Bordering Malaya’s ‘Benighted Lands’: Frontiers of Race and Colonialism on the Malay Peninsula, 1887–1902

From 1891 to 1895, the Pahang War disrupted Britain’s enclosure of territory on the Malay Peninsula. Fought in response to an uprising by up to 700 rebels in Pahang, the war was not only a means for controlling damage to British interests but also an arena for a subtle, geopolitical contest between Britain and Siam for the Siamese tributaries, including Kelantan and Terengganu. During this period Terengganu, sheltered by legal and territorial constructs that kept the Siamese frontier open until 1902, was becoming a hub for perang sabil (‘holy war’) against British and Siamese ‘competitive colonialisms’. Known to be providing discursive, human, and other political resources to the Pahang rebels, Terengganu came to be portrayed as a ‘wild’ and ‘benighted’ place by Pahang’s British Resident Hugh Clifford, an important broker of the colonial race-thinking deployed as a means for controlling and taming the frontier.

Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-century Indian Ocean: Sharīʿa, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives

Peacock’s chapter examines the circulation of Seventeenth-century Sufi scholars to the ‘contested peripheries’ of the Indian Ocean. He argues that notable Muslim Sufi shaykhs did not travel to maritime kingdoms such as Banten, Aceh, and the Maldives to learn from locals, but rather to propagate ‘shariʿa-minded piety’ focused on ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’. Peacock describes how the ambitions of religious scholars like the Syrian Qādirī preacher Muḥammad Shams al-Dīn intersected with early modern state-building in the Indian Ocean world. This chapter chronicles how Shams al-Dīn not only gained great political influence in Aceh, but was even made the actual ruler of the Maldives after his followers overthrew the sultan there. Peacock concludes that the cosmopolitanism of Sufi itinerants relied less on the fusion of pre-Islamic and Islamic practices than on universalist agendas of social transformation founded upon prophetic Sunna and enacted through the mechanisms of political coercion.

Islamicate Cosmopolitanism from North Africa to Southeast Asia

Lawrence introduces the idea that ‘Islamicate cosmopolitans’ engage in moral introspection to fashion a genuine orientation of openness to religious-cum-cultural difference. Drawing from the work of Marshall Hodgson, Lawrence argues that these cosmopolitans carried a specific conscience, a conscience that precedes Islam yet was reshaped by the Quran and ethical reflection within Muslim empires. The chapter then explores two renowned pre-modern thinkers, the scientific polymath Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī and the legal scholars Ibn Khaldūn, as exemplars of a universal ethos with an Islamicate accent. Yet, Lawrence also acknowledges how notions of cosmopolitan justice could nevertheless sustain coercion by directing Muslim commitment to state power through concepts such as the medieval ‘circle of justice’.

The ‘Shaykh al-Islaām of the Philippines’ and Coercive Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Global Empire

This chapter examines how some American colonial officials attempted to harness Philippine Muslim connections with the wider Islamic world in a project of ‘coercive cosmopolitanism’. Specifically, American authorities hoped that by recruiting a learned ‘modern Mohammedan’ teacher from Istanbul, a Palestinian named Sayyid Muḥammad Wajīh b. Munīb Zayd al-Kilānī al-Nābulsī, they could help to correct the supposedly ‘degraded’ forms of local religious practice and thereby combat Muslim resistance. Shaykh Wajīh’s odyssey from the Ottoman capital to the Philippines, where he acquired the moniker ‘Shaykh al-Islām of the Philippines’, reverberated from Singapore to Manila and Washington, generating optimism that such connections could promote both a deepening of religious belief as well affinities between Muslims and non-Muslims. Yet, this chapter also contends that decades of pacification freighted such encounters with mistrust, driving Shaykh Wajīh to quickly depart from the Philippines and revealing the perils of colonially-inspired, coercively produced bonds of cosmopolitanism.

