(22105956 - Journal of Sufi Studies) Sufism, Miracles and Oceanic Fatwas - The Beloved of North Jakarta

journal of Sufi Studies 11 (2022) 74–114
brill.com/jss
Sufism, Miracles and Oceanic Fatwas: The Beloved

of North Jakarta
Teren Sevea | ORCID: 0000-0001-9471-8141

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
tsevea@hds.harvard.edu
Abstract
This article examines stories, hagiographies, fatwas, and treatises related to the grave
of a sayyid miracle worker (keramat) buried in North Jakarta. It is a product of research
that began in 2008 when I first visited the Sufi shrine of the eminent keramat, Habib
Hussein al-ʿAydarus (d. 1169/1756), in the village of Luar Batang. Herefrom, I enjoyed
access to a series of documents, oral traditions and miracle stories, along with invalu-
able information via conversations with Sufi elders, devotees, and Habib Hussein’s
kinsmen. This article begins by introducing the Luar Batang shrine and stories of the
keramat’s apparitions that continue to be told in the village. It discusses a twenty-first
century moment when the keramat was seen by some to resist urban redevelopment
and collude with controversial Islamists and Sunni vigilantes. His apparitions and
miracle stories reminded votaries of his immortal history of resisting colonialism,
secularism, Islamophobia and ‘Christianisation’. From this contemporary moment, the
article turns its attention towards hagiographies produced in twentieth-century Java
by the historians of Sufi networks, before analysing fatwas on the keramat produced in
the late nineteenth century by Islamic scholars (ulama) from Yemen, Mecca, Medina
and Java concerning revenue, inheritance, and the legality of customs at the Luar
Batang shrine. The article works backwards from a contemporary moment in order to
introduce readers to the keramat, village and grave and his historical and peripatetic
life in Gujarat, Hadramaut and Java, before highlighting how the shrine of a seemingly
peripheral village in Jakarta has been a key concern for authorities across the Islamic
world and an Indian Ocean-wide devotional community. Miracle stories and hagiogra-
phies praising the keramat as the exemplar of Sunnism and Shafiʿism, as well as fatwas
defending the customs of his shrine as being inviolable ones, encourage us to discard
the still-regnant academic divisions of Sharia/Custom and Sufis/Ulama. Together, they
tell a story of miraculous narratives, devotional cultures, social memories and sacral
places that are often pushed to the margins of religious studies but refuse to fade into
oblivion.
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Sufism, Miracles and Oceanic Fatwas 75
Keywords
miracles – hagiography – customs – modern Sufism – Indian Ocean
1 Introduction
I first visited a village named Luar Batang in North Jakarta in 2008. I had read
translations of the accounts of Chinese explorers who had visited Luar Batang
in between the 1730s and 1790s, one of whom had described the area and village
as the “port of the sacred tomb” in 1736.1 While this traveller, Cheng Sun-wo,
associated the village that was located westwards of Batavia’s harbour with a
venerated grave, another Chinese observer named Ong Tae-Hae would describe
the most prominent Chinese residents of the village located by the “Holy grave
canal” in the 1780s and 90s.2 Being (fortunately) unaware of an easier path to
the grave, I passed through Luar Batang’s “Fish Market” that was condemned
by Jakartan urbanites as a “slum” and crossed a wooden walk-bridge built over
the “Holy grave canal” to join the path to Luar Batang’s shrine, and then walked
through the village’s narrow gangways (gang) teeming with hawkers, peddlers,
and autorickshaws. My initial education about the village and shrine came from
conversations with hawkers, before reaching the shrine and grave adorned with
a marble plate. The plate contains Arabic and Malay inscriptions describing
the buried saint as Habib Hussein b. Abu Bakr b. ʿAbdullah al-ʿAydarus and as
the Friend of God (waliAllah) and “Keramat [of] Luar Batang” who “departed
[died] on 17 Ramadan 1169 [24 June 1756].” In between 2008 and 2019, I visited
Luar Batang annually to sit with worshippers of the keramat and his descen-
dants, especially from the family of the closest male heir (ʿaṣaba) of Habib
Hussein, named Sayyid Hussein b. Ahmad al-ʿAydarus. Thanks to the immense
generosity of these interlocutors and other members of Habib Hussein’s devo-
tional community from Java, Singapore and Gujarat, I have been privileged to
enjoy access to a range of oral traditions and miracle stories, as well as texts
preserved within the Luar Batang shrine and private collections. Coveted
texts include published and unpublished Indonesian Malay hagiographies
and Arabic and Malay fatwas, while the miracle stories and poetic accounts
of the keramat are traditions transmitted primarily in Indonesian Malay and
1 Claudine Lombard-Salmon, “Un Chinois a Java (1729–36),” Bulletin de l’École française

d’Extrême-Orient 59 (1972): 279–318. See 293.
2 Ong Tae Hae, The Chinaman abroad, or, A Desultory Account of the Malayan Archipelago,
Particularly of Java (Shanghai: Mission Press, 1849), 23.
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to a much smaller extent in Urdu. Here, I introduce some of these materials

on the keramat.
The term keramat can be traced to the Arabic and Persianate word for
miracles (karāmāt). In the Malay-Javanese context, however, “keramat” refers
both to the miracle-working individual and the miracle-working shrine at their
burial site. The term thus includes the long afterlife of miracle workers: the
shrines erected at their graves live on as the penultimate source of miracles,
second only to God. The bodies of Islamic miracle-workers constitute an inter-
node (barzakh) between the physical and unseen worlds, and their graves
present an isthmus between this world and the beyond. In addition to being
the keramat, Habib Hussein is respected as a leading sayyid, that is, a male,
patrilineal descendant of Prophet Muhammad; Ḥabīb (sing., Ar. pl. Ḥabāʾib)
invests him as one of the “Beloveds” of God. Habib is typically bestowed upon
elite Muslims of the ʿAlid lineage, that is, descendants of Muhammad’s daugh-
ter, Fāṭima (d. 11/632), and his son-in-law, ʿAlī (d. 40/661), via their son, Ḥusayn
(d. 61/680). According to hagiographers’ Islamic maps of Batavia and Jakarta,
Habib Hussein was the progenitor of a line of ʿAlid keramats who sanctified
the metropolis with their bodies. Beginning with villages located along North
Jakarta’s harbours and coasts in the eighteenth century, ʿAlid keramat-graves
have proliferated in central, southern, and eastern Jakarta in the course of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to (re)Islamise urban spaces that
were, in some hagiographers’ fears, susceptible to “atheist communism” and
“Christianisation” in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia.3 As the progenitor
of ʿAlid saints in Jakarta, Habib Hussein has also been praised by hagiographers
as the most consummate Sufi and “Qutb” (from Arabic quṭb, axis) of the hid-
den hierarchy of ʿAlid saints in the ummah sebelah ini (“umma this side,” the
Malay-Javanese world).
Within Jakarta, the Luar Batang shrine’s popularity is only rivalled by the
grave of Habib Hasan Muhd al-Haddad (d. 1169/1756?). The latter shrine is also
located in North Jakarta, by the Koja harbour, surrounded by the International
Container Terminal and within eight miles of the Luar Batang shrine.
According to Habib Hasan’s hagiography, entitled Risalah Manaqib Mbah Priok
(RMMP), he had made a pilgrimage from Palembang (Sumatra) to Java, after a
pilgrimage to Hadramawt, to pay his respects to the Qutb, Habib Hussein.4 He
3 ʿAlid keramat-graves in Jakarta include those of Habib ʿAli b. ʿAbdurrahman al-Habshi

(1870–1968), Habib ʿAli b. Hussein al-ʿAttas (1891–1976) and Habib Salim b. Ahmad b. Jindan
(1906–1969).
4 Habib Abdulloh b. Abdurrahman Alaydrus and Habib Ali b. Abdurrahman Alaydrus, eds.,
Risalah Manaqib Mbah Priok: Maqom Keramat Wali Alloh Situs Sejarah Tanjung Priok (Pondok
Dayung) [hereafter, RMMP] (Java: n.p., n.d.), 4.
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would nonetheless die at sea days after surviving the attacks of Dutch customs
officers. By allowing dolphins to guide his floating corpse to North Batavia,
Habib Hasan would join his predecessor in sanctifying Batavian soil. In spite
of these exaltations within Islamic traditions as one of the most prominent
keramat of the region, Habib Hussein, has been mentioned in a mere handful
of academic works as a “lesser-known saint.”5 This unfortunately perpetuates
the conspicuous academic silence on (or oblivion of) the prominence of mir-
acle workers and keramats in Islamic societies across the globe, and further
pushes the lived religion of Muslims and non-Muslims and their saints to the
margins of Islamic studies. As Henri Chambert-Loir notes, the “cult of Muslim
saints” is universal and defines the religious life of the majority of Indonesians,
but remains ignored, with “no seminar about it, no book in Indonesian” and
little attention paid to it in the national media.6 Even religious studies schol-
ars calling upon peers to focus on devotional cults and miracle workers have
often assumed that “magic men” (and women) represented an “older religious
life” that had entered its historical twilight in Islamic societies by the twenti-
eth century.7 The one English-language article that has been written on the
nineteenth-century Luar Batang shrine inspires my work on the shrine, but
also assumes that Habib Hussein’s cult must have “become less prominent and
less popular” in the course of the twentieth century due to Islamic reform.8
My observations of the traffic of local devotees and more itinerant ones, as
well as group tours of pilgrims and sermon groups (majlis taklim), have led
me to assume otherwise. Pilgrims especially visit the grave during the Habib’s
annual commemoration (hawl) and before Ramadān; on a more regular basis,
the shrine complex is crowded on Thursday nights and Friday mornings and
during weekly rituals of remembering God (zikr) and recitations of salawat
(ṣalawāt; salutations to Muhammad and his family). The prominence of the
Luar Batang shrine is also attested to by the fact that Indonesian political
leaders, ranging from presidents to controversial vigilantes (discussed below)
5 Henri Chambert-Loir, “Saints and Ancestors: The Cult of Muslin saints in Java,” in The Potent
Dead: Ancestors, Saints and Heroes in Contemporary Indonesia, ed. Chambert-Loir and
Anthony Reid (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 135.
6 Ibid., 132–33.
7 James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 3, 16.
8 Nico Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine: The Perkara Luar Batang in
Batavia,” in Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade and Islam in Southeast Asia, ed. Huub
de Jonge and Nico Kaptein (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), 197.

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have made widely publicised pilgrimages to offer prayers amidst “thousands”

of worshippers.9
Habib Hussein has also failed to draw scholarly attention as one of the
Indian Ocean-traversing religious adepts or prominent “‘little men’ between big
Empires.”10 This is notwithstanding the fact that he had been celebrated within
Islamic literary traditions as one of the eminent saints of the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Islamic world. In an attempt to redress this conspicuous
academic silence, I suggest that the study of a sayyid and keramat can serve
as a microhistory of the Indian Ocean and Sufis who crossed spatial, ethnic,
and political boundaries to connect Muslim and non-Muslim communities of
the Indian Ocean ecumene and beyond, while mediating quotidian matters
of modern socioeconomic life by facilitating trade and travel and negotiating
colonial restrictions on Asian communities and capital.
Keramats including Habib Hussein were reputed to be able to effortlessly
travel or teleport themselves across the Indian Ocean to protect sea travellers;
locate themselves in port cities and participate in Sufi gatherings; confront
European authorities; and settle migrants into Java, Aceh, Malaya, and Gujarat.
Keramats navigated the islands and seas, calming storms and waves so that
the people and objects that traversed the region would arrive safely, and, irre-
spective of the city they chose to live in, healed itinerant workers, urbanites,
and royalty alike.11 Habib Hussein is portrayed as miraculously healing the ill
in Surat (Gujarat) and reviving the city’s socioeconomic life after it had been
ravaged by a Mughal navy blockade, drought, and cholera, and then help-
ing believers in Dutch Batavia, a port city plagued by Islamophobia, colonial
oppression, poverty, and the lack of medical facilities. The Dutch East India
Company (VOC) had indeed colonised Batavia by 1028/1619 and soon occu-
pied its northern shore, Sunda Kelapa, to establish a fortress, godowns, and
customs. By the 1140s/1730s, the VOC had reclaimed the coast located west of
the Sunda Kelapa harbour to house labourers who cleared the mud from the
shallow Ciliwung river estuary.12 The vessel Habib Hussein rode into Batavia
would have passed through Dutch customs, legally or illegally, before entering
9 Hartono Ahmad Jaiz and Hamzah Tede, Kuburan-kuburan Keramat di Nusantara (Jakarta:
Pustaka Al-Kaustar, 2011), 111–12.
10 Seema Alavi, “Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed Fanatics: Indian Muslims in nineteenth-
century trans-Asiatic Imperial Rivalries,” Modern Asian Studies 45.6 (2011): 1337–82.
11 See Barbara W. Andaya’s articles on water cosmologies and mysterious waterbodies: “The
Mysterious Ocean: Underwater Kingdoms, Sea Creatures, and Saintly Miracles in Early
Modern Southeast Asia and Europe,” NSC Working Paper 31 (2018): 1–31; “Seas, Oceans and
Cosmologies in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 48.3 (2017): 349–71.
12 Popi Puspitasari et al., “Ritual and Space Structure: Pilgrimage and Space Use in Historical
Urban Kampung Context of Luar Batang (Jakarta, Indonesia),” Procedia – Social and
Behavioral Sciences 36 (2012): 350–60; Alwi Shahab, Saudagar Baghdad dari Betawi
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the river estuary and crossing a northern barrier built on reclaimed land.
The name “Luar Batang” or “Out-of-Bar” possibly originates from this bar-
rier built from tree-trunks and iron. Having passed the “bar”, the keramat’s
vessel would have entered the village located outside the harbour (boom).
Hagiographers and storytellers have often highlighted how the Habib and suc-
cessive Islamic scholars (ʿulamāʾ) were especially targeted by “Islamophobic”
restrictions of their movements imposed by the Dutch, as well as the “pass
and quarter restrictions” on itinerant Asians that were especially stringent in
Batavia.13 While transgressing Islamophobic colonial authority, the keramats
maintained cordial relationships with gift-giving colonial authorities. Even as
Habib Hussein was frequently incarcerated for everyday forms of resistance,
oral histories describe his spectacular prison-breaks and conversions of his
incarcerators into initiates and magnanimous donors perpetuating the cus-
toms (ʿādat) of his devotional community and shrine. Having propagated
Shāfiʿism and Sufism in Surat, he eventually converted Dutch Batavia into a
pilgrimage centre that was the hub of a pilgrimage route connecting Batavia,
Mecca, Medina, Surat, Madras, Hadramawt, and Zabid (west Yemen). The sto-
ries of Habib Hussein, which contain all these features, thus present him as the
embodiment of a resilient form of Islam, one that is equipped to face empires
and the territorialisation and secularisation of the Indian Ocean, a region that
has been imagined by hagiographers, poets, and academic historians as a natu-
rally cosmopolitan and Islamic space.14
Sumit Mandal’s book on “creole Arabs” in the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Malay world, Becoming Arab, begins with a mention of Habib Hussein’s
grave in Luar Batang.15 Mandal describes the grave as a microcosm of a larger
“transregional” society wherein ports and populations from Batavia to Muscat
were intimately connected. Dutch scholars L. W. C. Van den Berg (1886) and
Ph. S. von Ronkel (1916–17) had earlier attested to this as well, highlighting
(Jakarta: Penerbit Republika, 2004), 22–23; Scott Merrilless, Batavia In Nineteenth Century
Photographs (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2000).
13 Sumit K. Mandal, Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 105.
14 See illuminating works on the Islamic Indian Ocean: Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim:
Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006); Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean,
1840–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); R. M. Eaton, “Islamic History as
World History,” in Essays on Islam and Indian History, ed. R. M. Eaton (New Delhi; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 9–44.; P. Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce
and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); J. Voll, “Islam as a Special
World System,” Journal of World History 5.2 (1994): 213–26; A. Wink, “Al-Hind: India and
Indonesia in the Islamic World-Economy, c. 700–1800 AD,” Itinerario 12.1 (1988): 33–70.
15 Mandal, Becoming Arab, xxiii.

