In A Sketch of Malayan Mining, published in 1928, Geologist to the Federated Malay States John B. Scrivenor reminisced about the ‘heyday of the pawang’. During those ‘palmy days’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was considered ‘fatal to not consult the pawang’ before mining for tin or gold. The ubiquitous pawangs worked as prospectors and were known to be adept at locating, excavating and smelting tin ore. They were also mediums for the spirits that guarded tin and gold deposits.

This book is about Islamic miracle workers and the connections between miracles and material life. To be more precise, it is about historical societies and economies where the production and extraction of natural resources, as well as the uses of technology, were intertwined with the ‘ilmu and barkat of the pawangs of the Malay world. Such miracle workers have consistently been dismissed as ‘magicians’ throughout the scholarship of the Malay Peninsula; this academic attitude was just as noticeable in the early nineteenth century as it is now. And yet, European travellers and Orientalists sometimes perceptively recognised that such miracle workers dominated many spheres of socio-economic life in modern Malaya and Sumatra, and were involved in and influenced political practices in the region. The writings of European journeymen and scholars thus reveal how nineteenth-century Malay society included a universe of peripatetic and professional pawangs.

In 2007, the State Museum of Negeri Sembilan printed a short Malay book entitled Adat Berpuar dan Pertahunan (Agrarian Fertility Rites and Annual Cultivation Customs). In the opening pages of this paperback, the museum chair and the chief minister of Negeri Sembilan joined the author Norhalim Ibrahim in lamenting that Malaysians had forgotten the customs (‘adat) and rice worlds of the ‘not-so-distant’ past. They claimed that Malaysians had discarded Malay values of cooperation that had formerly been imbibed along with the agrarian ‘adat of Minangkabau and other societies in Malayan history. They reminisced about a bucolic era when the ricefields of Negeri Sembilan had not yet been transformed into rubber and oil palm plantations. Ibrahim recalled an age of innocent Minangkabau peasants and the ubiquitous rice pawangs (such as the eminent Dato’ Pawang Muhd. Saleh) who had been impresarios of berpuar (an agrarian fertility rite). Ibrahim stated that, since the zenith of rice pawangs had long since passed and the memories of Minangkabau lands in Malaysia were now endangered, it was urgent to recover and preserve the religious histories of their rice worlds. This brief paperback reminds us that little has been recorded in popular media, official histories or academic publications about the everyday lives of Malay cultivators and agricultural techniques or the Islamic practices of agrarian pawangs. In their History of Malaysia, Andaya and Andaya similarly noted that Malayan historiography continues to suffer from ‘glaring gaps’ in information on the ‘life of the Malay peasant’ and ‘common people’ and on Islamic practices in rural villages. To fill in some of these gaps, this chapter recalls a history of the rice worlds of Islamic societies by investigating a corpus of texts compiled in Minangkabau lands in the Malay Peninsula.

When I first met Wak ‘Ali in Singapore in March 2010, he was being summoned for trespassing on state land and for ‘placing a kramat (open shed)’ over the grave of the early nineteenth-century pawang, Siti Maryam al-‘Aydarus. While serving as the custodian of the miracle-working grave (keramat) over the past few decades, Wak ‘Ali had developed a larger Sufi shrine on it, covered by a zinc roof held up with wooden pillars. He had indeed done this ‘illegally’, that is, without the permission of the Singapore Land Authority. In April 2010, he was evicted from the Kallang burial ground where the shrine was located. Siti Maryam’s gravesite was cordoned off and then demolished, along with the dozens of other graves that surrounded hers, to make way for a road and a riverfront recreational hub.

Muharram 1395 (January/February 1975). P. Renganathan Nathan (b. 1947) was accepted as a student by his first guru, a Sufi master from the island of Bawean in Java and a sea captain known as Zafir. Nathan was from a Tamil Hindu background. As a sailor, he had spent a decade serving with his captain in the waters and ports of the Malay Archipelago. In November 2017, I first heard Nathan tell how he had been enthralled as a teenager by Zafir’s seafaring ‘ilmu and his ability to negotiate with prophets, Sufi saints and spirits from various religious traditions to ensure safe journeys. Nathan was also in awe of Zafir’s healing ‘ilmu and his spectacular powers of cultivating his ‘corporeous body’ (jasad), which allowed him to remain physically in one part of the world while teleporting himself across the Indian Ocean to assist other sailors (and even air travellers) facing dangerous situations. When he was twenty-three years old, Nathan asked Zafir to impart his ‘ilmu, but the captain insisted that he first devote several years to practising extraordinary ascetic discipline, maintaining dietary restrictions and following the Shari‘a. After these years of asceticism had passed, Zafir initiated Nathan as his student (murid), then guided him along the bomoh path for three years. He advised Nathan to acquire more ‘ilmu from a senior bomoh and Sufi master named Hajji Hussein ‘al-Malabari’ (d. 1999). Hajji Hussein was based in Masai (Johor) and, as his name attests, was of Malayali origin; he belonged to the paideia of bomohs that Zafir belonged to, and such tariqa bonds were fomented through marriage alliances between the bomohs’ families. Nathan remembered Hajji Hussein as being a peripatetic bomoh and Qadiri Sufi master, and especially active in Kerala, Johor, Perak, Melaka, Aceh and East Java in the 1970s and 1980s. At the feet of Hajji Hussein, Nathan attained an education in techniques for disciplining the body and inner self and acquired the ‘ilmu and methods for entering the ‘alam ghaib and communicating with the ever-living Sufi master, ‘Abdul Qadir Jilani. Nathan studied with Hajji Hussein at his Sufi lodge (zawiya) for seven years before returning to his first guru, Zafir, to serve as his lieutenant and as a ‘lesser bomoh’ until 1991. While serving as Zafir’s deputy, Nathan began serving as a semi-professional bomoh and initiated his first batch of students with the permission of his senior gurus and under the boundaries laid by their fatwas. Like many of the pawangs discussed in the preceding chapters, Nathan was thus inducted into a hierarchical network of miracle workers and Sufis. He would remain bound by their instructions and fatwas for the rest of his life, even when speaking to commoners like me. Nathan stated unequivocally that deference to a senior guru, bodily discipline and refinement of his soul and self were processes of an ‘inner alchemy’ (mujahada) that he must undergo throughout his life if he wished to acquire more ‘ilmu and access the ‘alam ghaib.

I chanced upon part of a Jawi epistle in the debris of a graveyard in Singapore in 2010. The epistle was believed to have been written by ‘Abdullah al-‘Aydarus, a descendant of a woman named Siti Maryam al-‘Aydarus (d. 1853). Siti Maryam was widely venerated as a patrilineal descendant of Muhammad (sayyida) and as one of the awliya’. She was also a pawang with a respectable Sufi pedigree; her living devotees debated if she had been a master (shaykha) of the ‘Alawi, Naqshbandi or Qadiri tariqas. Her shrine (Figure 1.1) was located in the centre of a Muslim burial ground of ‘ninety-nine graves’ in a riparian settlement, along the banks of one of the oldest harbours of Singapore. I first visited her shrine three weeks before it was scheduled to be demolished. There I met the shrine’s custodian (khadim, juru kunci) and resident bomoh, a Bugis man named Muhd. ibn Hasan. Amongst believers from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Hadramaut, Muhd. Hasan was more popularly known as Wak ‘Ali Janggut or the ‘Bearded ‘Ali’, which is the name I henceforth follow. Although Wak ‘Ali belonged to a relatively informal network of bomohs, he reported that he had competed with other bomohs regularly and been chosen by Siti Maryam to acquire the ‘ilmu of the pawang and her Sufi predecessors.