Laffan M

MichAel lAffAn
The Sayyid in the Slippers: An Indian Ocean Itinerary

and Visions of Arab Sainthood, 1737-1929
Fig 1. The Tomb of Sayyid Alawi, Cape Town, as photographed by Arthur Elliot (1870-1938), beg. of
the 20th century.
He was a saint in his lifetime and stories are still told of how,
using his miraculous powers, he used to go into the locked and
guarded slave quarters at nighta bent little figure, with his
Koran under his arm. When he had finished reading to them the
law he would go out and fetch food orif it so happened that a
slave had no shoes, or his shoes pincheda new pair of shoes.
Imam of the Chiappini Street Mosque, Cape Town, 1929
Archipel 86, Paris, 2013, pp. 191-227
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Michael Laffan
On April 26, 1744, the fortuijn arrived off Cape Town and began
discharging supplies and instructions sent from Batavia, the capital of the
United East India Company (VOC). According to the summary record kept
in Holland, only one person remained ashore of the 70 who had spent the
previous eight weeks crossing the Indian Ocean. 1 Yet different sources show
that five others would be left in Africa. One was a Javanese called Kyai Hajji
Muhammad Mataram. Another was a Yemeni called Sayyid Alawi, said to
be from Mocha. Both were described as Mohammedan priests. Both were
in chains. Indeed Governor General Van Imhoffs letter of January 22 gave
specific instruction to Cape Governor Swellengrebel that neither man should
ever be allowed to return to the Indies, as they were said to have been the
most prominent troublemakers held accountable for the shocking events that
befell the European garrison at the Javanese capital of Kartasura in 1741.2
In order to recount what happened in Java in 1741 and what later
happened to Alawi, who is today remembered as one of the axial saints of
Cape Town, we must enter the web of fortified bureaux, ports and
plantations that constituted the VOCs network in the eighteenth century,
stretching as it did from the governing chambers of Holland to the island of
Deshima in Japan. On the way this essay will speak to demonstrations of
power, violence and resistance, conversion and collaboration, orthodoxy and
heresy. In so doing, and at the most basic level, my hope is to extend the
religious dimensions of Kerry Wards work on forced migration and offer
more detail on the life and afterlife of one exile in particular who is
celebrated in South Africa and utterly forgotten in Indonesia.3 At some
points there are things that can be said by virtue of surviving documentation,
largely Dutch, and the careful work of Merle Ricklefs and Willem
Remmelink.4 At others there will be a very strong whiff of speculation to
* I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to the staff and regulars of the Cape Town
Archives Repository: Ibrahim Kenny, Thembile, Cecil, James, Jaco van de Merwe and
Maureen Rall. Beyond its stony walls, too, I would like to express my appreciation to Cathy
Salter and family, Jim Armstrong, Rob Shell, Shamil Jeppie, Antonia Malan, Merle Ricklefs
and the ever inquisitive Annabel Gallop. Needless to say, the speculations and flights of
fancy remain very much my own.
1. That one person was the master, Kornelis Booys, who was replaced for the onward journey
to Texel on June 30. J.R. Bruijn et al. (eds.), Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th
centuries, 3 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), III, 372-73.
2. Batavia to Swellengrebel, Batavia, 22 January 1744, in Cape Town Archives Repository
(hereafter KAB), C 464, pp. 28-29; and CJ 3186, p. 39.
3. Kerry Ward, networks of empire: forced Migration in the Dutch east india company
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
4. Willem G.J. Remmelink, The chinese War and the collapse of the Javanese State, 17251743 (KITLV Press, 1994); and M. C. Ricklefs, The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java 17261749: history, literature and islam in the court of Pakubuwana ii (St. Leonards: Allen and
Unwin, 1998).
Archipel 86, Paris, 2013
The Sayyid in the Slippers
193
accompany the incense, though I hope in this regard that the detailed
foregrounding of the affairs of the Javanese court of Mataramwith its
intrigues, its rituals of protection, and the fatal imbrication in a Sino-Muslim
War against the VOCwill be justified by the ensuing South African story.
In relating a tale insufficiently connected by scholars of either extreme of
the Indian Ocean rim, I furthermore wish to hazard some suggestions about
the potential role and use of the figure of the Arab teacher, and to interrogate
the broader claims of grand opposition between seemingly entrenched Islam
and parvenu colonialism across the Indian Ocean. In this regard I will make
reference to the long developed Dutch opprobrium of the faith of their
adversaries in Asia and current assumptions regarding the practices
associated with its Sufi teachers. Of the latter, the most frequently cited are
said to be Qadiri. That is, they are linked, sometimes loosely, to the
Qadiriyya brotherhood, which takes its inspiration from the Kurdish saint of
Baghdad, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077-1166). Yet there were others in
motion as well, from the Rifaiyya of al-Jilanis Iraqi follower Ahmad alRifai (1118-81) to the more exclusive Alawiyya, monopolized by highborn Arabs with ancestral connections to the oases of Hadramawt in modernday Yemen. As we shall see, the ability to claim these connectionswhether
by virtue of their attested pedigrees or distinctive practices of
remembrance of Godrequires a certain faith in the power of memory, an
interrogation of the origins of the pedigrees in question, and a reading
against the colonial grain.
An Unsettled Kingdom: Mataram, 1737-39
Our story begins not with the arrival of an Arab on Java, but with the
death of a deposed Javanese king in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In early
1734, the reigning lord of the major Javanese kingdom of Mataram,
Susuhunan Pakubuwana II, learned that a previous ruler, Amangkurat III,
whose throne his father had usurped in 1705, had passed away in distant
Dutch-administered exile on the island of Ceylon (Lanka). Such was not a
surprise in and of itself, for by this time the rulers of Java had come, rather
begrudgingly, to depend on the neighbouring Dutch on the north coast for
arms, support and sites of imprisonment for their more troublesome courtiers
in the wake of so many uprisings and crises of succession over the previous
six decades.
This situation was a far cry from the early seventeenth century, when the
rampant Sultan Agung (r. 1613-45) had commenced his long and violent
reign by cowing the many minor courts of the island, starting with the more
famously Islamic port towns of the north coast, which he first subdued by
the mid 1620s before turning westward and sending two massive sieges
against the Dutch in their newly-established base of Batavia in 1628 and
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Michael Laffan
1629 (and with the object of subjugating the rival entrepot state of Banten
thereafter). The VOC weathered these attacks and eventually established a
modus vivendi that allowed them to continue their operations in the region.
A somewhat undermined Agung subsequently embraced many of the more
Islamic accoutrements of his coastal rivals even as he conquered the last
pious holdout of Giri around 1636, eventually sending a mission to Mecca to
obtain the title of sultan late in his reign, much as the rival lords of Banten
had in 1638, while his court oversaw the translation and reinterpretation of
numerous texts captured on the north coast. That said, as Merle Ricklefs has
shown, many of these translations bore the marks of a considerable
admixture of mystical ideas grounded in Javas pre-Islamic culture, that
would become hegemonic as Agungs heirs directed their energies toward
maintaining his inheritence in central and east Java, as well as on the
fractious island of Madura, sometimes affirming the place of Islam and at
others actively suppressing its champions.5
Meanwhile the Dutch continued to outplay their English and Muslim
competitors alike in West Java and in the spice islands further to the east. A
turning point was arguably reached in 1669 with the conquest of the
Makassarese Sultanate of Gowa on Sulawesi, whose ships, warriors and
even some ulama were famous throughout the region, from the resolutely
Islamic entrepot states of Aceh in Sumatra to the numerous principalities of
the Lesser Sundas and Moluccas. Indeed, after his return to the archipelago
from Arabia, the fall of his hometown of Gowa caused one celebrated
teacher, Shaykh Yusuf (1626-99), to seek his fortune in Banten where he
served as the key advisor to the sultan until the latter was deposed by his son
with VOC aid, leading the resistance thereafter until his capture in 1683.
As we shall see, the Islamic network that linked Aceh, Makassar and
Banten was to have its continued impact on Mataram too, despite the
interdictions of the VOC as Agungs successors also made use of European
men and equipment in their attempts to bring their coastal dependencies (and
their own relatives) to heel. By the 1670s Mataram had begun to
disintegrate, facing famine, attacks from roving Makassarese and, perhaps
most fatefully, the rebellion of Trunajaya (1649-80), who united many of
Matarams Madurese and Surabayan enemies against Agungs son
Amangkurat I (r. 1646-77). In 1677 the VOC agreed to aid Amangkurat, and
obtained significant promises, including rights to annual payments in cash
and crops, the stationing of a garrison at court, the acquisition of lands in the
Priangan Highlands south of Batavia (which were not Matarams to give),
and protectorate status over the buffer sultanate of Cirebon, which lay to the
east of Batavia.
5. For a general background, see M.C. Ricklefs, A history of Modern indonesia since c.
1200, 4th ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), esp. 46-53, 86-111.
195
Despite the appearance of a controlling interest over Java, though, the

