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Shiʿism in South East Asia: ʿAlid Piety and Sectarian Constructions Edited by Chiara Formichi and Michael Feener

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jis/etx038

1471-6917

Martin van Bruinessen,

Asian Studies and History

The title of this book is slightly deceptive, for apart from the last two chapters, which concern recent conversions to Shiʿism in Indonesia, and a chapter on Persian and Indian Shiʿis in Thailand, it does not really deal with actual Shiʿi communities but mostly describes expressions of piety focussing on ʿAlī and the ahl al-bayt in otherwise Sunni contexts. The editors and contributors provide a comprehensive overview of the various phenomena that by earlier generations of scholars were described as Shiʿi or influenced by Shiʿism. These include references to ʿAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn in early Malay texts and oral traditions, popular practices associated with ʿĀshūrā, and veneration for the ahl al-bayt. Scholars have assumed that among the various cultural flows that went into the making of Southeast Asian Islam there must have been early Persian or Shiʿi influences (the two are not always clearly distinguished), which were later marginalized due to increasing contacts with the Sunni Arab world. One version of this hypothesis was formulated by L. F. Brakel, the editor of the Ḥikayat Muhammad Hanafiyya (1975), the most explicitly Shiʿi of the early Malay texts, and based on a Persian original. Brakel noticed that the Shiʿi elements were more prominent in the older manuscripts than in more recent copies of this text, and believed that this indicated the existence of strong Shiʿi influences in early Southeast Asian Islam, which were in later stages deliberately purged, for which he coined the term ‘de-Shiʿitisation’. This hypothesis became a standard reference for later research, and several of the contributors to this volume also engage with it. A later incursion of Shiʿi influences that has drawn some scholarly attention survives in local festivals held in Muḥarram in various places on Sumatra’s West Coast and the Straits Settlements, which were introduced by Indian Shiʿi soldiers brought there by the British East India Company. Several scholars finally have pointed to yet another possible source of Shiʿi influences prior to the Iranian revolution, hinting that at least some of the Hadrami sayyids in Indonesia had long been crypto-Shiʿis.