“I often think it comical

How nature does contrive

That every body and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or a little Conservative.”

W.S. Gilbert, Iolanthe, II.

« ...if these people regard themselves for all

practical purposes as Muslims, it is difficult

to maintain that scientific research has come to

the conclusion that they are not. ...one is

inclined to feel that if an Indonesian says he

is a Muslim, it is better to take his word

for it. »

C.A.O. van Nieuwenhuijze (1958: 40)

There seems to have been an extraordinary desire on the part of Western social science observers to diminish, conceptually, the place and role of the religion and culture of Islam, now and in the past, in Southeast Asian societies. Sometimes this diminution has been wrought by metaphor : witness the often evoked «veil that conceals little and shapes nothing», Snouck Hurgronje's architectural mélange of pillars (rukn), some present, some missing, and some supererogatory (Hurgronje, 1906 [1893-94] : I, 313), J.C. van Leur's «thin and easily flaking glaze» (1955 : 169), or the geologicalcum-archeological figures involving sedimentation of cultures (critically discussed by Nakamura [1976 : 188f.]). Sometimes the diminution has been more carefully constructed through sociologic-chopping by the variation of «variants», as in Clifford Geertz's now ubiquitous ur-typology of santri, abangan, and priyayi (Geertz, 1960) and M.C. Ricklefs' more florid and Polonian distinctions between such problematical categories as «priyayiabangan-kolot/moderen» and «priyayi-santri-moderen» (Ricklefs, 1979 : 20; and cf. Geertz, 1965 : 121-40 for yet more extended recombination). Sometimes the diminution has been effected through binary opposition, by means of insistent and minatory dichotomisations between a supposedly irreconcilable « adat and Islam» or between «syncretically mystical» and «scripturally orthodox» forms. What such endeavours suggest more than anything,perhaps, is an uncontrolled passion for taxonomy, an operation which, like taxidermy, is seldom best performed upon the living. But it may also be said, in all charity, that what these complex hermeneutics principally evidence is the complexity of the problems that in fact arise when one tries to understand, and reduce to descriptive and analytical order, phenomena associated with the translation of a major religious system from the culture^) (systems of shared meaning) in which it arose and was formed to the substantially different cultures of Southeast Asia.

There has been increasing recognition in recent years - not new, no doubt, but newly reemphasized - of the tension that exists within the Islamic religious system and within societies that seek to embody or apply that system, between the demands of the ideal and the demands of social reality. This is not, of course, something that distinguishes Islam from other transcendental religions, but is often represented as of singular importance for or relevance to Islamic societies because of the role claimed within Islam by the sharia, the immutably revealed «way» of God that must govern all significant human action - a term too frequently translated into European languages as «Islamic law», with misleading positivist connotations, implying existence as or reducibility to a canon. If it be accepted that the sharia points to a discoverable but unrealizable ideal, of great – and dynamic - complexity, it follows that all Islamic societies (from the first generation in Arabia to the Indonesia or Morocco - or for the matter the Arabia - of the present) can exist only in approximation to that ideal. As Snouck Hurgronje remarked eighty years ago, at the outset of the scientific' study of Islam in the Indies (1906 [1893-4], II : 280), «The customary law of the Arabs and the 'Excellent Qànûn' (the mundane code) of the Turks differ from the written and unwritten adat law of our Indonesians, but they are equally far removed from the sharia or shar ...». The implications of this truism have been most often employed to controvert the textualists or classicists (as Snouck himself did [1884] in his scathing criticisms of L.W.C. van den Berg's exposition of Shàfi i’s Risàla as the «law» of Indonesian peoples, subject only to vestigial «deviations») (*) - those who have supposed that what «is» Islam can best be ascertained by inspection of the prescriptive literature. But there is a more useful and interesting point to be made about the lack of fit between ideal and social reality, as the work of, for example, Clive S. Kessler on Malaysia or Dale F. Eickelman on Morocco (2) suggests, namely that the recognition of this non-congruence by both prescribers (ulamà) and backsliders acts as a dynamic force within Islamic cultures, resulting in what can be seen as dialectic constantly engaged in translating synchronie tension (the aspect taken by the lack of fit at any given moment) into diachronic «oscillation» (social, cultural, political, or ideational change in one direction or another) (3).

