Sojourning on Mecca’s Verandah: Place, Temporality, and Islam in an Indonesian Province.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the orientations of Islamic practitioners to local Islamic pasts. Drawing on post-colonial ethnographic and archival sources from the Indonesian province of Aceh, it begins with an account of common narrative practices linking Aceh to the entwined histories of Islam and the Indonesian archipelago. After treating provincial-level narrative practice, the dissertation turns to a historical ethnography of narrative, social, and ritual practices in the regency of Nagan Raya, located on Aceh’s southwest coast. This treatment attends to the multifaceted ways Muslims in Nagan Raya have engaged local Islamic pasts through locally recognized categories of Islamic practitioners, the embodiment of genealogical histories, age-inflected pursuits of Islamic knowledge, and devotional rituals at the graves of powerful mystics who claimed to descend from the Prophet Muhammad. The dissertation argues that attention to the manners in which Muslims engage local Islamic pasts allows one to treat the local not simply as a category involved in struggles over Islamic orthodoxy, but as constitutive of the relationships of Muslims to the broader Islamic tradition. If the category of Islamic practice has tended to be defined by devotional and juridical practices oriented to the period of the Prophet Muhammad, this dissertation argues that narrative and social practices linking Muslims with local Islamic pasts be added to this category as well. Further, examining how Muslims engage local Islamic pasts illustrates how Islamic practitioners sometimes destabilize hierarchies of Islamic centers and peripheries as they position themselves within the Islamic tradition writ large. In the case of post-colonial Aceh, practices oriented to local Islamic pasts additionally have come to mediate the Indonesian nation for Acehnese Muslims in profound ways.

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