LAFFAN M

MichAel lAffAn

The Sayyid in the Slippers: An Indian Ocean Itinerary

and Visions of Arab Sainthood, 1737-1929

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013, pp. 191-227

Fig 1. The Tomb of Sayyid ʿAlawi, Cape Town, as photographed by Arthur Elliot (1870-1938), beg. ofthe 20th century.

He was a saint in his lifetime … and stories are still told of how,using his miraculous powers, he used to go into the locked andguarded slave quarters at night—a bent little figure, with hisKoran under his arm. When he had finished reading to them thelaw he would go out and fetch food or—if it so happened that aslave had no shoes, or his shoes pinched—a new pair of shoes.

Imam of the Chiappini Street Mosque, Cape Town, 1929

On April 26, 1744, the fortuijn arrived off Cape Town and begandischarging supplies and instructions sent from Batavia, the capital of theUnited East India Company (VOC). According to the summary record keptin Holland, only one person remained ashore of the 70 who had spent theprevious eight weeks crossing the Indian Ocean. 1 Yet different sources showthat five others would be left in Africa. One was a Javanese called Kyai HajjiMuhammad Mataram. Another was a Yemeni called Sayyid ʿAlawi, said tobe from Mocha. Both were described as “Mohammedan priests.” Both werein chains. Indeed Governor General Van Imhoff’s letter of January 22 gavespecific instruction to Cape Governor Swellengrebel that neither man shouldever be allowed to return to the Indies, as they were said to have been themost prominent troublemakers held accountable for the shocking events thatbefell the European garrison at the Javanese capital of Kartasura in 1741. 2

In order to recount what happened in Java in 1741 and what laterhappened to ʿAlawi, who is today remembered as one of the axial saints ofCape Town, we must enter the web of fortified bureaux, ports andplantations that constituted the VOC’s network in the eighteenth century,stretching as it did from the governing chambers of Holland to the island ofDeshima in Japan. On the way this essay will speak to demonstrations ofpower, violence and resistance, conversion and collaboration, orthodoxy andheresy. In so doing, and at the most basic level, my hope is to extend thereligious dimensions of Kerry Ward’s work on forced migration and offermore detail on the life and afterlife of one exile in particular who iscelebrated in South Africa and utterly forgotten in Indonesia. 3 At somepoints there are things that can be said by virtue of surviving documentation,largely Dutch, and the careful work of Merle Ricklefs and WillemRemmelink. 4 At others there will be a very strong whiff of speculation to

192 Michael Laffan

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

* I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to the staff and regulars of the Cape TownArchives Repository: Ibrahim Kenny, Thembile, Cecil, James, Jaco van de Merwe andMaureen Rall. Beyond its stony walls, too, I would like to express my appreciation to CathySalter and family, Jim Armstrong, Rob Shell, Shamil Jeppie, Antonia Malan, Merle Ricklefsand the ever inquisitive Annabel Gallop. Needless to say, the speculations and flights offancy remain very much my own.1. That one person was the master, Kornelis Booys, who was replaced for the onward journeyto Texel on June 30. J.R. Bruijn et al. (eds.), Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th

centuries, 3 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), III, 372-73.

2. Batavia to Swellengrebel, Batavia, 22 January 1744, in Cape Town Archives Repository(hereafter KAB), C 464, pp. 28-29; and CJ 3186, p. 39.

3. Kerry Ward, networks of empire: forced Migration in the Dutch east india company(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

4. Willem G.J. Remmelink, The chinese War and the collapse of the Javanese State, 1725-1743 (KITLV Press, 1994); and M. C. Ricklefs, The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java 1726-1749: history, literature and islam in the court of Pakubuwana ii (St. Leonards: Allen andUnwin, 1998).

accompany the incense, though I hope in this regard that the detailedforegrounding of the affairs of the Javanese court of Mataram—with itsintrigues, its rituals of protection, and the fatal imbrication in a Sino-MuslimWar against the VOC—will be justified by the ensuing South African story.

In relating a tale insufficiently connected by scholars of either extreme ofthe Indian Ocean rim, I furthermore wish to hazard some suggestions aboutthe potential role and use of the figure of the Arab teacher, and to interrogatethe broader claims of grand opposition between seemingly entrenched Islamand parvenu colonialism across the Indian Ocean. In this regard I will makereference to the long developed Dutch opprobrium of the faith of theiradversaries in Asia and current assumptions regarding the practicesassociated with its Sufi teachers. Of the latter, the most frequently cited aresaid to be Qadiri. That is, they are linked, sometimes loosely, to theQadiriyya brotherhood, which takes its inspiration from the Kurdish saint ofBaghdad, ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077-1166). Yet there were others inmotion as well, from the Rifaʿiyya of al-Jilani’s Iraqi follower Ahmad al-Rifaʿi (1118-81) to the more exclusive ʿAlawiyya, monopolized by high-born Arabs with ancestral connections to the oases of Hadramawt in modern-day Yemen. As we shall see, the ability to claim these connections—whetherby virtue of their attested pedigrees or distinctive practices of“remembrance” of God—requires a certain faith in the power of memory, aninterrogation of the origins of the pedigrees in question, and a readingagainst the colonial grain.

An Unsettled Kingdom: Mataram, 1737-39

Our story begins not with the arrival of an Arab on Java, but with thedeath of a deposed Javanese king in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In early1734, the reigning lord of the major Javanese kingdom of Mataram,Susuhunan Pakubuwana II, learned that a previous ruler, Amangkurat III,whose throne his father had usurped in 1705, had passed away in distantDutch-administered exile on the island of Ceylon (Lanka). Such was not asurprise in and of itself, for by this time the rulers of Java had come, ratherbegrudgingly, to depend on the neighbouring Dutch on the north coast forarms, support and sites of imprisonment for their more troublesome courtiersin the wake of so many uprisings and crises of succession over the previoussix decades.

This situation was a far cry from the early seventeenth century, when therampant Sultan Agung (r. 1613-45) had commenced his long and violentreign by cowing the many minor courts of the island, starting with the morefamously Islamic port towns of the north coast, which he first subdued bythe mid 1620s before turning westward and sending two massive siegesagainst the Dutch in their newly-established base of Batavia in 1628 and

The Sayyid in the Slippers 193


1629 (and with the object of subjugating the rival entrepot state of Bantenthereafter). The VOC weathered these attacks and eventually established amodus vivendi that allowed them to continue their operations in the region.A somewhat undermined Agung subsequently embraced many of the moreIslamic accoutrements of his coastal rivals even as he conquered the lastpious holdout of Giri around 1636, eventually sending a mission to Mecca toobtain the title of sultan late in his reign, much as the rival lords of Bantenhad in 1638, while his court oversaw the translation and reinterpretation ofnumerous texts captured on the north coast. That said, as Merle Ricklefs hasshown, many of these translations bore the marks of a considerableadmixture of mystical ideas grounded in Java’s pre-Islamic culture, thatwould become hegemonic as Agung’s heirs directed their energies towardmaintaining his inheritence in central and east Java, as well as on thefractious island of Madura, sometimes affirming the place of Islam and atothers actively suppressing its champions. 5

Meanwhile the Dutch continued to outplay their English and Muslimcompetitors alike in West Java and in the spice islands further to the east. Aturning point was arguably reached in 1669 with the conquest of theMakassarese Sultanate of Gowa on Sulawesi, whose ships, warriors andeven some ulama were famous throughout the region, from the resolutelyIslamic entrepot states of Aceh in Sumatra to the numerous principalities ofthe Lesser Sundas and Moluccas. Indeed, after his return to the archipelagofrom Arabia, the fall of his hometown of Gowa caused one celebratedteacher, Shaykh Yusuf (1626-99), to seek his fortune in Banten where heserved as the key advisor to the sultan until the latter was deposed by his sonwith VOC aid, leading the resistance thereafter until his capture in 1683.

As we shall see, the Islamic network that linked Aceh, Makassar andBanten was to have its continued impact on Mataram too, despite theinterdictions of the VOC as Agung’s successors also made use of Europeanmen and equipment in their attempts to bring their coastal dependencies (andtheir own relatives) to heel. By the 1670s Mataram had begun todisintegrate, facing famine, attacks from roving Makassarese and, perhapsmost fatefully, the rebellion of Trunajaya (1649-80), who united many ofMataram’s Madurese and Surabayan enemies against Agung’s sonAmangkurat I (r. 1646-77). In 1677 the VOC agreed to aid Amangkurat, andobtained significant promises, including rights to annual payments in cashand crops, the stationing of a garrison at court, the acquisition of lands in thePriangan Highlands south of Batavia (which were not Mataram’s to give),and protectorate status over the buffer sultanate of Cirebon, which lay to theeast of Batavia.

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5. For a general background, see M.C. Ricklefs, A history of Modern indonesia since c.1200, 4th ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), esp. 46-53, 86-111.

Despite the appearance of a controlling interest over Java, though, theVOC, which was undergoing internal crises of its own, sought not so much torule Mataram as deflect it from its own ambitions. Indeed the nature of VOC-Javanese collaboration was fraught and contradictory. While Amangkurat II(r. 1677-1703) seemed almost a creature of the Dutch at his ascension tothrone in 1677, he was unable to service his debts and fomented resistance atcourt, sheltering Makassarese and Balinese enemies of the Dutch. In 1686 aVOC officer, François Tack, sent to renegotiate various aspects of the treatiesat the new court of Kartasura (established in 1680), was killed together withseventy-four other VOC personel, forcing the Dutch garrison to withdraw toJepara. Subsequent infighting and rebellions brought the VOC back intocloser relations with Kartasura, even heralding their forcefull intervention infavour of Pakubuwana I (r. 1704-19), who would see to the deposition andexiling of his more legitimate rival Amangkurat III in 1705.

But to return to our opening story that commences some three decadeslater: In his embassy to Batavia in September of 1734, Mataram’s recently-appointed chief minister, Raden Adipati Natakusuma, requested that hismaster’s European allies return the remains of Amangkurat III and anysurviving family members, for they were the much-missed members of anintricate web of alliances that still overlay the many minor courts andregencies that were within Mataram’s orbit. Rebuffed on many other mattersby the Dutch in 1734, such as the question as to who had authority over thepeople living on the road to Semarang, this petition was at least heard.

Even if it was no longer the fearsome entity that it had been under Agung,Mataram, with a predominantly agrarian population of perhaps some twomillion, remained a potent Islamic domain. As we shall see, its sultan wasthen under the strong influence of a set of close marital relatives with a strongbent towards the faith and its global Sufi iterations, most notably her chiefminister Natakusuma, his brother-in-law Demang Urawan and even, I wouldpropose, the latter’s sister, Queen Ratu Kencana. And even if the VOC,having aided her lords in their wars of succession, had reasserted the right tomaintain a garrison at Kartasura, it was more akin to a nervous embassywhose soldiers were technically at the service of the Susuhunan, whosepalace walls faced them across the main square with its sacred fig trees.

On the other hand, the Susuhunan remained bound to the VOC byextensive debts. These were meant to be serviced with cash and deliveries ofrice that were intended to keep the wider European operation in motion asmuch as the market crops of coffee, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and, mostlucratively of all, sugar. Still, such obligations were still rarely met, and ifone were to look for a tangible centre of VOC authority in central Java, ithardly lay in the narrow confines of the Kartasuran fort, but began tomanifest a sweaty day’s march north on the road to Semarang, a town that



was, like so many of the archipelago’s ports, in the orbit of Batavia. With itscastle, its grand canal, and its masonry buildings looming over a mix ofsimpler wooden structures, that city and its environs took in a population ofsome twenty thousand people drawn from across Asia, Europe and Africa.And it was to Batavia that Natakusuma led an embassy once more inOctober of 1736, returning by way of Semarang on April 9, 1737.