What Snouck Hurgronje brought to the study of Islam in Southeast Asia then, besides his own great knowledge of the texts, was an ethnographic insistence on people and place combined with a recognition that all social actuality has particular historical roots. These have remained the fundamental desiderata of all serious inquiry, however difficult they may be to hold in balance with the need for more general explanatory modes. Indefatigable in pursuing both ethnography and the past, Snouck did so, as is well known, not in any disinterested fashion but, from the outset of his own experience in a living Islamic culture (in Mecca in 1884), as a committed Western liberal of the late nineteenth century and the political agent of a colonial power (4). The limitations this imposed affected less the descriptive quality of his work, despite its frequently scornful tone (as James Siegel has remarked [1979 : 14], «The strength of Dutch writing on Atjeh stems from its antagonism to its subject») than the interpretive. This is not the place to attempt proper evaluation of Snouck' s influence - either on policy or on the understanding of Islam in Indonesia - an influence that lasted officially for close on a half a century and has continued intellectually to the present time. It is surprising, in view of this acknowledged influence, that so little systematic attempt has so far been made to assess its form and extent by detailed critical examination of his voluminous published writings <5). Jacques Waardenburg's excellent study (1970) of Snouck as an Islamist does not concern itself very directly with the Indies, Harry J.

Benda's percipient comments (1958a : 338-47; 1958b) were largely limited to specific aspects of policy and administration, and Siegel's important revisions of Snouck (1969, 1979) are necessarily confined to Aceh, though much wider in their general relevance (6\

• • •

None of Snouck Hurgronje's analytical constructs about Indonesian society has had more pervasive effect than his formulation of the systematic oposition held to distinguish - culturally, socially, and politically – the domains of «adat» (custom, Ar. 'ada) and «hukum» (Islamic law, formally conceived; fiqh). Grounded in the exigencies of the colonial situation (not least as it manifested itself in Aceh, in the last years of the Dutch aggression there) as well as in Hurgronje's own positivist and juridical approach to culture and its constraints, this bifurcation posited (conceptually, and through the pursuit of policy) a necessary, or at any rate present antagonism between two ideational realms of Acehnese (and by extension all Muslim Indonesian) culture, and between their corresponding «functionaries», those seen to be the arbiters of adat on the one hand and of hukum on the other.

The extent to which Islamic law, as fiqh, had penetrated Indonesian (and other Southeast Asian Muslim) societies was indeed differential, as between different parts of the region and between one sort of socioeconomic milieu and another. It was certainly possible for the observer to discern in a variety of contexts, and to find seeming recognition for in the culture itself, a constant struggle on the part of some to extend the writ of fiqh (hukum), set against a corresponding desire on the part of others to maintain certain customary (non-Islamic but not ipso facto antithetical) practices (and their validations) describable as adat.

It is clear that Snouck, though well aware that °ada is a jurisprudentially cognizable if subsidiary element within the legal systems of all Muslims societies, was ambivalent about the nature of the relationship – ideological or sociological - between adat and hukum (later much more frequently referred to simply as «adat and Islam», tout court ) in Aceh. Asserting at one moment, for example, that «the very basis of life in Atjeh» lay «in the indissoluble union and indispensable cooperation of hukum or religious law with adat, the custom of the country» (1906 [1893-94] : I, 14), he says at the next that adat is as «mistress» with hukum «her obedient slave» {Ibid. : 153), and that their relationship is marked by a formal opposition expressable as a conflict between the actual (adat) and an only occasionally realized and largely alien ideal (Islam). The dynamics of this conflict were said to be evidenced in the then prevailing social (and political) conflict between secular adat chiefs (uleebalang, in Aceh) and 'ulama.