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the shrine’s prominence and its drawing of devotees from Javanese or Muslim
“natives,” but also from more itinerant Islamic pilgrims (including Arabs and
other Asian settlers), as well as believers of Chinese and Indo-European (“mes-
tizo”) origins. Van den Berg’s 1886 report on Arabs in the Netherlands Indies
highlighted that Habib Hussein had acquired an “enormous reputation as
keramat” across the Indian Ocean – his grave was one of the “primary sites of
pilgrimage across the Indian Archipelago.”16 The shrine attracted transregional
pilgrims especially during seasons of pilgrimage (Hajj); devotees often stopped
by on their way to the Haramayn at Luar Batang to ensure safe passage on the
maritime journey.17
While Batavia became a node of steamship travel to the Hajj, and even a hub,
like Singapore, for obtaining loans and debt-bonds for such journeys, passen-
gers depended on Habib Hussein’s intercession to travel and avoid ship-borne
diseases, and upon successfully completing the Hajj, made another pilgrim-
age to Luar Batang, passing through the village’s narrow lanes also occupied
by mendicants. The 1928 Sundanese ballad entitled Wawacan Pareumeun
Obor (Verse Tale of the Dimming of the Lamplight) similarly caricatured a
beggar of Luar Batang who unsuccessfully pursued the ballad’s protagonist
for votive offerings (sedekah; from Arabic ṣadaqa) by claiming to be a Habib.
The episode, however, betrayed an ethic shared amongst many maritime and
terrestrial travellers to Batavia of making the pilgrimage (djiarah; from Arabic
ziyāra) to Luar Batang. Its protagonist even compromised his own disinclina-
tion to visit the shrine after arriving in the city from West Java, following his
mother’s instructions.18
On Javanese soil, keramats, including Habib Hussein, thrived in cities
and villages that were demographically dominated by Javanese settlers and
Chinese immigrants in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, while witnessing growths of Arab communities and the fluctuating South
Asian populations. By plugging into the industries, bazaars, and communal
institutions of Batavia’s diverse peoples, keramats unintentionally challenged
the colonial (and at times, academic) conception of society as divided along
16 L. W. C. Van den Berg’s report on Arabs in the Netherlands Indies was commissioned by
the Governor-General of Batavia and published as Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes
dans l’Archipel indien (Batavia: Impr. du gouvernement, 1886), 162–63; Ph.S. van Ronkel,
“Moskeeen te Batavia,” Nederlandsch-Indië oud en nieuw 1 (1916/1917): 202–7.
17 Van Ronkel, “Moskeeen te Batavia,” 202–7.
18 M. K. Hardjakoesoema, Wawacan Pareumeun Obor (Weltevreden: Bale Poestaka, 1928),
43–44; Wendy Mukherjee, “Kaum Muda and Kaum Tua in West Java: The Literary Record,”
in Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought and Society, ed. P. G. Riddell and Tony Street (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 318.
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the lines of essentialised racial categories.19 Working in shared urban spaces,

Islamic keramats mediated the socioeconomic lives of individuals who con-
ducted business through caravans and ships circulating spaces as diverse as the
Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea.
The next section of this article discusses stories and rumours of apparitions
that continue to be told in Luar Batang – including a twenty-first century story
of the keramat reputedly intervening in an urban redevelopment project and
then blessing Islamist opponents of Jakarta’s simultaneously secular, “athe-
ist,” “Chinese,” and “Christian” government. This case of Sufi-Islamism only
reminds Indonesianists that any “[Sufi] moderate-progressive versus [Islamist]
conservative-fundamentalist” view of Indonesian Islam is futile.20 The article
works backwards from a contemporary moment because this better introduces
readers to the Luar Batang keramat and his historical life across Indian Ocean
port cities. Miracle stories are still told in Luar Batang and beyond by storytell-
ers and Sufi elders, and these stories were almost certainly transmitted during
Habib Hussein’s physical lifetime within smaller circles of listeners. The miracle
stories were then edited and disseminated across a more widespread Sufi net-
work that developed after the keramat’s physical death. I examine these older
biographical traditions and stories, compiled by the “historians” of Sufi networks
(ṭarīqa) in Java and beyond, in the second section of this article, before turning to
fatwas and epistles on the Luar Batang shrine in the third section. These fatwas
of ʿulamāʾ from late nineteenth-century Java, Yemen and Haramayn, including a
fatwa issued in Sayʾun (Hadramawt) in 1867, upheld the hierarchy of keramats,
sayyids and ʿulamāʾ and defended the customs of a shrine in a seemingly periph-
eral village of the Islamic world, Luar Batang. Indeed, Ismail Farjie Alatas’s
recent work reminds us that Java was not represented as an Islamic periphery in
Hadrami Sufi scholarship, and that from the late nineteenth century onwards,
Java’s shrines were prominent in a Hadrami “geography of sanctity”, drawing
pilgrims from Hadramawt and the western Indian Ocean region.21
19 Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of
Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); T. Harper, “Singapore, 1915,
and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47 (2013): 1782–811;
Harper, “Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: The Making of a Diasporic Public
Sphere in Singapore,” Sojourn 12.2 (1997): 261–92; S. L. Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life
and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016); Mandal, Becoming Arab.
20 Iqra Anugrah, “Recent Studies on Indonesian Islam: A Sign of Intellectual Exhaustion?”
Indonesia 100.1 (2015): 106, 114.
21 Ismail Farjie Alatas, “Hadrami Sufi-scholars and their shrines in Southeast Asia: A geog-
raphy,” in Routledge Handbook on Islam in Asia, ed. Chiara Formichi (London; New York:
Routledge, 2021), 209–24.

82 Sevea
The following sections further encourage readers to reconsider the regnant

academic divisions of Sharia/Custom, Sufis/ʿulamāʾ, Sufism/Islamism and
local mysticism/Arabic cosmopolitanism. This article also appeals to readers
to forsake, beforehand, any imagination of Javanese Islam being the “less-
than-pure-Islam” or devotionalism at Javanese shrines being “only superficially
Islamic,” along with continuing academic representations of Java’s sayyids as
strict evangelists who reformed local ʿādat and converted vernacular “Islam
from a South Indian semi-pantheist mysticism to the orthodoxy of Mecca and
Medina.”22 It does so even as it introduces readers to the miracles, customs
and charismatic authority of a keramat.
2 A Flying Sufi in Jakarta
In between 2016 and 2017, apparitions (penampakan) of Habib Hussein

(d. 1169/1756) were reported, in the vicinity of his grave and the adjacent Luar
Batang mosque.23 The shrine and mosque remain encircled, on one end, by
Jakarta’s oldest port, Sunda Kelapa, and on the other end by Luar Batang’s
settlements that have been viewed by Jakarta’s urbanites as forming one of
North Jakarta’s slums (kawasan kumuh).24 Luar Batang’s mosque was then
located westwards of the “Pasar Ikan” or Fish Market (the slum’s layout is men-
tioned above). Privileged believers had seen, smelt, and heard Habib Hussein
in Luar Batang on occasion in the twentieth century. Indeed, the keramat once
appeared (literally) to share an incantatory talisman or salutation (salawat)
in a “face-to-face” meeting with a noteworthy pilgrim, the Islamic scholar and
founder of an Islamic school (pesantren) for the Haba‌ʾib in Malang (East Java),
Habib Muhd b. Hussein Ba‌ʾabud (d. 1993). The talismanic salutation, to be dis-
seminated across the devotional community, would help pilgrims overcome
any “obstacles” suffered during the “New Order” (1966–98) of the military dic-
tator, Suharto, as well as socioeconomic crises that facilitated the end of the
22 Quoted from Chambert-Loir, “Saints and Ancestors,” 132–33; Shahab Ahmed, What Is
Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016),
450–2; Robert B. Serjeant, The Saiyids of Hadramawt: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on
5 June 1956 (London: SOAS, 1957), 25.
23 Apparition stories and images were circulated via WhatsApp Messenger, for instance,
and I am grateful to the storytellers, Wak Aiyim, Wak Isa and Wak Muhammad Hassan
especially, for sharing these miracle stories. Deirdre de la Cruz’s Mother Figured: Marian
Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015) argues that apparitions are “constitutive reminders” of the numinous in a moder-
nity driven towards forgetting its religious past; see 11.
24 Shahab, Saudagar Baghdad dari Betawi, 22–23.
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New Order. The salawat begins with an invocation of the two closest Friends of
God, Prophet Muhammad and Habib Hussein, before reminding its audience
of the need to venerate sayyids and keramats, so as to ensure their mediation
in material life. It has been printed for pilgrims to Luar Batang’s shrine and
serves as a reminder of Habib Hussein’s immortal presence (keberadaan). In
2016 and 2017, his purported visitations occurred when and after Luar Batang
was endangered by a major urban redevelopment project (see Fig. 1). This proj-
ect was designed to convert Jakarta’s oldest port into a tourist hub and exhibit
a sanitised version of the “Old City” (Kota Tua). It was spearheaded by Jakarta’s
governor, popularly known as “Ahok,” and evidently involved removing the
slums and stilt-houses lining the canal of the neighbourhood. The justification
for replacing these slum-villages was sophisticated, since they were especially
vulnerable to severe flooding due to the encroaching bay of the globe’s fastest-
sinking city. Visitors to Luar Batang including myself have walked through the
floods that plague its residents regularly, who also suffer a capricious electrical
supply and lack of access to desalinated water and adequate medical facilities.
The amenities available at Luar Batang are a stark contrast to those of a luxuri-
ous marina connecting North Jakarta to island-resorts, as well as the enormous
shopping malls of Mangga Dua that attract tourists – both the marina and
malls are within three miles of Luar Batang.
figure 1 Demolition of Pasar Ikan, located eastwards of the Luar Batang Mosque
NurPhoto via GettyImages