On his triumphant return to court, Natakusuma not only brought back theremains of Amangkurat, the surviving exiles, and a renewed treaty with theVOC. Far more importantly to the Javanese he brought numeroussupernaturally-powerful items of regalia that Amangkurat had managed tospirit away nearly three decades beforehand (and which the Dutch believedthat they still had in their storerooms in Lanka). Consisting of daggers (kris),pikes, and other warlike accoutrements, these were deemed crucial supportsfor the rightful governance of a kingdom whose elite were divided as to whatto do about the Dutch and the Chinese who often served as theirintermediaries. 6

This was not all. Natakusuma brought another potent ornament in theform of an Arab called ʿAlawi, who must have gained special attention forhis claim to descent from the Prophet, a lineage marked by his use of the titlesayyid. This was not the first time that an official mission to Batavia hadresulted in a connection with the wider Islamic world. After the largelyinconclusive discussions of 1734, Natakusuma had brought another teacherback with him in early 1735. This was Kyai Hajji Mataram, whose name(part title, part toponym) indicated that he was a Javanese distinguished byhaving made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was only in May of 1736, though,that the Dutch learned that Hajji Mataram had been given a residence nearthe Chinese quarter of Kartasura. Supported by an income of 100households, he was reportedly bent on establishing a religious school with adozen followers. 7

That the newly-arrived Governor at Semarang, Nicolaas Crul, was aliveto ʿAlawi’s presence in Kartasura in April of 1737 either speaks to anincreasing anxiety about such activities, or perhaps a sighting of the teacheron their short voyage from Batavia as ʿAlawi and the Lankan princes madetheir way to Semarang. 8 For now, though, the written record is silent as to

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6. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, toegang 1.04.02, VOC 8972, S. Kinderman to AbrahamFormieux, Colombo, 23 March 1737; M.C. Ricklefs, “The Missing Pusakas of Kartasura,” inSulastin Sutrisno et al. (eds.), Bahasa – Sastra – Budaya: Ratna Manikam UntaianPersembahan Kepada Prof. Dr. P.J. Zoetmulder (Yokyakarta: Gadjah Mada UniversityPress, 1985), 601-30.

7. Remmelink, chinese War, 94-95.

8. That said, Crul first made reference to his presence after his translator’s reading of a letterfrom the Susuhunan to Capt. Von Glan on April 9. VOC 2418, Crul to Duirvelt, Semarang,12 April 1737, under cover of Crul to Batavia, 21 May 1737.

ʿAlawi’s movements prior to 1737. It is thus hard to know what had impelledhim to leave his hometown of Mocha, where the coffee trade sustained some10-12,000 inhabitants. But even as demand for that stimulant continuedunabated in the Ottoman Empire, the external share of that trade was nowstarting to relocate—including to Java, where it was successfully cultivatedon VOC land in the Priangan and towards Cirebon. 9

Having much less need of coffee and no market for their sugar in Persia,the VOC was practically out of the Gulf trade in 1737 in any case. And if ithad little need of Arabica coffee, there was even less desire to import Arabclerics. Hence we might imagine ʿAlawi having made his way to SoutheastAsia on an Asian vessel and more than likely in the company of returning“Jawi” sojourners, as people from the wider Southeast Asian region wereknown. 10 Hajji Mataram’s accompanying Natakusuma on his secondmission to Batavia is perhaps suggestive of some connection with ʿAlawi.They could have met in Mecca or Medina, if not in coastal Yemen, whereearlier Jawis like ʿAbd al-Ra’uf of Singkel (1615-93) and his contemporaryShaykh Yusuf of Makassar are known to have studied and fully imbibed thelearning of the Sufi tariqas.

Still, there is no evidence of any such meeting for now, or even of arecent arrival. Perhaps, like so many Arab sojourners in the courts ofSoutheast Asia, such as the now famous Nur al-Din al-Raniri who was soinfluential at Aceh in the late 1630s, this particular sayyid had already been aguest elsewhere in the region, and only now was setting his cap at the largestremaining independent kingdom of Islam below the winds. 11

Regardless of how this particular adventurer’s steps were first directed toKartasura, ʿAlawi would have found himself in bewildering circumstances atcourt. Over the coming weeks, and in step with the festivities to mark theSusuhunan’s impending birthday on April 25, the Lankan princes would befeted. At the same time, however, they were kept under the watchful eye ofthe leading courtier, Demang Urawan, who had assumed day-to-day runningof affairs at the palace in the absence of his brother-in-law Natakusuma.Although technically of a lower rank than the chief minister, Urawan was theson of a celebrated exile, Pangeran Purbaya (d. 1726), whom Merle Ricklefsnotes had been sent to Batavia in 1721. Schooled, as Ricklefs also suggests,



9. Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620-1740 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958),183-211; Michel Tuchscherer (ed.), le commerce du café avant l’ère des plantationscoloniales : espaces, réseaux, sociétés (XVe-XiXe siècle) (Cairo : Institut françaisd’archéologie orientale, 2001).

10. Glamann referred to the ongoing presence of all manner of vessels calling at Mocha eachseason, including Acehnese ones. Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 189.

11. On Raniri and his movements, see the authoritative work of Paul Wormser: le Bustan al-Salatin de nuruddin ar-Raniri : Réflexions sur le rôle culturel d’un étranger dans le mondemalais au XViie siècle (Paris : Cahiers d’Archipel, 2012).

to the highest degree of a Javanese prince, it is likely that the young Urawancame to know much of the Dutch (and wider world) before his return toKartasura around 1727. He was also reputed to have been a lover ofPakubuwana II in his youth, and now seemed unassailable as the royalbrother-in-law twice over. This was accomplished by way of his marriage toPakubuwana’s sister, with his own sister being married to Pakubuwana inturn. 12

Within days of his arrival, too, ʿAlawi may have joined the throngs towatch one of Urawan’s leading henchmen, Raden Dipasana, engage inmortal combat. This contest was ordered as punishment to mollify the VOCfor Dipasana’s having sent his retainers to occupy the mosque of Tuban andthus gain control of that coastal regency in late 1736. The VOC, though,believed that Dipasana was a scapegoat and that the operation had beenplotted by Urawan. When ʿAlawi arrived, the Dutch garrison commander,Hendrick Duirvelt, was gravely concerned by rumours that Urawan had beenhoarding arms and ammunition originally intended for that purpose. 13 Afterprotecting his man for as long as he could, Urawan had handed Dipasanaover on Natakusuma’s return. And so it was that the loyal henchman, armedonly with a kris and small club, was made to fight a tiger. After making agood account of himself and even slaying the feline, the badly mauled noblewas dragged away to Urawan’s compound for the coup de grace by theSusuhunan’s kris.

Or at least that was what Duirvelt was told by Natakusuma on April 23during a visit to mark the king’s birthday. 14 By mid July the Dutch would beincensed to learn that Dipasana had been nursed, and his daughter evenbetrothed to Urawan. 15 The VOC had other grievances too. Dipasana’s casehad intersected with that of a Sino-Javanese known for his exactions amongChinese rice-procurers, tollgate operators, and traders who were soindispensable to the Dutch. He too was a protégé of Urawan and hadrecently been granted the title of Gunawangsa. By chance, though, thisGunawangsa had been arrested just as Natakusuma was on his way toBatavia.

During his negotiations at Batavia in 1736-37, Natakusuma hadsuccessfully convinced the VOC to prohibit Chinese from travelling into thecountryside and to leave the accumulation of the required harvests to thelocal lords. He also negotiated the right of the court to try its own officials,

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12. Regarding Urawan and his early history, see Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 17, 130.

13. VOC 2418, Hendrik Duirvelt to R.C. von Glan, Kartasura, 20 March 1737.

14. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 23 April 1737, under cover of Crul to Batavia,Semarang, 21 May 1737, apart.

15. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 12 and 22 July 1737, under cover of Crul toValkenier, Semarang, 30 July 1737.

like Gunawangsa, and so the VOC was compelled to hand him over. 16 Thekillings then stopped for a moment, but the assumedly Muslim Gunawangsa,whom the Dutch understood to be a spiritual mentor to Natakusuma, wastreated leniently after giving an oath in the royal mosque in which he deniedany guilt or connection to Urawan. This had been carried out in a processthat Duirvelt deemed to be an “abominable” parody of justice overseen by a“minor” cleric called Poemoelut. 17

Either way, in 1737 it was clear that, with his stockpile of weapons andnetwork of bellicose retainers and pliant priests, Urawan remained a powerto be reckoned with at Kartasura. ʿAlawi would certainly have seen thisconfirmed on the royal birthday, celebrated with the formal parading of agreat elephant that had been gifted by the Governor General, the formalraising of the Lankan princes to their new ranks with appropriate salaries,and Urawan’s own elevation to his father’s title of Pangeran Arya Purbaya.This promotion, which Crul felt presaged further “mischief” from “thearrogant and proud statesman,” amounted, as Ricklefs observes, to formalrecognition of Urawan/Purbaya’s control of the inner affairs at court. 18

And ʿAlawi, too, would profit. The day after the ceremonies marking theProphet’s Birthday on July 11, when Duirvelt would report the survival ofDipasana, he also noted that Sayyid ʿAlawi had begun to preside over Fridayprayers together with Hajji Mataram (displacing the previously usefulPoemoelut). This was in addition to being assigned a new house built inNatakusuma’s compound and a concubine selected from the court. 19

In some senses Urawan/Purbaya and his Islamic proteges seemed firmlyin control in 1737. During Governor Crul’s embassy to Kartasura inSeptember-October, at which time he delivered what he thought to be thetrue ancestral regalia, the dominant faction made its feelings mockinglyclear. For Crul was witness to several battles staged between victoriousbuffaloes and tigers, two tiger ordeals (won by the accused again), not tomention straight out tiger-sticking—and all in ignorance of the symbolismthat equated the VOC with rapacious tigers. Still, if things were bad fortigers, not all was necessarily well for the newly-annointed Purbaya. Inretrospect this had already become apparent on the Prophet’s birthday in Julywhen a key ally had not been granted a coveted post. Perhaps Natakusuma



16. Remmelink, chinese War, 92, 100-01, 103; Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 92-93,179-80.

17. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 9 May 1737, under cover of Crul to Batavia,Semarang, 21 May 1737, apart. Most likely called Pemulut, the documents also spell hisname as Poemulut.

18. VOC 2418, Crul to Batavia, Semarang, 21 May 1737, apart; Ricklefs, Seen and UnseenWorlds, 199.

19. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 12 July 1737, under cover of Crul to Valkenier,Semarang, 30 July 1737.

could sense what was coming and made contingency plans. UnderNatakusuma’s watchful eyes, or perhaps watching over him in turn, ʿAlawiwould gain yet more access to power as the edifice built up by the newPurbaya would start to collapse. The turning point came in March of 1738,when Queen Ratu Kencana, Purbaya’s beloved (and so-strategically married)sister, suffered a stillbirth.

It was at this juncture that Commander Duirvelt gained fresh intelligenceof ʿAlawi. In an attempt to gain intercession for the ailing queen, flintlockswere discharged at six each evening to ward of evil spirits. Sayyid ʿAlawiand Hajji Mataram were moreover said to be by her bedside or inconsultation with the Susuhunan on matters of state, day and night. It waseven implied that the Queen was a devotee of the teachings they offered, forit was seemingly by virtue of this devotion that Pakubuwana had called uponʿAlawi and Mataram, allegedly referring to her as “brother” in theirpresence, and having them treat her in contravention of normal Javanesepractices. 20

Of course such news, filtered through hostile informants and passed on toconfused Dutch servants, is hard to interpret. While it is possible that use ofthe term “brother” points to the Arabic usage favoured by members of a Sufiorder, who often refer to each other as fellow brethren (ikhwan), we must becautious given that the Javanese term for brother is not gendered, beingmarked instead by difference in age and status. It is thus the abnegation ofthe latter difference that is perhaps most pertinent for us here. And we arereally only left to ponder the, seemingly inappropriate, relationship betweenan Arab interloper and a Javanese prince.

