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Sufism in Southeast Asia: Reflections and Reconsiderations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 April 2011
Extract
In 1961 I published in this Journal a paper on the Islamization of peninsular and insular Southeast Asia. It was a paper I had presented to the first meeting of the conference of historians of Southeast Asia organized in January of that year at the University of Malaya in Singapore by the then Raffles Professor of History, K.G. Tregonning. It was a paper often referred to in discussions concerning the coming of Islam to the Malay world, and attracted its share of approbation and criticism.
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- Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 26 , 25th Anniversary Special Issue 1: Perspectives on Southeast Asian Studies , March 1995 , pp. 169 - 183
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1995
References
Earlier versions of this paper were prepared during my tenure of a Special Foreign Professorship at Chiba University, Japan, 1 Oct. to 31 Dec. 1991, sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, and presented in the seminars held at the Institute of Asian Culture, Sophia University, Tokyo; Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, International University of Japan, Urasa, Niigata Prefecture, and Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my colleagues at these institutions for their fruitful discussions.
1 “Sufism as a Category in Indonesian Literature and History”, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, 2 (1961): 10–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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3 Published as “Malay Sufism as Illustrated in a Collection of Anonymous Malay Tracts”, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, 2 (1957).Google Scholar
4 Hitti, Philip K., History of the Arabs [London: Macmillan (Papermac), 1979], p. 474.Google Scholar
5 Hall, D.G.E., A History of Southeast Asia (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 177.Google Scholar
6 See Jones, Russell, “Ten Indonesian Conversion Myths”, in Conversion to Islam, ed. Levtzion, N. (London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 129–58.Google Scholar
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8 Hitti, History, p. 656.
9 Hitti, History, p. 678. Fatimi's summary and interpretation of these events should be read against the information given in Hitti, pp. 655–56 & 677–78.
10 See Drewes, G.W.J. and Brakel, L.F., The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, Bibliotheca Indonesica 26 (Dordrecht: Floris Publications, 1986). The specific verse reference is p. 143 v. 13.Google Scholar
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13 An English rendering of the lines in question is:
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18 These passages are summarized from my draft translation of the Itḥrāf al-dhakī based on the Leiden Ms. Cod. Or. 7050.
19 al-Afrani al-Marakishi, Ṭabaqāt al-sulaḥrā' (Lithograph, no place, no date), pp. 210–11.
20 For a general survey of tafsīr in the region see Johns, A.H., “Qur'anic Exegesis in the Malay World: in Search of a Profile”, in Towards a History of the Interpretation of the Qur'an, ed. Rippin, A (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 257–87.Google Scholar
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23 Drewes, Directions, pp. 36–37.
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25 Cairo: Halabi, 1965.
26 For a more detailed study of Nawawi see my “On Qur'anic exegetes and exegesis: A case study in the transmission of Islamic learning” in P. Riddell and T. Street (eds.). Islam: Transmissions and Encounters (Leiden: E.J. Brill), in press.
27 Lapidus, Ira M., A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 259.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., pp. 102–103.
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