Dreamwork, art worlds and miracles in Malaysia

Abstract

Dreamwork recorded in the Malay art world questions the occult power of artistic agency. As I did participant observation in Malaysia and Singapore, the artist Mohammad Din Mohammad divulged knowledge of Sufi lore, shamanic healing, and Malay martial arts (silat). On a quest to comprehend, discover, create and articulate esoteric skills, secret knowledge and mysterious artifacts, the artist produced fine art paintings, talismanic jewelry and assemblage sculptures. These were to be used in psychic defence, dream incubation, for inspiration, and as medicine. A field site discussion as to whether a reported vision of a mysterious shadow warrior is a true, false, or meaningless dream forms the kernel of a dreamwork dialogue regarding miraculous agency. The artwork raises questions pertaining to sorcery, Islam, agency, and power in Southeast Asia, revealing a political battle of Sufi versus Wahhabi notions in the constitution of Malay modernity.

Keywords:

• agency
• art worlds
• dreamwork
• healing
• miracles
• power

Notes on contributor

D. S. Farrer is Visiting Scholar at Palau Community College, and has published: Shadows of the Prophet: Martial Arts and Sufi Mysticism (author, 2009), War Magic: Religion, Sorcery and Performance (editor, 2016), and Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World (co-editor, 2011).

ORCID

D.S. Farrer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9898-8330

Notes

1 This research is based upon participant observation, in-depth interviews, and video recorded in Singapore and Malaysia from 2002 to 2007, funded by a doctoral research grant and teaching assistant position with the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore; a field visit in 2012 funded by National Geographic; and concluded with follow-up semi-structured interviews via social media in 2019. Participation at Iain Edgar's Dream Literacy Workshop at the Association of Social Anthropology Conference on Symbiotic Anthropologies: Theoretical Commensalities and Methodological Mutualisms, University of Exeter, 2015, was made possible through a College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, University of Guam Travel Award. Some personal names have been changed throughout.

2 When the apparition appeared, Aminah was unsure if she was awake or asleep, and was uncertain if her experience was a dream or a vision. Dreams and visions have an important place in Islam as they provide divine revelation in an otherwise closed ‘belief system’ where Prophet Mohammad was the ‘seal of the Prophets’ relaying the final word from God (Edgar 2016).

3 Panglima Hitam is the warrior spirit summoned by silat masters to protect the martial arts training ground (gelanggang) (Rashid 1990).

4 Freud’s ([1955] 2010) ‘dream-work’ concept is different, referring to psychological processes occurring in dreaming, including condensation, displacement, the transformation of dream-thoughts into dream-content, the suppression of affect, etc.

5 For Becker: ‘Art worlds consist of all the people who are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art’ (1982, 34).

6 The alam Melayu or ‘Malay World’ refers to the collective areas historically ruled by a Malay sultanate, including: Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, the Isthmus of Kra, Riau, Sumatra, Aceh, the Sulu Archipelago, Kalimantan and the Southern Philippines (Benjamin 2003, 5 note 2; Milner 1981; Farrer 2009, 26–27).

7 Personal communication by Facebook Messenger (October 2019).

8 Mhd Din gave twenty-one solo exhibitions from 1978 to 2007, in Singapore, Malaysia, Paris, Turkey, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. His artwork also featured in group exhibitions in art centres, galleries, consulates, and museums in New York, London, Cologne, Bahrain, Dubai, Holland, Manila, Adelaide, Perth, Macau, and Hanoi. Mhd Din’s artworks are held in the collections of Bank Negara, Maybank, Petronas, Yayasan Seni Perak, Malacca Youth Museum, Singapore Art Museum, National University of Singapore Museum, and The Travel Lodge, Brunei Darussalam.

9 Edgar’s (2016, 32–33) list of the principles of ‘dream interpretation methods’ in Islam regarding the status of the interpreter and of the dream is unfortunately misnumbered and is unclear.

10 https://www.4life.com/corp/about/science

11 Personal communication, November 17, 2019.

12 This resonates with Spinoza’s declaration that, ‘God is Nature’, Dues et Natura (Spinoza [1677] 1996).

13 Due to their pre-Islamic animist origins the roles of bomoh (medium, faith healer), bomoh silat, and pawang (medicine-man, healer, witch doctor) are controversial, being forbidden in Islam. Mhd Din accepted the labels of guru silat, tabib (Sufi healer), and pawang (see also, Werner 1986, 17 note 1; Tuan Ismail 1991).

14 The complete inventory and cataloging of Mhd Din’s artwork has yet to be completed.

15 Zikr, is the ‘remembrance’ of God through individual or group chanting, or silently intoning the ninety-nine names of Allah.

16 Hadith: oral traditions based on the words and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad, collected after his death.

17 Hikmat is ‘knowledge, wisdom, magic, sorcery, supernatural power’ – https://ms.oxforddictionaries.com.

18 To attain mystical transcendence, Sufis must ascend four ‘planes’: (1) sharia (adherence to basic Islamic norms and legal requirements) (2) tarekat (spiritual guidance; discipleship of murid to shaykh), (3) hakikat (truth), (4) marifat (perfect gnosis) (Winstedt [1925] 1993, 75, diacritical marks removed; Farrer 2009, 153).

19 Haqqani interlocutors used the terms ‘bandit’ and ‘dog’ after Barber (1971).

20 Benjamin (2014, 26–33) says the Senoi Dreamwork Therapeutic movement have misrepresented and mythologized the Temiar (Senoi) through the supposed discovery of ‘dream control’, and should drop the term ‘Senoi’ from their title.

21 Malaysia has a ‘multimodal ontology’, or better still, a combined and uneven ontology constructed, contested, and variational over time, context, and circumstance (David and McNiven 2018).

22 Compare also with the dream of Vishnu, who dreams the universe into existence ‘while sleeping on the coils of the giant serpent Ananta’, as Lakshmi massages his legs (Kleiner 2010, 22).

23 http://malaycube.com

24 Muslim Malays have long since displaced magic spells (jampi-jampi) with Islamic prayer (ayat) and chant (zikr) (Farrer 2009, 236 note 14).

25 In Malaysia tanaga dalam (inner energy) is also referred to as yoga prana, and nafas batin, revealing ancient Indic and Arabic overlays on an indigenous animist ritual (see also Farrer 2009, 127–128).

26 Deleuze, following Spinoza, identifies three illusions in consciousness: ‘Nor does it suffice to say that consciousness deludes itself: consciousness is inseparable from the triple illusion that constitutes it, the illusion of finality, the illusion of freedom, and the theological illusion’ (Deleuze 1988a, 20).

27 Antonio Negri claims that, for Spinoza, ‘Politics is the realm of the material imagination’ (1991, 188), where the realist foundation of politics lies in ‘free necessity’. Negri (1991, 189) demarks the principal features in the ‘constitution of reality’ for Spinoza (prudentia-multitudo, libertas-securitas, conditio-constitutio) to observe: Potentia as the dynamic and constitutive inherence of the single in the multiplicity, of mind in the body, of freedom in necessity – power against Power – where potestas is presented as the subordination of the multiplicity, of the mind, of freedom, and of potentia (Negri 1991, 190–191).

28 Weber points out that ‘ideal types’ need not be perfect. Employed as a methodological device, ideal approximations demark social phenomenon to facilitate analysis (Weber 1958).