In his analysis, the ever-worried Commander Duirvelt certainly reportedhow the Arab dared to “strut about” in the royal presence (and in his slippersno less!) while the anti-Purbaya/Natakusuma nobles were aghast at theensuing institutional paralysis. Duirvelt was told repeatedly that “no weightydecision” could be taken at the court without the prior consultation with thenew “priests.” 21 Even when Ratu Kencana remained ill two weeks later,Pakubuwana was said to be consoled by ʿAlawi, emphatically identified asthe key means for the mischief of the ministers, and doubtless further evilshould she recover. 22

But she did not recover, and in mid April the gamelan orchestra wassilenced following her death on the 14th. Matters soon came to a head forUrawan/Purbaya with the claim that he had been intriguing against the VOCwith a rebel prince of Makassar. Even if the accusation was false, the

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20. VOC 2449, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 25 March, 1738, under cover of Crul to Batavia,1 April 1738.

21. VOC 2449, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 25 March 1738.

22. VOC 2449, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 31 March 1738.

Susuhunan decided to rusticate his brother-in-law in early October, beforehanding him to the Company in November on the understanding that thiswould be for a period in Batavia, and in exchange for being allowed to retainNatakusuma as his key statesman. 23

Hajji Mataram was weakened by association with Purbaya’s departure forthe North Coast, and then, quite contrary to Pakubuwana’s wishes, to Lanka.In October of 1738 it was rumoured that the once high priest at court hadbeen sent off to the town of Bagelan to serve as a normal cleric after adispute with ʿAlawi. 24 The precise reason for this is unclear. 25 Suffice it tosay that Natakusuma seemed determined to protect ʿAlawi. Moreover, theArab had a further role to play as Natakusuma would enlarge his Java-widenetwork of alliances. In July of 1739, Duirvelt would learn that the Arab hadbeen married at his own instigation some three months previously to ayouthful beauty brought from the holy mount of Giri, near the port ofGresik. 26 Evidently this was not deemed particularly important to Crul atSemarang, given that he did not, in his cover letter to Batavia, summarize theaccount of the secret and supposedly forced marriage held in Natakusuma’scompound, or yet the woman’s teary appeals to be returned to her family.Indeed Crul was more fixated on Pakubuwana’s pardoning of the remainingfollowers of Purbaya. 27

Islamic Connections

Stepping outside of the confines of the Dutch fortress, ʿAlawi’s marriagecould well have been a major source of religious prestige in Javanese eyes,and a powerful stitch in the political fabric of the realm. Setting aside thefact that it was all seen as a part of Natakusuma’s strategy of shoring upsupport with the courts of the coast, the mount of Giri is the site of one of thefirst Islamic polities of Java so often in tension with Mataram, and the youngwoman was implied as being a descendent of its sainted masters. Indeed wemay recall that, in his rise, Mataram’s Sultan Agung had crushed the northcoast ports before turning west to face the fledgling VOC at Batavia, and itwas from these courts that many texts were imported. In Indonesia today,



23. Remmelink, chinese War, 116.

24. Duirvelt mentioned the demotion of Mataram, but not the role of ʿAlawi; which wasreferred to in the subsequent cover letter of Crul. See VOC 7889, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura,29 October 1738 and Crul to Batavia, 3 November 1738, apart.

25. Ricklefs notes that both had clashed previously over their official roles, and uncertainhierarchy, with the two men alternately leading prayers or giving the Friday address. SeeM.C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A history of islamization from the fourteenth to theearly nineteenth centuries (EastBridge, 2006), 125.

26. VOC 7839, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 20 July 1739.

27. VOC 7839, Crul to Valkenier, Semarang, 29 July 1739.

moreover, Giri is presented as a gateway for a mystical form of Islam intothe archipelago. Yet can this tell us much of ʿAlawi and his beliefs, or indeedthose of the Javanese court? Clearly the Arab outsider was received as ateacher endowed with a knowledge of healing and attendant rituals ofprotection, but the sources make it difficult to pin him down except as somesort of patron to what Ricklefs argues was a rising interest in mysticism ledby a younger generation (with their marked disdain for the feline Dutch).Citing a text once in Urawan’s possession, Ricklefs has shown how theprince was attuned to a mix of Javanese traditions and those from beyond itsshores. The manuscript contains Arabic and Javanese glosses of the fourfoldSufi path, a translation of the Malay mystical poetry of Hamza Fansuri (d.1527), whose writings al-Raniri had disapproved of in Aceh, a Shattaridiagram (associated with the teachings of the Indian Siraj al-Din ʿAbdallahShattar, d.1406) explaining the inner salience of the testimony of faith, and apedigree of the Qadiri tradition. 28

This last element implied that its bearer was endowed with secretknowledge handed down by the Prophet through a series of teachers,principally ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani, whose tomb is now in Baghdad. The lasttwo masters in the list are the obliquely styled Shaykh Muhammad Khalifaand “the lowly and humble” holder of the pedigree, Shaykh Muhammad,who listed himself as “a seeker born in Intan.” Here I would wish to go outon something of a limb and suggest that the last place-name (lit. “diamond”),could well refer to Central Batavia much as it does today, originally being alocal gloss for the south-western bastion of the castle, known in Dutch asDiamant. If it were the case, then it could even be suggestive of arelationship formed with Urawan during his youthful exile. 29

Still, there may well have been other such gems in Java, and as thejuxtaposition of the Shattari diagram already indicates, possession of aQadiri pedigree does not a Qadiri make, or at least not exclusively. Even ifthey are remembered as key disseminators of particular lines in SoutheastAsia, the aforementioned ʿAbd al-Ra’uf of Singkel (famous as a Shattari)and Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar (a Khalwati) are known to have transcribednumerous pedigrees during their travels in Southeast Asia and Arabiawithout necessarily having met the shaykhs directly. 30

Unfortunately, too, we find no explicitly Arab linkage in Urawan’s list.The vague mention of a Muhammad Khalifa points to a moment of Qadiritransmission at some distance from an acknowledged centre, bearing in mind

202 Michael Laffan


28. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 205; BL, I.O. Islamic 2446, 333r-336r. I am gratefulto Oman Fathurahman for identifying the image.

29. British Library (herafter BL), I.O. Islamic 2446, 336r.

30. See Martin van Bruinessen, “Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani and the Qadiriyya inIndonesia,” Journal of the history of Sufism 1-2 (2000): 361-95.

that a khalifa is usually the viceroy of an absent master. And even if thearchipelago’s competing sovereigns were given to collecting diverse lineagesbinding them to the person of the Prophet, and moreover welcoming of hislineal descendants, the various (Sufi) representatives were not alwaysencouraging of rivals from abroad. Around 1731, for example, Hajji AhmadMutamakin of Cabolek had tried to propagate at Kartasura the Naqshbandiform associated with a Yemeni teacher called Zayn. 31 At that time, though,the recently-returned Urawan/Purbaya was convinced by a Javanese teacher,one Ketib Anom (“Young Khatib”) of Kudus, that Mutamakin’s foreignknowledge was confusing to the common faithful, declaring that all therequisite learning could be extracted from the Javanese tradition (in whichthe Shattari rite of ʿAbd al-Ra’uf was already represented) if one only knewhow to read its texts correctly. As Ketib Anom mockingly noted, there wasno need for these books from Arabia. 32

Naturally such books, and preferably with owners’ marks, would beuseful to the historian. Hence it is all the more frustrating that currentholdings suggest that ʿAlawi never put his name to any texts for the elitebrethren around him. With the precise nature of ʿAlawi’s teachings and hisattitude to local traditions still opaque, we must leave him at the height of hispowers. For now he was seemingly the preeminent cleric in the largestMuslim realm in Indonesia, linking the archipelago to the birthplace of theprophet in a marriage approved by his sovereign patron. As it stood, theSusuhunan remained the axial figure of the Javanese Islamic tradition, if onewhose political choices would prove disastrous. To understand these choicesand their repercussions, we must return to Batavia.

Fear, Massacre and the Shame of Conversion, 1740-43

Trouble had been brewing for some time at Batavia and the many coastaltowns where the Chinese were a prominent part of the social fabric. Theirships had long handled significant measures of trade to and, far moreimportantly in later years, within the region. From Batavia’s formalinception in 1619, the Dutch had encouraged their Chinese and Japaneseallies to settle there even as other, more clearly Muslim, groupings likeJavanese and “Moors” were denied entrance. Indeed, at Banten andJayakarta the Dutch and English were granted a place in quarterstraditionally assigned to the Chinese. Still, the walled Dutch city thatemerged at Jayakarta had many representatives of broader Indies culture that



31. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 131-51. On Zayn, perhaps Zayn b. Muhammad ʿAbdal-Baqi al-Mizjaji (1643-1725), the son of Shaykh Yusuf’s teacher, see Van Bruinessen, “TheOrigins and Development of the Naqshbandi Order in Indonesia,” Der islam 67 (1990), 150-179, esp. 156-57.

32. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 149.

took in Christian and Muslim alike. They ranged from the mixed-racechildren of VOC employees, to Makassarese and Ambonese soldiers,manumitted and Christianized locals called Mardijkers (from the Malaymerdeka meaning “free”), and the thousands of slaves taken from across theIndian Ocean and Southeast Asia, including East Africa, Madagascar, Lanka,the Coromandel Coast, Bengal, and almost all the islands of the archipelago.As far as the last, hardly homogenous, group is concerned, by the eighteenthcentury the majority came from Bali and Sulawesi.

Even so, it was apparent that it was the Chinese who oiled the machineryof VOC capitalism, who shipped the rice and timber tribute from the east ofJava, and who provided food, alcohol, companionship and a notable tint tothe culture of the north coast, especially after Qing bans on travel wereformally lifted in 1684. Over time, too, the Chinese had taken on themanagement of much of the agriculture beyond Batavia, running many ofthe sugar mills in its immediate hinterland.

Regardless of VOC blindness to any distinction beyond being recentlyarrived or having deeper roots, with many being “shaved” and identifiablyMuslim as a consequence, there were key divisions among the Chinese.Those within Batavia’s walls—and there was a peak of some five thousandin the city in the early 1730s—tended to come from Fujian. 33 By contrastmany of the newcomers lodged in the settlements outside the fortificationshad roots in the ports of Guangdong. Still, there was solidarity of sorts, andthe VOC was happy to deal through the city-dwellers.

By the late 1730s, however, the intramural population was in decline,ravished by a series of malaria outbreaks. When Natakusuma led his firstembassy in late 1734 he had found little enthusiasm from a moribundadministration. Governor General Dirk van Cloon would himself be dead byMarch of 1735. And beyond the walls that would be briefly overseen byAbraham Patras (1735-37) and Adriaan Valckenier (1737-1741), thesituation was parlous. The closure of the Persian market for sugar meant thatthere was less and less work for the mills, let alone the newcomers, whichfed a trend towards banditry and even direct attacks. In July of 1740 theVOC proposed to expel many immigrants, which only led to rumors of plansto deport all “excess” Chinese, or even to drown them beyond sight of land.

Having obtained the worried cooperation of the Chinese quartermasters,who disarmed the intramural population after a post outside the walls wasoverrun on September 7, 1740, the VOC and their servants panicked,unleashing nearly two weeks of bloodshed on the 9th. By the end of the goryproceedings, a local Chinese population exceeding some 10,000 (counting

204 Michael Laffan


33. Remco Raben, Batavia and colombo: The ethnic and Spatial Order of Two colonialcities 1600-1800, unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of Leiden, 1996, 173.

many beyond the walls) had evaporated. 34 Once the panic was over, areassuring message was sent to the Susuhunan who was requested to takecare of roving brigands while—perhaps with greater anxiety—a formalapology was dispatched to the Qing emperor. 35 Certainly, the Dutch werewell aware that their enterprise depended on collaboration. Within weeksofficials were instructed to woo Chinese artisans once more and to treat theirtraders well.