84 Sevea
The urban redevelopment project was unfavourably received by Pasar

Ikan’s residents, whose settlements and informal economies were demolished
by Indonesia’s security forces in April 2016. The forces were then tasked with
evicting remaining residents of Luar Batang’s slum and resettling them in
subsidised apartments. Beyond a small group of sayyids and sayyidahs, Luar
Batang appears to be populated by ethnically diverse working-class residents
of Bugis origins (from Sulawesi) and from across Java. These residents work at
the Sunda Kelapa port and factories and as boatmen, fish-sellers or fishermen,
and operate formal and informal businesses through rental housing along the
narrow gangways of Luar Batang. To oppose the 2016 “beautification” project,
aggrieved residents formed mass organisations (ormas) and “armies”, includ-
ing the Laskar Pembela Luar Batang (Luar Batang Defenders Army).25 The
resistance would be intensified with the participation of the Sunni vigilante
movement called Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders Front; FPI) led by
an incendiary and opportunistic Sufi-Islamist and sayyid of part-Hadrami ori-
gins known as “Habib Rizieq” (b. 1965).26 FPI vigilantes joined agitators from
the Laskar and smaller ormas in Luar Batang, while Habib Rizieq facilitated
ceremonies that venerated keramats and sayyids and delivered incendiary
speeches against Ahok and other secular leaders of Indonesia who had forgot-
ten Jakarta’s and Luar Batang’s Islamic history. Ahok was then campaigning
(in vain) for a gubernatorial re-election and was, incidentally, a Christian of
Chinese origin.27 While a number of Luar Batang residents I met were con-
vinced that Habib Rizieq had Habib Hussein’s charismatic religious authority
(baraka) transferred to him amidst the resistance in 2016, FPI sympathisers
also argued that Habib Hussein would continue to bless the leader and levitate
over devotional gatherings he addressed in Luar Batang in 2017. Photographs
and videos of a spiritual being adorning the performative form of ʿAlawi sayy-
ids in Java, in a white turban (ʿimāma) and long robe ( jubba) and hovering over
Habib Rizieq were uploaded online, to legitimise the claim.28 Hagiographers
25 Amongst a variety of news articles and videos available on resistance in Luar Batang,
see Renaldo Gabriel’s 22 November 2016 “Menyambangi Luar Batang, Pusat Gerakan
Anti-Ahok,” https://www.vice.com/id/article/aevv8p/menyambangi-luar-batang-pusat
-perlawanan-gerakan-anti-ahok.
26 For an account of Habib Rizieq’s Sufism, see Mark Woodward, et al., “Ordering What
is Right, Forbidding What is Wrong: Two faces of Hadhrami Dakwah in Contemporary
Indonesia,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 46.2 (2012): 105–46.
27 Mona Lohanda, “The Tragedy of Basuki Tjahaja Purnam,” Religious Pluralism in Indonesia:
Threats and Opportunities for Democracy, ed. Chiara Formichi (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2021), pp. 113–45.
28 For an account of ʿAlid evangelists in Indonesia performing their ʿAlawi sayyidness sarto-
rially, see Syamsul Rijal, “Performing Arab Saints and Marketing the Prophet: Habaib and
Islamic Markets in Contemporary Indonesia,” Archipel 99 (2020): 189–213.
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and kinsmen of the keramat I sat with in Luar Batang continue to debate
the authenticity of the apparition stories reported in 2016 and 2017, as well
as accompanying photographs and videos, but only cast doubt on the iden-
tity of the keramat hovering over Habib Rizieq. They suggest that the form of
keramats is hard to distinguish for humans; as such, the hovering saint could
either be Habib Hussein or another keramat from his paideia of ʿAlid saints
from Hadramawt, South Asia, and Java.29
George Quinn’s Bandit Saints of Java is one of the few English-language
books on Java concerned with keramats.30 While Quinn does not discuss Luar
Batang’s keramat, he noted that the FPI vigilantes had earlier agitated against
Jakarta’s government at the shrine of another popular keramat, Habib Hasan
(introduced above). In April 2010, a police-driven beautification project to
expand port facilities targeted Habib Hasan’s grave and a slum located next
to it, and would suffer the violent resistance of residents organised as “Aksi
Bela Islam” (Action Defending Islam), along with FPI agitators.31 Following
earlier (Muslim) governors, Ahok would relaunch the redevelopment project
in this part of North Jakarta in 2016, while attempting the major reconstruction
of Pasar Ikan and Luar Batang. By late 2016, Ahok faced Sufi-Islamist resistance
across North Jakarta. After having denounced Habib Rizieq’s misinterpreta-
tion of a Qurʾanic verse aimed at forbidding non-Muslims (and, by implication,
him) from leading Muslim societies, he was charged for blasphemy. Following
mass anti-blasphemy demonstrations in Jakarta that were led by an alliance
of Islamic reformists and Islamists, Ahok attempted to enhance his Islamic
credentials in March 2017 by designating Habib Hasan’s grave as a cultural
sanctuary (cagar budaya).32 He simultaneously pledged to develop it, along
with the Luar Batang shrine, into a hub of religious tourism, to (re)connect
North Jakarta’s Sufi shrines to widespread ports of the Islamic world. Ahok
would thus acquire votes from parts of Islamic North Jakarta in the guberna-
torial election, but he would be imprisoned for blasphemy by May 2017 and
remain vilified amongst several believers at Luar Batang.
Between April 2016 and December 2019, I was privileged to sit with some
of Habib Hussein’s descendants, village elders and residents, as well as itin-
erant pilgrims, at Luar Batang, annually. On those occasions, I have heard
29 This was the opinion expressed by Habib Hussein’s kinsmen including Hussein Fikri.
30 George Quinn, Bandit Saints of Java: How Java’s eccentric saints are challenging fundamen-
talist Islam in modern Indonesia (Lanham: Monsoon Books, 2019).
31 Quinn describes the events of 14 April 2010 in Bandit Saints of Java, 139–41.
32 The anti-Ahok alliance consisted of the FPI, as well as the Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI,
Party of Liberation), the Gerakan Nasional Pengawal Fatwa – Majelis Ulama Indonesia
(GNPF-MUI, National Movement for Guiding the Fatwa of Majelis Ulama Indonesia) and
the Forum Umat Islam (FUI, Islamic Community Forum).

86 Sevea
many denounce Ahok and the prevalence of a secular nationalism that

allowed even “heterodox” ideologies and movements such as the Jamaʿat-i
Aḥmadiyya (established by the Islamic reformer from north India, Mīrzā
Ghulām Aḥmad, by 1888), to flourish in post-colonial Indonesia. Quoting
Sufi-Islamists including Habib Rizieq, my interlocutors berated Ahok and
occasionally censured Ahok’s Muslim supporters as hypocrites (munāfiq), sin-
ners ( fāsiq), and apostates (murtad), undeserving of keramats’ intercession.
My interlocutors also seem to have borrowed heresiological vocabulary from
generations of Islamists to condemn some post-colonial Indonesian leaders
for monopolising Indonesia’s microeconomies with an anti-Islamic capital-
ism and Christianisation (Kristensasi).33 Ahok was, moreover and somewhat
contradictorily, feared for (re)facilitating an atheist communist revolution.
Readers might assume that fears of such a hydra-ideology (Christianisation,
atheism, and communism) are unfounded, especially after the massacre
of communists or sympathisers of the Communist Party (PKI) in 1965–66.
Nonetheless, such dystopian representations of Indonesian politics are con-
tained in the stories and hagiographies of Jakarta’s keramats who, according
to some hagiographers, continued Habib Hussein’s mission of resisting Dutch
colonialism and post-colonial secular nationalism. The hagiographies of ʿAlid
keramats including Habib ʿAli al-ʿAttas (1891–1976; buried in east Jakarta), for
instance, describe him as striving against communism and atheism. According
to one such account, Habib ʿAli had declared that it was obligatory for Muslims
to battle kāfir “oppressors” and atheist power (kekuatan atheis), and invited
Muslims to exterminate communists and other infidels with the baraka of
ʿulamāʾ and God’s Friends buried in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago.34
I have also recorded anecdotes in Luar Batang in 2018 and 2019 praising
Habib Rizieq as one of Habib Hussein’s revolutionary heirs, even after he had
absconded to Saudi Arabia following legal persecution for insulting state sym-
bols and Indonesia’s first president, and after he was legally summoned (in
his self-imposed exile) for violating Indonesia’s anti-pornography laws. While
33 See, for instance, Hamka, 1001 Soal Kehidupan (Jakarta: Gema Insani, 2016), 405–71.
34 Abdul Qadir Umar Mauladawilah, 17 Habaib Berperanguh di Indonesia [hereafter, 17H]
(Java: Pustaka Bayan, 2008), 120–21. Non-ʿAlid Sufi-Islamists including the founder of
the now-mythologised anti-colonial movement, Darul Islam, Kartosuwiryo (1905–62),
have also been valourised in contemporary Indonesia. Kartosuwiryo had opposed secu-
lar nationalism after Indonesian independence and called for the establishment of an
Islamic State; his movement was banned and persecuted in the 1950s and 60s and he
was executed (or martyred). See Chiara Formichi, Islam and the Making of the Nation:
Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in Twentieth-Century Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press,
2012).
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numerous ‘traditionalist’ Indonesian Muslims and prominent living masters of

Java have been antipathetic towards the FPI and its leader, posters at the Luar
Batang shrine bazaar adorned the FPI leader with an elaborate Sufi network,
and he continues to be celebrated on the social media of groups including the
Laskar Keramat Luar Batang (Luar Batang Keramat Army).35 Some images
of Habib Rizieq connect him to his lofty predecessors and are found amidst
those of other “Hadrami” Sufis including the Nine Friends (wali sanga) who
Islamised Java.36 According to some stories, he acquired esoteric knowledge
(ʿilm) expeditiously as a child in Luar Batang through the aptitude of his soul
and matured to become the viceregent of the Luar Batang keramat in the lat-
ter’s immortal war against colonialism (kolonialisme), atheism (atheisme),
“Islamophobia” and “Kristensasi”.37
Habib Rizieq would also opportunistically join various elders of Luar
Batang in 2016 to defend the inviolable sanctity of the settlement, including its
flooded gangways and the talismanic water supplied by a well at the shrine, the
latter of which relieved residents suffering from inadequate medical facilities.
Storytellers and hagiographers of the past and the present have circulated sto-
ries of how Habib Hussein momentarily overcame his death and reanimated
himself in the eighteenth century to sanctify Luar Batang and remind followers
of his selected burial village. In doing so, storytellers and hagiographers con-
demn the ignorant ( jāhil) for being epistemologically colonised, in assuming
that the village name “Luar Batang” originated from it being located outside
the harbour and the northern barrier. On the contrary, it originated from the
playful methods Habib Hussein used at his funeral. Having chosen to live in
the village, the keramat preferred to be buried there and refused to be bur-
ied in a cemetery located in central Batavia, as required by Dutch laws. Even
as his casket was being carried in procession, the immortal keramat “popped
in and out” of the bars (batang) of his casket. He disappeared (being out-of-
bar or luar batang) to register his protest, forcing the procession to bury his
body in the village that would thereafter be known as Luar Batang, signifying
it as a monument of his resistance to colonial and post-colonial restrictions on
35 Alatas, What is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Community in Indonesia (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2021), 179–80.
36 For representations of the wali sanga as Hadramis, see the alKisah magazine; Alwi Shihab,
Islam Sufistik: Islam Pertama dan Pengaruhnya Hingga Kini di Indonesia (Bandung: Mizan,
2001); Mauladawilah, 17H, 16–17; Mauladawilah, Tiga Serangkai Ulama Tanah Betawi (Java:
Pustaka Basma and Majelis Kheir Ta‌ʾlimul Qurʾan Wattahfidz, 2009), 85–87.
37 I reproduce some of the terms used by select Habib Hussein’s kinsmen, and storytell-
ers, pilgrims and residents of Kampung Luar Batang including Mansur Amin, Sumin,
Gundardi, Taha, Aiyim, Muhammad Hasan and ʿAbdul Qadir al-ʿAydarus.

88 Sevea
Islamic scholars and Sufis. Hagiographers also reminded ignorant Indonesian

Muslims that only the greatest nations have conserved, protected and valued
the history of keramats, while chiding them for doubting the veracity of spec-
tacular stories and forgetting the keramats’ history of religious revolution,
blaming amnesia on the self-absorption of humans (nafsu manusia).38 They
also warned them against becoming hypocrites (munāfiq), that is, claiming to
be Muslims but failing to value the Sufi traditions and refusing to believe in
miracle stories due to simple notions of chronology and reality, and, as such,
forgetting Islamic pasts of keramats and devotional communities across the
Indian Ocean.
In 2016 and 2017, Habib Hussein would remind audiences of his immortal
presence in the “first Islamic village of Jakarta,” one that had survived natural
disasters and outlived governments. Such stories are comparable to the volu-
minous “hagio-biographical narratives” of sayyid-Sufis across societies of the
Indian Ocean who were “fearless champions on behalf of the oppressed” and
used their supernatural powers to “scare” oppressive temporal rulers.39 Stories
of the Luar Batang keramat protecting his grave and village were also compa-
rable to the anecdotes of some of Habib Hussein’s ʿAlid successors including
the aforementioned Habib Hassan and the renowned keramat of Singapore,
Habib Nuh al-Habshi (d. 1866). The RMMP reported that Habib Hasan had
first prevented a wanton demolition of his grave to expand port facilities in
Dutch Batavia through killing dozens of labourers employed for urban rede-
velopment, along with Dutch officials. Habib Hasan also appeared hovering
over his grave, compelling Dutch officials to employ an Islamic medium to
appease the keramat while donating land for his new mausoleum.40 To remind
Indonesians that it was a major transgression of Sharia and Muhammad’s cus-
tom to unsettle the presence of keramats, Habib Hasan even released fireballs
into the skies in the 1990s and then the year 2000, before he buried bulldoz-
ers and injured or killed labourers and authorities trying to remove his shrine
to expand port facilities. While Habib Hussein’s direct and indirect interven-
tion was celebrated by some residents of Luar Batang for leading to Ahok’s
shocking electoral defeat and his subsequent imprisonment, Habib Hasan’s
hagiographers clarified that the attempts to molest his presence by the “New
Order” regime (1966–98) of the dictator Suharto, had indeed resulted in the
38 ʿAbdul Ghani Said, Tujuh Wali Melayu (Kuala Lumpur: Penerbitan Hikmah, 1993), 1–14;
RMMP, 21.
39 Alexander Knysh, “The Sada in History: A Critical Essay on Hadrami Historiography,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 9.2 (1999): 215–22.
40 Alaydarus and Alaydarus, RMMP, 18–21.
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violent end of the Order and democratisation. Miracle stories of Habib Nuh
similarly praise his success in guarding his shrine against post-colonial urban
redevelopment, especially since it is encircled by the skyscrapers of Singapore’s
commercial district and land that has been reclaimed to expand the sec-
ond busiest port in the world. Renditions of miracle stories and eyewitness
accounts state that Habib Nuh appeared to stop attacks, using similar tactics,
by toppling or exploding bulldozers, injuring their drivers, and killing belliger-
ent developers.41 In the following section, I turn from these more recent stories
to trace how storytellers and hagiographers of the past have circulated stories
of Habib Hussein’s historical life.
3 The Sufi Hagiographical Narrative: Connecting Gujarat,

Hadramawt, and Java
Tony K. Stewart’s Witness to Marvels examines the storytelling and perfor-

mances of Bengali saints’ stories (pir katha), uncovering the “religious and
cultural work” that stories and their “hagiographical narrative” accomplished
in the past and present.42 He restores the coherence of miracle stories as a
fictional genre and describes an autotelic, self-referential world of “bios-as-
fiction” that allows stories to be “detached from and read independently of
context.” Stewart’s explanation of how miracle narratives have been propa-
gated through textual hagiographies and oral literature while maintaining the
“fidelity of the tale” is as applicable to the anecdotes of keramats of Gujarat,
Hadramawt, Java and the Malay world as it is to Bengali saints’ stories.43 Like
Stewart, a handful of academic scholars of medieval and modern South Asia,
Africa, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula, have investigated hagiographies and
oral traditions. These scholars may have disagreed over methods of inquiry
and about wonder-tales being history or fiction, but together, they appreciate
the social significance of narrative traditions filled with rumours, magic, gos-
sip, divination, and non-academic conceptions of time and temporality that
41 Readers familiar with Amitav Ghosh’s accounts of immortal Sufis and Hindu spirits
immobilising bulldozers to resist technocratic development in Egypt and southeastern
India could approach these keramat stories as cosmopolitan and phenomenological
experiences of the supernatural across the Indian Ocean region; see In an Antique Land
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
42 Tony K. Stewart, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (Oakland: University
of California Press, 2019), 35.
43 Stewart, Witness to Marvels, 14, 42.