VOC, which was undergoing internal crises of its own, sought not so much to
rule Mataram as deflect it from its own ambitions. Indeed the nature of VOCJavanese collaboration was fraught and contradictory. While Amangkurat II
(r. 1677-1703) seemed almost a creature of the Dutch at his ascension to
throne in 1677, he was unable to service his debts and fomented resistance at
court, sheltering Makassarese and Balinese enemies of the Dutch. In 1686 a
VOC officer, Franois Tack, sent to renegotiate various aspects of the treaties
at the new court of Kartasura (established in 1680), was killed together with
seventy-four other VOC personel, forcing the Dutch garrison to withdraw to
Jepara. Subsequent infighting and rebellions brought the VOC back into
closer relations with Kartasura, even heralding their forcefull intervention in
favour of Pakubuwana I (r. 1704-19), who would see to the deposition and
exiling of his more legitimate rival Amangkurat III in 1705.
But to return to our opening story that commences some three decades
later: In his embassy to Batavia in September of 1734, Matarams recentlyappointed chief minister, Raden Adipati Natakusuma, requested that his
masters European allies return the remains of Amangkurat III and any
surviving family members, for they were the much-missed members of an
intricate web of alliances that still overlay the many minor courts and
regencies that were within Matarams orbit. Rebuffed on many other matters
by the Dutch in 1734, such as the question as to who had authority over the
people living on the road to Semarang, this petition was at least heard.
Even if it was no longer the fearsome entity that it had been under Agung,
Mataram, with a predominantly agrarian population of perhaps some two
million, remained a potent Islamic domain. As we shall see, its sultan was
then under the strong influence of a set of close marital relatives with a strong
bent towards the faith and its global Sufi iterations, most notably her chief
minister Natakusuma, his brother-in-law Demang Urawan and even, I would
propose, the latters sister, Queen Ratu Kencana. And even if the VOC,
having aided her lords in their wars of succession, had reasserted the right to
maintain a garrison at Kartasura, it was more akin to a nervous embassy
whose soldiers were technically at the service of the Susuhunan, whose
palace walls faced them across the main square with its sacred fig trees.
On the other hand, the Susuhunan remained bound to the VOC by
extensive debts. These were meant to be serviced with cash and deliveries of
rice that were intended to keep the wider European operation in motion as
much as the market crops of coffee, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and, most
lucratively of all, sugar. Still, such obligations were still rarely met, and if
one were to look for a tangible centre of VOC authority in central Java, it
hardly lay in the narrow confines of the Kartasuran fort, but began to
manifest a sweaty days march north on the road to Semarang, a town that
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was, like so many of the archipelagos ports, in the orbit of Batavia. With its
castle, its grand canal, and its masonry buildings looming over a mix of
simpler wooden structures, that city and its environs took in a population of
some twenty thousand people drawn from across Asia, Europe and Africa.
And it was to Batavia that Natakusuma led an embassy once more in
October of 1736, returning by way of Semarang on April 9, 1737.
On his triumphant return to court, Natakusuma not only brought back the
remains of Amangkurat, the surviving exiles, and a renewed treaty with the
VOC. Far more importantly to the Javanese he brought numerous
supernaturally-powerful items of regalia that Amangkurat had managed to
spirit away nearly three decades beforehand (and which the Dutch believed
that they still had in their storerooms in Lanka). Consisting of daggers (kris),
pikes, and other warlike accoutrements, these were deemed crucial supports
for the rightful governance of a kingdom whose elite were divided as to what
to do about the Dutch and the Chinese who often served as their
intermediaries.6
This was not all. Natakusuma brought another potent ornament in the
form of an Arab called Alawi, who must have gained special attention for
his claim to descent from the Prophet, a lineage marked by his use of the title
sayyid. This was not the first time that an official mission to Batavia had
resulted in a connection with the wider Islamic world. After the largely
inconclusive discussions of 1734, Natakusuma had brought another teacher
back with him in early 1735. This was Kyai Hajji Mataram, whose name
(part title, part toponym) indicated that he was a Javanese distinguished by
having made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was only in May of 1736, though,
that the Dutch learned that Hajji Mataram had been given a residence near
the Chinese quarter of Kartasura. Supported by an income of 100
households, he was reportedly bent on establishing a religious school with a
dozen followers.7
That the newly-arrived Governor at Semarang, Nicolaas Crul, was alive
to Alawis presence in Kartasura in April of 1737 either speaks to an
increasing anxiety about such activities, or perhaps a sighting of the teacher
on their short voyage from Batavia as Alawi and the Lankan princes made
their way to Semarang.8 For now, though, the written record is silent as to
6. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, toegang 1.04.02, VOC 8972, S. Kinderman to Abraham
Formieux, Colombo, 23 March 1737; M.C. Ricklefs, The Missing Pusakas of Kartasura, in
Sulastin Sutrisno et al. (eds.), Bahasa Sastra Budaya: Ratna Manikam Untaian
Persembahan Kepada Prof. Dr. P.J. Zoetmulder (Yokyakarta: Gadjah Mada University
Press, 1985), 601-30.
7. Remmelink, chinese War, 94-95.
8. That said, Crul first made reference to his presence after his translators reading of a letter
from the Susuhunan to Capt. Von Glan on April 9. VOC 2418, Crul to Duirvelt, Semarang,
12 April 1737, under cover of Crul to Batavia, 21 May 1737.
197
Alawis movements prior to 1737. It is thus hard to know what had impelled
him to leave his hometown of Mocha, where the coffee trade sustained some
10-12,000 inhabitants. But even as demand for that stimulant continued
unabated in the Ottoman Empire, the external share of that trade was now
starting to relocateincluding to Java, where it was successfully cultivated
on VOC land in the Priangan and towards Cirebon.9
Having much less need of coffee and no market for their sugar in Persia,
the VOC was practically out of the Gulf trade in 1737 in any case. And if it
had little need of Arabica coffee, there was even less desire to import Arab
clerics. Hence we might imagine Alawi having made his way to Southeast
Asia on an Asian vessel and more than likely in the company of returning
Jawi sojourners, as people from the wider Southeast Asian region were
known.10 Hajji Matarams accompanying Natakusuma on his second
mission to Batavia is perhaps suggestive of some connection with Alawi.
They could have met in Mecca or Medina, if not in coastal Yemen, where
earlier Jawis like Abd al-Rauf of Singkel (1615-93) and his contemporary
Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar are known to have studied and fully imbibed the
learning of the Sufi tariqas.
Still, there is no evidence of any such meeting for now, or even of a
recent arrival. Perhaps, like so many Arab sojourners in the courts of
Southeast Asia, such as the now famous Nur al-Din al-Raniri who was so
influential at Aceh in the late 1630s, this particular sayyid had already been a
guest elsewhere in the region, and only now was setting his cap at the largest
remaining independent kingdom of Islam below the winds.11
Regardless of how this particular adventurers steps were first directed to
Kartasura, Alawi would have found himself in bewildering circumstances at
court. Over the coming weeks, and in step with the festivities to mark the
Susuhunans impending birthday on April 25, the Lankan princes would be
feted. At the same time, however, they were kept under the watchful eye of
the leading courtier, Demang Urawan, who had assumed day-to-day running
of affairs at the palace in the absence of his brother-in-law Natakusuma.
Although technically of a lower rank than the chief minister, Urawan was the
son of a celebrated exile, Pangeran Purbaya (d. 1726), whom Merle Ricklefs
notes had been sent to Batavia in 1721. Schooled, as Ricklefs also suggests,
9. Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620-1740 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958),
183-211; Michel Tuchscherer (ed.), le commerce du caf avant lre des plantations
coloniales : espaces, rseaux, socits (XV e -XiX e sicle) (Cairo : Institut franais
darchologie orientale, 2001).
10. Glamann referred to the ongoing presence of all manner of vessels calling at Mocha each
season, including Acehnese ones. Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 189.
11. On Raniri and his movements, see the authoritative work of Paul Wormser: le Bustan alSalatin de nuruddin ar-Raniri : Rflexions sur le rle culturel dun tranger dans le monde
malais au XViie sicle (Paris : Cahiers dArchipel, 2012).
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Michael Laffan
to the highest degree of a Javanese prince, it is likely that the young Urawan
came to know much of the Dutch (and wider world) before his return to
Kartasura around 1727. He was also reputed to have been a lover of
Pakubuwana II in his youth, and now seemed unassailable as the royal
brother-in-law twice over. This was accomplished by way of his marriage to
Pakubuwanas sister, with his own sister being married to Pakubuwana in
turn.12
Within days of his arrival, too, Alawi may have joined the throngs to
watch one of Urawans leading henchmen, Raden Dipasana, engage in
mortal combat. This contest was ordered as punishment to mollify the VOC
for Dipasanas having sent his retainers to occupy the mosque of Tuban and
thus gain control of that coastal regency in late 1736. The VOC, though,
believed that Dipasana was a scapegoat and that the operation had been
plotted by Urawan. When Alawi arrived, the Dutch garrison commander,
Hendrick Duirvelt, was gravely concerned by rumours that Urawan had been
hoarding arms and ammunition originally intended for that purpose.13 After
protecting his man for as long as he could, Urawan had handed Dipasana
over on Natakusumas return. And so it was that the loyal henchman, armed
only with a kris and small club, was made to fight a tiger. After making a
good account of himself and even slaying the feline, the badly mauled noble
was dragged away to Urawans compound for the coup de grace by the
Susuhunans kris.
Or at least that was what Duirvelt was told by Natakusuma on April 23
during a visit to mark the kings birthday.14 By mid July the Dutch would be
incensed to learn that Dipasana had been nursed, and his daughter even
betrothed to Urawan.15 The VOC had other grievances too. Dipasanas case
had intersected with that of a Sino-Javanese known for his exactions among
Chinese rice-procurers, tollgate operators, and traders who were so
indispensable to the Dutch. He too was a protg of Urawan and had
recently been granted the title of Gunawangsa. By chance, though, this
Gunawangsa had been arrested just as Natakusuma was on his way to
Batavia.
During his negotiations at Batavia in 1736-37, Natakusuma had
successfully convinced the VOC to prohibit Chinese from travelling into the
countryside and to leave the accumulation of the required harvests to the
local lords. He also negotiated the right of the court to try its own officials,
12. Regarding Urawan and his early history, see Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 17, 130.
13. VOC 2418, Hendrik Duirvelt to R.C. von Glan, Kartasura, 20 March 1737.
14. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 23 April 1737, under cover of Crul to Batavia,
Semarang, 21 May 1737, apart.
15. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 12 and 22 July 1737, under cover of Crul to
Valkenier, Semarang, 30 July 1737.
199
like Gunawangsa, and so the VOC was compelled to hand him over.16 The
killings then stopped for a moment, but the assumedly Muslim Gunawangsa,
whom the Dutch understood to be a spiritual mentor to Natakusuma, was
treated leniently after giving an oath in the royal mosque in which he denied
any guilt or connection to Urawan. This had been carried out in a process
that Duirvelt deemed to be an abominable parody of justice overseen by a
minor cleric called Poemoelut.17
Either way, in 1737 it was clear that, with his stockpile of weapons and
network of bellicose retainers and pliant priests, Urawan remained a power
to be reckoned with at Kartasura. Alawi would certainly have seen this
confirmed on the royal birthday, celebrated with the formal parading of a
great elephant that had been gifted by the Governor General, the formal
raising of the Lankan princes to their new ranks with appropriate salaries,
and Urawans own elevation to his fathers title of Pangeran Arya Purbaya.
This promotion, which Crul felt presaged further mischief from the
arrogant and proud statesman, amounted, as Ricklefs observes, to formal
recognition of Urawan/Purbayas control of the inner affairs at court.18
And Alawi, too, would profit. The day after the ceremonies marking the
Prophets Birthday on July 11, when Duirvelt would report the survival of
Dipasana, he also noted that Sayyid Alawi had begun to preside over Friday
prayers together with Hajji Mataram (displacing the previously useful
Poemoelut). This was in addition to being assigned a new house built in
Natakusumas compound and a concubine selected from the court.19
In some senses Urawan/Purbaya and his Islamic proteges seemed firmly
in control in 1737. During Governor Cruls embassy to Kartasura in
September-October, at which time he delivered what he thought to be the
true ancestral regalia, the dominant faction made its feelings mockingly
clear. For Crul was witness to several battles staged between victorious
buffaloes and tigers, two tiger ordeals (won by the accused again), not to
mention straight out tiger-stickingand all in ignorance of the symbolism
that equated the VOC with rapacious tigers. Still, if things were bad for
tigers, not all was necessarily well for the newly-annointed Purbaya. In
retrospect this had already become apparent on the Prophets birthday in July
when a key ally had not been granted a coveted post. Perhaps Natakusuma
16. Remmelink, chinese War, 92, 100-01, 103; Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 92-93,
179-80.
17. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 9 May 1737, under cover of Crul to Batavia,
Semarang, 21 May 1737, apart. Most likely called Pemulut, the documents also spell his
name as Poemulut.
18. VOC 2418, Crul to Batavia, Semarang, 21 May 1737, apart; Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen
Worlds, 199.
19. VOC 2418, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 12 July 1737, under cover of Crul to Valkenier,
Semarang, 30 July 1737.
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Michael Laffan
could sense what was coming and made contingency plans. Under
Natakusumas watchful eyes, or perhaps watching over him in turn, Alawi
would gain yet more access to power as the edifice built up by the new
Purbaya would start to collapse. The turning point came in March of 1738,
when Queen Ratu Kencana, Purbayas beloved (and so-strategically married)
sister, suffered a stillbirth.
It was at this juncture that Commander Duirvelt gained fresh intelligence
of Alawi. In an attempt to gain intercession for the ailing queen, flintlocks
were discharged at six each evening to ward of evil spirits. Sayyid Alawi
and Hajji Mataram were moreover said to be by her bedside or in
consultation with the Susuhunan on matters of state, day and night. It was
even implied that the Queen was a devotee of the teachings they offered, for
it was seemingly by virtue of this devotion that Pakubuwana had called upon
Alawi and Mataram, allegedly referring to her as brother in their
presence, and having them treat her in contravention of normal Javanese
practices.20
Of course such news, filtered through hostile informants and passed on to
confused Dutch servants, is hard to interpret. While it is possible that use of
the term brother points to the Arabic usage favoured by members of a Sufi
order, who often refer to each other as fellow brethren (ikhwan), we must be
cautious given that the Javanese term for brother is not gendered, being
marked instead by difference in age and status. It is thus the abnegation of
the latter difference that is perhaps most pertinent for us here. And we are
really only left to ponder the, seemingly inappropriate, relationship between
an Arab interloper and a Javanese prince.
In his analysis, the ever-worried Commander Duirvelt certainly reported
how the Arab dared to strut about in the royal presence (and in his slippers
no less!) while the anti-Purbaya/Natakusuma nobles were aghast at the
ensuing institutional paralysis. Duirvelt was told repeatedly that no weighty
decision could be taken at the court without the prior consultation with the
new priests.21 Even when Ratu Kencana remained ill two weeks later,
Pakubuwana was said to be consoled by Alawi, emphatically identified as
the key means for the mischief of the ministers, and doubtless further evil
should she recover.22
But she did not recover, and in mid April the gamelan orchestra was
silenced following her death on the 14th. Matters soon came to a head for
Urawan/Purbaya with the claim that he had been intriguing against the VOC
with a rebel prince of Makassar. Even if the accusation was false, the
20. VOC 2449, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 25 March, 1738, under cover of Crul to Batavia,
1 April 1738.
21. VOC 2449, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 25 March 1738.
22. VOC 2449, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 31 March 1738.
201
Susuhunan decided to rusticate his brother-in-law in early October, before