There were ultimately many Chinese who did respond to such offers. By1743 significant settlements would even reappear outside the walls. Notsurprisingly though there were many who did not respond so kindly in 1740,and roving bands continued to link up across the island, including in thevicinity of Kartasura. The VOC therefore encouraged the Susuhunan to takethem in hand, and his chief minister Natakusuma was put on the job. In thisendeavor, however, the statesman played a double game, for Pakubuwana’scourt was divided on how to react to this falling out, and assumed weakeningof, the two foreign populations. Ricklefs and Remmelink seem to agree thatlingering anger over the unwanted expulsion of Urawan/Purbaya may wellhave pushed the Susuhunan and his Islamising backers toward the Chineserebels in the end, many of them being Muslim too. Matters were not helpedby the fact that the new garrison commander, Johannes van Velsen, managedto give offense on several occasions with his brusque manner and paranoidvisitations, even entering the palace with loaded pistols in his belt. 36

After various protestations of enduring loyalty to the VOC on the part ofNatakusuma, the garrison would be surprised by a sudden Javanese attack on20 July 1741. An attempt on Van Velsen failed in the fort, while dozens ofmen and a cannon were overwhelmed outside. Panicked after fighting apitched battle against their assailants who had managed to gain access beforethe first shots were fired, the skittish denizens buried their fellow Christianand flung the corpses of their Muslim assailants into the river, hunkeringdown as preparations were made across the square for a full-scale siege.

Messages were sent to the Susuhunan under truce, but the bewilderedgarrison was merely informed by Natakusuma on July 25 that Pakubuwanawas angry with them. According to the testimony of the surviving officers,



34. Striking data from December 1740 lists the only Chinese in Batavia as a “family” of sixwomen and one daughter in the wijk of Hendrick Dusseldorp. See VOC 7559, Brieven enPapieren van Batavia, 10 January 1741.

35. Huysers would later quip that it was fortunate that the Dutch had not treated the Japanesein such a way. Ary Huysers, het leeven van Reinier de Klerk Gouverneur-Generaal vannederlands indië (Amsterdam: G. Roos, 1787), 13. Perhaps they need not have worried.Memorials submitted to Beijing blamed greedy Chinese leaders in Batavia as much as theirtax-hungry overlords. Claudine Salmon, “The Massacre of 1740 as Reflected in aContemporary Chinese Narrative,” Archipel 77 (2009): 149-54.


Van Velsen sent out repeated requests to be allowed to retreat to the coast,and was offered false hope until the arrival of a large force of Chinese onAugust 1. There were also mocking encounters. Just after midnight on July27, a Javanese appeared before the ramparts claiming to have a royal letterfor the Commander. Beckoned forward, he was told to swiftly pass itthrough an eyelet or receive some lead for his troubles. The courier merelylaughed and said he would jump over the wall, upon which he scamperedatop the battlement and was fired upon without effect. A second volleybrought him to earth. In the morning his corpse was stripped and thrown intothe river. At this time he was found to be in possession of a spell book,bearing a Javanese invocation that “all waters before him would be pushedback, the mountains would make way, and no firearm could do him harm.”While such invocations evidently did their bearer no good, this caused thegarrison to see him as an emissary of “the Javanese Pope Arja Mataram.” 37

The standoff continued. On August 8, the trumpeter returned from thepalace with a letter declaring that Pakubuwana and his ministers had nointention of harming the garrison if they would but willingly accept Islam. 38

According to the later report of Lieutenant Wiltvang and his subordinates,the garrison rebuffed the offer, declaring that, “by the Almighty and allChristians,” they would be “protected from such thoughts and would preferto fight for as long as the strength remained in their bodies.” Later thatafternoon Van Velsen reread the letter and gave a further address on the“abomination” of conversion. The following day an attempt was made towrite a letter to Pakubuwana promising to ameliorate the conditions of theLankan exiles, and especially his “brother and sister.” 39 This was a clearreference to Purbaya and Pakubuwana’s sister, and Van Velsen knew fullwell that the court regarded all the exiles as members of one much missedand forgiven assemblage. 40 Van Velsen even intimated that things might gobadly for them should the “Mohammedan crown” be disgraced by allowing amassacre of VOC employees. 41

The Susuhunan merely renewed his offer to pardon the garrison if theywould but willingly convert to Islam. Having resolved to fight to the last and

206 Michael Laffan


37. P.A. Leupe, “Verhaal van het Gepasseerde te Kartasoera vóór en onder de Belegering,Item na het Demolieren der Vesting, door den Opper-Chirurgijn Aarnout Gerritsz 1742,”“Aanteekening, van den 20sten Julij 1741 in Z.M. Hofwagt,” and “Aanteekening, van hetGepasseerde te Kartasoera door den Luitenant Nicolaas Wiltvang en de Overige Vaandrigs,”Bijdragen tot de Taal-, land en Volkenkunde 11 (1864): 102-41, esp. 130.

38. Leupe, “Verhaal,” 133.


40. In August of 1737, Natakusuma had conveyed a request that an older grouping of exilesdispatched to Lanka and the Cape should continue to be supported by the court. VOC 2418,Crul to Valkenier, Semarang, 21 August 1737.

41. Leupe, “Verhaal,” 134 n.

convening a collective prayer in the early hours of August 10, Van Velsen’sartillerist discovered that most of the guns had been spiked. With no chanceof making a valiant end of it, they surrendered. Van Velsen accepted a whitebanner from a garrison slave before sending some 190 defenders out in rankorder—from slaves to senior officers and their families. The men were thenrestrained in small groups, given Javanese dress and, after interrogations,incorporated within various retinues.

No general massacre ensued, which subsequent observers haveinterpreted as a majority submission to Islam and its jubilant partisans.Certainly there were pious celebrations. Soon after their victory, one of themen in Natakusuma’s orbit set to work on a poem that he claimed distilledthe essence of the fath al-Rahman—Zakariyya al-Ansari’s (d. 1520) famouscommentary on a much older work by Raslan al-Dimashqi, who had been aninveterate enemy of the crusader Franks. 42

It is just possible that the poet in question may have been Ketib Anom,the defender of the Javanized Shattari tradition against Hajji Mutamakin andhis Arab books in 1731. 43 If he were, it would perhaps explain why this textis now bound with a Shattari pedigree written in the same, if slightly morerushed, hand. In any case, by linking ʿAbd al-Shattar’s esoteric knowledge ofthe Prophet to Southeast Asia via Ahmad Qushashi of Medina’s studentʿAbd al-Ra’uf bin ʿAli of Singkel (who is defined as being “of the people ofShaykh Hamza [al-Fansuri]”), this pedigree terminates with Pakubuwana,who is identified as nothing less than a master of the order and a descendantof the Prophet. 44

But what of ʿAlawi? Even if there is mention in these pedigrees of anearlier teacher of “the ʿAlawi clan” (Sayyid Wajhallah kang abangsa ʿAlawi,f.38r and 25r.), our particular Arab is not in sight, though this is not toexclude him from the celebrations or their consequences. Later Dutch reportsasserted that, aside from Natakusuma’s son-in-law Rajaniti, “the inflamatorypriest” was the loudest voice demanding the conversion of the Dutch.Similarly Javanese accounts of the war place both Hajji Mataram andʿAlawi—described as the “Lord Sayyid” (Tuwan Sayyid) or “the BelovedSayyid” (Sayyid Mahbub)—in the vanguard of the emboldened force thatmarched off to besiege Semarang which, like other north coast Dutch



42. See BL, MS Jav. 83 and G.W.J. Drewes, Directions for Travellers on the Mystic Path:Zakariyyā’ al-Anṣārī’s Kitāb Fatḥ al-Raḥmān and its indonesian Adaptations (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 3. Ricklefs has corrected the original date of composition proposedby Drewes and argued for 14 August 1741. See Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 255, n 42.

43. Ricklefs notes that a Ketib Anom was instated as penghulu in 1739 when the court waspurged of various elements, including known homosexuals. Ricklefs, Seen and UnseenWorlds, 221-22.

44. BL, MS Jav. 83, 24v-26r. It would appear that the author made two copies of thepedigree, as one incomplete version is found at 19v-20r.

enclaves, was also surrounded by hostile Chinese who seemed to have theupper hand for the moment. 45

While smaller bases, such as that of Rembang, had fallen, the Dutch didbetter further east, and the all-important siege of Semarang was repulsed inmid November, facing well-organized resistance and having failed to exciteany sympathies among the VOC’s auxiliaries. After all, as Remmelinkargues, these same troops had been involved in the Batavian pogrom, andhardly felt that it was in their interest to side with the Chinese simplybecause Java’s paramount ruler declared it to be an Islamic duty. 46 By lateNovember of 1741 the court that had sent letters across the island declaringwar on the Infidel Company would be in negotiations as the rebellious andopportunistic Cakraningrat IV of Madura was sweeping westward with hiseyes on the throne. Indeed his forces ultimately sacked Kartasura in Octoberof 1742, after Pakubuwana had abandoned it to the Chinese and their allieson June 30, and he fully expected to retain the city and the throne. He wouldbe sadly mistaken, as the VOC decided in the end that a penitentPakubuwana was preferable for their purposes.

On the whole our understanding of what happened in Kartasura after thecapitulation of the Dutch garrison is the work of vengeful reconstructionafter the return of the much-diminished Pakubuwana to the Dutch fold in1742. By then the Susuhunan, in exchange for Dutch protection and in thehope of keeping his throne, had cast off his Islamic advisers and accepted thearrest and exile of Natakusuma to Lanka. Yet there were others to bepunished for events that captured the imagination of two British scholar-officials some fifty years after they had apparently been forgotten by theVOC. In their popular nineteenth century histories, Thomas StamfordRaffles (1781-1826) and John Crawfurd (1783-1868) reported that thegarrison had suffered cold-blooded murder and forced circumcision. Raffles,who relied on Dutch reports, seems to have thought that the greater part ofthe garrison was circumcised after their officers had been killed; whileCrawfurd, citing “the authority of native manuscripts,” declared that theSusuhunan had the officers convert, undergo circumcision and then bebludgeoned. 47

The fact remains that the overwhelming majority were spared afterhaving been interrogated and their possessions confiscated. The initial

208 Michael Laffan


45. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 253 n. and 260, citing Babad Kraton, II, 368, 373.


47. Thomas Stamford Raffles, The history of Java, John Bastin intro., Oxford in AsiaHistorical Reprints (Kuala Lumpur etc.: Oxford University Press, 1965), 218-22; JohnCrawfurd, history of the indian Archipelago: containing an Account of the Manners, Arts,languages, Religions, institutions, and commerce of its inhabitants, 3 vols. (Edinburgh:Archibald Constable and Co., 1820), II, 363.

victims were Van Velsen and an ill-starred companion, while others (perhapsa dozen) lost their lives later in separate arguments. 48 Yet even asRemmelink and Ricklefs play down these killings in their engaging debateover Javanese historiography, both imply that there were indeed forcedcircumcisions in 1741. This is not to say that the issue is a fiction per se.Dutchmen had certainly accepted circumcision before as a prerequisite forconversion, and the spectre of this practice did appear in the Dutch accounts,as in Van Velsen’s address of August 8:

Friends and Brothers! I hope that all of you, by the grace of God and the Holy Spirit, willnot turn aside from our Christian religion, and attach yourselves to the accursedMohammedan faith. Just think, friends!, what a disgraceful abomination circumcision isin itself, setting aside the fact that leaving the faith entails the greatest dishonour, makingus no longer worthy to stand before God and Christians. 49

Yet it is striking that there is no first-hand account of any individualhaving undergone this “abomination.” While perhaps indicative of the deepshame of apostasy and physical violation, this may also stem from the factthat the main accounts were relayed by men who were treated relatively wellin captivity, and these were not available until 177 survivors (and womenand children, though not, it seems, their slaves) were gathered together inlate December.