90 Sevea
were circulated to create communities of collective belief.44 Shahzad Bashir’s

seminal work on the early modern Central Asian Naqshbandīs, for instance,
attended to the “social logic” of hagiographies, highlighting how they were
historical projects of the disciples of deceased saints, produced to consolidate
widespread Sufi networks that developed posthumously.45 Varuni Bhatia’s
work on modern Bengali hagiographies on an early modern Vaishnava miracle
worker also highlighted how malleable saints’ histories could be in hagio-
graphical narratives; Bhatia described how the miracle worker was represented
varyingly to appeal to a Bengali middle-class’s anxieties about losing Vaishnava
traditions under colonialism.46
I was encouraged to value miracle stories as histories by hagiographers
who identified themselves as historians writing history (sejarah). They insist
that keramats and their miracles were historical events, not fictive or meta-
phorical subjects. In writing history, storytellers and hagiographers of Habib
Hussein were paranoid about the challenges secular, western rationality and
“Christianisation,” as well as iconoclastic and “democratising” Muslim move-
ments, posed to Islamic authenticity and sayyid hierarchies in the colonial
and post-colonial Malay-Javanese world. Moreover, while twentieth- and
twenty-first century Sufi elders, storytellers, and hagiographers have propa-
gated miracle stories and maintained the “fidelity of the tale” in doing so,
they edited the abundant stories that had been passed down across genera-
tions. They reviewed stories to propagate a correct Islamic history, abiding by
the “social logic” and demands of a widespread Sufi community connecting
44 Daud Ali, “Temporality, Narration and the Problem of History: A View from Western India
c. 1100–1400,” Indian Economic Social History Review 50 (2013): 237–47; Shahid Amin,
Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2016); Raziuddin Aquil, “Miracles, Authority, and Benevolence: Stories
of Karamat in Sufi Literature of the Delhi Sultanate,” in Sufi Cults and the Evolution of
Medieval Indian Culture, ed. Anup Taneja (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical
Research; Northern Book Centre, 2003); Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History,
and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992);
Green, Bombay Islam; Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial
Africa (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
45 Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), 164–213.
46 Varuni Bhatia, Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial
Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). David Hardiman similarly elaborated
on how members of the Indian middle class, recounting the historical life of the “pop-
ular” holy man of Shirdi (Maharashtra) or Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918), depicted him as a
pan-Indian, timeless saint who challenged British authority and western technocratic sci-
entific rationality, “Miracle Cures for a Suffering Nation: Sai Baba of Shirdi,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 57.2 (2015): 355–80.
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Java to Hadramawt and the Haramayn. Prominent hagiographers also edited

out stories of non-Muslim devotees of the keramat – these could have been
apocryphal rather than factual and contradicted a properly Islamic history
of an Arab missionary and the Islamic cosmology he enforced across Indian
Ocean cities. Hagiographers from Hussein b. Ahmad’s family have also omit-
ted accounts of the keramat’s productive marriages with Javanese women and
anecdotes of him fathering a line of ʿulamāʾ and pious courtiers who lived in
west Java and northern Malaya – these tales could contradict historical tradi-
tions of the celibate ascetic and presumably allow less-proximate kinsmen to
claim or imagine inheritance.
Hagiographers fastidiously describe the minutiae of the Habib Hussein’s
daily life and indulge in material positivism and edit what they consider
apocryphal traditions of his historical life, beginning with his childhood
in Hadramawt, teenage years in Surat (ca. 1147–9/mid–1730s) and maturity in
Java (ca. 1149/1736–1169/1756).47 Stories of the keramat’s salvific knowledge,
his healing powers, travels across the Indian Ocean, perpetuation of maritime
trade and industries, transgression of western monopolies and restrictions,
interactions with Hindu, Buddhist, and “Tionghua” (Chinese) audiences
along with “white men,” and “crimes” and incarceration, have been dissemi-
nated faithfully by storytellers, across centuries, orally and “mouth-to-mouth”
(mulut-ke-mulut). Connecting twentieth-century telling of miracle stories to
the “original” transmitters and memorisers of these anecdotes via direct chains
of oral transmission implied that the facts of the events reported were accu-
rate. Where storytellers and hagiographers are inconsistent is in the order
in which they relate the miracle stories and in describing his birthplace, the
age at which he arrived in Surat and Batavia, and how he befriended his clos-
est Tionghua disciple. They are also inconsistent in the names they give for
the colonial officers who either harassed or venerated him, the names of the
47 I use the noun hagiography in general throughout this article, because these texts are
typically formulaic in reproducing anecdotes of God’s Friend as a charismatic miracle
worker – even when the hagiographies differ in terms of their emphasis on the Friend’s
saintliness being preordained or connected to learning and discipline, these differences
do not seem to be reflected in the entitled genres of texts. For illuminating work on hagi-
ographies and genres, see Alexandre Papas’s “Hagiography, Persian and Turkish” and
Mikko Viitamäki’s “Hagiography in South Asia,” Encyclopaedia of Islam – Three Online, eds.
Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett K. Rowson, https://
referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/hagiography-persian
-and-turkish-COM_23914?s.num=5&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-3&s
.q=papas and https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/
hagiography-in-south-asia-COM_35695?s.num=1&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia
-of-islam-3&s.q=mikko.

92 Sevea
villages, streets, and docks he roamed, and the prisons from which he escaped,
and his celibacy or marriages. All these narrators explain away such inconsis-
tencies by stating that some minor details may have been amended over the
decades, but that the events have been preserved and transmitted accurately.
This caveat has a precedent in the biographical traditions and literature of
Muhammad, and hagiographers and storytellers typically leave the ultimate
judgment of accuracy to God by inserting the formulaic statement wallahu
aʿlam (“only God knows”) into their narrations.
Hagiographies of Habib Hussein have been written and published by
twentieth-century descendants of the keramat or “historians” from Sufi ṭarīqa
based in Java. Via such narratives, exultant narrators united the key protagonist
(the keramat) with the audience to augment a community based on a collective
belief in miracles. The first attempt to compile miracle stories and biographi-
cal data in Luar Batang appears to have been made by a female descendant of
the keramat in the 1940s and 1950s. This hagiographer, Muznah bt. Hussein b.
Ahmad al-ʿAydarus, began documenting miracle stories that had been passed
down orally through generations of Habib Hussein’s descendants, the custo-
dians of his shrine, and storytellers from the “laity.” From the 1940s onwards,
family hagiographers have feared that the deaths of the old Islamic storytellers
could lead to Sufi traditions being lost from the genteel consciousness of the
Islamic “community this side,” so they edited inherited stories and had them
written, typed, or cheaply photocopied for posterity.48 Muznah al-ʿAydarus’s
younger brother’s son, ʿAbdullah b. Abu Bakr al-ʿAydarus (d. 1999), would print
a hagiography entitled Sepintas Riwayat Shahibul Qutub Al-Habib Hussein
bin Abubakar Alaydarus (Brief Biography of the Possessor of the Axis, Habib
Hussein bin Abubakar Alaydarus; SR) in the 1990s. The Luar Batang shrine
bazaar has reputedly sold thousands of copies of the cheaply-published SR
and ʿAbdullah’s son, Hussein Fikri, has recently printed a second edition of it
for sale at the bazaar.49 I have been privileged to sit with Hussein Fikri and his
elder brother at Luar Batang, and to be introduced to the oral traditions shared
48 I reproduce the words of hagiographers including Habib Hussein Fikri and the
Singapore-based, Habib ʿAbdullah al-ʿAttas (d. 2010), who sat with me in 2009 and 2010
and shared copies of his typed and cheaply printed hagiographies of Malay-Indonesian
keramats.
49 Habib Abdullah b. Abubakar al-Aydarus’s hagiography, Sepintas Riwayat Shahibul Qutub
Al-Habib Husein bin Abubakar Alaydarus: Memuat Karomah Kampung Luar Batang
(Jakarta: Makam Keramat Luar Batang, 1998) was republished in 2019. See Habib
Abdullah, Sepintas Riwayat Shohibul Maqam Al-Habib Husein bin Abubakar Alaydarus
Kampung Luar Batang, ed. Habib Husein Fikri (Jakarta: Makam Keramat Luar Batang,
2019). In this article, my references to Sepintas Riwayat (hereafter ‘SR’) are directed to the
2019 edition which reproduces all the oral traditions and miracles of the earlier one.
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by more of Habib Hussein’s descendants, custodians, storytellers, Sufi elders,

and genealogists, including the most senior kinsman of Hussein b. Ahmad liv-
ing in Bogor (south of Jakarta), as well as leaders of an ʿAlid genealogy-telling
organisation in southern Jakarta, “Naqobatul Asyrof Al-Kubro.”50
Noting that Muslims in secularised and Christianised societies (and, by
implication, the Malay-Javanese world) were “losing [Islamic] tradition at
an exponential pace,” Hussein Fikri explained that he had received permis-
sions (ijāza) and was tasked to print the stories as the living representative
(wakīl) of the original storytellers. He is currently producing a third edition
of the SR and updating it with stories of Habib Hussein’s unimpeded flow of
miracles throughout his afterlife. Like other hagiographer-historians, Hussein
Fikri strives to ensure that each rendition of miracle stories meets historio-
graphical standards of the community’s historians (standards that were and
remain disputed by individual elders) and studies reports of his most recent
miracles that are posted online and in print media, at times dispelling “popu-
lar,” “apocryphal” tales. The latest edition of the SR aims to remind readers that
all believers were required to respect the family of Muhammad (ahl al-bayt)
and his patrilineal descendants and sayyids including Habib Hussein as well
as the kinsmen of the keramat. Muslims were to disregard condemnations of
such privilege as well as “magical” miracle stories and shrine veneration made
by Sunni reformists, liberal modernisers, scripturalists (“Salafis”) and icono-
clasts and followers of the anti-Sufi reformist, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb
(d. 1206/1792), “Wahhabis.” Twentieth- and twenty-first century hagiographers
follow the example of a long line of Sufi masters and scholars (ʿulamāʾ) of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Java, Hadramawt, Haramayn and
Malay Peninsula (examined below), who had defended the veneration of sayy-
ids buried in the “lands below the winds,” while condemning Sunni critics as
kāfirs and “enemies of God [destined to] hellfire.”51
Anecdotes of Habib Hussein have also been documented and published (on
occasion) by Sufi masters and the Sufi historians from twentieth-century Java.
Hussein Fikri and other storytellers have also depended on the biographical
notes included in an Arabic account of ʿAlid and Hadrami Sufi masters across
50 The prominent elder in Bogor was Habib Hussein b. Hasan al-ʿAydarus, and genealogists
included Habib Hafiz b. Farid al-ʿAydarus and Habib Zainal Abidin b. Saqqaf Asseqaf.
51 The critics oft-represented by hagiographers as “Wahhabis” and “Salafis” included and
reformists from global movements that had Sufi origins (such as the Tabhligi Jamaʿat)
and Sharia-minded Sufis calling for a more rational and scriptural conception of Sufism
over pomp, magic, shrine veneration and privileges extracted by profiteering sayyids.
See Ustaz Novel b. Muhd al-ʿAydarus, Ahlul Bidʾah Hasanah: Jawaban Untuk Mereka Yang
Mempersoalkan Amalan Para Wali (Java: Taman Ilmu, 2011).

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the Indian Ocean, Taj al-Aʾras (1953), written by the aforementioned keramat
and reputed warrior against Indonesian communism, Habib ʿAli al-ʿAttas.52 The
1652-pages-long Taj al-Aʾras (Crown of Brides) was compiled as a hagiography
of an ʿAlid master, Habib Salih b. ʿAbdullah al-ʿAttas (d. 1863) and the Indian
Ocean-wide network and genealogy of ʿAlid saints that he belonged to. The
second volume of the tome contains accounts of keramats in Southeast Asia
including the “virtuous imam” and “hardworking” member of the esteemed
Hadrami ʿulamāʾ, Habib Hussein.53
In addition to the anecdotes in Taj al-Aʾras, miracle stories featuring
Habib Hussein were compiled in a volume of short hagiographies, 17 Habaib
Berpengaruh di Indonesia (17 Influential Haba‌ʾib in Indonesia; 17H). 17H was
written in Shaʿbān 1429 (August 2008) by a sayyid hagiographer in Malang
named ʿAbdul Qadir b. ʿUmar Mauladawilah. He is also the author of other
hagiographies of “influential Haba‌ʾib” and Ulama Tanah Betawi (ʿUlamāʾ of
Batavian Land) (2009). Mauladawilah recurrently appealed to his literate and
sayyid audiences to realise that it was their Islamic responsibility to remember
histories of Hadrami ʿulamāʾ including Habib Hussein.54 It was the onus of
learned Muslims to disseminate histories of the sacrifices the Hadrami ʿulamāʾ
made to propagate Sufism and Shāfiʿism to the East and the ways they had
embodied ideal Islamic comportment (akhlāq) and Muhammad’s norm in
their historical lives. The hagiographer relied on the miracle stories of Hadrami
Sufi masters such as Habib Salim asy-Syathiri (1900?–2018) to conclude that all
of the earliest Islamisers of Java, including the Wali Sanga and Habib Hussein,
were from Hadramawt and Hadrami parentage, in spite of sojourns in South
Asia. Each of these texts seems to emphasize that Habib Hussein was born
in Hadramawt. Family hagiographers, too, stress the keramat’s pure Yemeni
origins despite some miracle stories and Urdu textual traditions claiming
he was of creole (Hadrami-Gujarati) origins.55 One could assume that this is
indicative of, in Mandal’s terms, a Hadrami “rediscovery” in the Malay world
52 ʿAli al-ʿAttas, Taj al-A’ras ʿala manaqib al-Habib al-qutb Salih b. ʿAbdullah al-ʿAttas, vol. 2
(Kudus: Manara, 1979 [1953]).
53 al-ʿAttas, Taj al-Aʾras, 2:391. Also see Ismail Farjie Alatas’s illuminating discussions:
“Becoming Indonesians: The Ba ʿAlawi in the Interstices of the Nation,” Die Welt des
Islams 51.1 (2011): 61–2; Alatas, “Hadrami Sufi-scholars and their shrines in Southeast Asia:
A geography,” 211.
54 Mauladawilah, 17H, 16–7; Mauladawilah, Tiga Serangkai Ulama, 85–7.
55 I refer here to miracle stories and “Urdu” textual traditions remembering Habib Hussein
as a saint of part-Gujarati origins and his widespread travels across North India, preserved
by some biographers and storytellers of creole, Gujarati and Hadrami origins. I was privi-
leged to sit with ʿAbdul Qadir al-ʿAydarus, ʿAbdullah al-ʿAttas, Muhammad ʿAli Khan Surati
and Hussein Khanali ‘Qattai’, in Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, in December 2015
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in the 1990s, when “creole Arabs” engaged in public debates in an increasingly