handing him to the Company in November on the understanding that this
would be for a period in Batavia, and in exchange for being allowed to retain
Natakusuma as his key statesman.23
Hajji Mataram was weakened by association with Purbayas departure for
the North Coast, and then, quite contrary to Pakubuwanas wishes, to Lanka.
In October of 1738 it was rumoured that the once high priest at court had
been sent off to the town of Bagelan to serve as a normal cleric after a
dispute with Alawi.24 The precise reason for this is unclear.25 Suffice it to
say that Natakusuma seemed determined to protect Alawi. Moreover, the
Arab had a further role to play as Natakusuma would enlarge his Java-wide
network of alliances. In July of 1739, Duirvelt would learn that the Arab had
been married at his own instigation some three months previously to a
youthful beauty brought from the holy mount of Giri, near the port of
Gresik. 26 Evidently this was not deemed particularly important to Crul at
Semarang, given that he did not, in his cover letter to Batavia, summarize the
account of the secret and supposedly forced marriage held in Natakusumas
compound, or yet the womans teary appeals to be returned to her family.
Indeed Crul was more fixated on Pakubuwanas pardoning of the remaining
followers of Purbaya.27
Islamic Connections
Stepping outside of the confines of the Dutch fortress, Alawis marriage
could well have been a major source of religious prestige in Javanese eyes,
and a powerful stitch in the political fabric of the realm. Setting aside the
fact that it was all seen as a part of Natakusumas strategy of shoring up
support with the courts of the coast, the mount of Giri is the site of one of the
first Islamic polities of Java so often in tension with Mataram, and the young
woman was implied as being a descendent of its sainted masters. Indeed we
may recall that, in his rise, Matarams Sultan Agung had crushed the north
coast ports before turning west to face the fledgling VOC at Batavia, and it
was from these courts that many texts were imported. In Indonesia today,
23. Remmelink, chinese War, 116.
24. Duirvelt mentioned the demotion of Mataram, but not the role of Alawi; which was
referred to in the subsequent cover letter of Crul. See VOC 7889, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura,
29 October 1738 and Crul to Batavia, 3 November 1738, apart.
25. Ricklefs notes that both had clashed previously over their official roles, and uncertain
hierarchy, with the two men alternately leading prayers or giving the Friday address. See
M.C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A history of islamization from the fourteenth to the
early nineteenth centuries (EastBridge, 2006), 125.
26. VOC 7839, Duirvelt to Crul, Kartasura, 20 July 1739.
27. VOC 7839, Crul to Valkenier, Semarang, 29 July 1739.
202
Michael Laffan
moreover, Giri is presented as a gateway for a mystical form of Islam into