Of course, by the time that they were assembled, tales of atrocities hadalready spread far and wide. One German soldier stationed at Surabaya in1741 explained that when the garrison heard that “300” of their Kartasurancolleagues had been circumcised before a proportion were dismembered orwhipped to death, they set upon their Chinese prisoners and massacredthem. 50 By contrast, of the few victims whose testimony is documented,Wiltvang and three ensigns could only recount that having apparentlyrefused “circumcision”, four men assigned to Rajaniti (themselves?) weretreated in a most “odious” manner. This odium entailed being made to goand “pray each day in their temples and in the manner of their laws” as wellas being obliged to sit in attendance before their new lords, lighting theirpipes, taking lessons from their “popes” until midnight, and even keepingtheir fasts. 51

The officers’ account agrees in this regard with that of the surgeon,Aarnout Gerritsz., who never recounted the Susuhunan’s demands or Van



48. For the death of Van Velsen and the narrow escape of a guardsman, see Leupe,“Verhaal,” 119.


50. Mary Somers Heidhues, “1740 and the Chinese Massacre in Batavia: Some GermanEyewitness Accounts,” Archipel 77 (2009), 117-148, at 140.


Velsen’s address (he despised the man), nor yet admitted to havingconverted. Rather he claimed that, after a terrifying prelude that saw hisgoods ransacked as his wife begged for his life, he was the subject of lessonsgiven by a local “pope,” being made to write out the basic elements of thecreed in Arabic script. Still, he had an appropriate victim of the ultimateabomination in the duplicitous translator, who was last seen dressed as aJavanese noble. Sent off to the ancestral site of Mataram with a retinuecomprised of several of the garrison, the interpreter fell out with Rajanitiwhereupon he was circumcised and killed, much to Gerritsz.’s satisfaction(many of the surgeon’s belongings had passed into the translator’s hands). 52

Even this order of events seems unlikely. More probable is the scenariothat a willingly-circumcized translator later fell out with Rajaniti. On thewhole then, one can really only say that the question of circumcision, whenit arose, was a gloss for conversion that spoke more to fear and shame on theDutch side (not to mention decades of others turning Turk) than anycalculated Javanese humiliation. After all, trained soldiers were usefuladditions to a retinue, and all the more so as fully capable fellow Muslims—joined by faith to the rulers, but with no alternate ties or lingering shame todistract them. 53

So where was ʿAlawi in all this? Doubtless an Arab teacher would havemade an impact on the VOC prisoners, circumcized or not, who could surelytell the difference between different sorts of “popes.” But again it seems thatʿAlawi never appeared at the forefront of such actions, though he was brieflyassociated with a graver atrocity said to have occurred on the first day of thesiege. For while Natakusuma sealed off the kraton, as the first shots werefired, and as some forty Europeans were purportedly killed at Rajaniti’sorder, the “inflamatory priest” supposedly oversaw the massacre of 1040Javanese, including women and children. 54

This claim was made by one Bappa Sanka (ironically the Malay for “Mr.Suspicion”) of Demak. Communicated to Semarang a week after the August10 surrender, it was never repeated. After the war such a crime againstmembers of a foreign faith was surplus to requirements anyway, as the VOCwere far more concerned with preserving the religious dignity of their

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53. Such was by no means a new strategy. Renegades were always to be found and insistentdeclarations for Christ were rare. For a sanctimonious example of the latter, see Frederik deHoutman, “Cort Verhael van Frederik de Houtman,” in W. S. Unger, ed., De Oudste reizenvan de Zeeuwen naar Oost-indië (Gouda, 1880), 64-111.

54. VOC 7843, Abraham Roos to Valkenier, Semarang, 25 August 1741. The figure of fortyseems a reasonable estimate of European casualties. According to the party that managed tofight their way back to the fort from their outpost on the Siti Inggil, 24 were killed while 13were wounded. There is no other mention of a domestic massacre of a thousand Javanese.Leupe, “Verhaal,” 141.

servants. So when Captain Joan Andries van Hohendorff went to Kartasurain July of 1743 to conclude a new treaty with Pakubuwana, he carried withhim secret instructions. If the Susuhunan was unprepared to hand over thetwo men declared responsible for “the affront to our nation and religion …and before the whole world,” then Hohendorff was to replace him withanother prince. 55

Having seen his capital utterly despoiled, first by Chinese and then by theMadurese, a despondent Pakubuwana was prepared to offer up his Arab allyand report the full confession of the late Rajaniti. Indeed, in the wake of thelatter’s death in mid May, the Susuhunan had few scapegoats to offer. Fortheir part, the Dutch commissioners were surprised to find that ʿAlawi wasstill ministering from the little mosque on the parade ground, given earlierreports suggested that he had been dragged off in chains or killed byChinese. Glad of the prize, Hohendorff assembled a team to take charge ofthe ringleader priest on August 10, 1743, exactly two years after thesurrender of the garrison, as well as the unrequested Hajji Mataram, whomPakubuwana handed over for good measure. 56

Neither put up a fight. Chained and sent down to Semarang, they wouldbe transported to Batavia and eventually consigned to the hold of thefortuijn. It is only in the cover letter from Semarang that we have the firstexplicit indication of ʿAlawi’s Yemeni origins, when one of the two chained“Arabic priests” is named as “Alowie absie Arabie van Jaman,” which mightwell be a Javanised form of ʿAlawi al-Habshi al-ʿArabi or even theprisoner’s own declaration of being “ʿAlawi Habshi, an Arab fromYemen.” 57 Certainly the link to the Habshi clan of Yemen—so called for anancestral adventure in Ethiopia (al-Habash)—is tantalizing. 58

For his part Hajji Mataram is accorded the longer name of “HadjeMohamat van Mattarm,” which, setting aside the ubiquity of the nameMuhammad, helps makes him a candidate for the self-deprecating Qadiriwho may have been born in sight of the bastion of the Castle of Batavia. Soit was that, several decks above their cramped compartment, Captain Booys’



55. High Government to Hohendorff, Batavia, 29 July 1743, in J.K.J. de Jonge (ed.), DeOpkomst van het nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-indië, 13 vols. (s’ Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff,1862-909), IX, 433, n.

56. VOC 7893, Verijssel and Thijling to Raden van Nederlandsch Indie, Semarang, 11August 1743 and Hohendorff to Van Imhoff, Kartasura, 12 August 1743.

57. VOC 7847, Verijssel to Van Imhoff, Semarang, 15 September 1743.

58. According to an authoritative genealogical history of the ʿAlawi clan of Hadramawt,several prominent figures had migrated to Mocha by the eighteenth century, though noneappear to maintain the designation Habshi or seem connected to the later Habshis who didmake a name for themselves in Indonesia. See ʿAbd al-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Husayn al-Mashhur, Shams al-zahira fi nasab ahl al-bayt min Bani ʿAlawi, 2 vols. (Jeddah: ʿAlam al-Maʿrifa, 1984) passim. With thanks to Alexander Knysh and Kazuhiro Arai.

cabin contained a sealed letter for the Governor of the Cape colony declaringat the end of its business that he was sending them:

two Mahomedan Priests … said to have been the two foremost instigators of what befellour European settlement in the year 1741, and handed over to the Company by theSusuhunan. Following yesterday’s decree, they are exiled to the Cape in chains, to bedealt with in whatever manner. You believe most fitting to guarantee that they never havethe opportunity to escape, which could have grave consequences for the Company. 59

The Cape of Grave Consequences

When ʿAlawi and Hajji Mataram finally stumbled down into the boat thatwould take them to Robben Island in late April of 1744, they were just thelatest in a long line of exiles and slaves sent to Africa. Some had been sentinto more genteel repose, surrounded by their retainers at the expense of theCompany or the courts from which they originated. 60 Shaykh Yusuf, leaderof the Bantenese rebellion against the Dutch at his capture in 1683, and areluctant resident of Lanka until 1694, had lived in relative isolation at Faurewith some two dozen followers, wives and slaves until his death in 1699. 61

Equally the rowdiness of another Javanese nobleman’s retainers (and a fire)at Stellenbosch led to protests from his neighbors. 62

Still, such circumstances were rare. Established in 1652 as a site forprovisioning the VOC in Asia, and ruled as a satellite of Batavia, Cape Townwas not a convict colony, though it was certainly rough. With its rather moreEuropean character, a small and decidedly male population weathered theconstant gales in many public houses before being bustled home at curfewby the roving band of ruffian constables known as caffers, many of whomhad been sent westward as convicts (bandieten) or slaves. Indeed the vastmajority of deportees to Africa were slaves, either of the VOC or traded byprivate owners residing at the Cape or returning from Asia. The most

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59. Raden van Batavia to Swellengrebel, Batavia, 22 January 1744, KAB, C 464, pp. 28-29.Received 27 April, my emphasis. This letter also referred to two other deportees destined forthe town: the Javanese Droena and a Makassarese, Carrang Assan. Variants (with Droenagiven as Drand of Paningtoetoel) also appear on a list of arrivals together with a Chinese,Lim Japko or Lim Tsiako. KAB, CJ 3186, p. 39. It appears that the Makassarese soon passedaway, given a skilled bandiet jongen called Cauian Assana died in the Lodge that August.KAB, Attestatiën, C 2498 (17 August 1744), folio 51. By marked contrast Lim wouldeventually prosper, even gaining pardon in 1759, as well as a slave whom he would manumitand marry prior to his return in 1760. KAB CJ 3190, p. 37, and Resolution of 18 December1859, C 137, pp. 505-529; 560-564.

60. In 1723 Capetonian authorities believed that the retainers constituted the most dangerousconvicts. See Resolution of 14 December 1723, KAB, C 69, pp. 43-52.

61. I.D. du Plessis, The cape Malays: history, Religion, Traditions, folk Tales (Cape Town:Balkema, 1972), 4.

62. See Resolutions of 3 and 18 February 1716, KAB, C 35, pp. 82-96, 108-145; 25 February1716, KAB, C 36, pp. 2-25; and 9 Jan 1720, KAB, C 51, pp. 103-112.

numerous were from Sulawesi, who were valued as clever if highly volatileservants. The women usually served as domestics while the men were to beseen out walking for hours on end to scour the surrounding hills forfirewood. Yet they were not all from Sulawesi. Cape slaves were usuallyhoused together with unfortunates taken from Madagascar, India andMozambique, if not in the cramped lodge by the Company gardens, then inquarters at the back of the city’s homes.

Meanwhile the officially registered convicts were sent over in everincreasing numbers in the eighteenth century. According to Penn, some 312Asian convicts arrived between 1722 and 1748, much to the displeasure ofthe local authorities, who had already complained to Batavia in 1715 thatthey were being swamped. 63 Yet arrive they did, to be liberally mixed inwith local miscreants and, if not supported by any allowance, to be deployedon such public works as a failed attempt to build a breakwater across theharbour between 1743 and 1751. Often seen in leg irons, such deporteeswere a noticeable feature of Cape life well beyond the VOC period. Andwhile less likely to die of their labors as compared with those condemned todredge the fetid canals of Batavia, they labored under the threat of furtherdisplacement or the gallows that loomed at prominent spots around the town.

It was to Robben Island, though, that the most threatening wereconsigned. Having been informed by Batavia of the extreme danger the“priests” posed, the council decided to send both to the island, not only inchains, but chained together for life. In addition the supervisor wasthreatened with “the heaviest punishment” should he fail to observe all theirdoings or yet allow them to escape. 64 Hence on landing in April of 1744they would have been lodged with the other “Indians” (indiaanen) in thecompound that lay a short distance from the harbour and the house of thePostholder. Based on the surviving rolls, that year saw quite a turnover. Ofthe 28 Europeans registered, 17 remained, the rest having absconded overthe years. And of the 21 Indiaanen, ʿAlawi and Mataram would haveencountered a mix of 18 slaves and freemen sent from the Cape, Colombo,and Batavia. They included four identified as Bengalis, three Bugis, and ascattering of individual Sinhalese, Balinese, a “Hottentot” and a Chinese.The last was released the month that they arrived, and by the end of the yearanother six were either deceased, discharged or reassigned to the town. Leftbehind were such men as Claas Cok, a Company slave from Bengal who hadbeen sentenced to life imprisonment in September of 1715; Fortuijn of



63. Nigel Penn, “Robben Island 1488-1805,” in Harriet Deacon (ed.), The island: A historyof Robben island, 1488-1990 (Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip, 1996), 21; KAB,LM 36, 7v.