Siegel has argued persuasively that much of this is misperceived, that the sociology and the ideational system of nineteenth century A Aceh was rather different from the picture Hurgronje derives, and that «it was not a society bifurcated into Islamic and customary elements, but one divided into four groups - uleëbalang, ulama, peasants, and the sultan and his group - each of which has its own view of the nature of Islam and adat» (1969 : 11). This sundering of social group from inextricable association with one or another dichotomous ideological set, and the changed social dynamic that results, is important, and is something that will have to be considered again later with respect to the work of Geertz. The loss of subtlety in analysis that is the product of constructing systematic oppositions between «adat and Islam» largely irrespective of other social and cultural complexities, is the subject of an important article by Taufik Abdullah (1966 :1-24) on Minangkabau, which along with Aceh has been a prime exemplar in the adat/lslam literature - in part because of the nature of the early nineteenth century internecine conflict known as the « podri war», which brought major segments of the society into collision along assumedly adat/lslam lines (7), and in part because of its matrilineal social structure, held to be antithetical to Islamic ideas of social organization. Abdullah argues that the term adat itself, as understood in Minangkabau, must be recognized as ambiguous, denoting on the one hand «[the] local custom which regulates the interaction of members of a society» (hence potentially in opposition to fiqh), and on the other «the whole structural system of society, of which local custom is only a component» (Ibid. : 1-2). The significance of Abdullah's analysis rests in large part on his elucidation of the complex dialectic that has existed historically in Minangkabau between adat in the first sense and Islam, the two combining in a dynamic and perpetually shifting way to produce adat in the second and larger sense - an adat in which Islam itself is an increasingly determinative and authoritative component (Ibid. : 10). Abdullah sees the intermittent eruption of social conflict in Minangkabau, consequent upon successive attempts by one or another element of the 'ulama to assert a stronger or sharper voice for Islam within the culture, as strengthening the Islamic component in the overall «adat Minangkabau» without destroying the notion that adat and Islam are the twin pillars of society, each in its own way necessary and justifiable, but with conflict over their precise relationship an endemic an indeed integrating feature (because of the recognition it affords both sides) of the Minangkabau world.

A related argument has been advanced by P.E. de Josselin de Jong (1960a [1951]) with reference especially to the political sociology of the groups involved, in Minangkabau and in the associated matrilineal society of Negri Sembilan, Malaysia. In a subsequent article (1960b), de Jong notes that in Malaysia, which during the colonial period suffered no «discovery of customary law» comparable to that imposed on the Dutch East Indies (see below), the formal position of Islam was stronger than in Indonesia.

Examining in detail the course of a 1951 dispute between the religious section of a branch of UMNO (the Malay political party) and local customary law «traditionalists» over a proposed alteration of inheritance law to bring it more into line with fiqh prescriptions, de Jong suggests that the conflict was one «between two systems of ideals and practices, both of which were considered by the society concerned as being an integral [part] of its culture, both applicable to the entire society, and both perceived as a system by the inhabitants of that society [1960b : 199]». Though he sees problems in the comparison, in that all members of the society adhere to both systems, de Jong suggests that it might be fruitful to look at the resulting dynamic of change within «the inheritance systems of lowland Malaya» in a theoretical framework such as that elaborated by E.R. Leach (1954) for the oscillatory «political systems of highland Burma» (Ibid. : 200) (8\David J. Banks (1976) takes the argument about supposedly conflicting value systems a stage further, in the direction of an actual «unity of Islamic Malay culture», based on his work in Kedah, again in relation to inheritance systems. Noting that, for colonial governments bent on rule, «if Islam appeared to imply a society based upon patrilineal clans, like those in the Middle East, a model of society composed of conflicting value systems made sense when one found Islam in societies without clans or with matriclans», Banks argues that the «hypothetical internal conflicts» on which colonial policies were based have tended to be perpetuated by modern Western scholars, without regard for «the revolutionary [and transformation al] impact of Islam on rural Malay culture» (Ibid. : 582). Arguing that «there is no justification for a distinction between a culturally defined sphere of adat and a culturally defined sphere of Islam with respect to the distribution of wealth in Malay society» (Ibid. : 581-582), Banks discusses three general principles which Malays use, he suggests, to understand the distribution of wealth : the goodness of giving, the principle of male responsability, and the fruits of honest labour. As religious values that provide models for ideal social behavior, they explicitly embody principles of Islamic law, in outline if not always in detail, and those employing them «associate Islam with the goodness of their ideal way of life, and [find in it] a source of prescribed action» (Ibid. : 576). Islam, says Banks, is seen, in this context and others, as a «progressive source of adat, and a potential vehicle for the radical transformation of society (Ibid. : 583).