delineated Hadrami identity.56 Denying keramats’ creole-ness was, however,
also probably symptomatic of a complex initiative to define the transregional
sanctity of shrines in Southeast Asia that can be traced to the late nineteenth
century. Herefrom hagiographers increasingly traced the roots of keramats to
Hadramawt, describing it as the place from which Islam originated (“tempat
terbit agama Islam”) and the birthplace of strict evangelists of the ʿAlawi ṭarīqa
and Shāfiʿism.
Most print hagiographies and oral traditions agree that Habib Hussein
began performing miracles during his childhood and teenage years in port cit-
ies across the Indian Ocean. There was (and remains) a consensus amongst
hagiographers that Habib Hussein was orphaned at an early age and adopted
by a single working-class weaver.57 The SR, for instance, described the keramat’s
adoptive mother as a weaver working in “someplace” in Hadramawt.58 Habib
Hussein’s career as a miracle worker ostensibly began as a child, in whatever
year his mother worked at a textile “factory.” One miracle story concerns a time
when the cherubic keramat replaced his mother who was exhausted by the
intensive labour of weaving in the factory, only to fall asleep. While slumbering,
however, he evolved into a “spinning machine,” shocking audiences through
producing an enormous amount of textile for export across the ocean.59 In
spite of his working-class origins, hagiographers emphasised that the keramat
received a thorough Islamic education under the guidance of a Shāfiʿi scholar
and Sufi master. Across the early modern Islamic world, Sufi masters were rec-
ognisable at an early age since they mastered Islamic arts and sciences and
esoteric knowledge through the soul’s aptitude and enlightenment instead of
intellect.60 While common Muslims spent years in Tarim mastering canonical
Shāfiʿi and Sufi texts and Islamic comportment and Muhammad’s norm, Habib
Hussein was a prodigy “born with mastery of the Sharia and ṭarīqa” – he mas-
tered ʿAlawi Sufism and Shāfiʿism as a child and embodied all the knowledge
being taught by his guru. As a teenager, as such, he embarked on a mission to
and January 2016, for instance, and I discuss these oral and textual traditions in detail in
a separate study.
56 Mandal, Becoming Arab, 235–36. The SR emphasised that the keramat was born “some-
place in South Yemen, Hadramawt,” and included an ʿAlid genealogy of Habib Hussein,
stating that he descended from the progenitor of Hadrami sayyid-Sufis across the Indian
Ocean, Ahmad b. ʿIsa (d. 345/956), also known as the Migrant (Muhajir), as well as the
founder of the ʿAlawi Sufi ṭarīqa, Muhd al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 653/1255).
57 Mauladawilah, 17H, 20–1.
58 Alaydrus, SR, 9–10.
60 Grehan, Twilight of the Saints, 66.

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shower “mercy on all creations” (rahmatan lil-alamin) of the Indian Ocean by

“propagating Islam” to the East, leaving his guru to console his single mother
while continuing to support her by throwing monies into the waters of Gujarat
and Java to float to her.61 The Taj al-Aʾras’s author was more certain about locales
and names and stated that Habib Hussein was born in the Hadhrami town
of Maʿaiqab, located in between Shibam and al-Hazm, but studied in Tarim
under the “axis of guidance” and reputed “renewer” of the twelfth Islamic cen-
tury, Habib ʿAbdullah b. ʿAlawi al-Haddad (1044/1634–1132/1720); it was Habib
ʿAbdullah who ordered Habib Hussein to travel towards Java.62
By adolescence, Habib Hussein had also become the fulcrum of a devotional
community of sojourning merchants by disseminating baraka to mediate the
capricious nature of oceanic trade and imperial blockades across an Indian
Ocean world that was dominated by Muslim and non-Muslim empires and
companies. While the Taj al-Aʾras stated that Habib Hussein’s journeys east-
wards involved steady transitions from trade (tijārat) to evangelism (daʿwa),
his Indonesian Malay hagiographers discussed how he had accompanied cara-
vans of merchants from Gujarat that he had first consorted with in his home
city for his mission eastwards. These caravans, according to storytellers’ maps,
travelled to ports including Mukalla (Hadramawt), Mocha, Surat and Batavia,
ferrying the keramat who guarded them with baraka as they faced oceanic and
terrestrial frontiers, malevolent spirits, naval blockades and European restric-
tions on Asian traffic. Stewart considered the miracle stories embedded in the
pir kathas he examined to be “a function of the strategic geography of Bengal.”63
Similarly, stories of Sufis including Habib Hussein exemplified how miracle
workers secured the flow of capital and traders across the Indian Ocean, while
demonstrating how the oceanic traffic of textiles (as well as coffee, spices, aro-
matic woods, resins, rattans, gold, silver and tin) sustained ʿAlid Sufis.
Through free rides on ships and camels or ponies and accepting donations
of ṣadaqa (charities), Habib Hussein accompanied merchants from Gujarat
across various ports and arrived in Surat by 1147/1148 (1734/1735). Twentieth-
and twenty-first-century hagiographers have been silent about oral stories
related to Habib Hussein following the oceanic routes taken by earlier Sufis
across Mukalla, Surat, Nagore, Aceh, Pasai, Palembang and Batavia. They have
also been reticent about the presence of other saints and missionaries in cities
visited by the teenager in the between the 1730s and 1750s, as well as the Islamic
61 Alaydrus, SR, 11, 22–23.

62 al-ʿAttas, Taj al-Aʾras, 2:391–92. I am indebted to Max Johnson Dugan, who read and trans-
lated sections of the Taj al-Aʾras and other Arabic documents, with me.
63 Stewart, Witness to Marvels, xix.
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histories of Gujarat and Islamic connections of Gujarat and the Malay world
that allowed Gujarati Sufis to hold lofty titles including “Shaykh al-Islam” at
the Acehnese court in the seventeenth century.64 In doing so, they have repre-
sented Habib Hussein as traversing Indic spaces of the Indian Ocean that were
“untouched by tawḥīd” (God’s Oneness) and immersed in “kufr” (infidelity).65
The imagination of a non-Muslim “Hind” (India) is so well-entrenched
in the hagiographical narrative that hagiographers and storytellers discount
the possibility that the keramat and his mother could be located in textile-
producing centres such as Surat and Bharuch. While Yemen was certainly at a
hub of oceanic networks across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds, it
was the world’s largest major supplier of coffee at the time of Habib Hussein’s
childhood and Yemeni ports such as Mocha attracted various merchants from
Gujarat who were emissaries of major shipowners of Indian and Turkish ori-
gins who sold Indian textiles in Yemen.66 Surat (the main port of Gujarat, a
titular subah or province of the Mughal empire) was represented in hagiogra-
phies as the tawḥīd-less frontier of the Islamic world until the arrival of Habib
Hussein. In the SR and 17H, amongst more hagiographies, the Gujarati port was
portrayed as a tawḥīd-less and “Buddhist” city populated by votaries of a god
(Dewa). This port named “Surati” or “Suratee,” i.e., Surat, had deteriorated by
1148/1735, into a “city of death” plagued by economic collapse and drought and
a cholera outbreak.67
The representation of a macabre setting appears to correspond with Ashin
Das Gupta’s and Engseng Ho’s notes on Surat being brought to a complete socio-
economic “standstill” in 1735 after the unremunerated East African corps of the
Mughal navy blockaded the port. Ho’s Graves of Tarim highlights that the crisis
was only resolved after a prominent sayyid living in Surat, Zayn al-ʿAydarus, arbi-
trated and led the city to reconciliatory prayer.68 Habib Hussein’s hagiographers
however depicted Surat as receiving its first sayyid (Habib Hussein) in 1735. In
the eyes of its desperate residents, the majestic sea-wandering keramat was the
“Dewa’s avatar who could save the state from catastrophe.”69 Capitalising on
the tragedy and to proselytise, the keramat led drought and cholera-stricken
Gujaratis to a new prayer, educating them about tawḥīd while calling upon
64 Much ink has been spilled on the Sufi, Nuruddin Raniri (d. 1658) from Rander (Surat),
who served at the Acehnese court as the Shaykh al-Islam.
65 al-ʿAttas, Taj al-Aʾras, 2:391–92.
66 Nancy Um, Shipped but Not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during
Yemen’s Age of Coffee (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017).
67 Alaydrus, SR, 12–3; Mauladawilah, 17H, 22.
68 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 113–14.
69 Alaydrus, SR, 12.

98 Sevea
them to profess Islam by reciting “lailahaillAllah-MuhammadurrasulAllah.” He

would then part the clouds to draw rain and water all of “barren” Surat, bestow-
ing “fertility” onto it for ages.
Habib Hussein’s rainmaking stories connected the keramat to many other
Sufi masters across the Indian Ocean who, like the immortal fish-rider Khizr,
delivered water to arid terrains, primarily for parched and impoverished
populations.70 Habib Hussein’s rainmaking was evangelical, according to the
SR and 17H, and converted the “flocks” of Gujaratis to Islam. He then Islamised
Surat, commanding the “governor” to build a mosque and well for pilgrims,
before blessing a pool with his touch and bodily fluids. Cholera victims then
dipped into the pool, emerging as healed Muslims. Projecting an image of
Habib Hussein as the primary Islamiser and ʿAlid Sufi of the early modern
Indian Ocean, hagiographers have privileged stories of the port-hopping mis-
sionary who converted populations instantly through miracles and simple
rites. The evangelical history of Habib Hussein, as such, departs from histo-
ries suggesting that conversions across Indian Ocean communities occurred
through a much more gradual acculturation to Islam and Sufism.71
Habib Hussein’s hagiographers may represent the keramat as a pioneer of
Islam in Surat, but do not propose that Java was a non-Muslim space in the
1730s. Hagiographers were and are certainly learned about the presence of
the popularly venerated Wali Sanga and their influence (pengaruhan) in
Batavia, but remain silent about earlier God’s Friends. In doing so, they por-
tray Habib Hussein as the Friend who fully Islamised Batavia by propagating
a “puritanical Islam” (in hagiographers’ terms). Arriving at the Sunda Kelapa
port of Dutch Batavia after the conversion of Surat, Habib Hussein was pre-
vented by Dutch officials from passing the customs barrier, and according
to the 17H, he was smuggled in by his lovers (muḥibbīn) through a lifeboat.72
Mauladawilah elaborated on how Habib Hussein was violently expelled from
Batavia’s bay in 1158–9/1746 when he arrived there with a team of preachers as
70 For instance, see Mohd Ghouse Khan Surattee, Lambang Terukhir: Dalam Mengisahkan
Manaqib Habib Noh bin Muhamad Alhabsyi Yang Syahir Edisi Kedua (Singapore: Unit
Dakwah Masjid Al’Firdaus, 2011), 52.
71 For instance, refer to Richard Eaton’s works on conversion on the Bengal frontier,
“Shrine, Cultivators, and Muslim ‘Conversion’,” The Medieval History Journal 12.2 (July/
December 2009): 191–220, and “Who are the Bengal Muslims?” in Essays on Islam
and Indian History, ed. Eaton, 249–67. Also see the contributions to A. C. S. Peacock’s
Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2017), including Eaton’s “Reconsidering ‘Conversion to Islam’ in Indian History,”
Devin DeWeese’s “Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of
Sufis in the Islamisation of the Turks of Central Asia” and Edwin Wieringa’s “The Story
of Yusuf and Indonesia’s Islamisation: A Work of Literature Plus.”
72 Mauladawilah, 17H, 24–26.
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a twenty-five-year-old Sufi. Throughout hagiographies, the young keramat was

represented as the lofty predecessor of more aged evangelists who would con-
tinue to be denied entry into Batavia in the nineteenth century, through being
denied a series of pass restrictions.73 ʿAbdullah al-ʿAydarus, his aunt and then
his son, disagreed with the dates of other hagiographers and proposed that
their ancestor arrived in Batavia shortly after serving as the messiah of Surat.
Nonetheless, all of Habib Hussein’s hagiographers agree that he settled in the
village that would later be named “Luar Batang” immediately after overcoming
Dutch customs barriers. His humble hut then became the pivot of a Sufi devo-
tional community formed of settled and more itinerant initiates (murīd) and
lovers from diverse ethnic backgrounds. According to the Taj al-Aʾras, the immi-
grant’s baraka and the miracles (khawāriq) from his Hand converted several
non-believers (kuffār) and had devotees “hurrying to him from all directions”
of Java. While the Arabic text stated that the authorities in Java, including the
“most extreme” ones, would fear and respect him simultaneously, Indonesian
Malay hagiographies elaborated on how the celebrity missionary drew the
“cynicism and anxieties” of anti-Asian and Islamophobic VOC police.74
Habib Hussein has also been represented as the most eminent member of
a community of immigrants that suffered the intense screening and policing
of Asians in Batavia that was ordered by the Governor-General of the Dutch
East Indies, Adriaan Valckenier (r. 1737–41).75 In 1152–3/1740, this community
consisted of approximately 2,500 Chinese families of traders, artisans, sugar
millers, and shopkeepers, and in Rajab 1153/October 1740, the VOC would
fear a rebellion led by this community.76 Amidst rumour of Chinese settlers
being deported and killed extrajudicially, and especially after news arrived of
Europeans being attacked by Chinese gangs near Batavia, a curfew was declared
in the city. Valckenier welcomed a massacre and approximately 10,000 Chinese
settlers were killed by Europeans and their subordinates. Storytellers and hagi-
ographers across generations have often agreed that the keramat’s closest
friend was one such “Tionghua” (I reproduce the ethnic reference) persecuted
in 1153/1740. While 17H suggested that the friendship between the keramat and
Tionghua first bloomed after the latter smuggled Habib Hussein into Batavia
through a lifeboat, the keramat’s descendants emphasise that the friends first
met amidst the 1153/1740 massacre to represent the keramat as the guardian
(muhaymin) of all “races” who submitted to Islam. Protecting the Tionghua
73 Mandal, Becoming Arab, 105.

75 While maintaining the narrative, Mauladawilah claims that Habib Hussein arrived in
Batavia in 1158–9/1746, 17H, 24.
76 Merle C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 112–13.

