Charting a Malay-Islamic past: An emerging transnational geography of meaning and the consolidation of an exclusivist identity in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This article examines an emerging historical narrative that invokes an exclusivist Malay-Islamic identity in Malaysia through a sacred geography centred on Aceh in Indonesia. The examination is located against the growing sacralisation of space across the world and its often contentious if not violent political outcomes. It considers the role of scholarship on sacred geographies in the face of output on the same subject by an informal expert – a person working outside of established institutional frameworks. The article focuses on the writings of Radzi Sapiee, a Malaysian informal expert who advances an exclusivist Malay-Islamic identity based on field observations, scholarly works, and inner wisdom. His partially completed book series constitutes an autobiographical return to Aceh and articulates a transnational geography of meaning that consolidates the exclusivist identity within the already racialised politics of Malaysia by further grounding it in space and time.

KEYWORDS:

• Geography of meaning
• exclusivist Malay-Islamic identity
• informal expert
• scholarship on sacred geographies
• Aceh
• Malaysia
• keramat (Muslim gravesite-shrine)

Acknowledgements

This article grew out of a fellowship and workshop at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands, in August and September 2017, and the conversations and unstinting support of Marieke Bloembergen and David Kloos. The second part of the article includes in much revised form a paper delivered at the workshop ‘Circulating the Bay of Bengal, Miraculously: Translating Wonder and Travel in Southeast Asia’ organized by the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre in Singapore in February 2017. I am grateful to Teren Sevea for inviting me to this meeting and his unfailing encouragement. I thank Dag Yngvesson for his careful reading and detailed comments of a draft and two anonymous reviewers whose insights helped to better frame and contextualize the argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Sesi bicara di DBP – Mengenali Kepustakaan Ali Hasjmy,’ http://merahsilu.blogspot.com/2019/02/bicara-di-dbp-mengenali-kepustakaan-ali.html.

2 The blog is titled ‘Catatan Si Merah Silu [Notes of Merah Silu]’ and can be accessed through the following URL: http://merahsilu.blogspot.com/.

3 Thailand is the only country in this list that was not colonized.

4 These were Monash University Malaysia, University College Sedaya International, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia), and the University of Oxford.

5 The Hikayat Mareskalek (Story of Mareskalek) written by Abdullah al-Misri in the early nineteenth century tells of a European governor-general who in a fit of vanity took the title Susuhunan, an honorific used to address the nine saints who are said to have converted Java’s population to Islam. He is haunted by a visit in his dreams by one of the said saints and decides, as a result, to make penance by going on a ritual pilgrimage to the gravesite shrines of each one of them.

6 I focus on Muslims in this article but keramat have been known to draw people of diverse faiths.