As may be evident from the foregoing, many of the problems associated with consideration of relationships between adat and Islam in Southeast Asia result from the overdetermination of adat carried out by the Dutch in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the purpose of colonial rule. Some consideration must be given to this process, for the light it sheds upon the development of the Indonesian juridical system and consequently upon discussions of Indonesian (and indeed, though somewhat differently, Malaysian) legal culture, and the place within it of Islamic jurisprudence. Though the « adat law school» is primarily, and rightly, identifical with the work of Cornelis van Vollenhoven (and his student Barend terHaar), it was Snouck Hurgronje who first proposed the distinction between mere custom and «custom that has legal consequences» (Hurgronje, 1893, cited in ter Haar, 1962 : 5; cf. Drewes, 1957 : 13), that was to give « adatrecht» its intellectual charter. Just as Islam was seen by the Dutch as essentially « plichtenleer » - «a doctrine of duties» (9) - so local custom, thought to be culturally prior, pre-eminent, and sui juris, was regarded as embodying codifiable rules for the regulation of social behavior. The essence of the adatrecht system as it developed, therefore, was the determination («discovery», or ontdekking, as the process was styled; see van Vollenhoven [1928]) of local particularities and their enshrinement in a vast literature that set its face against any tendency towards more unified systems of law for indigenes, whether engendered by the Dutch colonial system itself or by Islam. As a result of the efforts at such discovery, the Indies were divided into nineteen separate «law circles» (rechtskring), each a geographical entity whose borders were drawn in such a way as to include peoples thought to be ethnographically and culturally homogeneous, at least when viewed from the standpoint of adat (10). Van Vollenhoven, the architect of this system, and the principal coordinator of the enormous collections of ethnographic data that resulted C11), saw in its creation taxonomic principles that went beyond the mere discovery of «law circles» and aimed at the elaboration of a new comparative study of law, or «thesmography» (van Vollenhoven, 1934 : 1, 57). In an article published first in 1921 he likened «families of law» to «families of languages», and wrote : «The large law family (in one large law district), is split into law tribes (each in its own law region), which in their turn may be divided into circle laws (each in its own circle), below which are found only parish laws, law dialects» (Ibid.).

Thus for the Indies there was established, in van Vollenhoven's terms, an Austronesian (or Malagasy-Polynesian) law family, an Indonesian law tribe, and the nineteen law circles into which Indonesia was seen as being subdivided. Within this taxonomy there was no room for an autonomous «Islamic law» (any more than there was for the Arabic language), except in so far as it had been subordinately and fragmentarily «received into» (as the expression had it) one or another particular adat - though as Daniel S.

Lev has pointed out (1972a : 4-5; 1972b : 250), Islam had already begunto provide a universal law for the archipelago considerably before Dutch political authority was completed, and Islamic legal concepts and vocabulary had to supply, through the Arabicized lingua franca of Malay, most of the basic notion, of law (hukum), justice (keadilan), rights (hak), and of course adat itself. This last mainly epistemological argument has been advanced with some force, in a more general lexical and philosophical context, by Naguib al-Attas (1969: 6-8; 1970: 142-75).