the archipelago. Yet can this tell us much of Alawi and his beliefs, or indeed
those of the Javanese court? Clearly the Arab outsider was received as a
teacher endowed with a knowledge of healing and attendant rituals of
protection, but the sources make it difficult to pin him down except as some
sort of patron to what Ricklefs argues was a rising interest in mysticism led
by a younger generation (with their marked disdain for the feline Dutch).
Citing a text once in Urawans possession, Ricklefs has shown how the
prince was attuned to a mix of Javanese traditions and those from beyond its
shores. The manuscript contains Arabic and Javanese glosses of the fourfold
Sufi path, a translation of the Malay mystical poetry of Hamza Fansuri (d.
1527), whose writings al-Raniri had disapproved of in Aceh, a Shattari
diagram (associated with the teachings of the Indian Siraj al-Din Abdallah
Shattar, d.1406) explaining the inner salience of the testimony of faith, and a
pedigree of the Qadiri tradition.28
This last element implied that its bearer was endowed with secret
knowledge handed down by the Prophet through a series of teachers,
principally Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, whose tomb is now in Baghdad. The last
two masters in the list are the obliquely styled Shaykh Muhammad Khalifa
and the lowly and humble holder of the pedigree, Shaykh Muhammad,
who listed himself as a seeker born in Intan. Here I would wish to go out
on something of a limb and suggest that the last place-name (lit. diamond),
could well refer to Central Batavia much as it does today, originally being a
local gloss for the south-western bastion of the castle, known in Dutch as
Diamant. If it were the case, then it could even be suggestive of a
relationship formed with Urawan during his youthful exile.29
Still, there may well have been other such gems in Java, and as the
juxtaposition of the Shattari diagram already indicates, possession of a
Qadiri pedigree does not a Qadiri make, or at least not exclusively. Even if
they are remembered as key disseminators of particular lines in Southeast
Asia, the aforementioned Abd al-Rauf of Singkel (famous as a Shattari)
and Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar (a Khalwati) are known to have transcribed
numerous pedigrees during their travels in Southeast Asia and Arabia
without necessarily having met the shaykhs directly.30
Unfortunately, too, we find no explicitly Arab linkage in Urawans list.
The vague mention of a Muhammad Khalifa points to a moment of Qadiri
transmission at some distance from an acknowledged centre, bearing in mind
28. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 205; BL, I.O. Islamic 2446, 333r-336r. I am grateful
to Oman Fathurahman for identifying the image.
29. British Library (herafter BL), I.O. Islamic 2446, 336r.
30. See Martin van Bruinessen, Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani and the Qadiriyya in
Indonesia, Journal of the history of Sufism 1-2 (2000): 361-95.
203
that a khalifa is usually the viceroy of an absent master. And even if the
archipelagos competing sovereigns were given to collecting diverse lineages
binding them to the person of the Prophet, and moreover welcoming of his
lineal descendants, the various (Sufi) representatives were not always
encouraging of rivals from abroad. Around 1731, for example, Hajji Ahmad
Mutamakin of Cabolek had tried to propagate at Kartasura the Naqshbandi
form associated with a Yemeni teacher called Zayn.31 At that time, though,
the recently-returned Urawan/Purbaya was convinced by a Javanese teacher,
one Ketib Anom (Young Khatib) of Kudus, that Mutamakins foreign
knowledge was confusing to the common faithful, declaring that all the
requisite learning could be extracted from the Javanese tradition (in which
the Shattari rite of Abd al-Rauf was already represented) if one only knew
how to read its texts correctly. As Ketib Anom mockingly noted, there was
no need for these books from Arabia.32
Naturally such books, and preferably with owners marks, would be
useful to the historian. Hence it is all the more frustrating that current
holdings suggest that Alawi never put his name to any texts for the elite
brethren around him. With the precise nature of Alawis teachings and his
attitude to local traditions still opaque, we must leave him at the height of his
powers. For now he was seemingly the preeminent cleric in the largest
Muslim realm in Indonesia, linking the archipelago to the birthplace of the
prophet in a marriage approved by his sovereign patron. As it stood, the
Susuhunan remained the axial figure of the Javanese Islamic tradition, if one
whose political choices would prove disastrous. To understand these choices
and their repercussions, we must return to Batavia.
Fear, Massacre and the Shame of Conversion, 1740-43
Trouble had been brewing for some time at Batavia and the many coastal
towns where the Chinese were a prominent part of the social fabric. Their
ships had long handled significant measures of trade to and, far more
importantly in later years, within the region. From Batavias formal
inception in 1619, the Dutch had encouraged their Chinese and Japanese
allies to settle there even as other, more clearly Muslim, groupings like
Javanese and Moors were denied entrance. Indeed, at Banten and
Jayakarta the Dutch and English were granted a place in quarters
traditionally assigned to the Chinese. Still, the walled Dutch city that
emerged at Jayakarta had many representatives of broader Indies culture that
31. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 131-51. On Zayn, perhaps Zayn b. Muhammad Abd
al-Baqi al-Mizjaji (1643-1725), the son of Shaykh Yusufs teacher, see Van Bruinessen, The
Origins and Development of the Naqshbandi Order in Indonesia, Der islam 67 (1990), 150179, esp. 156-57.
32. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 149.
204
Michael Laffan
took in Christian and Muslim alike. They ranged from the mixed-race
children of VOC employees, to Makassarese and Ambonese soldiers,
manumitted and Christianized locals called Mardijkers (from the Malay
merdeka meaning free), and the thousands of slaves taken from across the
Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, including East Africa, Madagascar, Lanka,
the Coromandel Coast, Bengal, and almost all the islands of the archipelago.
As far as the last, hardly homogenous, group is concerned, by the eighteenth
century the majority came from Bali and Sulawesi.
Even so, it was apparent that it was the Chinese who oiled the machinery
of VOC capitalism, who shipped the rice and timber tribute from the east of
Java, and who provided food, alcohol, companionship and a notable tint to
the culture of the north coast, especially after Qing bans on travel were
formally lifted in 1684. Over time, too, the Chinese had taken on the
management of much of the agriculture beyond Batavia, running many of
the sugar mills in its immediate hinterland.
Regardless of VOC blindness to any distinction beyond being recently
arrived or having deeper roots, with many being shaved and identifiably
Muslim as a consequence, there were key divisions among the Chinese.
Those within Batavias wallsand there was a peak of some five thousand
in the city in the early 1730stended to come from Fujian.33 By contrast
many of the newcomers lodged in the settlements outside the fortifications
had roots in the ports of Guangdong. Still, there was solidarity of sorts, and
the VOC was happy to deal through the city-dwellers.
By the late 1730s, however, the intramural population was in decline,
ravished by a series of malaria outbreaks. When Natakusuma led his first
embassy in late 1734 he had found little enthusiasm from a moribund
administration. Governor General Dirk van Cloon would himself be dead by
March of 1735. And beyond the walls that would be briefly overseen by
Abraham Patras (1735-37) and Adriaan Valckenier (1737-1741), the
situation was parlous. The closure of the Persian market for sugar meant that
there was less and less work for the mills, let alone the newcomers, which
fed a trend towards banditry and even direct attacks. In July of 1740 the
VOC proposed to expel many immigrants, which only led to rumors of plans
to deport all excess Chinese, or even to drown them beyond sight of land.
Having obtained the worried cooperation of the Chinese quartermasters,
who disarmed the intramural population after a post outside the walls was
overrun on September 7, 1740, the VOC and their servants panicked,
unleashing nearly two weeks of bloodshed on the 9th. By the end of the gory
proceedings, a local Chinese population exceeding some 10,000 (counting
33. Remco Raben, Batavia and colombo: The ethnic and Spatial Order of Two colonial
cities 1600-1800, unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of Leiden, 1996, 173.
205
many beyond the walls) had evaporated.34 Once the panic was over, a
reassuring message was sent to the Susuhunan who was requested to take
care of roving brigands whileperhaps with greater anxietya formal
apology was dispatched to the Qing emperor.35 Certainly, the Dutch were
well aware that their enterprise depended on collaboration. Within weeks
officials were instructed to woo Chinese artisans once more and to treat their
traders well.
There were ultimately many Chinese who did respond to such offers. By
1743 significant settlements would even reappear outside the walls. Not
surprisingly though there were many who did not respond so kindly in 1740,
and roving bands continued to link up across the island, including in the
vicinity of Kartasura. The VOC therefore encouraged the Susuhunan to take
them in hand, and his chief minister Natakusuma was put on the job. In this
endeavor, however, the statesman played a double game, for Pakubuwanas
court was divided on how to react to this falling out, and assumed weakening
of, the two foreign populations. Ricklefs and Remmelink seem to agree that
lingering anger over the unwanted expulsion of Urawan/Purbaya may well
have pushed the Susuhunan and his Islamising backers toward the Chinese
rebels in the end, many of them being Muslim too. Matters were not helped
by the fact that the new garrison commander, Johannes van Velsen, managed
to give offense on several occasions with his brusque manner and paranoid
visitations, even entering the palace with loaded pistols in his belt.36
After various protestations of enduring loyalty to the VOC on the part of
Natakusuma, the garrison would be surprised by a sudden Javanese attack on
20 July 1741. An attempt on Van Velsen failed in the fort, while dozens of
men and a cannon were overwhelmed outside. Panicked after fighting a
pitched battle against their assailants who had managed to gain access before
the first shots were fired, the skittish denizens buried their fellow Christian
and flung the corpses of their Muslim assailants into the river, hunkering
down as preparations were made across the square for a full-scale siege.
Messages were sent to the Susuhunan under truce, but the bewildered
garrison was merely informed by Natakusuma on July 25 that Pakubuwana
was angry with them. According to the testimony of the surviving officers,
34. Striking data from December 1740 lists the only Chinese in Batavia as a family of six
women and one daughter in the wijk of Hendrick Dusseldorp. See VOC 7559, Brieven en
Papieren van Batavia, 10 January 1741.
35. Huysers would later quip that it was fortunate that the Dutch had not treated the Japanese
in such a way. Ary Huysers, het leeven van Reinier de Klerk Gouverneur-Generaal van
nederlands indi (Amsterdam: G. Roos, 1787), 13. Perhaps they need not have worried.
Memorials submitted to Beijing blamed greedy Chinese leaders in Batavia as much as their
tax-hungry overlords. Claudine Salmon, The Massacre of 1740 as Reflected in a
Contemporary Chinese Narrative, Archipel 77 (2009): 149-54.
206
Michael Laffan
Van Velsen sent out repeated requests to be allowed to retreat to the coast,
and was offered false hope until the arrival of a large force of Chinese on
August 1. There were also mocking encounters. Just after midnight on July
27, a Javanese appeared before the ramparts claiming to have a royal letter
for the Commander. Beckoned forward, he was told to swiftly pass it
through an eyelet or receive some lead for his troubles. The courier merely
laughed and said he would jump over the wall, upon which he scampered
atop the battlement and was fired upon without effect. A second volley
brought him to earth. In the morning his corpse was stripped and thrown into
the river. At this time he was found to be in possession of a spell book,
bearing a Javanese invocation that all waters before him would be pushed
back, the mountains would make way, and no firearm could do him harm.
While such invocations evidently did their bearer no good, this caused the
garrison to see him as an emissary of the Javanese Pope Arja Mataram.37
The standoff continued. On August 8, the trumpeter returned from the
palace with a letter declaring that Pakubuwana and his ministers had no
intention of harming the garrison if they would but willingly accept Islam.38
According to the later report of Lieutenant Wiltvang and his subordinates,
the garrison rebuffed the offer, declaring that, by the Almighty and all
Christians, they would be protected from such thoughts and would prefer
to fight for as long as the strength remained in their bodies. Later that
afternoon Van Velsen reread the letter and gave a further address on the
abomination of conversion. The following day an attempt was made to
write a letter to Pakubuwana promising to ameliorate the conditions of the
Lankan exiles, and especially his brother and sister.39 This was a clear
reference to Purbaya and Pakubuwanas sister, and Van Velsen knew full
well that the court regarded all the exiles as members of one much missed
and forgiven assemblage.40 Van Velsen even intimated that things might go
badly for them should the Mohammedan crown be disgraced by allowing a
massacre of VOC employees.41
The Susuhunan merely renewed his offer to pardon the garrison if they
would but willingly convert to Islam. Having resolved to fight to the last and
37. P.A. Leupe, Verhaal van het Gepasseerde te Kartasoera vr en onder de Belegering,
Item na het Demolieren der Vesting, door den Opper-Chirurgijn Aarnout Gerritsz 1742,
Aanteekening, van den 20sten Julij 1741 in Z.M. Hofwagt, and Aanteekening, van het
Gepasseerde te Kartasoera door den Luitenant Nicolaas Wiltvang en de Overige Vaandrigs,
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, land en Volkenkunde 11 (1864): 102-41, esp. 130.
38. Leupe, Verhaal, 133.
40. In August of 1737, Natakusuma had conveyed a request that an older grouping of exiles
dispatched to Lanka and the Cape should continue to be supported by the court. VOC 2418,
Crul to Valkenier, Semarang, 21 August 1737.
41. Leupe, Verhaal, 134 n.
207
convening a collective prayer in the early hours of August 10, Van Velsens
artillerist discovered that most of the guns had been spiked. With no chance
of making a valiant end of it, they surrendered. Van Velsen accepted a white
banner from a garrison slave before sending some 190 defenders out in rank
orderfrom slaves to senior officers and their families. The men were then
restrained in small groups, given Javanese dress and, after interrogations,
incorporated within various retinues.
No general massacre ensued, which subsequent observers have
interpreted as a majority submission to Islam and its jubilant partisans.
Certainly there were pious celebrations. Soon after their victory, one of the
men in Natakusumas orbit set to work on a poem that he claimed distilled
the essence of the fath al-RahmanZakariyya al-Ansaris (d. 1520) famous
commentary on a much older work by Raslan al-Dimashqi, who had been an
inveterate enemy of the crusader Franks.42
It is just possible that the poet in question may have been Ketib Anom,
the defender of the Javanized Shattari tradition against Hajji Mutamakin and
his Arab books in 1731.43 If he were, it would perhaps explain why this text
is now bound with a Shattari pedigree written in the same, if slightly more
rushed, hand. In any case, by linking Abd al-Shattars esoteric knowledge of
the Prophet to Southeast Asia via Ahmad Qushashi of Medinas student
Abd al-Rauf bin Ali of Singkel (who is defined as being of the people of
Shaykh Hamza [al-Fansuri]), this pedigree terminates with Pakubuwana,
who is identified as nothing less than a master of the order and a descendant
of the Prophet.44
But what of Alawi? Even if there is mention in these pedigrees of an
earlier teacher of the Alawi clan (Sayyid Wajhallah kang abangsa Alawi,
f.38r and 25r.), our particular Arab is not in sight, though this is not to
exclude him from the celebrations or their consequences. Later Dutch reports
asserted that, aside from Natakusumas son-in-law Rajaniti, the inflamatory
priest was the loudest voice demanding the conversion of the Dutch.
Similarly Javanese accounts of the war place both Hajji Mataram and
Alawidescribed as the Lord Sayyid (Tuwan Sayyid) or the Beloved
Sayyid (Sayyid Mahbub)in the vanguard of the emboldened force that
marched off to besiege Semarang which, like other north coast Dutch
42. See BL, MS Jav. 83 and G.W.J. Drewes, Directions for Travellers on the Mystic Path:
Zakariyy al-Anrs Kitb Fat al-Ramn and its indonesian Adaptations (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 3. Ricklefs has corrected the original date of composition proposed
by Drewes and argued for 14 August 1741. See Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 255, n 42.
43. Ricklefs notes that a Ketib Anom was instated as penghulu in 1739 when the court was
purged of various elements, including known homosexuals. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen
Worlds, 221-22.
44. BL, MS Jav. 83, 24v-26r. It would appear that the author made two copies of the
pedigree, as one incomplete version is found at 19v-20r.
208
Michael Laffan
enclaves, was also surrounded by hostile Chinese who seemed to have the
upper hand for the moment.45
While smaller bases, such as that of Rembang, had fallen, the Dutch did
better further east, and the all-important siege of Semarang was repulsed in
mid November, facing well-organized resistance and having failed to excite
any sympathies among the VOCs auxiliaries. After all, as Remmelink
argues, these same troops had been involved in the Batavian pogrom, and
hardly felt that it was in their interest to side with the Chinese simply
because Javas paramount ruler declared it to be an Islamic duty.46 By late
November of 1741 the court that had sent letters across the island declaring
war on the Infidel Company would be in negotiations as the rebellious and
opportunistic Cakraningrat IV of Madura was sweeping westward with his
eyes on the throne. Indeed his forces ultimately sacked Kartasura in October
of 1742, after Pakubuwana had abandoned it to the Chinese and their allies
on June 30, and he fully expected to retain the city and the throne. He would
be sadly mistaken, as the VOC decided in the end that a penitent
Pakubuwana was preferable for their purposes.
On the whole our understanding of what happened in Kartasura after the
capitulation of the Dutch garrison is the work of vengeful reconstruction
after the return of the much-diminished Pakubuwana to the Dutch fold in
1742. By then the Susuhunan, in exchange for Dutch protection and in the
hope of keeping his throne, had cast off his Islamic advisers and accepted the
arrest and exile of Natakusuma to Lanka. Yet there were others to be
punished for events that captured the imagination of two British scholarofficials some fifty years after they had apparently been forgotten by the
VOC. In their popular nineteenth century histories, Thomas Stamford
Raffles (1781-1826) and John Crawfurd (1783-1868) reported that the
garrison had suffered cold-blooded murder and forced circumcision. Raffles,
who relied on Dutch reports, seems to have thought that the greater part of
the garrison was circumcised after their officers had been killed; while
Crawfurd, citing the authority of native manuscripts, declared that the
Susuhunan had the officers convert, undergo circumcision and then be
bludgeoned.47
The fact remains that the overwhelming majority were spared after
having been interrogated and their possessions confiscated. The initial
45. Ricklefs, Seen and Unseen Worlds, 253 n. and 260, citing Babad Kraton, II, 368, 373.
47. Thomas Stamford Raffles, The history of Java, John Bastin intro., Oxford in Asia
Historical Reprints (Kuala Lumpur etc.: Oxford University Press, 1965), 218-22; John
Crawfurd, history of the indian Archipelago: containing an Account of the Manners, Arts,
languages, Religions, institutions, and commerce of its inhabitants, 3 vols. (Edinburgh:
Archibald Constable and Co., 1820), II, 363.
209
victims were Van Velsen and an ill-starred companion, while others (perhaps
a dozen) lost their lives later in separate arguments.48 Yet even as
Remmelink and Ricklefs play down these killings in their engaging debate
over Javanese historiography, both imply that there were indeed forced
circumcisions in 1741. This is not to say that the issue is a fiction per se.
Dutchmen had certainly accepted circumcision before as a prerequisite for
conversion, and the spectre of this practice did appear in the Dutch accounts,
as in Van Velsens address of August 8:
Friends and Brothers! I hope that all of you, by the grace of God and the Holy Spirit, will
not turn aside from our Christian religion, and attach yourselves to the accursed
Mohammedan faith. Just think, friends!, what a disgraceful abomination circumcision is
in itself, setting aside the fact that leaving the faith entails the greatest dishonour, making
us no longer worthy to stand before God and Christians. 49
Yet it is striking that there is no first-hand account of any individual