64. Resolution of 28 April 1744, KAB, C 122, pp. 168-71.

Bengal, given 50 years in 1722; Daeng Mahmud, “the so-called Prince ofTernate” sent at the governor’s discretion in the same year; as well as severallocals: Augustijn from the Cape; the Hottentot Claas, and three men of Bugisheritage—Marcus, Lapeij and (another) Fortuijn. 65

This small band was subject to constant fluctuation as new prisoners werecarried away by mortality or the whims of the castle. Those who remainedwere normally employed collecting shells for limekilns, hacking out localstone, and dispatching seals for oil or even the odd penguin for food.Sometimes they would be taken 50 km north to Dassen Island to do the samesort of collecting and butchering. In short, life was bleak. Food rations wereinadequate too, with the supplies from the mainland often delayed becauseof rough seas or countervailing winds. Indeed Cape Town itself was atantalizing proposition. Clearly visible across the bay, it was sundered by aformidable stretch of water.

Still the water did offer an escape, if almost always to the Europeans(often useful deserters or disgraced soldiers) who were picked up eachseason by the regular crowd of vessels anchored offshore. The Indiaanenwere less fortunate. An absence is normally marked on the file by virtue ofdeath or reassignment. Such was the case for Hajji Mataram, who onlysurvived into 1745, earning a terse annotation. Meanwhile the lists for thenext sixteen years continue to show the name of his once-clanking twin“Said Aloewi” or “Zaid Aloewi” with a marginal note sometimes mentioninghis place of origin (Mocha) and date of transportation and sentence.

Such scribal inconsistencies were a regular feature of the lists. Thissometimes entailed long increases in sentences, or even amnesia as to whysomeone had been sent to Africa. Sadly the successive supervisors seem notto have taken the governor’s admonitions to heart, and the current files havevery little to say about ʿAlawi of Mocha. We thus have no sense of whetherhe played a pastoral role among the community, of whom a bare few wereidentifiably Muslim, if not by their Dutch-given names, then by their placesof origin.

In 1748, for example, ʿAlawi was one of only 17 Indiaanen, stillincluding Claas Kok, Augustijn, and “the so-called Prince of Ternate.” By1758 their number would rise to 64, of whom around 18 were Muslims fromthe Indies or else locally born of Muslim parents. But did these men everplace any confidence in the Arab priest? One suspects that, setting aside thecurrent tradition that accords the Cape’s pious forebears with an active spiritof resistance, ʿAlawi was something of a social outlier, or perhaps just aresigned prisoner. His name appears nowhere in the documents relating to an

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65. KAB, CJ 3188, pp. 309-16. The Prince of Ternate had been sent over in 1722 for havingkept a gambling house. Resolution of 24 November 1722, KAB, C 61, pp. 27-34.

escape attempt made in 1751 by fifteen recent arrivals who planned to killthe European guards and convicts alike. 66

Years passed, and more convicts would be sent to Africa as Java waswracked by new wars of succession and even patchwork partition in 1755.And while some of the royal exiles would be called home to the successorcourts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, nobody had need of ʿAlawi. Indeed itappears that all memory of him had been effaced as much as the city ofKartasura had been razed or carried off. Then, in February of 1761,instructions came from the castle that all convict rolls were to be sent totown. After scrutinizing the lists and finding the now innocuous (orunrecognized?) priest among some 46 “Indians and Slaves etc.”, the ordercame for the Mochan (listed in contemporary documents as both “ZaidAlowie” and “Sout Lowis”) to be sent across the bay to take up a position asa caffer on 18 July 1761. 67

This was a release of sorts. Usually housed in the slave lodge, the cafferswere employed and clothed by the Fiscal. Dressed in bright blue waistcoatsand equipped with canes or whips, these were distinctive figures widelyreviled for their brutality. It was their job to enforce the curfew at night, tohaul drunks, prisoners or absconding slaves away for punishment, and, mostgruesomely, to assist with executions. These ranged from straightforwardhangings—usually of Europeans—to the brandings, breakings, burnings, andimpalings inflicted on anyone else who dared to lay a hand on their mastersor their property, including their fellow slaves dehumanized in inventories asmere “pieces.” 68

The very name of the office of caffer spoke to their derided status too.Originally the term used for non-Muslim Africans employed on the streets ofBatavia, the office and name had been disseminated wherever unremittinglyharsh VOC justice was meted out. While hardly a ticket-of-leave, being acaffer gave one the run of the town at night. They were thus liminal figurespar excellence. And it was perhaps in that position that ʿAlawi first took uphis role as it is now remembered in Cape Town: as a kindly constable andadvocate of the poor, who took to infiltrating the slave lodge to spread the



66. The plot was discovered by chance and the group fully exposed under torture, in thecourse of which some claimed that they were also acting with the encouragement of thewealthy Daeng Manganan. Penn, “Robben Island,” 29-30.

67. KAB, CJ 3189, pp. 9-17, 24.

68. On the role of the caffers, see Robert Carl-Heinz Shell, children of Bondage: A Socialhistory of the Slave Society at the cape of Good hope, 1652-1838 (University Press of NewEngland, 1994), 189-94; Ward, networks of empire, 45, 102, 123, 264-69. The fragmentaryhistory of one caffer who left Robben Island in 1743 is taken up by Gerald Groenewald in his“Panaij van Boegies: Slave - Bandiet – Caffer,” Quarterly Bulletin of the national library ofSouth Africa 59, 2 (2005): 50-62. For but one inventory of slave “pieces” by type and locale,see KAB, C 2632, p. 110.

word of Islam and ameliorate their condition. Certainly ʿAlawi’s putativeactivities seem to explain an uptake in slave conversions by the 1770s,contrasting with the older norm that had seen the bulk of the junior inmatesreceive instruction in Christianity from a series of slave teachers even as thedoors of the lodge would be opened as a brothel for soldiers in the earlyevening. 69

Yet again there is nothing in the Cape records to confirm any suchministry. Lacking surviving documents from the Fiscal’s office, we are in noposition to say how long ʿAlawi served in his appointed post either. Alreadyof note, though, is the fact that he never appeared in the lodge register, whichis indicative of an ability to finance himself beyond any derisory salary hewould have been paid. Indeed the last unequivocal annotation about him,other than somebody’s cursory indication of his death (at date unknown), isin regard to the inquest into the fate of a Chinese woman in July of 1763. 70

While hardly a large community of the sort to be found in Southeast Asia,the Chinese were a feature of Cape life too. The VOC had once hoped topopulate the settlement with willing sojourners brought from Java, thoughnone could be found who were eager to be that far from the MiddleKingdom. Rather, those who made it there came as sailors on Western shipsor else as exiles. At present there is no precise knowledge of why the womanThisgingnio was exiled from Cirebon in 1747, but she evidently enjoyedsome quality of life after her release from the lodge in 1757, owning a housewith her partner Onkonko (exiled in 1746), a fishing business, furniture, andeven a few slaves. With the death of Onkonko, though, she began to drink inearnest, and it was this that was assumed to be to the cause of her death inthe early hours of 9 July 1763.

This death also brought to light the fact that ʿAlawi was present in herhome as a lodger. While not mentioned as a caffer—though he must havebeen familiar to the investigating officers by virtue of having fulfilled thatrole—the “Arab and Mohammedan Priest” explained how he hadremonstrated with his landlady for her drinking, and that it was he who hadtidied her naked corpse on discovering it in the morning, placing a pillowunder her head and a sheet over her body. 71 And with that first reportage ofhis speech, ʿAlawi passes from official sight, his account confirmed by theslaves in attendance and subsequently accepted, perhaps even trusted, amongthe Muslims, Europeans and Chinese who apparently recognized his role

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69. Shell, children of Bondage, 172-205.

70. James C. Armstrong, “The Estate of a Chinese Woman in the Mid-Eighteenth Century atthe Cape of Good Hope,” Journal of chinese Overseas 4,1 (2008): 111-126. Her arrival isnoted in KAB, CJ 3186, 33-39. The documents relating to the investigation are in CJ 3173,pp. 128-31.

71. KAB, CJ 3173, pp. 129-30.

among a small but growing community. Indeed ʿAlawi’s role at the Capemust have begun beyond the lodge with the leading of prayers in privatehomes and the naming of newborn children as a mixed population of Muslimand nominally Christian slaves began to be drawn to an alternate sharedidentity that ranked them as something more than mere items. 72 And even ifthe public practice and communal spread of Islam was formally forbidden,there is clear evidence that Muslims were meeting. A member of Cook’ssecond voyage to the Pacific, Georg Forster (1754-94), noted in October of1772 that a few Muslim slaves would gather at the home of “a freeMahomedan” in order to “read, or rather chaunt [sic], several prayers andchapters of the Koran.” 73

We know, moreover, from the Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg(1743-1828) that there were active celebrations of key feasts, attended notonly by “priests” but carried out with the patronage of prominent exiles.Four months before Forster called at port, Thunberg had paid a visit to agaily-decorated home where the “Javanese” community was celebratingwhat he thought was their new year. Given the date and description, this wasactually the celebration of the Birth of the Prophet, with the front of theroom taken up by an elevated platform on which a text was placed before adecorated column (assumedly taking the place of the prayer niche). Theevening was celebrated with the recitation of odes in the honour of theProphet and led by “two priests distinguished by a small conical cap fromthe rest, who wore handkerchiefs tied round their heads.”

About eight in the evening the service commenced, when they began to sing, loud andsoft alternately, sometimes the priests alone, at other times the whole congregation. Afterthis a priest read out of the great book that lay on the cushion before the altar, thecongregation at times reading aloud after him. I observed them reading after the Orientalmanner, from right to left, and imagined it to be the Alcoran that they were reading, theJavanese being mostly Mahometans. Between singing and reading, coffee was served upin cups, and the principal man of the congregation accompanied their singing on theviolin. I understood afterwards, that this was a prince from Java, who had opposed theinterests of the Dutch East-India Company, and for that reason had been brought from hisnative country to the Cape, where he lives at the Company’s expense. 74

Rather than being a recitation of the Qur’an, Thunberg more likely sawan example of communal recollection (dhikr) of the kind still practiced



72. It seems something must have impelled the VOC at the Cape to prohibit the sale of slavesto “Moors and Heathens” in the 1770s and further to encourage the provision of Christianeducation. According to strangely precise estimates offered by Yusuf Da Costa, Muslimnumbers had jumped from 154 to 730 in the 1750s, and then almost doubled to 1307 over the1760s, out of a slave population that only went from 4166 in 1750 to 5191 in 1770. EbrahimMahomed Mahida, history of Muslims in South Africa: A chronology (Durban: Arabic StudyCircle, 1993), 7.

73. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968), 51.

74. Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels at the cape of Good hope, 1772-1775 (Van RiebeeckSociety: Cape Town, 1986), 47-48.

today. 75 Ward has furthermore argued that the accompanist patron should beidentified as Raden Mas Kreti, the long displaced brother of PangeranMangkunegara, whose father had been sent to Batavia and then Lanka in1728. 76 Yet we must wonder if an aged ʿAlawi may have been one of thetwo conical-hatted imams. Or did a beturbanned Yemeni keep away from thegenteel recitations of the exiles, gathering with those who reflected in moreunruly ways on the perfection of the Prophet?

A Far Cry from Kartasura

It must have been for reasons of priestly respectability among thecommunity that with his passing (perhaps in the 1770s) ʿAlawi was interredwith other “free blacks” who seldom found mention in the Church registers,and close to a cluster of Chinese tombs on the once bald lower slopes ofSignal Hill. 77 Now known as the Tana Baru, this plot overlooks whatbecame the “Malay” quarter of Bo-Kaap that developed under the British inthe nineteenth century. Indeed the British had long had an eye on thiscommunity. In 1781 the English East India Company estimated that twofifths of the colony’s slave population of 30,000 were Muslim, and believedthat the smaller Dutch population of 17,000 lived in greater fear of them thanany foreign invasion, which they were themselves plotting at the time. 78

With British rule established in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, thecommunity would, over the course of the nineteenth century, obtain freedomof religion, the manumission of the remaining slaves and significantconsideration for their loyalty and increasing prominence in the town. In theSpring of 1929, a reporter for the cape Times accompanied the Imam of theChiappini Street mosque up through the steep streets of Bo-Kaap to learnmore of the graves of a plot since filled with hundreds of inscribed slatestaken from Robben Island. The imam in question was the lineal descendantof Tuan Guru (d. 1806), a Tidorese who had also spent time on RobbenIsland in the 1780s for daring to treat with the British against the Dutch, andwhose tomb lay a few feet away from the similarly-renderred white wallsenclosing the saintly grave (kramat) of the hallowed “Tuan Said.” 79

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75. Desmond Desai, “The Ratiep Art Form of South African Muslims,” PhD Dissertation,Department of Music, University of Natal, 1993, 119.