100 Sevea
from bloodthirsty VOC troops and servants, the keramat faced the heavily-
armed soldiers unarmed but was able to scare them with terrorising stares till
they were left with their “heads bowing.”77 Debates ensue amongst hagiogra-
phers about whether the saved Tionghua was already a Muslim or converted
to Islam following Habib Hussein’s intervention. Whatever his confessional
identity was before meeting Habib Hussein, he would therefrom enjoy siestas
along Batavia’s coasts with his keramat-friend and the privilege of temporarily
adorning a hat (kopyah) that Habib Hussein’s had been investitured with by
diverse Sufi masters of the past, which allowed him to see diverse parts of the
Indian Ocean (from China to India and then to Mecca and Hadramawt) con-
currently, to reign over earthly affairs and intervene on behalf of his devotees.
The Chinese friend would become very close to the keramat, and also enjoy the
privilege of being buried in the only grave located next to his within the Luar
Batang shrine.
Habib Hussein’s friend’s grave is adorned today with a sign identifying
him as “Hajji ʿAbdul Qadir”. The Taj al-Aʾras indeed reminds pilgrims to Luar
Batang that “he who would not make pilgrimage to al-Hajj ʿAbdullah al-Qadir
would not fulfil their intended pilgrimage” to Luar Batang.78 Hajji ʿAbdul Qadir
is described in the Taj al-Aʾras as Habib Hussein’s “special pupil” and transla-
tor from the community of “natives,” but hagiographers from Habib Hussein’s
family have argued that the buried friend was none other than a prominent
eighteenth-century merchant named Nek Bok Seng, who converted to Islam
at Habib Hussein’s hands. Nek was indeed praised in Ong’s 1793 travelogue,
Desultory Account of the Malayan Archipelago (mentioned above). Following
his visit to North Batavia in 1791, Ong described Nek as a sage-like “retired
scholar of the age” and the “chrysanthemum” who emanated knowledge.79
Being sagacious, Nek “separated himself from common pursuits,” immersed
himself solely in erudite concerns, and hosted admirers of his arts at a “country-
seat” located by the “Holy grave canal” (almost certainly a reference to the
canal dividing Luar Batang and Pasar Ikan). Nek however was not represented
in Ong’s travelogue as a Muslim or “Sit-lam” (Islam). Hagiographers have val-
ued Chinese literature for evidence of Nek’s presence and scholastic elitism
in Luar Batang, and depended on the traditions of Sufi elders and generations
of storytellers to propose that Nek was indeed Sit-lam and the consummate
murīd, Hajji ʿAbdul Qadir.
That the historical lives of saints were marked by violent encounters with
European power (at customs barriers or while protecting cosmopolitan initiates

78 al-ʿAttas, Taj al-Aʾras, 2:393.
79 Ong, The Chinaman Abroad, 23.
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from persecution) is a standard trope within miracle stories from the colonised
Islamic world. Indeed, Habib Hussein’s hagiographies elaborated on how he
was regularly imprisoned in Dutch Batavia by “Islamophobic” authorities for
his radical evangelism and appeal amongst an Indian Ocean-wide devotional
community, and for opposing the policing of his murīds. All hagiographies
faithfully reproduce oral traditions, eyewitness memories, and rumours of
times when the keramat was imprisoned for his “crime” of “propagating Islam”
and placed in solitary confinement and cages, tied with “chains of steel.”80
Storytellers disagree only on how much of Habib Hussein’s life in Batavia
was spent in jail since oral traditions emphasise that “prison became the new
home” of the keramat in the Dutch colony.81 In prison, he was visited by the
spirits of the progenitors of the Sufi ṭarīqas from across the Islamic world and
investitured with the aforementioned Hat, identifying him as the Qutb and
Shaykh (Master) of multiple ṭarīqas. Eyewitnesses, nevertheless, were said to
have delighted in seeing the “walls and steel trellis” of prison being impotent as
the keramat escaped confinement spectacularly to perpetuate his mission. The
keramat also multi-located during incarceration, proselytising to prisoners in
prison-halls and evangelising to freemen in public at the same time that he
was chained in a solitary cell. Playfully, he shocked policemen and the “Dutch
princes of law” by multi-locating in prison and streets beyond the prison wall;
he was often seen fast asleep in his cell and chains at the same time that he was
seen and heard on the street agitating authorities.
Stories of Habib Hussein’s spectacular escapes and multi-location are com-
parable to the voluminous narratives of his saintly successors in Singapore,
India, and Senegal. The hagiographies of some of the most prominent Sufis
from these parts of the Islamic world are similarly replete with stories of their
encounters with British and French authorities and miraculous escapes from
penal institutions and asylums upon being confined in prisons and asylums
for “crimes” and “lunacy.”82 Hagiographers would also compare Habib Hussein
80 Alaydrus, SR, 17–18; Mauladawilah, 17H, 26–28.

81 Mauladawilah, 17H, 27.
82 Habib Nuh (d. 1866) recurrently lampooned Singapore’s British rulers by “toppling” them
off horse-carriages and disappeared from cells he was placed in, or multi-located while
being incarcerated; see Said, Tujuh Wali Melayu, 21–22, and Surattee, Lambang Terukir,
50, 55–57. The hagiographies of Banne Miyan (d. 1921) (the cannabis-puffing ecstatic
of Aurangabad in western India) and Ahmadu Bamba (d. 1927) (founder of the Muridi
ṭarīqa in Senegal) world are similarly replete with stories of their encounters with British
and French authorities and miraculous escapes from penal institutions and asylums.
See Green, “Transgressions of a Holy Fool: A Majzub in Colonial India,” In Islam in South
Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009);
C. A. Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya
of Senegal, 1853–1913 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 134–40.

102 Sevea
to other Friends from the Malay Peninsula and Java who had resisted the “poi-
son of secularism and poking needles of Christianity that were brought by
colonisers.”83 He would be identified with later warrior-Sufis from Malaya who
blessed and motivated jihādīs by miraculously overturning British armadas
and ʿAlid keramats who supported peasant rebellions in nineteenth-century
Banten in west Java.84 Twentieth-century storytellers and hagiographers would
even describe the prisons Habib Hussein was incarcerated in, in Glodok (a vil-
lage in north-western Batavia, within six miles of Luar Batang). By describing
“sections” (seksi) of the Glodok Prison that Habib Hussein inhabited in the
years 1149/1736–1163/1750, hagiographers connected him to some of the most
prominent nationalists and revolutionaries of Indonesia who were held in the
same section of the prison two centuries later, to remind audiences of an oft-
forgotten history of Islamic resistance.85 Stories of the prisons being shared by
the immortal keramat and Indonesian nationalists were also comparable to
anecdotes of his successors in twentieth-century Batavia who, as revolution-
ary ʿAlid keramats, were arrested and bound with Indonesian nationalists in
Batavia, Banten, and Bogor.86 Some of these nineteenth- and early-twentieth
century keramats would perform miracles for their incarcerators and become
their Sufi masters, following the example of Habib Hussein. Indeed, the Luar
Batang keramat was reputed to have “dumbfounded” his incarcerators and
undermined Christian power through years of multi-locating and escap-
ing, and to have eventually compelled a community of Dutchmen and VOC
servants to be initiated into his Sufi network. Moreover, while he Islamised
prisons, hagiographers also suggested that the keramat infused some Islamic
morality into the Dutch-Batavian regime in the course of the eighteenth
century through initiating “Governors” and “Dutch Headmen” through his mir-
acles. The SR and Luar Batang storytellers, for instance, reproduced anecdotes
of Habib Hussein’s encounter with a Dutch “Sinyo” (Sir) when the latter was
a child from a modest background.87 This appears to be a reference to Jacob
Mossel, who served as Governor-General from 1750–61. The fearless keramat
had purportedly “terrified” the Dutch child by thumping his chest in public
and disclosing a prophecy aloud that the Sinyo would acquire the highest
83 Quoted from Said, Tujuh Wali Melayu, 5.

84 Ibid., 33–39, 42–43; Mauladawilah, 17H, 44–47.
86 ʿAlid keramats shared Glodok prison sections with Muhammad Hatta, while Habib ʿAli
al-Habshi was reputed to have been arrested with K. H. Agus Salim during the Japanese
occupation. In a similar vein, hagiographies elaborated on Sukarno’s relationship with
Habib ʿAlwi al-Haddad of Bogor (d. 1953); see Mauladawilah, 17H, 87–88, 96–98.
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office of the Dutch East Indies upon maturity. The Sinyo would predictably
assume Governor-Generalship and became a devoted murīd of Habib Hussein.
He would then then channel the Company into the service of Islam and God’s
Friends through donating monies and gold for the provision of the keramat’s
family, along with the piece of land that would eventually house the kera-
mat’s grave and the mosque that would expand from Habib Hussein’s modest
mosque (surau). In compiling such anecdotes, hagiographers and storytellers
have denied claims that the Luar Batang shrine complex had contained an
inscription stating that it was built in Muḥarram 1152/April 1739 in the lifetime
of Habib Hussein, to perpetuate the longstanding custom of receiving dona-
tions from selfless votaries.88 As the Taj al-Aʾras highlights, Habib Hussein was
an ascetic and had renounced material possessions, but this did not impede
followers from “heaping gifts and votive offerings” over him. He received gifts
as the penultimate source of miracles in his physical lifetime and beyond – his
body constituted an internode between the physical and unseen worlds, and
then his grave presented an isthmus between this world and the beyond (see
Fig. 2). The abundance of votive offerings compelled the keramat’s “blameless,
figure 2 Image of Luar Batang Shrine, ca. 1900s. Poster sold at Luar Batang shrine bazaar.
88 Van Ronkel, “Moskeeen te Batavia,” 206; Alaydrus, SR, 19–26.

104 Sevea
respected” kinsmen to manage his shrine’s treasury, receive donations, con-

duct annual Islamic festivals, feed pilgrims, and accept the surplus remaining
from offerings to their ancestor.89 It is to these donations and finances of the
keramat and the “profitable aspect of the cult” (in Nico Kaptein’s terms), that
the following section of this article turns its attention to.90
4 Luar Batang at the Centre of Disputes over Islam
Among the most informative documents concerning the Luar Batang shrine are
those that ostensibly deal with the sharing of revenues from the shrine among
competing parties, including families who trace their descent to Habib
Hussein. These documents also appear to reveal overt signs of contestations in
the Islamic world over the legitimacy of shrine customs in the face of reformist
pressures from groups such as Salafis, the Wahhabis, liberal reformers, as well
as Sufis calling for scriptural reforms in Sufism itself. The dispute over the
shrine’s finances was introduced, including to me, by Kaptein’s article on
the Batavian scholar Sayyid ʿUthman b. Yahya’s (d. 1331/1914) intervention in the
perkara Luar Batang (Luar Batang matter) in the late nineteenth century.91
ʿUthman had produced a Malay lithographic booklet compiling his opinions
on the perkara after he was visited by district heads or “Commandants” at
his residence in Petamburan (central Batavia) from July 1870 to August 1876.
Chiefs of the “Foreign Orientals” in Java were appointed based on their repute
in Arab settlements; serving as the representatives of the Dutch administra-
tion, they were given titular military ranks, including Commandant, abiding
by the precedent of the VOC.92 In Rabīʿ al-Ākhir 1287/July 1870, ʿUthman was
first visited by a Commandant named Hamza and two of his “Adjutants.”93 The
visitors sought ʿUthman’s legal opinion on the matter and masʾala (problem)
of Luar Batang.94 Commandant Hamza also shared an Arabic fatwa related
to the urgent masʾala that was issued by a reputed Arab headman (peng-
hulu Arab) named Habib Taha al-Saqqaf. Commandant Hamza’s fatwa is the
89 al-ʿAttas, Taj al-Aʾras, 2:392–93.

90 Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine,” 189.
91 Ibid., 190–94.
92 Mandal, Becoming Arab, 110.
93 ʿUthman’s 1870 fatwa and later Malay treatise (Batavia: n.p., n.d., ca. 1870s), discussed
below, were compiled in an untitled Jawi lithograph booklet, housed at the Leiden
University Library as 8198a (2). I refer to the lithograph booklet from here as “ʿUthman,
Untitled [Perkara Luar Batang].”
94 ʿUthman, Untitled [Perkara Luar Batang], fols. 1–3.
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aforementioned Sayʾun fatwa that remains treasured by Hussein b. Ahmad’s

family at the Luar Batang shrine. It is also the first available document on the
Luar Batang keramat. Since ʿUthman’s writings on the issue are a response to
and a reaffirmation of the Sayʾun fatwa, in this section, I analyse the original
fatwa, followed by ʿUthman’s responses and intervention in the perkara and
masʾala. ʿUthman intervened through fatwas and an Arabic text titled Simṭ
al-shudhūr wa’l-jawāhir fi ḥall takhṣīṣ al-nudhūr li’l-sāda al-ṭāhir (The string of
beads and jewels, in the main part concerning the issue about the votive offer-
ings to pure sayyids), followed by a larger treatise authored by him to refute
objections and support his original stance on the Sayʾun fatwa when the dis-
pute was brought before him a second time.95
In the words of the Sayʾun fatwa, it was “written, stipulated, and read out” in
Rabīʿ al-Thānī 1284/August 1867 by the “head of religion” in Sayʾun, Habib Taha
b. ʿAlawi b. Hasan b. ʿAlawi al-Saqqaf.96 It was produced after Hussein b. Ahmad
appealed to the Islamic council (majlis) of Sayʾun to adjudicate on the masʾala,
that is, a contest over which family was most entitled to the alms (ṣadaqa),
offerings (nudhūr; nazar) and other gifts made to the miracle working grave
(maqam-keramat) in Luar Batang, and the redistribution of surpluses. This
dispute was then waged between two leading families from the descendants
of Habib Hussein; these were the families of Hussein b. Ahmad (b. ʿAbdullah)
al-ʿAydarus and his eponymous rival, Hussein b. ʿAli al-ʿAydarus. The dispute
had allegedly surfaced a century earlier after Habib Hussein’s death in the 1750s
or 1790s. According to an epistemic community of ʿulamāʾ in Sayʾun, Zabid,
Mecca, Medina, and Batavia, at the time of the keramat’s demise, his reput-
edly closest and most legitimate heir (qaraba; asabanya yang paling dekat)
was Ahmad b. ʿAbdullah al-ʿAydarus, the father of Hussein b. Ahmad. While
Ahmad was legally responsible for conducting the keramat’s funeral proceed-
ings, he was then based in the Arab Peninsula and, as such, the funeral in
Batavia was managed by the “others” (seemingly a reference to the keramat’s
less-proximate kin, as well as to those not belonging to the bangsa al-ʿAydarus
or noble al-ʿAydarus community).97 This had also led one of the Commandants
of Batavia to deduce that the others were to legitimately receive the finances of
the Luar Batang shrine and manage these. A later Batavian Commandant, how-
ever, reputedly recognised this as a contravention of the ʿurf of the ʿulamāʾ and
95 Also see Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine.”