having undergone this abomination. While perhaps indicative of the deep
shame of apostasy and physical violation, this may also stem from the fact
that the main accounts were relayed by men who were treated relatively well
in captivity, and these were not available until 177 survivors (and women
and children, though not, it seems, their slaves) were gathered together in
late December.
Of course, by the time that they were assembled, tales of atrocities had
already spread far and wide. One German soldier stationed at Surabaya in
1741 explained that when the garrison heard that 300 of their Kartasuran
colleagues had been circumcised before a proportion were dismembered or
whipped to death, they set upon their Chinese prisoners and massacred
them. 50 By contrast, of the few victims whose testimony is documented,
Wiltvang and three ensigns could only recount that having apparently
refused circumcision, four men assigned to Rajaniti (themselves?) were
treated in a most odious manner. This odium entailed being made to go
and pray each day in their temples and in the manner of their laws as well
as being obliged to sit in attendance before their new lords, lighting their
pipes, taking lessons from their popes until midnight, and even keeping
their fasts.51
The officers account agrees in this regard with that of the surgeon,
Aarnout Gerritsz., who never recounted the Susuhunans demands or Van
48. For the death of Van Velsen and the narrow escape of a guardsman, see Leupe,
Verhaal, 119.
50. Mary Somers Heidhues, 1740 and the Chinese Massacre in Batavia: Some German
Eyewitness Accounts, Archipel 77 (2009), 117-148, at 140.
210
Michael Laffan
Velsens address (he despised the man), nor yet admitted to having
converted. Rather he claimed that, after a terrifying prelude that saw his
goods ransacked as his wife begged for his life, he was the subject of lessons
given by a local pope, being made to write out the basic elements of the
creed in Arabic script. Still, he had an appropriate victim of the ultimate
abomination in the duplicitous translator, who was last seen dressed as a
Javanese noble. Sent off to the ancestral site of Mataram with a retinue
comprised of several of the garrison, the interpreter fell out with Rajaniti
whereupon he was circumcised and killed, much to Gerritsz.s satisfaction
(many of the surgeons belongings had passed into the translators hands).52
Even this order of events seems unlikely. More probable is the scenario
that a willingly-circumcized translator later fell out with Rajaniti. On the
whole then, one can really only say that the question of circumcision, when
it arose, was a gloss for conversion that spoke more to fear and shame on the
Dutch side (not to mention decades of others turning Turk) than any
calculated Javanese humiliation. After all, trained soldiers were useful
additions to a retinue, and all the more so as fully capable fellow Muslims
joined by faith to the rulers, but with no alternate ties or lingering shame to
distract them.53
So where was Alawi in all this? Doubtless an Arab teacher would have
made an impact on the VOC prisoners, circumcized or not, who could surely
tell the difference between different sorts of popes. But again it seems that
Alawi never appeared at the forefront of such actions, though he was briefly
associated with a graver atrocity said to have occurred on the first day of the
siege. For while Natakusuma sealed off the kraton, as the first shots were
fired, and as some forty Europeans were purportedly killed at Rajanitis
order, the inflamatory priest supposedly oversaw the massacre of 1040
Javanese, including women and children.54
This claim was made by one Bappa Sanka (ironically the Malay for Mr.
Suspicion) of Demak. Communicated to Semarang a week after the August
10 surrender, it was never repeated. After the war such a crime against
members of a foreign faith was surplus to requirements anyway, as the VOC
were far more concerned with preserving the religious dignity of their
53. Such was by no means a new strategy. Renegades were always to be found and insistent
declarations for Christ were rare. For a sanctimonious example of the latter, see Frederik de
Houtman, Cort Verhael van Frederik de Houtman, in W. S. Unger, ed., De Oudste reizen
van de Zeeuwen naar Oost-indi (Gouda, 1880), 64-111.
54. VOC 7843, Abraham Roos to Valkenier, Semarang, 25 August 1741. The figure of forty
seems a reasonable estimate of European casualties. According to the party that managed to
fight their way back to the fort from their outpost on the Siti Inggil, 24 were killed while 13
were wounded. There is no other mention of a domestic massacre of a thousand Javanese.
Leupe, Verhaal, 141.
211
servants. So when Captain Joan Andries van Hohendorff went to Kartasura

in July of 1743 to conclude a new treaty with Pakubuwana, he carried with
him secret instructions. If the Susuhunan was unprepared to hand over the
two men declared responsible for the affront to our nation and religion
and before the whole world, then Hohendorff was to replace him with
another prince.55
Having seen his capital utterly despoiled, first by Chinese and then by the
Madurese, a despondent Pakubuwana was prepared to offer up his Arab ally
and report the full confession of the late Rajaniti. Indeed, in the wake of the
latters death in mid May, the Susuhunan had few scapegoats to offer. For
their part, the Dutch commissioners were surprised to find that Alawi was
still ministering from the little mosque on the parade ground, given earlier
reports suggested that he had been dragged off in chains or killed by
Chinese. Glad of the prize, Hohendorff assembled a team to take charge of
the ringleader priest on August 10, 1743, exactly two years after the
surrender of the garrison, as well as the unrequested Hajji Mataram, whom
Pakubuwana handed over for good measure.56
Neither put up a fight. Chained and sent down to Semarang, they would
be transported to Batavia and eventually consigned to the hold of the
fortuijn. It is only in the cover letter from Semarang that we have the first
explicit indication of Alawis Yemeni origins, when one of the two chained
Arabic priests is named as Alowie absie Arabie van Jaman, which might
well be a Javanised form of Alawi al-Habshi al-Arabi or even the
prisoners own declaration of being Alawi Habshi, an Arab from
Yemen. 57 Certainly the link to the Habshi clan of Yemenso called for an
ancestral adventure in Ethiopia (al-Habash)is tantalizing.58
For his part Hajji Mataram is accorded the longer name of Hadje
Mohamat van Mattarm, which, setting aside the ubiquity of the name
Muhammad, helps makes him a candidate for the self-deprecating Qadiri
who may have been born in sight of the bastion of the Castle of Batavia. So
it was that, several decks above their cramped compartment, Captain Booys
55. High Government to Hohendorff, Batavia, 29 July 1743, in J.K.J. de Jonge (ed.), De
Opkomst van het nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-indi, 13 vols. (s Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff,
1862-909), IX, 433, n.
56. VOC 7893, Verijssel and Thijling to Raden van Nederlandsch Indie, Semarang, 11
August 1743 and Hohendorff to Van Imhoff, Kartasura, 12 August 1743.
57. VOC 7847, Verijssel to Van Imhoff, Semarang, 15 September 1743.
58. According to an authoritative genealogical history of the Alawi clan of Hadramawt,
several prominent figures had migrated to Mocha by the eighteenth century, though none
appear to maintain the designation Habshi or seem connected to the later Habshis who did
make a name for themselves in Indonesia. See Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Husayn alMashhur, Shams al-zahira fi nasab ahl al-bayt min Bani Alawi, 2 vols. (Jeddah: Alam alMarifa, 1984) passim. With thanks to Alexander Knysh and Kazuhiro Arai.
212
Michael Laffan
cabin contained a sealed letter for the Governor of the Cape colony declaring
at the end of its business that he was sending them:
two Mahomedan Priests said to have been the two foremost instigators of what befell
our European settlement in the year 1741, and handed over to the Company by the
Susuhunan. Following yesterdays decree, they are exiled to the Cape in chains, to be
dealt with in whatever manner. You believe most fitting to guarantee that they never have
the opportunity to escape, which could have grave consequences for the Company. 59
The Cape of Grave Consequences

When Alawi and Hajji Mataram finally stumbled down into the boat that
would take them to Robben Island in late April of 1744, they were just the
latest in a long line of exiles and slaves sent to Africa. Some had been sent
into more genteel repose, surrounded by their retainers at the expense of the
Company or the courts from which they originated.60 Shaykh Yusuf, leader
of the Bantenese rebellion against the Dutch at his capture in 1683, and a
reluctant resident of Lanka until 1694, had lived in relative isolation at Faure
with some two dozen followers, wives and slaves until his death in 1699.61
Equally the rowdiness of another Javanese noblemans retainers (and a fire)
at Stellenbosch led to protests from his neighbors.62
Still, such circumstances were rare. Established in 1652 as a site for
provisioning the VOC in Asia, and ruled as a satellite of Batavia, Cape Town
was not a convict colony, though it was certainly rough. With its rather more
European character, a small and decidedly male population weathered the
constant gales in many public houses before being bustled home at curfew
by the roving band of ruffian constables known as caffers, many of whom
had been sent westward as convicts (bandieten) or slaves. Indeed the vast
majority of deportees to Africa were slaves, either of the VOC or traded by
private owners residing at the Cape or returning from Asia. The most
59. Raden van Batavia to Swellengrebel, Batavia, 22 January 1744, KAB, C 464, pp. 28-29.
Received 27 April, my emphasis. This letter also referred to two other deportees destined for
the town: the Javanese Droena and a Makassarese, Carrang Assan. Variants (with Droena
given as Drand of Paningtoetoel) also appear on a list of arrivals together with a Chinese,
Lim Japko or Lim Tsiako. KAB, CJ 3186, p. 39. It appears that the Makassarese soon passed
away, given a skilled bandiet jongen called Cauian Assana died in the Lodge that August.
KAB, Attestatin, C 2498 (17 August 1744), folio 51. By marked contrast Lim would
eventually prosper, even gaining pardon in 1759, as well as a slave whom he would manumit
and marry prior to his return in 1760. KAB CJ 3190, p. 37, and Resolution of 18 December
1859, C 137, pp. 505-529; 560-564.
60. In 1723 Capetonian authorities believed that the retainers constituted the most dangerous
convicts. See Resolution of 14 December 1723, KAB, C 69, pp. 43-52.
61. I.D. du Plessis, The cape Malays: history, Religion, Traditions, folk Tales (Cape Town:
Balkema, 1972), 4.
62. See Resolutions of 3 and 18 February 1716, KAB, C 35, pp. 82-96, 108-145; 25 February
1716, KAB, C 36, pp. 2-25; and 9 Jan 1720, KAB, C 51, pp. 103-112.
213
numerous were from Sulawesi, who were valued as clever if highly volatile
servants. The women usually served as domestics while the men were to be
seen out walking for hours on end to scour the surrounding hills for
firewood. Yet they were not all from Sulawesi. Cape slaves were usually
housed together with unfortunates taken from Madagascar, India and
Mozambique, if not in the cramped lodge by the Company gardens, then in
quarters at the back of the citys homes.
Meanwhile the officially registered convicts were sent over in ever
increasing numbers in the eighteenth century. According to Penn, some 312
Asian convicts arrived between 1722 and 1748, much to the displeasure of
the local authorities, who had already complained to Batavia in 1715 that
they were being swamped.63 Yet arrive they did, to be liberally mixed in
with local miscreants and, if not supported by any allowance, to be deployed
on such public works as a failed attempt to build a breakwater across the
harbour between 1743 and 1751. Often seen in leg irons, such deportees
were a noticeable feature of Cape life well beyond the VOC period. And
while less likely to die of their labors as compared with those condemned to
dredge the fetid canals of Batavia, they labored under the threat of further
displacement or the gallows that loomed at prominent spots around the town.
It was to Robben Island, though, that the most threatening were
consigned. Having been informed by Batavia of the extreme danger the
priests posed, the council decided to send both to the island, not only in
chains, but chained together for life. In addition the supervisor was
threatened with the heaviest punishment should he fail to observe all their
doings or yet allow them to escape.64 Hence on landing in April of 1744
they would have been lodged with the other Indians (indiaanen) in the
compound that lay a short distance from the harbour and the house of the
Postholder. Based on the surviving rolls, that year saw quite a turnover. Of
the 28 Europeans registered, 17 remained, the rest having absconded over
the years. And of the 21 Indiaanen, Alawi and Mataram would have
encountered a mix of 18 slaves and freemen sent from the Cape, Colombo,
and Batavia. They included four identified as Bengalis, three Bugis, and a
scattering of individual Sinhalese, Balinese, a Hottentot and a Chinese.
The last was released the month that they arrived, and by the end of the year
another six were either deceased, discharged or reassigned to the town. Left
behind were such men as Claas Cok, a Company slave from Bengal who had
been sentenced to life imprisonment in September of 1715; Fortuijn of
63. Nigel Penn, Robben Island 1488-1805, in Harriet Deacon (ed.), The island: A history
of Robben island, 1488-1990 (Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip, 1996), 21; KAB,
LM 36, 7v.
64. Resolution of 28 April 1744, KAB, C 122, pp. 168-71.
214
Michael Laffan
Bengal, given 50 years in 1722; Daeng Mahmud, the so-called Prince of