76. Ward, networks of empire, 227 ff. Cf. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi,1749-1792: A history of the Division of Java (London: OUP, 1974), 270, 287-88.

77. Thunberg noted simple rattan arches over Chinese graves on Signal Hill in 1772 withoutremarking on any obviously Muslim ones nearby, though Sparrman did associate the gravesof the Chinese with those of free blacks that same year. Thunberg, Travels, 49; AndrewSparrman, A Voyage to the cape of Good hope towards the Antarctic Polar circle andRound the World: But chiefly into the country of the hottentots and caffres, from the Year1772, to 1776, 2 vols. (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971), I, 12.

78. See Minutes of the Secret Committee [of the EIC] 1778-1858, BL, IOR L/PS/1/5, 91-82.

Pointing to a niche in the Kramat, the Imaum said that the custom, when a Believerwanted intercession, was to burn three candles of different colours in the night. … TuanSaid, said the Imaum, was a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, and came to theCape of his own accord to keep alive the faith of Islam after the death of Shiek Josef over200 years ago. He was a man of tremendous influence in the Malay Archipelago, andcame out without wife or retinue to keep his countrymen at the Cape in the path of theProphet. “He was a saint in his lifetime,” declared the Imaum, “and stories are still told ofhow, using his miraculous powers, he used to go into the locked and guarded slavequarters at night—a bent little figure, with his Koran under his arm. When he had finishedreading to them the law he would go out and fetch food or—if it so happened that a slavehad no shoes, or his shoes pinched—a new pair of shoes. The guards and the masters ofthe slaves could never account for the evidence of his visit which met their eyes whenthey called the slaves to their tasks next morning. 80

While a correspondent of the cape naturalist was unable to extract anysuch story when she visited six years later—beyond the general sense thatʿAlawi had “probably come from Arabia, and was regarded as a man of highstatus”—the above quotation formed the nub of the folkloric musings of I.D.du Plessis in the 1950s, and then histories collected by Achmat Davids in the1980s. Davids even incorporated the lines about ʿAlawi’s nocturnal visitsinto the much-used guide to Cape Town’s kramats, kramats that the imamexplained formed a protective circle around the city foretold by TuanGuru. 81

In many senses ʿAlawi’s grave stands out as the first located within easysight of the town. Many earlier sites are, by stark contrast, further afield orhigher up the slopes where wood gatherers once wandered in relativefreedom. 82 Today ʿAlawi is celebrated as the first imam of the community(with his tombstone inscribed with the pseudo-Sufi name of MogamadDarwies, i.e. “dervish”), Alawie, even as Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar iscredited as the harbinger of Islam at the Cape and Tuan Guru is lauded forestablishing the first mosque. Such vagueness has arguably aided theappropriation of ʿAlawi by Capetonians seeking a more empowering historybeyond slavery and exile.



79. See fig. 1, KAB, E3934, for how Sayyid ʿAlawi’s tomb appeared in the early 1900s. Thewalls of Tuan Guru’s kramat may first be discerned as a backdrop for once substantialChinese tombs in the 1843 sketch of George Angas. Nigel Worden et al. (eds.), cape Town:The Making of a city: An illustrated social history (Kemilworth: David Philip, 1998), 76-77.

80. Anon. “A Circle of Islam,” cape Times, 30 November 1929, 15-16.

81. K.M. Jeffreys, “The Malay Tombs of the Holy Circle. 2. The Tombs of Signal HillCemetary,” The cape naturalist 1, 2 (July 1935): 40-43; I.D. Du Plessis and C.A. Lückhoff,The Malay Quarter and its People (Cape Town and Amsterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1953), 34;Mansor Jaffer (ed.), Guide to the Kramats of the Western cape, 3rd rev. ed. (Cape Town:Cape Mazaar [Kramat] Society, 2010), 42-43. Incidentally the guide gives ʿAlawi’s deathdate as 1803.

82. Bradlow first made the suggestion that wood-gathering slaves may well have practicedtheir faith out of sight of the authorities. Muhammad ʿAdil Bradlow, “Imperialism, StateFormation and the Establishment of a Muslim community at the Cape of Good Hope, 1770-1840: A Study in Urban Resistance,” MA Thesis, University of Cape Town, 1988, 107-08.

It is certainly important to place Sayyid ʿAlawi’s kramat within theemerging topography of the town to gain some sense of the mechanisms thatperpetuated his memory, and which may even help unlock his past activities.Not only was his grave, perched on the cliff of the Tana Baru, seen as themost efficacious for visitation, it was this structure that loomed directly—even commandingly—over the old quarry below; the first public site ofFriday Prayers. 83 In some circles, moreover, the upper streets of the BoKaap are remembered as a locus for the ecstatic drumming andmortifications of the ritual known as ratiep or califah, of which we start tohave accounts in the nineteenth century. In 1835, for instance, an appalledAmerican missionary, George Champion, watched through a window as adozen or so men chanted and drummed with increasing tempo while a “halfnaked” member performed “a variety of eccentric movements, throwinghimself int’ every possible position, & at the same time catching a chainwhich he threw in the air.” 84 In the 1850s, Alfred Cole visited a house tofind devotees piercing their cheeks and tongues with skewers or their sideswith daggers, and otherwise bedecking themselves with red-hot chains astheir fellows maintained drumming chants under the direction of their leaderor “Califah.” None showed any sign of pain and all emerged unscathed bywhat Cole cast as “evident jugglery.” 85

To be sure, similar forms of what is normally seen as Rifa`i dhikr are awell-known feature of societies up the East African coast, with whom theever more successful Muslims of Cape Town were in sustained conversationafter the final abolition of slavery in 1834. Even so, in Cape Town suchdramatic practice is firmly associated with a deep Malayo-Indonesian andvaguely Qadiri cultural past rather than a nascent Afro-Islamic one. It ismoreover attributed to Shaykh Yusuf. Yet here we are faced with a problem,for we have no attested linking of such practices to Shaykh Yusuf during histime in Asia, or anywhere else for that matter.

By contrast, however, we do find such influence at Banten some decadesafter Yusuf’s exile to Lanka, and shortly before Sayyid ʿAlawi was atMataram. Based on a mostly Arabic manual now held in Indonesia’s

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83. John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the interior of Southern Africa in the years 1797and 1798, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1801-04), II, 427; Anon., State of the cape ofGood hope in 1822 (London: 1823), 68.

84. G. Champion, Journal of an American Missionary in the cape colony: 1835, Alan R.Booth (ed.) (Cape Town: South African Library, 1968), 20. Champion attributed thepopularity of Islam to the kind treatment and respectable burials the slaves were offered, andlooked on with grudging admiration when the prisoners of the Amsterdam Battery wouldhasten to prayers in “one of the alcoves of their stoney prison.” Champion, op. cit., 21.

85. A.W. Cole, The cape and the Kafirs: Or notes of five Years’ Residence in South Africa(London: Bentley, 1852), 44-46; see also Anon., “Islam at the Cape,” cape MonthlyMagazine, December 1861, 353-63, esp. 356-60.

National Library, a later crown prince of Banten would be inducted as aRifaʿi in the 1730s by a teacher of part-Arab extraction called ʿAbdallah b.ʿAbd al-Qahhar. Also known locally as al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-ʿAlawi, thisman was furthermore a disseminator of the ʿAydarusi and Haddadi variantsof the ʿAlawi tradition of Tarim in Hadramawt. In fact he claimed that hehad been taught the Haddadi line by a son of the great founder ʿAbdallah b.ʿAlawi al-Haddad (1634-1720), and he seems to have imparted thisprivileged knowledge to the prince once he assumed the throne as SultanAbu l-Fattah (r. 1733-48). 86

To return to his Rifaʿi expertise, though, it is noteworthy that ʿAbdullahb. ʿAbd al-Qahhar is the first person to use the term debus—by which suchstabbing practices are often known in Malay after the Arabic word for anawl—in a Southeast Asian text. This mention comes when the shaykh statesthat he has taught the prince techniques of invulnerability against swords andawls, the ingestion of poisons and glass, or the handling of ferociousanimals—be they scorpions, or the rather unfamiliar bears and lions. 87

Whereas the piercing and burning trials that this Banten-based Sayyid‘Alawi taught are almost exclusively associated with the Rifaʿi order in Iraq,India and Egypt, it seems striking that in West Java (as in Cape Town) theywere primarily identified with the Qadiriyya, even as they were (and indeedare) performed together with the flags and invocations of several orders. Andon this hybrid note it is all the more curious too that in South Africa theseperformances usually commence with the litany (ratib) of ʿAbdallah al-Haddad. 88

This all brings us back once again to our parallel ʿAlawi and the potentiallink between him and the Javanese elite who seem to have had an interest inQadiri pedigrees. For even if the Kartasurans were not yet taken with theRifaʿi feats of dhikr in the ways that the neighboring rulers of Banten were,it would appear from other post-factum evidence that it was precisely thesestyles of Sufi recollection that were gaining ground in the region as a whole.There are references, for example, to far-flung eastern court of Bimaencouraging well-attended performances of the dabus in the mid-1780s that



86. Risalat al-majmuʿ fi bayan isnadah (sic) al-Rifaʿi wa-l-Qadiri wa-ibn ʿAlwan wa-l-ʿAydarus wa-ghayruhum wa-l-salasil wa-l-tara’iq wa-l-hirqa [sic] ʿala hasab al-taqa,Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, ms A 96, pp. 25-26, 146-49. With thanks toOman Fathurahman. For more on ʿAbdullah’s later activities as a favourite of Sultan Abu l-Nasr, see Martin van Bruinessen, “Shariʿa Court, Tarekat and Pesantren: ReligiousInstitutions in the Sultanate of Banten,” Archipel 50 (1995): 165-200, at 182.