Writing Cosmopolitan History in Nineteenth-century China: Li Huanyi’s Words and Deeds of Islamic Exemplars

This chapter suggests that we understand cosmopolitanism among Hui Muslims in nineteenth-century China as the ability to situate oneself in relation to both Chinese and Islamic history. Based on Li Huanyi’s 1874 Words and Deeds of Islamic Exemplars (Ch. Qingzhen xianzheng yanxing lüe), the chapter shows how Hui Muslims forged a universal history addressing two poles of authority—one in the Chinese court and the other in the Prophet Muhammad. In particular, the figure of Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad reputedly dispatched to Chang’an, emerges in Li’s history as the crucial spatial and temporal link joining Arabia and the Chinese court. By showing how subsequent accounts of imperial Muslim figures are portrayed as continuing Waqqāṣ’ service in China, this chapter argues that Li deploys this universal Islamic history not to undermine but rather to legitimate the power of the Chinese imperial state.

Hijra, Hajj and Muslim Mobilities: Considering Coercion and Asymmetrical Power Dynamics in Histories of Islamic Cosmopolitanism

This introduction lays out the argument that an exploration of Muslim mobility and diversity across Asian history can help identify coercive dimensions that are often elided in dominant modern visions of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Starting with a discussion of the role that images of the premodern Muslim kingdom of al-Andalus in Spain have played in Muslim memory as a marker both of nostalgia and loss, the introduction then transitions to Asia. Specifically, the chapter traces how Islamic ideas of pilgrimage, migration, and learning shaped imaginaries of movement and of ‘opening’ frontier space defined as much by agonistic confrontation as by accommodation. These conceptual reflections build upon references to particular histories and historiographies of cosmopolitanism - including debates on the Indian Ocean, Sufism, religious ‘conscience’, and the global ‘umma’. Finally, this discussion sets the stage for the volume chapters to follow on coercion, asymmetrical power relations, and cosmopolitanism across diverse Asian Muslim societies.

Variations of ‘Islamic Military Cosmopolitanism’: The Survival Strategies of Hui Muslims during the Modern Period

Hui Muslims have devised various forms of ‘Islamic cosmopolitanism’ through Islamic legal responses to external domination. This chapter provides three case studies to examine how Hui Muslims have both survived as religiously observant and ethnically distinct Muslims among non-Muslim Chinese, while simultaneously remaining loyal citizens to a non-Islamic state. First, Ma Anyi in his 1905 work, Taḥqīq al-īmān, situated Chinese Muslims outside the territory that the global umma had to defend as a means to protect the personal security of Muslims under non-Islamic Qing rule. Wang Jingzhai (d. 1949) directed attention away from global umma discourses to argue for China to be considered as an Islamic country. Lastly, Hui writers in the journal Yuehua invoked the Muslim unity for a defensive jihād against the Japanese. Through these cases, this chapter shows how Islamic cosmopolitanism reflected majority pressures on minority communities and the friction between different religious values and legal orders.

The White Heron Called by the Muezzin: Shrines, Sufis and Warlords in Early Modern Java

This chapter explores two modalities of Sufi warfare on the Indonesian island of Java; a reputed cosmopolitan one deriving from courts as well as religious scholars and a seemingly localized one centred on shrine polities. The latter indeed proves intrinsically embedded in Java through holy graves and miraculous sites of worship. This does not entail, however, that their armed endeavours were stirred by local concerns only. To the contrary, overseas trade networks and elaborate diplomatic ties shaped the military interventions of shrine polities like that of Giri in East Java and also bolstered their armies. On the other hand, the scripture-based campaigns of ‘holy war’ made by sultanates like that of Banten and scholars like al-Maqassārī, faltered due to their inability to connect to political concerns of the wide range of Islamic polities and actors involved.

Afghanistan’s Cosmopolitan Trading Networks: A View from Yiwu, China

This chapter explores Afghan trading networks that are active across a variety of Eurasian contexts. These predominantly, but not exclusively, Muslim traders have come to fill important niches in the forms of economic activity often identified by anthropology as representing ‘globalisation from below’. This chapter emphasises ethnographically the culturally flexible dispositions of Afghan traders, while also bringing attention to the analytical issues that are raised when they are thought of as ‘Muslim cosmopolitans’. In particular this analysis highlights how 'armoured' forms of cosmopolitanism have been frequently visited on Afghanistan during its modern history, often meaning that mobility has been experienced by the country's people in the context of violence and coercion. We explore these issues through a focused ethnographic examination of the lives and activities of Afghan traders in the Chinese international trade city of Yiwu - a critically important node for this and other trading groups, communities and networks.