Ternate sent at the governors discretion in the same year; as well as several
locals: Augustijn from the Cape; the Hottentot Claas, and three men of Bugis
heritageMarcus, Lapeij and (another) Fortuijn.65
This small band was subject to constant fluctuation as new prisoners were
carried away by mortality or the whims of the castle. Those who remained
were normally employed collecting shells for limekilns, hacking out local
stone, and dispatching seals for oil or even the odd penguin for food.
Sometimes they would be taken 50 km north to Dassen Island to do the same
sort of collecting and butchering. In short, life was bleak. Food rations were
inadequate too, with the supplies from the mainland often delayed because
of rough seas or countervailing winds. Indeed Cape Town itself was a
tantalizing proposition. Clearly visible across the bay, it was sundered by a
formidable stretch of water.
Still the water did offer an escape, if almost always to the Europeans
(often useful deserters or disgraced soldiers) who were picked up each
season by the regular crowd of vessels anchored offshore. The Indiaanen
were less fortunate. An absence is normally marked on the file by virtue of
death or reassignment. Such was the case for Hajji Mataram, who only
survived into 1745, earning a terse annotation. Meanwhile the lists for the
next sixteen years continue to show the name of his once-clanking twin
Said Aloewi or Zaid Aloewi with a marginal note sometimes mentioning
his place of origin (Mocha) and date of transportation and sentence.
Such scribal inconsistencies were a regular feature of the lists. This
sometimes entailed long increases in sentences, or even amnesia as to why
someone had been sent to Africa. Sadly the successive supervisors seem not
to have taken the governors admonitions to heart, and the current files have
very little to say about Alawi of Mocha. We thus have no sense of whether
he played a pastoral role among the community, of whom a bare few were
identifiably Muslim, if not by their Dutch-given names, then by their places
of origin.
In 1748, for example, Alawi was one of only 17 Indiaanen, still
including Claas Kok, Augustijn, and the so-called Prince of Ternate. By
1758 their number would rise to 64, of whom around 18 were Muslims from
the Indies or else locally born of Muslim parents. But did these men ever
place any confidence in the Arab priest? One suspects that, setting aside the
current tradition that accords the Capes pious forebears with an active spirit
of resistance, Alawi was something of a social outlier, or perhaps just a
resigned prisoner. His name appears nowhere in the documents relating to an
65. KAB, CJ 3188, pp. 309-16. The Prince of Ternate had been sent over in 1722 for having
kept a gambling house. Resolution of 24 November 1722, KAB, C 61, pp. 27-34.
215
escape attempt made in 1751 by fifteen recent arrivals who planned to kill
the European guards and convicts alike.66
Years passed, and more convicts would be sent to Africa as Java was
wracked by new wars of succession and even patchwork partition in 1755.
And while some of the royal exiles would be called home to the successor
courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, nobody had need of Alawi. Indeed it
appears that all memory of him had been effaced as much as the city of
Kartasura had been razed or carried off. Then, in February of 1761,
instructions came from the castle that all convict rolls were to be sent to
town. After scrutinizing the lists and finding the now innocuous (or
unrecognized?) priest among some 46 Indians and Slaves etc., the order
came for the Mochan (listed in contemporary documents as both Zaid
Alowie and Sout Lowis) to be sent across the bay to take up a position as
a caffer on 18 July 1761.67
This was a release of sorts. Usually housed in the slave lodge, the caffers
were employed and clothed by the Fiscal. Dressed in bright blue waistcoats
and equipped with canes or whips, these were distinctive figures widely
reviled for their brutality. It was their job to enforce the curfew at night, to
haul drunks, prisoners or absconding slaves away for punishment, and, most
gruesomely, to assist with executions. These ranged from straightforward
hangingsusually of Europeansto the brandings, breakings, burnings, and
impalings inflicted on anyone else who dared to lay a hand on their masters
or their property, including their fellow slaves dehumanized in inventories as
mere pieces.68
The very name of the office of caffer spoke to their derided status too.
Originally the term used for non-Muslim Africans employed on the streets of
Batavia, the office and name had been disseminated wherever unremittingly
harsh VOC justice was meted out. While hardly a ticket-of-leave, being a
caffer gave one the run of the town at night. They were thus liminal figures
par excellence. And it was perhaps in that position that Alawi first took up
his role as it is now remembered in Cape Town: as a kindly constable and
advocate of the poor, who took to infiltrating the slave lodge to spread the
66. The plot was discovered by chance and the group fully exposed under torture, in the
course of which some claimed that they were also acting with the encouragement of the
wealthy Daeng Manganan. Penn, Robben Island, 29-30.
67. KAB, CJ 3189, pp. 9-17, 24.
68. On the role of the caffers, see Robert Carl-Heinz Shell, children of Bondage: A Social
history of the Slave Society at the cape of Good hope, 1652-1838 (University Press of New
England, 1994), 189-94; Ward, networks of empire, 45, 102, 123, 264-69. The fragmentary
history of one caffer who left Robben Island in 1743 is taken up by Gerald Groenewald in his
Panaij van Boegies: Slave - Bandiet Caffer, Quarterly Bulletin of the national library of
South Africa 59, 2 (2005): 50-62. For but one inventory of slave pieces by type and locale,
see KAB, C 2632, p. 110.
216
Michael Laffan
word of Islam and ameliorate their condition. Certainly Alawis putative

activities seem to explain an uptake in slave conversions by the 1770s,
contrasting with the older norm that had seen the bulk of the junior inmates
receive instruction in Christianity from a series of slave teachers even as the
doors of the lodge would be opened as a brothel for soldiers in the early
evening.69
Yet again there is nothing in the Cape records to confirm any such
ministry. Lacking surviving documents from the Fiscals office, we are in no
position to say how long Alawi served in his appointed post either. Already
of note, though, is the fact that he never appeared in the lodge register, which
is indicative of an ability to finance himself beyond any derisory salary he
would have been paid. Indeed the last unequivocal annotation about him,
other than somebodys cursory indication of his death (at date unknown), is
in regard to the inquest into the fate of a Chinese woman in July of 1763.70
While hardly a large community of the sort to be found in Southeast Asia,
the Chinese were a feature of Cape life too. The VOC had once hoped to
populate the settlement with willing sojourners brought from Java, though
none could be found who were eager to be that far from the Middle
Kingdom. Rather, those who made it there came as sailors on Western ships
or else as exiles. At present there is no precise knowledge of why the woman
Thisgingnio was exiled from Cirebon in 1747, but she evidently enjoyed
some quality of life after her release from the lodge in 1757, owning a house
with her partner Onkonko (exiled in 1746), a fishing business, furniture, and
even a few slaves. With the death of Onkonko, though, she began to drink in
earnest, and it was this that was assumed to be to the cause of her death in
the early hours of 9 July 1763.
This death also brought to light the fact that Alawi was present in her
home as a lodger. While not mentioned as a cafferthough he must have
been familiar to the investigating officers by virtue of having fulfilled that
rolethe Arab and Mohammedan Priest explained how he had
remonstrated with his landlady for her drinking, and that it was he who had
tidied her naked corpse on discovering it in the morning, placing a pillow
under her head and a sheet over her body.71 And with that first reportage of
his speech, Alawi passes from official sight, his account confirmed by the
slaves in attendance and subsequently accepted, perhaps even trusted, among
the Muslims, Europeans and Chinese who apparently recognized his role
69. Shell, children of Bondage, 172-205.
70. James C. Armstrong, The Estate of a Chinese Woman in the Mid-Eighteenth Century at
the Cape of Good Hope, Journal of chinese Overseas 4,1 (2008): 111-126. Her arrival is
noted in KAB, CJ 3186, 33-39. The documents relating to the investigation are in CJ 3173,
pp. 128-31.
71. KAB, CJ 3173, pp. 129-30.
217
among a small but growing community. Indeed Alawis role at the Cape
must have begun beyond the lodge with the leading of prayers in private
homes and the naming of newborn children as a mixed population of Muslim
and nominally Christian slaves began to be drawn to an alternate shared
identity that ranked them as something more than mere items.72 And even if
the public practice and communal spread of Islam was formally forbidden,
there is clear evidence that Muslims were meeting. A member of Cooks
second voyage to the Pacific, Georg Forster (1754-94), noted in October of
1772 that a few Muslim slaves would gather at the home of a free
Mahomedan in order to read, or rather chaunt [sic], several prayers and
chapters of the Koran.73
We know, moreover, from the Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg
(1743-1828) that there were active celebrations of key feasts, attended not
only by priests but carried out with the patronage of prominent exiles.
Four months before Forster called at port, Thunberg had paid a visit to a
gaily-decorated home where the Javanese community was celebrating
what he thought was their new year. Given the date and description, this was
actually the celebration of the Birth of the Prophet, with the front of the
room taken up by an elevated platform on which a text was placed before a
decorated column (assumedly taking the place of the prayer niche). The
evening was celebrated with the recitation of odes in the honour of the
Prophet and led by two priests distinguished by a small conical cap from
the rest, who wore handkerchiefs tied round their heads.
About eight in the evening the service commenced, when they began to sing, loud and
soft alternately, sometimes the priests alone, at other times the whole congregation. After
this a priest read out of the great book that lay on the cushion before the altar, the
congregation at times reading aloud after him. I observed them reading after the Oriental
manner, from right to left, and imagined it to be the Alcoran that they were reading, the
Javanese being mostly Mahometans. Between singing and reading, coffee was served up
in cups, and the principal man of the congregation accompanied their singing on the
violin. I understood afterwards, that this was a prince from Java, who had opposed the
interests of the Dutch East-India Company, and for that reason had been brought from his
native country to the Cape, where he lives at the Companys expense. 74
Rather than being a recitation of the Quran, Thunberg more likely saw
an example of communal recollection (dhikr) of the kind still practiced
72. It seems something must have impelled the VOC at the Cape to prohibit the sale of slaves
to Moors and Heathens in the 1770s and further to encourage the provision of Christian
education. According to strangely precise estimates offered by Yusuf Da Costa, Muslim
numbers had jumped from 154 to 730 in the 1750s, and then almost doubled to 1307 over the
1760s, out of a slave population that only went from 4166 in 1750 to 5191 in 1770. Ebrahim
Mahomed Mahida, history of Muslims in South Africa: A chronology (Durban: Arabic Study
Circle, 1993), 7.
73. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968), 51.
74. Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels at the cape of Good hope, 1772-1775 (Van Riebeeck
Society: Cape Town, 1986), 47-48.
218
Michael Laffan
today.75 Ward has furthermore argued that the accompanist patron should be
identified as Raden Mas Kreti, the long displaced brother of Pangeran
Mangkunegara, whose father had been sent to Batavia and then Lanka in
1728.76 Yet we must wonder if an aged Alawi may have been one of the
two conical-hatted imams. Or did a beturbanned Yemeni keep away from the
genteel recitations of the exiles, gathering with those who reflected in more
unruly ways on the perfection of the Prophet?
A Far Cry from Kartasura
It must have been for reasons of priestly respectability among the
community that with his passing (perhaps in the 1770s) Alawi was interred
with other free blacks who seldom found mention in the Church registers,
and close to a cluster of Chinese tombs on the once bald lower slopes of
Signal Hill.77 Now known as the Tana Baru, this plot overlooks what
became the Malay quarter of Bo-Kaap that developed under the British in
the nineteenth century. Indeed the British had long had an eye on this
community. In 1781 the English East India Company estimated that two
fifths of the colonys slave population of 30,000 were Muslim, and believed
that the smaller Dutch population of 17,000 lived in greater fear of them than
any foreign invasion, which they were themselves plotting at the time.78
With British rule established in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the
community would, over the course of the nineteenth century, obtain freedom
of religion, the manumission of the remaining slaves and significant
consideration for their loyalty and increasing prominence in the town. In the
Spring of 1929, a reporter for the cape Times accompanied the Imam of the
Chiappini Street mosque up through the steep streets of Bo-Kaap to learn
more of the graves of a plot since filled with hundreds of inscribed slates
taken from Robben Island. The imam in question was the lineal descendant
of Tuan Guru (d. 1806), a Tidorese who had also spent time on Robben
Island in the 1780s for daring to treat with the British against the Dutch, and
whose tomb lay a few feet away from the similarly-renderred white walls
enclosing the saintly grave (kramat) of the hallowed Tuan Said.79
75. Desmond Desai, The Ratiep Art Form of South African Muslims, PhD Dissertation,
Department of Music, University of Natal, 1993, 119.
76. Ward, networks of empire, 227 ff. Cf. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi,
1749-1792: A history of the Division of Java (London: OUP, 1974), 270, 287-88.
77. Thunberg noted simple rattan arches over Chinese graves on Signal Hill in 1772 without
remarking on any obviously Muslim ones nearby, though Sparrman did associate the graves
of the Chinese with those of free blacks that same year. Thunberg, Travels, 49; Andrew
Sparrman, A Voyage to the cape of Good hope towards the Antarctic Polar circle and
Round the World: But chiefly into the country of the hottentots and caffres, from the Year
1772, to 1776, 2 vols. (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971), I, 12.
78. See Minutes of the Secret Committee [of the EIC] 1778-1858, BL, IOR L/PS/1/5, 91-82.
219
Pointing to a niche in the Kramat, the Imaum said that the custom, when a Believer
wanted intercession, was to burn three candles of different colours in the night. Tuan
Said, said the Imaum, was a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, and came to the
Cape of his own accord to keep alive the faith of Islam after the death of Shiek Josef over
200 years ago. He was a man of tremendous influence in the Malay Archipelago, and
came out without wife or retinue to keep his countrymen at the Cape in the path of the
Prophet. He was a saint in his lifetime, declared the Imaum, and stories are still told of
how, using his miraculous powers, he used to go into the locked and guarded slave
quarters at nighta bent little figure, with his Koran under his arm. When he had finished
reading to them the law he would go out and fetch food orif it so happened that a slave
had no shoes, or his shoes pincheda new pair of shoes. The guards and the masters of
the slaves could never account for the evidence of his visit which met their eyes when
they called the slaves to their tasks next morning.80
While a correspondent of the cape naturalist was unable to extract any