Though the Dutch development of adatrecht undoubtedly owed some thing to continental ideas of jurisprudence that saw law as the natural out growth of natural community, with «unnatural» alien accretions to be avoided as much as possible (Lev, 1972a : 17), the practical value for colonial rule of emphasizing, elaborating upon, and codifying - in a word, constituting - local particularisms in customary law, and of favoring the traditional authority structures linked to them, is evident (12). Islam, as an ideology and as a source of political power, had been associated at least since the Java War of the early nineteenth century (and through many other protest movements thereafter, culminating in the mass politics of nationalism in the first decades of the twentieth century) with appeals to the existence of a common identity and shared moral (not to say legal) community among the umma, transcending local loyalities and opposed to the imposition and perpetuation of alien rule (13). Similar situations obtained in other colonial contexts where Islam was involved. It is not surprising, for example, in the light of the Islamically strongly opposed French attempts to restore traditional Berber law among groups already Muslim in Morocco (see, e.g., Maunier, 1949 : 487-89; Brown, 1976 : 198-200), that the French scholaradministrator G.H. Bousquet should have regarded the Dutch «découverte » of customary law in Indonesia as «very instructive» for his fellowcountrymen (Bousquet, 1938 : 226) (14). David Gilmartin (1981), in a recent paper on the manner in which the British in the Punjab stage-managed «the conflict between the commitment to «race» and «tribe» and the commitment to «Islamic solidarity» by the development of a system of customary law, makes clear in addition the extent to which this has become a critical problem for independent Pakistan.

A similar concern with the legacy of Dutch adatrecht-politiek underlies Lev's study (1972a) of the legal culture of independent Indonesia, and the place occupied within that culture by specifically Islamic legal institutions. The material copiously cited by Lev, together with his own analysis of the configurations of political and social power which emerged during the struggle for independence, makes clear the extremely complex way in which Indonesia has moved from a legal dualism defined by the Dutch (marked by the coexistence of an adat law within which Islam was assigned a merely conditional and subordinate position, and a Western-derived unified civil and criminal law) to a revised dualism in which, somewhat against the odds (and contrary to the experience of many other Muslim states) the proponents of Islamic law have been able markedly to strengthen their position institutionally while forced to concede that the legitimising force for those institutions, and the determination of their still limited jurisdiction, rests with the modern state and the civil and criminal law system inherited from the Dutch that it embodies. Aside from reflecting the real political and social power available at crucial moments to the representatives of Islamic authority, this process has been aided by the relative demise of adat legal institutions (formally abolished in 1950, assisted by the patent lack of fit between particularist adat and national ethos, as well as by identification of adat functionaries with colonial concepts of traditional authority), which has left Islam as alone expressive (in however, attentuated a way, as the result of colonial rule) of anything that can claim to constitute autochthonous law (15).

The history of the British response in the Malay states to the supposed (and supposedly conflicting) existence of separate jurai domains for adat and Islam was somewhat different from that of the Dutch in Indonesia, and (along with the emergence in Malaysia of a vastly different kind of plural

society) has led to significant differences in both legal culture and its institutions. Early British administrators (and faute de mieux scholars, though none had the training of their Dutch counterparts), such as W.E. Maxwell (1884) and R. J. Wilkinson (1908), certainly saw «the acceptance of Moslem law» by the Malays as having been partial and severely constrained by «their own adat or customary law» (Wilkinson, 1908 : I, 48-49) (16X But Wilkin son himself, the most percipient of these commentators, noted nonetheless that «There can be no doubt that Moslem law would have ended by becoming the law of Malaya had not British law stepped in to check it...It was gaining ground everywhere when the British authorities came into Malaya and limited the scope of religious law...» ( Ibid. : 49). Despite the progressive contraction during the first years of colonial rule of the realm permitted to Islamic law and its functionaries (a process described by, interalia, William R. Roff [1965, 1973] and A.M. M. Mackeen [1969]), there was little or no attempt to reproduce the Dutch adatrecht system (the only real example is found in relation to the matrilineal society of Negeri Sembilan)<17). On the contrary, with the definition of the relationship between adat and Islam and their respective jural domains left by treaty from the outset to the Malay sultans (and their establishments) (18), adat came to apply (as in general, one must assume, it had for long done) solely to «custom that has no

legal consequences», while Islam was increasingly furnished with a formal, institutional structure it had not for the most part previously possessed. Concurrently with this, and in large measure part of the same process (and substantially at Malay initiative), there was brought into being a considerable body of positive (initially colonial) law which sought to give expression to elements of the sharla. The conjoint presence, in indépendant Malaysia, of elaborate institutional structures for islamic authority and of a related and growing corpus of positive law for Muslims, the whole coexisting with a secular civil and criminal law system derived from the British, has produced a legal dualism that is markedly different in many respects from that of Indonesia, though still very little described or studied. (19)