96 Kaptein had stated that Habib Taha was one of the many headmen of Arabs in Batavia,
ibid., 190.
97 Information here is also derived from ʿUthman’s treatise, Untitled [Perkara Luar Batang],
fol. 13, and the oral traditions inherited by hagiographers based in Java and Singapore
including ʿAbdullah al-ʿAttas, Muhammad Hasan, and Hussein al-ʿAydarus.

106 Sevea
Sufis and corrected the arbitrary custom (ʿurf sembarang) of his predecessor;
he thus sent the hasil maqam (“grave’s produce,” or surpluses from offerings) to
Ahmad in Hadramawt.
The masʾala might have been temporarily resolved by the delivery of sur-
pluses from the shrine’s offerings to Ahmad, and more pertinently, by the
reassertion of the jurisdiction of the ʿulamāʾ over these matters. Nonetheless,
it apparently re-erupted in the 1860s. The rival family of Hussein b. ʿAli, or a
Commandant, had seemingly begun to intervene in the management of the
Luar Batang shrine’s finances, and this led Ahmad’s son to Hadramawt to
beseech the intervention of Arab ʿulamāʾ through the Sayʾun council. Through
the council’s meeting(s), Haba‌ʾib present in Sayʾun, the ʿulamāʾ of Zabid, Mecca
and Medina and other Sufi elders (“personages with esoteric knowledge and
honourable ones, personages of authority-religious experts and reliable ones
who walk the straight path”), reviewed Hussein b. Ahmad’s genealogy (sha-
jara) and attribution (nisba).98 Following their genealogical investigation, the
ʿulamāʾ and elders concluded that Hussein b. Ahmad was the qaraba of Habib
Hussein and that his father was the most legitimate patrilineal heir (ʿaṣaba).
Upon receiving the unanimous endorsement of the paideia of ʿulamāʾ from
Hadramawt, Mecca, Medina and Zabid, Taha al-Saqqaf issued the fatwa for
circulation across the Indian Ocean. It was proclaimed or read out by eleven
witnesses from across prestigious sayyid lineages: six witnesses were from the
al-ʿAydarus lineage, three from the al-Saqqaf lineage, one from the al-Habshi
line, and one from the al-Bahar lineage. The reason for this impressive assem-
bly was to assert the authoritativeness of this judgement. As the Sayʾun fatwa
would attest, the prior intervention of non-ʿulamāʾ (in this case, the first
Commandant) in matters of Sharia and ʿurf was intolerable. The fatwa (and
ʿUthman’s addendums) would perpetuate an Indian Ocean-wide ʿulamāʾ’s
deep suspicion of the non-ʿulamāʾ, and especially the masses, intervening in
and deciding on questions of Islamic comportment, revealing anxieties per-
taining to claims of legitimate authority on Islamic matters in the region.
This collective of ʿulamāʾ and Sufi elders vociferously responded as repre-
sentatives of an Islamic world of Sunni scholars, and opposed to any “local”
and uninformed detractors in Java, or the Arab world. The fatwa brought to
bear the force of the consensus of the ʿulamāʾ in favour of one of the parties
in the dispute and called upon all believers (muʾminīn) across the Islamic
98 Thanks to the generosity of Habib Hussein Fikri, I was also provided a photostat copy
of the Malay translation of the Sayʾun fatwa (discussed below) to cite from, which con-
tained the header “Salinan fatwa Pengoeloe Arab tentang Makam-Keramat Loear Batang
Tahoen 1284.”
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world to acknowledge Hussein b. Ahmad and his family as the most legitimate
kinsmen (ʿaṣaba) of the Luar Batang keramat. The fatwa claimed that even
members of Hussein b. ʿAli’s family based in Hadramawt had overcome narrow
kin affiliation to accept the jurisdiction of the ʿulamāʾ. It then called upon the
officials and dignitaries of Java to accept the ʿulamāʾ ruling on the ʿaṣaba, so
as to ensure that they will continue receiving the supplications (duʿāʾ) of the
sayyids across the Indian Ocean world. One of these dignitaries, Commandant
Hamza, would request ʿUthman b. Yahya in July 1870 to review the Sayʾun fatwa
and share his legal opinion on the “Islamic regulations in terms of problems
concerning the graves of the Friends of God” (aturan agama Islam di dalam
masalah maqam qubur awliya).99 ʿUthman would then produce his own fatwa
to support the Sayʾun one, replete with proof (dalīl) derived from the Qurʾan
and Hadith, clarifying repeatedly that his opinion was the united opinion of
the ʿulamāʾ (ittefaq ulama) across the four countries (negeri), Mecca, Medina,
Hadramawt, and Zabid (Yemen), which were, in his eyes, the homelands of
Islam. To bolster his credentials as a member of this paideia, ʿUthman affirmed
that he had his opinions read out to and endorsed by peripatetic ʿulamāʾ from
various parts of the globe, including Hadramawt and Sumatra, who were
sojourning in Batavia, and emphasised that one of these scholars had served as
a witness when the Sayʾun fatwa was first issued. ʿUthman was indubitably pre-
occupied with defending the transregional ʿulamāʾ’s authority and endorsed
the Sayʾun fatwa, stating that Hussein b. Ahmad was the legal mustaḥiqq
(“deserver”) of all offerings at Luar Batang’s shrine, according to ʿādat, ʿurf and
Sharia.100 For his non-ʿulamāʾ audience, he defined the nature of nazar, ṣadaqa
and the intention (niyat) of offering to a keramat and sayyids. He defended the
legality of gifts made by non-Muslims and “conquerors,” and even legitimised
profit accumulation, claiming that the surplus gifts including lamp oil could be
sold on the market to derive more capital for the shrine.101
It is clear that what was at stake was actually the authority and legitimacy
of the Indian Ocean-spanning paideia of ʿulamāʾ. To refute the ruling of the
Sayʾun fatwa was to refute the legitimacy of the scholars themselves, and to
challenge the intricate processes of Shāfiʿi jurisprudence. The furious defence
of the Sayʾun fatwa by ʿUthman was intended to contest the forces arrayed
against the status enjoyed by sayyids in parts of the Islamic world, and to ensure
the continuation of longstanding traditions of donating money to venerable
sayyids and sayyid miracle-workers. By extension, the dispute was also about

100 Ibid., fols. 4, 9, 22.
101 Also see Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine,” 190.

108 Sevea
the erosion of the authority of these traditional scholars with their unbroken
chain of argumentation coming down from personages like Abū Zakariyyā
Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 975/1567) and
ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar b. Yaḥyā (d. 1265/1849). Any democratisation of Islamic legal
interpretation through scripturalist ideas put forth by non-traditional schol-
ars or Muslim officials who were not members of the learned ʿulamāʾ was to
be prohibited.
ʿUthman’s strategies to handle the dispute and ideas of upholding the
ʿulamāʾ’s consensus can be seen in the Simṭ al-shudhūr and the way he secured
the authority of Arab scholars, as well as the longer Malay treatise he wrote
around the same time that he was writing the Simṭ al-shudhūr. ʿUthman com-
pleted the Simṭ al-shudhūr by early Rajab 1294/July 1877 and would refer to it
as an exposition of his arguments and as one of the many appendices to the
fatwas on the Luar Batang keramat.102 In light of disputes between the sayyid
families at Luar Batang and a seemingly democratising impulse to challenge
sayyid privilege, the raad agama, a religious council established by the Dutch
across Java to adjudicate on family and inheritance matters, had ruled to trans-
fer the profits of the Luar Batang shrine to the Commandant instead of the
keramat’s descendants.103 As the legal counsel of the Luar Batang sayyids,
ʿUthman challenged this decision successfully. He also positioned himself as a
member of a widespread paideia of ʿulamāʾ and a representative of the Grand
Mufti of Shāfiʿism by sending the Simṭ al-shudhūr to Mecca for Ahmad Zayni
Dahlan’s (d. 1304/1886) seal of approval (literally).
ʿUthman would refer to the 1877 Simṭ al-shudhūr in his undated Malay
treatise that he had begun to write at the same time as the former, i.e.,
after he was re-approached to opine on the Luar Batang masʾala, on
12 Rajab 1293/3 August 1876, by a newly-appointed Commandant named
ʿAlwan.104 ʿUthman would thereafter proceed to write the longer treatise to
support the fatwa, presenting a forceful array of arguments used to assert the
authority of the ʿulamāʾ, drawing on several jurisprudential texts and irrefut-
able legal evidences (naṣṣ), and dispelling objections (aitraaz). ʿUthman was
revolted by the detractors who were challenging the unanimous (muafaqa-ed)
legal opinion of a global community of Sunni scholars and Sufi masters and
fearful of common Muslims (and Commandants) having opinions on religious
regulations (aturan agama), which would encourage a broader democratisa-
tion of Islamic legal interpretation. He stressed that believers depend on the
102 ʿUthman Simṭ al-shudhūr wa’l-jawāhir fi ḥall takhṣīṣ al-nudhūr li’l-sāda al-ṭāhir (Batavia,
1877), housed at the Leiden University Library as Or. 7057a (4).
103 Also see Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine,” 192.
104 ʿUthman, Untitled [Perkara Luar Batang], fol. 9.
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intercession of the ʿulamāʾ and defer to the opinion of the transregional ʿulamāʾ
and the consensus (ijma; muafaqa) they reached on perkaras and masʾalas of
Luar Batang and beyond. Unlike ignorant commoners, in ʿUthman’s scathing
terms, the paideia of ʿulamāʾ were most learned in the esoteric arguments of
the Qurʾan and Hadith, and in the procedures of uncovering proof (dalīl) and
naṣṣ. ʿUthman’s treatise is preoccupied with revealing the dalīl and naṣṣ of the
ʿulamāʾ, while highlighting how the ʿulamāʾ were also most knowledgeable of
legal reasoning (ijtihād). To undermine dissenters ignorant of jurisprudence
(ʿilm fiqh), ʿUthman included interpretations of Qurʾanic verses and Hadith,
quotations from a series of Arabic legal texts and canonical texts (kitāb), along
with extracts from the opinions of a community of Sunni ʿulamāʾ from various
periods of Islamic history and parts of the Islamic world to portray an una-
nimity of legal opinion. While ʿUthman fails to elaborate on the nature of the
“aitraaz,” this community was probably an ideologically diverse one consisting
of rival sayyids challenging the inheritance of Hussein b. Ahmad, Sunni reform-
ists, liberal modernisers, Salafis and iconoclasts or “Wahhabis” challenging
sayyid-privilege at Luar Batang. ʿUthman collectively condemned dissenters
for capitalising on the Luar Batang masʾala as an opportunity to reject the
global ʿulamāʾ’s legitimacy and consensus, and in doing so, he charged them
with “heresy.”
ʿUthman used the very heresiological arguments and arguments regarding
innovation, etc., that were often weaponised against the Sufis to argue against
those challenging the ʿurf and ʿādat of the shrine. While heresiology and the
term bidaʿ (innovations) has been associated in Islamic studies and popular
discourse with anti-Sufi reformists attacking Custom, ʿUthman and the signa-
tories of the Sayʾun fatwa berated the rejection of Luar Batang’s custom (ʿurf;
ʿādat) and the ʿulamāʾ’s opinion, as being a deplorable innovation. ʿUthman
warned common Muslims without ʿAlid lineage (orang ajnabi) about how it
was heretical to not venerate and make offerings to the sayyid Friends and
keramats, and to challenge the hierarchical-cosmological order of a sayyid-
driven Islam. ʿUthman’s collected sources emphasised that Muslims were to
love Muhammad’s family (ahl al-bayt) even more than their own. Muslims
who challenged sayyid-privilege and refuted the opinion of the ʿulamāʾ on
this sacrosanct custom, were “eating the right [haq]” of Muhammad’s family.
In ʿUthman’s scathing terms, such Muslims were not only nominal ones igno-
rant ( jāhil) of Islamic law, tradition and comportment, but indeed hypocrites
(munāfiq) and apostates (murtad) who made their way “out of Islam,” becom-
ing kāfirs condemned to hellfire.105 ʿUthman also threatened the dissenters
who questioned the authority of the qāḍī, ʿulamāʾ and gurus who endorsed the
105 Ibid., fols. 6, 15–17.

110 Sevea
Sayʾun fatwa on Luar Batang’s customs of sayyid-keramat-privilege, to express

their iconoclastic opinions “to the face” of scholars committed to upholding
religious regulations including ʿUthman himself. ʿUthman was cognisant of
rebellious attempts within Batavia to challenge the Sayʾun fatwa through alter-
native ones.106 He instructed notaries in Batavia to refuse any such heretical
fatwa that detractors may have attained.
Like his contemporaries in India, ʿUthman was familiar with reformists
declaring that Sufi shrines’ customs had become a “faux-Sharia” for devotees,
but were in reality heretical.107 One of ʿUthman’s most prominent peers and
fellow student of Ahmad Zayni Dahlan was the north Indian Sufi master
and founder of the “Barelvī” school named Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1340/1921).
Both Khan and ʿUthman strived to monopolise the heresiological debate and
as such accentuated that it was Sharia and obligatory for all Sunnis to abide by
ʿurf and ʿādat that had been established by the ʿulamāʾ across eras of Islamic
history through a sophisticated process of consensus.108 In ʿUthman’s terms,
critics of ʿurf might claim to be attacking unlawful innovations, but were in
reality being “fraudulent in faith” and heretical – through refuting the legal
ʿurf, critics were indeed creating a new and “arbitrary ʿurf.” Among the vari-
ety of Sunni and Shāfiʿi scholars invoked by ʿUthman were Imam Nawawī,
Ibn Ḥajar and ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar. He reproduced quotations from the works of
these scholars and summarised their inviolable opinions on ʿurf, and accentu-
ated that the Islamic authority of the peripatetic Hadrami scholar, ʿAbdallāh b.
ʿUmar, was sacrosanct in Java (tanah Java) and the west (maghrib).109 Reformists
calling for the discarding of Luar Batang’s ʿurf of offerings to keramats were
ultimately damaging the Islamic faith (rosakkan agama Islam).110
In the vein of his contemporaries in Yemen, Haramayn and India, ʿUthman
highlighted that while the essence and form of conventionalised ʿurf was
inviolable, acts of perpetuating ʿurf could evolve across contexts and times.
In Luar Batang’s shrine, for instance, it was legal for the sayyid-descendants of
the keramat to receive money-offerings. Money (in its modern form) was
106 Ibid., fol. 23.