such story when she visited six years laterbeyond the general sense that
Alawi had probably come from Arabia, and was regarded as a man of high
statusthe above quotation formed the nub of the folkloric musings of I.D.
du Plessis in the 1950s, and then histories collected by Achmat Davids in the
1980s. Davids even incorporated the lines about Alawis nocturnal visits
into the much-used guide to Cape Towns kramats, kramats that the imam
explained formed a protective circle around the city foretold by Tuan
Guru. 81
In many senses Alawis grave stands out as the first located within easy
sight of the town. Many earlier sites are, by stark contrast, further afield or
higher up the slopes where wood gatherers once wandered in relative
freedom.82 Today Alawi is celebrated as the first imam of the community
(with his tombstone inscribed with the pseudo-Sufi name of Mogamad
Darwies, i.e. dervish), Alawie, even as Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar is
credited as the harbinger of Islam at the Cape and Tuan Guru is lauded for
establishing the first mosque. Such vagueness has arguably aided the
appropriation of Alawi by Capetonians seeking a more empowering history
beyond slavery and exile.
79. See fig. 1, KAB, E3934, for how Sayyid Alawis tomb appeared in the early 1900s. The
walls of Tuan Gurus kramat may first be discerned as a backdrop for once substantial
Chinese tombs in the 1843 sketch of George Angas. Nigel Worden et al. (eds.), cape Town:
The Making of a city: An illustrated social history (Kemilworth: David Philip, 1998), 76-77.
80. Anon. A Circle of Islam, cape Times, 30 November 1929, 15-16.
81. K.M. Jeffreys, The Malay Tombs of the Holy Circle. 2. The Tombs of Signal Hill
Cemetary, The cape naturalist 1, 2 (July 1935): 40-43; I.D. Du Plessis and C.A. Lckhoff,
The Malay Quarter and its People (Cape Town and Amsterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1953), 34;
Mansor Jaffer (ed.), Guide to the Kramats of the Western cape, 3rd rev. ed. (Cape Town:
Cape Mazaar [Kramat] Society, 2010), 42-43. Incidentally the guide gives Alawis death
date as 1803.
82. Bradlow first made the suggestion that wood-gathering slaves may well have practiced
their faith out of sight of the authorities. Muhammad Adil Bradlow, Imperialism, State
Formation and the Establishment of a Muslim community at the Cape of Good Hope, 17701840: A Study in Urban Resistance, MA Thesis, University of Cape Town, 1988, 107-08.
220
Michael Laffan
It is certainly important to place Sayyid Alawis kramat within the

emerging topography of the town to gain some sense of the mechanisms that
perpetuated his memory, and which may even help unlock his past activities.
Not only was his grave, perched on the cliff of the Tana Baru, seen as the
most efficacious for visitation, it was this structure that loomed directly
even commandinglyover the old quarry below; the first public site of
Friday Prayers.83 In some circles, moreover, the upper streets of the Bo
Kaap are remembered as a locus for the ecstatic drumming and
mortifications of the ritual known as ratiep or califah, of which we start to
have accounts in the nineteenth century. In 1835, for instance, an appalled
American missionary, George Champion, watched through a window as a
dozen or so men chanted and drummed with increasing tempo while a half
naked member performed a variety of eccentric movements, throwing
himself int every possible position, & at the same time catching a chain
which he threw in the air.84 In the 1850s, Alfred Cole visited a house to
find devotees piercing their cheeks and tongues with skewers or their sides
with daggers, and otherwise bedecking themselves with red-hot chains as
their fellows maintained drumming chants under the direction of their leader
or Califah. None showed any sign of pain and all emerged unscathed by
what Cole cast as evident jugglery.85
To be sure, similar forms of what is normally seen as Rifa`i dhikr are a
well-known feature of societies up the East African coast, with whom the
ever more successful Muslims of Cape Town were in sustained conversation
after the final abolition of slavery in 1834. Even so, in Cape Town such
dramatic practice is firmly associated with a deep Malayo-Indonesian and
vaguely Qadiri cultural past rather than a nascent Afro-Islamic one. It is
moreover attributed to Shaykh Yusuf. Yet here we are faced with a problem,
for we have no attested linking of such practices to Shaykh Yusuf during his
time in Asia, or anywhere else for that matter.
By contrast, however, we do find such influence at Banten some decades
after Yusufs exile to Lanka, and shortly before Sayyid Alawi was at
Mataram. Based on a mostly Arabic manual now held in Indonesias
83. John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the interior of Southern Africa in the years 1797
and 1798, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1801-04), II, 427; Anon., State of the cape of
Good hope in 1822 (London: 1823), 68.
84. G. Champion, Journal of an American Missionary in the cape colony: 1835, Alan R.
Booth (ed.) (Cape Town: South African Library, 1968), 20. Champion attributed the
popularity of Islam to the kind treatment and respectable burials the slaves were offered, and
looked on with grudging admiration when the prisoners of the Amsterdam Battery would
hasten to prayers in one of the alcoves of their stoney prison. Champion, op. cit., 21.
85. A.W. Cole, The cape and the Kafirs: Or notes of five Years Residence in South Africa
(London: Bentley, 1852), 44-46; see also Anon., Islam at the Cape, cape Monthly
Magazine, December 1861, 353-63, esp. 356-60.
221
National Library, a later crown prince of Banten would be inducted as a

Rifai in the 1730s by a teacher of part-Arab extraction called Abdallah b.
Abd al-Qahhar. Also known locally as al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Alawi, this
man was furthermore a disseminator of the Aydarusi and Haddadi variants
of the Alawi tradition of Tarim in Hadramawt. In fact he claimed that he
had been taught the Haddadi line by a son of the great founder Abdallah b.
Alawi al-Haddad (1634-1720), and he seems to have imparted this
privileged knowledge to the prince once he assumed the throne as Sultan
Abu l-Fattah (r. 1733-48). 86
To return to his Rifai expertise, though, it is noteworthy that Abdullah
b. Abd al-Qahhar is the first person to use the term debusby which such
stabbing practices are often known in Malay after the Arabic word for an
awlin a Southeast Asian text. This mention comes when the shaykh states
that he has taught the prince techniques of invulnerability against swords and
awls, the ingestion of poisons and glass, or the handling of ferocious
animalsbe they scorpions, or the rather unfamiliar bears and lions.87
Whereas the piercing and burning trials that this Banten-based Sayyid
Alawi taught are almost exclusively associated with the Rifai order in Iraq,
India and Egypt, it seems striking that in West Java (as in Cape Town) they
were primarily identified with the Qadiriyya, even as they were (and indeed
are) performed together with the flags and invocations of several orders. And
on this hybrid note it is all the more curious too that in South Africa these
performances usually commence with the litany (ratib) of Abdallah alHaddad.88
This all brings us back once again to our parallel Alawi and the potential
link between him and the Javanese elite who seem to have had an interest in
Qadiri pedigrees. For even if the Kartasurans were not yet taken with the
Rifai feats of dhikr in the ways that the neighboring rulers of Banten were,
it would appear from other post-factum evidence that it was precisely these
styles of Sufi recollection that were gaining ground in the region as a whole.
There are references, for example, to far-flung eastern court of Bima
encouraging well-attended performances of the dabus in the mid-1780s that
86. Risalat al-majmu fi bayan isnadah (sic) al-Rifai wa-l-Qadiri wa-ibn Alwan wa-lAydarus wa-ghayruhum wa-l-salasil wa-l-taraiq wa-l-hirqa [sic] ala hasab al-taqa,
Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, ms A 96, pp. 25-26, 146-49. With thanks to
Oman Fathurahman. For more on Abdullahs later activities as a favourite of Sultan Abu lNasr, see Martin van Bruinessen, Sharia Court, Tarekat and Pesantren: Religious
Institutions in the Sultanate of Banten, Archipel 50 (1995): 165-200, at 182.
87. Risalat al-majmu, pp. 24-25, 66-72.
88. Yusuf da Costa made precisely this connection, much as Bradlow asserted that Alawi
was a propagandist of the Alawiyya, though he assumed that he had been a khalifa of Hajji
Mataram. Yusuf da Costa and Achmat Davids, Pages from cape Muslim history
(Pietermaritzburg, 1994), 135; and Bradlow, Imperialism, 125-26.
222
Michael Laffan
seem connected to a shaykh from Batavia, while later manuscripts from the
nineteenth century, such as a fine illustrated copy now held in the Indonesian
National Library, make it plain just how iconic the ritual, with its banners
and awls, would become across the archipelago as a whole.89
Putting such skills into practice was obviously the making of a spectacle,
though such seem to have been kept behind the walls of the various courts
for its initial iterations in the region. The first mention of dabus in a Malaylanguage text comes a few decades after Abdullah b. Abd al-Qahhar
inducted the young Abu l-Fattah of Banten. It concerns the visit of a
Sumatran pepper trader to Banten around 1760, where he found access to
Abu l-Fattahs heir, the reigning Abu l-Nasr (r.1753-77), controlled by a
mystic who led musical entertainments with a group of forty men known to
perform debus in the Arab manner.90
That such techniques were still associated with authoritatively Arab
practice in the 1760s is telling. Being separated from the rulers of their home
world, I would suggest that it would have made sense for the diverse peoples
of the Cape, and especially the more recent arrivals, to associate such
efficacious practices with Alawi by virtue of his origins. Regardless of
whether Muhammad Darwish Alawi might have been an exponent of the
debus (or even when he acquired the designation of dervish), as a caffer he
could have turned a blind eye to such exercises if they occurred in the city
limits, practices which Mason argues formed a strong attractive bond for the
conversion of slaves, allowing for the transcendence of the mundane world
of the flesh and direct experience of a superior spiritual reality.91
While Bradlow, too, put Sufism at the centre of his argument for the
subtle resistance of the Muslims to Dutch rule92 and Mason suggests that it
89. With thanks to Henri Chambert-Loir. For details concerning the years 1786 and 1787, see
his iman dan Diplomasi: serpihan sejarah Kerajaan Bima (Jakarta: Gramedia, 2010), 85-87.
For a reproduction of the Indonesian National Library manuscript (Kitab Mawlid MS A70),
see James Bennett (ed.), crescent Moon: islamic Art and civilisation in Southeast Asia
(Adelaide and Canberra: Art Gallery of South Australia/National Gallery of Australia, ca.
2006), p. 133. For later ethnographic reports and analyses, see Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje,
The Achehnese, trans. A.W.S. OSullivan (Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906), II, 250-57; Jacob
Vredenbregt, 1973. Dabus in West Java, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, land- en Volkenkunde 129
(1973): 302-20; Margaret J. Kartomi, Dabuih in West Sumatra: A Synthesis of Muslim and
Pre-Muslim Ceremony and Musical Style, Archipel 41 (1991): 33-52; and Van Bruinessen,
Sharia Court, Tarekat and Pesantren.
90. G.W.J. Drewes (ed.), De Biografie van een Minangkabausen Peperhandelaar in de
lampongs (s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 124:5; W. Marsden (tr.), Memoirs of a
Malayan family, Written by Themselves, Translated from the Original (London: 1830), 35-36.
91. John Edwin Mason, A Faith for Ourselves: Slavery, Sufism, and Conversion to Islam
at the Cape, South African historical Journal 46,1 (2002): 3-24, esp. 4-7.
92. That said, Bradlow deprived many of his early Muslims of much agency in predicating
Islam on the exclusive practice of the baya. See Bradlow, Imperialism, State Formation and
the Establishment of a Muslim community, 3-4.
223
empowered its convert-adherents spiritually as much as socially, one might

