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By Root 636 0

Similar trends have been found in Tanzania and Uganda. In Uganda the largest missionary movement in the world, the Jama'at Tabligh, is very active and influential. Originating in the Indian subcontinent, it is highly significant that its focus is on the existing Muslim community. As with many other revivalist movements today, it wants the Quran and shariah to be the only guides to conduct, and the basis of all legislation.162 Similar trends are obvious all over south and southeast Asia. One visible sign is the many mosques and madrasas (religious schools) funded by money from oil-rich Arab states. Yet the process whereby orthodox, normative, Islam triumphs is far from complete: to revert to earlier terminology, these authorities have not yet completely eradicated additive change and achieved substitutive change. In Mayotte, a surviving French possession in the Comoro Islands, everyone is Muslim to be sure, but many also are spirit mediums. To avoid what seems to be inevitable conflict between the two, when people are setting off to go to a spirit ceremony they take off their amulets which contain Quranic passages.163 Even the most vigorous rectifier from the Hijaz will find it hard to eliminate completely this sort of flexibility, a cohabitation of normative Islam with older informal beliefs.

Hadhrami and other religious guides also operated in Indonesia, and indeed continue to do so to this day. Ann Bang describes how the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Indonesia recruited a mass following in the early nineteenth century. Their practice, not unusually for Sufis, incorporated pre-Islamic practice to an extent: the recitation of the dhikr, for example, was believed to make the devout invulnerable. In the second half of the century these 'unorthodox' practices came under attack from a source which we have encountered many times already, namely Indonesian scholars who had been educated in the heartland of Mecca and then came home to rectify the religious practice of their Indonesian fellows. The famous Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje gave an account of these efforts in Aceh, where religious mysticism was very popular. A particular reformer started a crusade against such deviations as cock fighting, opium smoking, gambling and pederasty.

What seems to be different about reform and purification movements in Indonesia as compared with the Swahili coast is that much of the impetus in the latter came from men from outside, especially Hadhramis, or at least people who though originating on the coast had studied in Hadhrami madrassas. In Indonesia it seems that local people who had studied in Mecca played a much larger role than did men from outside, whether from Hadhramaut or elsewhere. The career of Sayyid Uthman, born in Jakarta in 1822, is revealing. He was of Hadhrami stock, though his father lived in Java. He studied in the Hadhramaut, and travelled widely. Back in Jakarta in 1862, he led campaigns against innovation and acculturation. However, his influence seems to have been very largely restricted to his fellow Hadhramis in Java; local Muslims were less impressed.164

This in turn signals that we should not too glibly write about a Muslim 'community' all around the shores of the Indian Ocean. There were pronounced divisions within the community, based on religious practice, that is adherence to different schools of law, or to different Sufi orders, and on ethnicity. One example that we have already noticed is that the Hadhramis follow the Shafi school, but this is not followed in many other areas around the shores of the ocean. In India, for example, the dominant legal school is the Hanafi. In general Arabs from what they proclaimed to be the heartland, that is the Hijaz and southern Arabia, especially Hadhramaut, kept some distance from local Muslims in other areas, be this the Swahili coast, or India, or the Malay world. Children whose parents hailed from these areas were often sent home to study. Sometimes wives were taken from home, rather than intermarry with local women, or at least the main wife would be of Arab stock