107 Sher Ali Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2020), 186–94.
109 ʿUthman’s fatwa is replete with Arabic quotations from and references to the works of
ʿulamāʾ including ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar, Ibn Ḥajar, Imām Nawawī, Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b.
Muḥammad b. Ḥabīb al-Māwardī and Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī, with expositions on the dalīl
of the ʿulamāʾ from canonical texts and fatwas. ʿUthman also clarifies that he could only
reproduce extracts of their detailed fatwas and merely introduce their ʿilm of uṣūl al-fiqh.
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not forbidden by Sharia and the ʿādat of ʿulamāʾ of the past, and was, as
such, legal. Even the “innovated” action of offering money to venerate
Muhammad’s family and keramats was meritorious since it did not compro-
mise God’s sovereignty and did not impede customs that had been regularised
across the Islamic centuries. Unlike dissenters who were ignorant of Islamic
jurisprudence and enjoyed “playing God” to reject rituals and actions
that had not been forbidden, the ʿulamāʾ were adepts of contextualising
ʿurf.111 Although ʿUthman’s treatise celebrated Arab homelands of Islam, he
followed the steps of the Arab ʿulamāʾ who produced the Sayʾun fatwa and
defended the customs of a shrine in a seemingly peripheral village of the
Islamic world, Luar Batang. Scholars including ʿUthman portrayed the Luar
Batang shrine as an exemplary ʿAlid shrine whose customs resembled the cus-
toms of eminent Sufi shrines across Aden, Egypt and Hadramawt, as well as
the shrines of Muhammad, David and the master from Baghdad, ʿAbd al-Qādir
al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166).112 This paideia romanticised an Islamic past when votive
offerings had been donated to the legal representatives of prophets and Sufis at
these shrines with neither interruption nor the attacks of iconoclasts. The tran-
sregional ʿulamāʾ was, however, well-aware of Wahhabi desecration on Arab
Sufi shrines, as well as the condemnations of shrine customs by critics calling
for scriptural reform of traditional Sufism. Luar Batang’s customs as such were
vociferously defended and the Batavian shrine became a microcosm of a larger
debate revolving around customs and privilege that was being waged across
the Islamic world.
Debates over Islamic authority continued beyond the stated dispute.
Frial R. Supratman’s Indonesian article on a request for donations made by
the sayyids of Luar Batang to the Ottoman sultan, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd/Abdülhamid
(r. 1876–1909), in 1898, speaks of how the Luar Batang shrine became the source
of a controversy that was in fact telling of Islamic connections across the inter-
weaved Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds.113 The Ottoman-Turkish
document shows sayyids appealing to the Ottoman sultan for donations to
renovate Habib Hussein’s grave and to construct (or expand) a mosque and
madrasa. They did this bypassing the Dutch authorities, in response to Dutch
inertia in supplying donations for the repair of the structure as well as the
“disintegrating glass” of the revenue-generating grave in the 1890s. Dutch
newspaper articles represented this episode as betraying ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd’s
111 Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, 263.

113 Frial R. Supratman, “Makam Sayyid Husein bin Abu Bakar al-Aydarus: Jaringan Spiritual
Usmani di Indonesia akhir abad ke-19,” Afkaruna 12.2 (2016): 169–86.

112 Sevea
pan-Islamism – after all, Ottoman support for a “foremost Sufi saint of the
Islamic world” was in line with representing the caliphate as a patron of shrines
and agent of unity across the Islamic world (alem-i Islamiyet), and as the resil-
ient Islamic power across oceans dominated by western powers. However, this
incident was also but one example of the Luar Batang grave being a microcosm
of transregional connections. Habib Hussein’s grave was a pivot connecting the
Ottomans, the Hadramis, and the port city of Batavia, and further entrenched
an Islamic network that was already forged by the sayyids’ leadership of Sufi
networks across the Islamic world and their role as diplomatic emissaries con-
nected to the Ottoman Consulate in Batavia, established in 1883.
5 Conclusion
In defending the privileges of Luar Batang’s keramat and his kinsmen, members
of the transregional paideia of ʿulamāʾ were aware that the sayyids of Southeast
Asian port cities were being represented in popular discourse, legal records
and orientalists’ notes, as exploiters of the “natives.” Late nineteenth-century
newspaper articles and Dutch and English literature described the Arab sayyid
as “the greatest lecher [wellusteling],” who thrived in the British and Dutch
colonies of Java and the Malay world and extorted money and favours from
natives by claiming to be a descendant of keramats and Muhammad.114 In the
1860s, newspaper articles even reported on nefarious sayyids in Batavia and
Singapore who claimed to be kinsmen of deceased keramats to board Dutch
trading schooners, extort money from the crew and drug them with amulets
to steal the vessels’ cargo.115 The idea that Habib Hussein’s self-avowed kins-
men were unscrupulous profiteers was perpetuated in the aforementioned
ballad, Wawacan Pareumeun Obor, describing its protagonist as a modernist
who refused to be harassed by a Habib begging donation, as well as by early
twentieth-century disputes and lawsuits over their rights to the shrine profits
waged between rival sayyids. To force the warring sayyids to reach a consensus
over distributing and managing the Luar Batang shrine’s revenue, the Dutch
advisor for native affairs, C. Snouck Hurgronje, officially recommended that
the Governor-General close the shrine temporarily in 1905.116 In the same
114 Mandal, Becoming Arab, 132–33.

115 “Pretender,” Straits Times, July 12, 1869: 2.
116 Emile Gobee and Cornelis Adriaanse, Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje 1889–
1936, II, (‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1959), 1592–1595; Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of
an Arab Shrine,” 193.
Studiesfrom
11 Brill.com06/03/2022
(2022) 74–11412:18:07PM
year, the internationally-renowned Salafi scholar and journalist, Rashīd Riḍā

(1865–1935) published a fatwa in a leading Islamic journal, al-Manār (The
Lighthouse), on donations to shrines and keramats. Rashīd Riḍā’s fatwa was
produced in response to a request for an opinion on the matter made by a
sayyid from Singapore and unequivocally stated that Muslims were forbidden
from spending money on keramats and shrines; such customs were illegal and
contravened Muhammad’s norm.117
Reformists such as Rashīd Riḍā certainly aspired to eradicate various shrine-
based customs and innovations and the popular belief in miracle workers.
Even they, however, often became prisoners of the much more conventional,
miraculous and customary, tradition of Islam. On his 1908 “homecoming tour”
to parts of Ottoman Syria, Rashīd Riḍā was surrounded by crowds requesting
charms and miracles, touching him to access his alleged baraka; the crowds
ferried the globe-trotting celebrity to his home in Qalamun, leaving him to
helplessly scorn such customs as being those of lands where “civilisation had
not yet reached.”118 While reformists attacking “magical” and shrine-based cus-
toms were often aware of or repulsed by the cosmic hierarchy of keramats,
even sympathetic academic scholars have opined that the “older religious
life” of “magic men,” miracle workers and popular “cults” entered its histori-
cal twilight by the late nineteenth century.119 This twilight reputedly stripped
charismatic religious authorities throughout the Islamic world of their promi-
nence. The charismatic religious authority of Luar Batang’s keramat, however,
would not reach its twilight. Even documents on his charisma including the
Sayʾun fatwa would enjoy a long afterlife in Batavia and Jakarta, in translation,
to remind colonial and post-colonial authorities of a widespread ʿulamāʾ’s
endorsement of the shrine’s exemplary customs and Habib Hussein’s charisma
and most legitimate heirs. Sayyids from Hussein b. Ahmad’s family would first
share a translated photostat copy of the fatwa produced by a “certified trans-
lator” with the raad agama in February 1930, before sending a translated and
romanised copy of it, via a 3 rupiah stamp, to the Head of Jakarta City (Kepala
Kota Jakarta) in November 1954.120
In the academic literature on Indonesian Islam, Kevin Fogg has noted that
charisma has often been neglected in comparison to the bureaucratisation
117 Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine,” 196.

118 Grehan, Twilight of the Saints, 82–83.
119 This opinion was observable in Grehan’s Twilight of the Saints, 16, and Kaptein’s “Conflicts
About the Income of an Arab Shrine.”
120 Habib Hussein Fikri kindly provided me copies of the translated and romanised fatwas
(dated 27 February 1930 and 3 November 1954). There is also a stamp of the translator
named Hussein b. Said.

114 Sevea
of civil society organisations, relations of Islamic movements and the state

and rational Islamic expressions of courtly culture, nationalism and politi-
cal ideology.121 Miraculous narratives of keramats, for instance, have not been
subjected to more rigorous historical, sociological or literary analysis and have
often only been recognised as windows into the mentalité of the world in which
bodies including the world’s largest Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama
(NU), prevail. I have taken a step toward writing about such charismatic figures,
following more recent works on the performance of sainthood and sayyidness
across the Malay world and Java, and the recently deceased Merle C. Ricklefs’s
biography of an eighteenth-century Javanese prince and Soul Catcher.122
Ricklefs noted that it is perhaps unnecessary to remind readers that Indonesia
is the globe’s largest Muslim state and the 100 million-large Javanese population
forms one of the largest Muslim ethnic-groups – according to him, the more
pressing task is to write biographies of the prominent Muslims of Java. Ricklefs
focussed on a prince he described as “one of the most flamboyant figures” of
his era. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I analyse the textual and oral tra-
ditions of a figure who enjoys prominence from the eighteenth-century to the
present within both elite and subaltern Islamic societies and recover data of
his life and afterlife and his role as the pivot of a widespread devotional com-
munity.123 Challenging easy periodisation and notions of a historical twilight,
Habib Hussein enjoys a long afterlife. His miracle stories and incarnations as a
port-hopping messiah, an evangelist of Sufism and Shāfiʿism and anecdotes of
resisting Islamophobic authority, continue to appeal to twentieth- and twenty-
first-century pilgrims and inspire hagiographic and rare academic works on his
historical life and afterlife. Every account of the Beloved’s life, in the words of
his Jakartan hagiographer, is a story of love (ḥubb; cinta) and loving the kera-
mat and Muhammad’s family unceasingly.124 Remembering, history-writing,
and defending custom from the attacks of Islamophobes and heretics, is part
and parcel of the process of loving the Beloved of North Jakarta.
121 See Kevin Fogg’s study of a Javanese organisation built on the charisma of Habib Idrus
b. Salim al-Jufri, “Reinforcing Charisma in the Bureaucratisation of Indonesian Islamic
Organisations,” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 37.1 (2018): 117–40. Fogg’s article
includes a concise review of scholarship on Islamic organisations and movements, as well
as the bureaucratisation of Islam and state-society relations in Indonesia; see 119.
122 Rijal, “Performing Arab Saints”; Ricklefs, Soul Catcher: Java’s Fiery Prince Mangkunagara I,
1726–95 (Asian Studies Association of Australia: Southeast Asian Publications Series, 2018).
123 Ricklefs, Soul Catcher, 2.
124 I paraphrase the words of Habib Hussein Fikri, Masjid Luar Batang, 28 December 2019.
Studiesfrom
11 Brill.com06/03/2022
(2022) 74–11412:18:07PM

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journal of Sufi Studies 11 (2022) 74–114

Sufism, Miracles and Oceanic Fatwas: The Beloved

Teren Sevea | ORCID: 0000-0001-9471-8141

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/22105956-bja10019

miracles – hagiography – customs – modern Sufism – Indian Ocean

1 Claudine Lombard-Salmon, “Un Chinois a Java (1729–36),” Bulletin de l’École française

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to a much smaller extent in Urdu. Here, I introduce some of these materials

3 ʿAlid keramat-graves in Jakarta include those of Habib ʿAli b. ʿAbdurrahman al-Habshi

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have made widely publicised pilgrimages to offer prayers amidst “thousands”

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the lines of essentialised racial categories.19 Working in shared urban spaces,

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The following sections further encourage readers to reconsider the regnant

2 A Flying Sufi in Jakarta

In between 2016 and 2017, apparitions (penampakan) of Habib Hussein

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The urban redevelopment project was unfavourably received by Pasar

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many denounce Ahok and the prevalence of a secular nationalism that

numerous ‘traditionalist’ Indonesian Muslims and prominent living masters of

35 Alatas, What is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Community in Indonesia (Princeton:

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Islamic scholars and Sufis. Hagiographers also reminded ignorant Indonesian

3 The Sufi Hagiographical Narrative: Connecting Gujarat,

Tony K. Stewart’s Witness to Marvels examines the storytelling and perfor-

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were circulated to create communities of collective belief.44 Shahzad Bashir’s

Java to Hadramawt and the Haramayn. Prominent hagiographers also edited

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by more of Habib Hussein’s descendants, custodians, storytellers, Sufi elders,

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in the 1990s, when “creole Arabs” engaged in public debates in an increasingly

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shower “mercy on all creations” (rahmatan lil-alamin) of the Indian Ocean by

61 Alaydrus, SR, 11, 22–23.

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them to profess Islam by reciting “lailahaillAllah-MuhammadurrasulAllah.” He

a twenty-five-year-old Sufi. Throughout hagiographies, the young keramat was

73 Mandal, Becoming Arab, 105.

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77 Alaydrus, SR, 15–16.

80 Alaydrus, SR, 17–18; Mauladawilah, 17H, 26–28.

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83 Quoted from Said, Tujuh Wali Melayu, 5.

88 Van Ronkel, “Moskeeen te Batavia,” 206; Alaydrus, SR, 19–26.

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respected” kinsmen to manage his shrine’s treasury, receive donations, con-

4 Luar Batang at the Centre of Disputes over Islam

89 al-ʿAttas, Taj al-Aʾras, 2:392–93.

aforementioned Sayʾun fatwa that remains treasured by Hussein b. Ahmad’s

95 Also see Kaptein, “Conflicts About the Income of an Arab Shrine.”

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99 ʿUthman, Untitled [Perkara Luar Batang], fols. 1–3.

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105 Ibid., fols. 6, 15–17.

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Sayʾun fatwa on Luar Batang’s customs of sayyid-keramat-privilege, to express

106 Ibid., fol. 23.

111 Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, 263.

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114 Mandal, Becoming Arab, 132–33.