Islam against the global power of colonial armies. Societies in which this sort of individual achievement was possible ultimately posed a much greater headache for colonial rulers than did societies like those of central and eastern Java whose social hierarchies became increasingly rigid from the seventeenth century on. This form of resistance to European hegemony lasted into the twentieth century when it was superceded by new forms of Islam that advocated the integration of an Islam purified of medieval accretions with European models of economic, educational and scientific progress. Many of my most articulate informants at the end of the twentieth century had spent their youths as guerilla fighters hoping to establish a modern Islamic state purged of colonial vestiges. I knew in 1988 that Muhammad Idris Daeng Sarika, a close friend of my host Abdul Hakim, had served in the personal bodyguard of Kahar Muzakkar, the leader of the Darul Islam insurrection. He did not feel comfortable talking about his experiences, however, until after the fall of Suharto’s New Order in 1999. When he did start talking to The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf 37 me about the 1950s, his main topics were the miraculous powers Shaikh Yusuf had drawn upon in his struggle against the infidel Dutch, and the book of invulnerability magic he had acquired from his grandfather, Panre Abeng. Many times the spells he learned from this book had kept him safe from government weapons. Once his clothes were entirely shredded by an automatic gun but his skin was left unmarked. Panre Abeng was a wanderer who appeared in Ara in about 1890 and married a local noble woman. Some say he was from Luwu’ far to the north, others from Selayar, to the south. Muhammad Idris insisted he was descended from the Haji Ahmad the Bugis, also known as Panre Lohe, the Great Scholar who had once sat at the feet of the great Indo-Hadrami scholar, Nur al-Din al-Raniri. According to Muhammad Idris, Panre Abeng’s book of spells had once belonged Panre Lohe’s great grandson, Abd al-Basir Zainal Abidin, better known as Tu ri Masigi’na, “He [Who Adhered to] the Mosque”. The legacy of Shaikh Yusuf’s generation of cosmopolitan hajjis thus stretched downward through the centuries to late twentieth century South Sulawesi.2 1 Its transcription and publication may have been instigated by the researches of the famous Islamic modernist Hamka, who spent 1932-1934 as a young man in Ujung Pandang and studied with Nuruddin Daeng Magassing (1962, 1963: 37). 2 In 1988 villagers felt a strong sense of solidarity with the Mujahiddin of Afghanistan and attributed their victory over the Russians to divine intervention that had been invoked by the prayers of the entire ummah. 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