also see in the burnings and piercings of the debus ratiep some physical
inversion of, or even the calculated imbuing of invulnerability against, the
gruesome punishments inflicted by the VOC. As Admiral Stavorinus
recollected of his visit to the Cape in the late 1760s:
Punishments are very severe here, especially with regard to oriental slaves. In the year
1768, I saw one, who had set a house on fire, broken alive on the wheel, after the flesh
had been torn from his body, in eight different places, with red-hot pincers, without his
giving any sign of pain, during the execution of this barbarous sentence, which lasted full
a quarter of an hour. 93
Well into the early 1800s, observers peddled stories of the impervious
Malay assassin or Bugis recalcitrant who welcomed the release of death
with senses dulled by opium, or who supposedly smoked his pipe in resigned
indifference as his limbs were smashed one by one (to local acclaim).94 And
while the castle complained in the 1780 that the convict-caffers were rather
less terrible than they needed to be when dealing with their European
charges, we might also see priestly supporters in the community
encouraging the slaves that the caffers so frequently had to thrash to be
steadfast in hope of the certain victory to come.95 The British officer John
Schofield Mayson noted with sarcastic amusement the case of an imamadvocate in the 1850s who stood filling the ear of a minor offender in court
with just such advice, to be steadfast and thus escape unhurt by his ordeal.
Such was repeated while the man endured a flogging, though at the
conclusion the imam was rewarded for his solicitude with blows from his
very pained advisee.96
Of course the point of the ratiep is that pain and injury will only accrue to
those insufficiently preparedas much spiritually as physically. Yet such
displays have also come in for criticism as much within the Muslim
communities around the Indian Ocean as from gawking interlopers.97 They
93. Johan Splinter Stavorinus, Voyages to the east-indies, 3 vols. (London: Robinson, 1798),
I, 571.
94. Franois Le Vaillant, Travels into the interior of Africa via the cape of Good hope, 2
vols. (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2007), 49; Sparmann, Voyage to the cape of Good
hope, II, 342; Robert C.H. Shell (ed.), with the assistance of Raymond and Edward Hudson,
Out of livery: The Papers of Samuel eusebius hudson, 1764-1828 (Unpublished MS), 20405; see also Kirsten McKenzie, The Making of an english Slave-owner: Samuel eusebius
hudson at the cape of Good hope 1796-1807 (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1993), 95-96.
95. On the laxity of the caffers, see Resolution of 22 August 1780, KAB, C 158, pp. 241-248.
Moves were made to dispense with Asian officers entirely in 1786. H.C.V. Leibbrandt, Precis
of the Archives of the cape of Good hope: Requesten (Memorials) 1715-1806, 5 vols (Cape
Town and London: Cape Times Limited, 1905-89), I, 22.
96. John Schofield Mayson, The Malays of capetown (Cape Town: Africana Connoisseurs
Press, 1963; originally Manchester: Galt & Co., 1861), 17.
97. As Annabel Gallop pointed out to me with reference to its unpublished (and unopenable)
224
Michael Laffan
may even have led to an attempt on the part of the well-to-do to disassociate
the saints of Tana Baru with the excesses of fellow Capetonians of less
august standing such as the Mozambiquan Griep, who had accidentally
caused the death of Abdul Zaghie as he and his friends performed the
Callifat at the home of a Makassarese in 1813 (which is the first time it
attracted official notice in South Africa).98 And then there were the
complaints about the sheer noise. In 1855, rival factions placed petitions
before the British authorities regarding the disruptive spectacle of the
Califah. One group, having had their nocturnal gatherings banned,
respectfully sought to maintain the practice of the ratiep, which they had
enjoyed without interruption for such a number of years. Meanwhile the
other faction of recognized imams approved its limitation, speaking to the
nuisance and discredit it brought to their religion, and claiming as
justification their greater connection with contemporary Islamic practice in
Mecca, where so many respectable people were now travelling for the
pilgrimage.99 If distant Asia was their sundered past, Africa and Arabia were
their beckoning future, and in time the increasing numbers of returned Hajjis
would displace a previous cornucopia of self-appointed Imams, many of
whom might have claimed the authority of a noble Arab patron as they
offered instruction in the protective rites of their forefathers.100 Some
upwardly-mobile Hajjis must have been annoyed to read in the cape
Monthly of 1861 that the ancient ritual was regarded by their fellow
believers as the most important part of the education of the young, being
practiced each Friday night in order to give a more strictly religious
character to that day.101
In recent years the researches of local historians have led to the
development of a museum specifically for the history of Islam at the Cape,
replete with a rack of ratiep implements and numerous Malay texts that had
been compiled in the nineteenth century. Yet, with the decided shift towards
Afrikaans for daily life, and a better command of Arabic for religious
purposes, such writings in what was once a liturgical, or even secret,
language have few interpreters today.
pages, the illustrated Kitab Mawlid A70 published by Bennett shows evidence of a
subsequent owner having had many of the dabus pages stuck together. See Bennett, crescent
Moon, 272-273.
98. KAB, CJ 805, no.37, as cited in Mason, Faith for Ourselves, 20.
99. J.S. De Lima, The califa Question: Documents connected with this Matter (Cape Town:
Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co., 1857), esp. 1, 2-8.
100. Shamil Jeppie, Leadership and Loyalties: The Imams of Nineteenth Century Colonial
Cape Town, South Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa 26, 2 (May, 1996): 139-62.
101. Anon., Islam at the Cape, 359.
225
Among those that came to light is a richly illustrated manual of prayers

and invocations. Known as the Red Kietaab, it contains images of Mecca
and the saintly graves of Medina, words of scorn for any who deny the
legitimacy of Rifai techniques, and apparent mention of Sayyid Alawi
among a slew of saints, in addition to numerous banners associated with the
ratiep. Moreover, on the final pages one finds, atop a pile of awls and
skewers, standards seemingly planted in grassy ground and bearing two
wordsQadar and Alawireferencing two traditions and perhaps
hinting at one, now obscured, teacher.102
Conclusion
What defined a Muslim in relation to the far-flung and hardly uniform
VOC world in the eighteenth century? And which way should Alawis life
trajectory and contributions be read? Was Islam marked in Dutch eyes solely
by masculine exercises of power and resistance, or did they assume that it
depended, like their own public faith, on a deeply ingrained knowledge of
prayer and text instilled by priests and practiced in the home as much by
sovereign wives and mothers as pious husbands and sons? Or should we read
this potential narrative as one part of a greater whole of heroic resistance in
the face of alien domination, tracking the development (or persistence) of an
autochthonous awareness among believers seeking aid from the saints of ages
past, and well away from the watchful eyes of the enforcers of an alien law?
Suffice it to say that, far from being the harbinger of a new and ever more
united Islamic consciousness across the Ocean, Sayyid Alawi, in life and
perhaps even more so in death, could have served as a recognizably Arab
catalyst for the activation of diverse forms of practice in two distinct, if
related, settings: perhaps leading dhikr in support of a dying queen and then
jihad on behalf of her royal widower in Java, or maybe even propagating the
ratib of Abdallah al-Haddad at the Cape in conjunction with exercises
popularly associated with Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. Indeed the events of
Alawis life and the activities of teachers like him should lead us to question
the contingent rise of new forms of practice among courts and societies in
the face of encroaching Christian power. By the same token, though, we
must also be cautious in setting up a story of Islam and colonialism as
commensurate foes or yet that the former somehow embodied inherently
cosmopolitan networks. Even if each set of peoples and practices
overlapped, in the eighteenth century it was the VOC that could dictate what
sort of movement was possible to and in the newest corner of the Indian
Ocean Arena. For while a Javanese could travel to Mecca and an Arab
102. MS in private hands, Cape Town. Cf. War of the Red Kitaab, noseweek 88, 1
February 2007.
226
Michael Laffan
shaykh could appear in Batavia, the journey to the Cape was long one
without a return, and it was there that certain practices could live on and
attain rather different valences and ancestries, which are hotly disputed
today.
Seen in this light, the story of an Islamicate Indian Ocean is only one that
emerges under the later aeges of the English East India Company. And it is
only under such seemingly paradoxical conditions of colonialism and
relative freedom of movement that an even more open Arab lake could be
imagined as the natural antecedent of the European one, which could
become ever more entangled through the labours of so many Hadramis
whose ancestral valleys were finally enfolded with the Ingrams Peace of
1934.103
In focussing on the VOC and its networks we may nevertheless discern
the roots of this vision, which is arguably Arabizing the story of Islam in
Southeast Asia today. Even if Alawi was not responsible for the
transplantation of ecstatic Sufism to Cape Town after his enforced
occultation on Robben Island, his sainted body would have been invoked as
a natural pole of attraction for others reconstituting the original Arab
protective rituals of their home societies, rituals now enacted in a shared and
rather more egalitarian Jawi sub-culture, and in ways that trouble Rosss
argument that Cape Town slaves were never able to create any community
to transcend the individualization of their enslavement and
transportation. 104
So it was that, toward the nineteenth century, a form of ecstatic dhikr
could emerge in the waning shadows of VOC rule, and perhaps even under
the kindly eye of a hardy sojourner who had tasted the bounty of an island
once full of rice, jungles and tigers, but who now settled for the offerings of
a few dozen households given at the Cape of Storms. Today Alawis heavily
remodeled tomb stands as but one of many holy graves encircling, and
thereby protecting, the Cape from the storms to come.
103. See Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the indian
Ocean (Berkeley, 2006).
104. Robert Ross, cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, etc.:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 17, 118.
227
Fig 2. The remodeled tomb of Sayyid Alawi (Tuan Said), photograph by author, September 2012.

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MichAel lAffAn

The Sayyid in the Slippers: An Indian Ocean Itinerary

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

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

The Sayyid in the Slippers

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

Despite the appearance of a controlling interest over Java, though, the

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

Susuhunan decided to rusticate his brother-in-law in early October, before

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

moreover, Giri is presented as a gateway for a mystical form of Islam into

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

The Sayyid in the Slippers

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

The Sayyid in the Slippers

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

Yet it is striking that there is no first-hand account of any individual

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

servants. So when Captain Joan Andries van Hohendorff went to Kartasura

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The Cape of Grave Consequences

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

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Bengal, given 50 years in 1722; Daeng Mahmud, the so-called Prince of

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

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word of Islam and ameliorate their condition. Certainly Alawis putative

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The Sayyid in the Slippers

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

The Sayyid in the Slippers

While a correspondent of the cape naturalist was unable to extract any

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

It is certainly important to place Sayyid Alawis kramat within the

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

The Sayyid in the Slippers

National Library, a later crown prince of Banten would be inducted as a

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

Archipel 86, Paris, 2013

The Sayyid in the Slippers

empowered its convert-adherents spiritually as much as socially, one might