* * *

If the relationship between «Islam and adat» - conflictual or dialectical - has supplied one of the dominant paradigms in terms of which Islam and society in Southeast Asia has been viewed, that between «mystical» religious beliefs and practices (whether derived from «animist», «Indie», «Javanist», or Sufi materials) and «orthodox», «orthoprax», «scripturalist», or «legalistic» Islam (the terminology on both sides has become very various in the effort to grapple with the abstractions and constructions necessarily involved) has been equally prominent. This relationship too refers to features of Islam in Southeast Asia which mark it off (or are assumed to mark it off) from that normative or essentialist Islam set out (or understood to be set out) in the texts and pursued by the 'ulamà. As with Islam and adat (though to a substantially greater degree because of the positivist form in which the adat/Islam dyad has been cast) it concerns the relationships between the mystical modes of religious experience by which (more vulgarly, the extent to which) Islam came to be received, adopted, absorbed, translated into the existing cultures of maritime Southeast Asia, and the manner in which Islam has been understood and elaborated within those cultures. Rather more than with discussions of adat and Islam, then, discussions of mystical modes of religious thought, belief and practice and their relation to a supposed vrai Islam have found themselves forced to address- all at once, and often on the basis of very slender evidence - most of the crucial questions that can be asked about the transmission of a multivalent religious system, over a period of some seven centuries in a variety of contrasting social as well as cultural contexts. Many of the problems presented by contemporary social science divagations upon Islam and society in Southeast Asia stem from resulting conflations of both time and place - using (for example) not merely what little is yet understood of 16th century Java to stand for 18th and 19th century Java, but the thus derived late Java to stand for all of modern Indonesia.

Where the historians are concerned, the extensive literature on «the coming of Islam» to Southeast Asia, its propagation and indigenous establishment - processes commonly reckoned to have begun in northern Sumatra in the late 13th century A.D. - has taken as its starting point a number of questions, the asking and answering of which vary in sociological import. Among these questions three are prominent : Whence? Why at this time (and not earlier, or indeed later)? and By what agency? Largely because of the fragmentariness and elusiveness of the evidence, none has proved susceptible of an incontestable answer, but the attempts to address them and the kinds of consideration that result provided some understanding of the main interpretative assumptions made by scholars concerning the relationship between Islam and society during the period of early transplantation, assumptions that have continued to influence studies of Islam in Southeast Asia up to the present time and which therefore continue to need examination.

Three survey articles on the early islamization of Southeast Asia may serve to introduce most of the main lines of argument (2°). G.W. J. Drewes' essay, «New light on the coming of Islam to Southeast Asia?» (1968), is primarily concerned with the «provenance» literature, which he discusses in detail. S.O. Robson's «Java at the crossroads ; aspects of Javanese cultural history in the 14th and 15th centuries (1981) examines the conjunctions between Islamization and patterns of trade and commerce. And A.H. Johns, building on earlier work of his own and others, seeks in «Islam in Southeast Asia : reflections and new directions» (1975) to establish something of the spiritual and intellectual lineaments of early Muslim societies"in Southeast Asia, and thereby approach understanding as well of the sociological dynamic of Islamic expansion.

Because the immediate «whence» of Islam in 13th-14th century northern Sumatra and the Malay peninsula has often been seen as carrying implications of something beyond mere place, and has having potential explanatory value for the kind of Islam that was conveyed, a good deal of (in the result) rather sterile attention has been paid to provenance. The upshot of this, while still in some respects uncertain, leads, as Drewes makes clear, to the considerable probability that the agents of early Islamization came most frequently from South India (as had been proposed by Hurgronje [ 1924 (18837; 1906 (1893-94) ] and as is indeed recounted in the Malay chronicles). Drewes suggests accordingly, following Marrison (1951) and Bausani (1964) that what is needed for further understanding of this vexed question is renewed archeological research in southern India as well as northern Sumatra, and painstaking study of Islam in southern India, epigraphically and through its Persianate Tamil literature (21).

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