87. Risalat al-majmuʿ, pp. 24-25, 66-72.

88. Yusuf da Costa made precisely this connection, much as Bradlow asserted that ʿAlawiwas a propagandist of the ʿAlawiyya, though he assumed that he had been a khalifa of HajjiMataram. Yusuf da Costa and Achmat Davids, Pages from cape Muslim history(Pietermaritzburg, 1994), 135; and Bradlow, “Imperialism,” 125-26.

seem connected to a shaykh from Batavia, while later manuscripts from thenineteenth century, such as a fine illustrated copy now held in the IndonesianNational Library, make it plain just how iconic the ritual, with its bannersand awls, would become across the archipelago as a whole. 89

Putting such skills into practice was obviously the making of a spectacle,though such seem to have been kept behind the walls of the various courtsfor its initial iterations in the region. The first mention of dabus in a Malay-language text comes a few decades after ʿAbdullah b. ʿAbd al-Qahharinducted the young Abu l-Fattah of Banten. It concerns the visit of aSumatran pepper trader to Banten around 1760, where he found access toAbu l-Fattah’s heir, the reigning Abu l-Nasr (r.1753-77), controlled by amystic who led musical entertainments with a group of forty men known “toperform debus in the Arab manner.” 90

That such techniques were still associated with authoritatively Arabpractice in the 1760s is telling. Being separated from the rulers of their homeworld, I would suggest that it would have made sense for the diverse peoplesof the Cape, and especially the more recent arrivals, to associate suchefficacious practices with ʿAlawi by virtue of his origins. Regardless ofwhether “Muhammad Darwish” ʿAlawi might have been an exponent of thedebus (or even when he acquired the designation of “dervish”), as a caffer hecould have turned a blind eye to such exercises if they occurred in the citylimits, practices which Mason argues formed a strong attractive bond for theconversion of slaves, allowing for the transcendence of the “mundane worldof the flesh” and “direct experience” of a “superior spiritual reality.” 91

While Bradlow, too, put Sufism at the centre of his argument for thesubtle resistance of the Muslims to Dutch rule 92 and Mason suggests that it

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89. With thanks to Henri Chambert-Loir. For details concerning the years 1786 and 1787, seehis iman dan Diplomasi: serpihan sejarah Kerajaan Bima (Jakarta: Gramedia, 2010), 85-87.For a reproduction of the Indonesian National Library manuscript (Kitab Mawlid MS A70),see James Bennett (ed.), crescent Moon: islamic Art and civilisation in Southeast Asia(Adelaide and Canberra: Art Gallery of South Australia/National Gallery of Australia, ca.2006), p. 133. For later ethnographic reports and analyses, see Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje,The Achehnese, trans. A.W.S. O’Sullivan (Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906), II, 250-57; JacobVredenbregt, 1973. “Dabus in West Java,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, land- en Volkenkunde 129(1973): 302-20; Margaret J. Kartomi, “Dabuih in West Sumatra: A Synthesis of Muslim andPre-Muslim Ceremony and Musical Style,” Archipel 41 (1991): 33-52; and Van Bruinessen,“Shariʿa Court, Tarekat and Pesantren.”

90. G.W.J. Drewes (ed.), De Biografie van een Minangkabausen Peperhandelaar in delampongs (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 124:5; W. Marsden (tr.), Memoirs of aMalayan family, Written by Themselves, Translated from the Original (London: 1830), 35-36.

91. John Edwin Mason, “‘A Faith for Ourselves’: Slavery, Sufism, and Conversion to Islamat the Cape,” South African historical Journal 46,1 (2002): 3-24, esp. 4-7.

92. That said, Bradlow deprived many of his early Muslims of much agency in predicatingIslam on the exclusive practice of the bayʿa. See Bradlow, “Imperialism, State Formation andthe Establishment of a Muslim community,” 3-4.

empowered its convert-adherents spiritually as much as socially, one mightalso see in the burnings and piercings of the debus ratiep some physicalinversion of, or even the calculated imbuing of invulnerability against, thegruesome punishments inflicted by the VOC. As Admiral Stavorinusrecollected of his visit to the Cape in the late 1760s:

Punishments are very severe here, especially with regard to oriental slaves. In the year1768, I saw one, who had set a house on fire, broken alive on the wheel, after the fleshhad been torn from his body, in eight different places, with red-hot pincers, without hisgiving any sign of pain, during the execution of this barbarous sentence, which lasted fulla quarter of an hour. 93

Well into the early 1800s, observers peddled stories of the impervious“Malay” assassin or “Bugis” recalcitrant who welcomed the release of deathwith senses dulled by opium, or who supposedly smoked his pipe in resignedindifference as his limbs were smashed one by one (to local acclaim). 94 Andwhile the castle complained in the 1780 that the convict-caffers were ratherless terrible than they needed to be when dealing with their Europeancharges, we might also see “priestly” supporters in the communityencouraging the slaves that the caffers so frequently had to thrash to besteadfast in hope of the certain victory to come. 95 The British officer JohnSchofield Mayson noted with sarcastic amusement the case of an imam-advocate in the 1850s who stood filling the ear of a minor offender in courtwith just such advice, to be steadfast and thus “escape unhurt” by his ordeal.Such was repeated while the man endured a flogging, though at theconclusion the imam was rewarded for his solicitude with blows from hisvery pained advisee. 96

Of course the point of the ratiep is that pain and injury will only accrue tothose insufficiently prepared—as much spiritually as physically. Yet suchdisplays have also come in for criticism as much within the Muslimcommunities around the Indian Ocean as from gawking interlopers. 97 They



93. Johan Splinter Stavorinus, Voyages to the east-indies, 3 vols. (London: Robinson, 1798),I, 571.

94. François Le Vaillant, Travels into the interior of Africa via the cape of Good hope, 2vols. (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2007), 49; Sparmann, Voyage to the cape of Goodhope, II, 342; Robert C.H. Shell (ed.), with the assistance of Raymond and Edward Hudson,Out of livery: The Papers of Samuel eusebius hudson, 1764-1828 (Unpublished MS), 204-05; see also Kirsten McKenzie, The Making of an english Slave-owner: Samuel eusebiushudson at the cape of Good hope 1796-1807 (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1993), 95-96.

95. On the laxity of the caffers, see Resolution of 22 August 1780, KAB, C 158, pp. 241-248.Moves were made to dispense with Asian officers entirely in 1786. H.C.V. Leibbrandt, Precisof the Archives of the cape of Good hope: Requesten (Memorials) 1715-1806, 5 vols (CapeTown and London: Cape Times Limited, 1905-89), I, 22.

96. John Schofield Mayson, The Malays of capetown (Cape Town: Africana ConnoisseursPress, 1963; originally Manchester: Galt & Co., 1861), 17.

97. As Annabel Gallop pointed out to me with reference to its unpublished (and unopenable)

may even have led to an attempt on the part of the well-to-do to disassociatethe saints of Tana Baru with the excesses of fellow Capetonians of lessaugust standing such as the Mozambiquan Griep, who had accidentallycaused the death of Abdul Zaghie as he and his friends performed the“Callifat” at the home of a Makassarese in 1813 (which is the first time itattracted official notice in South Africa). 98 And then there were thecomplaints about the sheer noise. In 1855, rival factions placed petitionsbefore the British authorities regarding the disruptive spectacle of the“Califah.” One group, having had their nocturnal gatherings banned,respectfully sought to maintain the practice of the ratiep, which they had“enjoyed without interruption for such a number of years.” Meanwhile theother faction of recognized imams approved its limitation, speaking to the“nuisance” and “discredit” it brought to their religion, and claiming asjustification their greater connection with contemporary Islamic practice inMecca, where so many respectable people were now travelling for thepilgrimage. 99 If distant Asia was their sundered past, Africa and Arabia weretheir beckoning future, and in time the increasing numbers of returned Hajjiswould displace a previous cornucopia of self-appointed Imams, many ofwhom might have claimed the authority of a noble Arab patron as theyoffered instruction in the protective rites of their forefathers. 100 Someupwardly-mobile Hajjis must have been annoyed to read in the capeMonthly of 1861 that the “ancient” ritual was regarded by their fellowbelievers as “the most important part of the education of the young,” beingpracticed each Friday night “in order … to give a more strictly religiouscharacter to that day.” 101

In recent years the researches of local historians have led to thedevelopment of a museum specifically for the history of Islam at the Cape,replete with a rack of ratiep implements and numerous Malay texts that hadbeen compiled in the nineteenth century. Yet, with the decided shift towardsAfrikaans for daily life, and a better command of Arabic for religiouspurposes, such writings in what was once a liturgical, or even secret,language have few interpreters today.

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pages, the illustrated Kitab Mawlid A70 published by Bennett shows evidence of asubsequent owner having had many of the dabus pages stuck together. See Bennett, crescentMoon, 272-273.

98. KAB, CJ 805, no.37, as cited in Mason, “Faith for Ourselves,” 20.

99. J.S. De Lima, The califa Question: Documents connected with this Matter (Cape Town:Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co., 1857), esp. 1, 2-8.

100. Shamil Jeppie, “Leadership and Loyalties: The Imams of Nineteenth Century ColonialCape Town, South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 26, 2 (May, 1996): 139-62.

101. Anon., “Islam at the Cape,” 359.

Among those that came to light is a richly illustrated manual of prayersand invocations. Known as the Red Kietaab, it contains images of Meccaand the saintly graves of Medina, words of scorn for any who deny thelegitimacy of Rifaʿi techniques, and apparent mention of Sayyid ʿAlawiamong a slew of saints, in addition to numerous banners associated with theratiep. Moreover, on the final pages one finds, atop a pile of awls andskewers, standards seemingly planted in grassy ground and bearing twowords—”Qadar” and “Alawi”—referencing two traditions and perhapshinting at one, now obscured, teacher. 102

Conclusion

What defined a Muslim in relation to the far-flung and hardly uniformVOC world in the eighteenth century? And which way should ʿAlawi’s lifetrajectory and contributions be read? Was Islam marked in Dutch eyes solelyby masculine exercises of power and resistance, or did they assume that itdepended, like their own “public” faith, on a deeply ingrained knowledge ofprayer and text instilled by “priests” and practiced in the home as much bysovereign wives and mothers as pious husbands and sons? Or should we readthis potential narrative as one part of a greater whole of heroic resistance inthe face of alien domination, tracking the development (or persistence) of anautochthonous awareness among believers seeking aid from the saints of agespast, and well away from the watchful eyes of the enforcers of an alien law?

Suffice it to say that, far from being the harbinger of a new and ever moreunited Islamic consciousness across the Ocean, Sayyid ʿAlawi, in life andperhaps even more so in death, could have served as a recognizably “Arab”catalyst for the activation of diverse forms of practice in two distinct, ifrelated, settings: perhaps leading dhikr in support of a dying queen and thenjihad on behalf of her royal widower in Java, or maybe even propagating theratib of ʿAbdallah al-Haddad at the Cape in conjunction with exercisespopularly associated with ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani. Indeed the events ofʿAlawi’s life and the activities of teachers like him should lead us to questionthe contingent rise of new forms of practice among courts and societies inthe face of encroaching Christian power. By the same token, though, wemust also be cautious in setting up a story of Islam and colonialism ascommensurate foes or yet that the former somehow embodied inherently“cosmopolitan” networks. Even if each set of peoples and practicesoverlapped, in the eighteenth century it was the VOC that could dictate whatsort of movement was possible to and in the newest corner of the IndianOcean Arena. For while a Javanese could travel to Mecca and an Arab



102. MS in private hands, Cape Town. Cf. “War of the Red Kitaab,” noseweek 88, 1February 2007.

shaykh could appear in Batavia, the journey to the Cape was long onewithout a return, and it was there that certain practices could live on andattain rather different valences and ancestries, which are hotly disputedtoday.

Seen in this light, the story of an Islamicate Indian Ocean is only one thatemerges under the later aeges of the English East India Company. And it isonly under such seemingly paradoxical conditions of colonialism andrelative freedom of movement that an even more open “Arab lake” could beimagined as the natural antecedent of the European one, which couldbecome ever more entangled through the labours of so many Hadramiswhose ancestral valleys were finally enfolded with the Ingrams Peace of1934. 103

In focussing on the VOC and its networks we may nevertheless discernthe roots of this vision, which is arguably Arabizing the story of Islam inSoutheast Asia today. Even if ʿAlawi was not responsible for thetransplantation of ecstatic Sufism to Cape Town after his enforcedoccultation on Robben Island, his sainted body would have been invoked asa natural pole of attraction for others reconstituting the “original” Arabprotective rituals of their home societies, rituals now enacted in a shared andrather more egalitarian Jawi sub-culture, and in ways that trouble Ross’sargument that Cape Town slaves were never able to “create any communityto transcend the individualization of their enslavement andtransportation.” 104

So it was that, toward the nineteenth century, a form of ecstatic dhikrcould emerge in the waning shadows of VOC rule, and perhaps even underthe kindly eye of a hardy sojourner who had tasted the bounty of an islandonce full of rice, jungles and tigers, but who now settled for the offerings ofa few dozen households given at the Cape of Storms. Today ʿAlawi’s heavilyremodeled tomb stands as but one of many holy graves encircling, andthereby protecting, the Cape from the storms to come.

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103. See Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the indianOcean (Berkeley, 2006).

104. Robert Ross, cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, etc.:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 17, 118.



Fig 2. The remodeled tomb of Sayyid ʿAlawi (Tuan Said), photograph by author, September 2012.

LAFFAN M

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