Then and Now: The Keramat Phenomenon in Singapore

Singapore once abounded with keramat that ranged from sturdy structures, such as the Keramat Iskandar Shah* at Fort Canning, to simple roadside shrines, such as the vanished Orang Halus* keramat at the Havelock Road Police Station.¹ Sadly, most of these keramat were demolished over the past half century to make way for development. The most recent of these demolitions, Keramat Siti Mariam in Kallang*, was followed by an exhibition at the National University of Singapore’s museum in 2011, but most of the demolitions were carried out without much notice.

Keramat represent physical markers of Singapore’s history as a maritime trading centre, yet they are also focal points for the communities in which they stood, offering a sanctified space where people could seek solace or ask for dispensation or intervention in personal problems. Maintained by self-appointed caretakers, each keramat has folklore that interweaves historical facts with a syncretic spirituality mirroring the sensibilities of the community.

This paper will offer a brief of analysis of the various types of keramat that were once found across Singapore, including keramat hidup or living keramat, datuk keramat, grave-shrines or shrines that resemble graves, and authentic graves. It concludes by examining how, for instance as vernacular culture, keramat often have fraught relationships with authority, both religious and secular.

What’s a Keramat?

Keramat are sacred objects that possess a special energy known as semangat. These may be natural objects like trees, rocks, termite mounds, whirlpools, waterfalls; living animals; living people; graves of wali or venerated persons; old graves of unknown origin; spirits of animals or holy men; or a combination thereof.

Each keramat is unique, yet different ethnic groups may have varying perspectives on a single keramat. It was common for a keramat to have multiple identities: names, ages, origins, and even genders could change over time.

However, some keramat have maintained relatively stable identities over the decades. It is perhaps not a coincidence that most of these tend to be the keramat that still exist, for instance, Habib Nuh, Iskandar Shah, Radin Mas and Tok Lasam*.

While the keramat tradition is rooted in the Islamic culture of the region, the relationship between keramat and Islam is complex. Some modern Muslims are regular devotees at keramat, while others consider them to be idolatrous. The belief of most Muslims I spoke with falls somewhere between these two polarities.

In the simplest sense, keramat are grounded in a localised version of Islam that incorporates Sufi practices from the Hadhramout (a region in Yemen) filtered through South Asia. Some keramat demonstrate a syncretic blend of Taoist, Hindu and local animistic practices. There is also a tradition of Baba Chinese keramat that invoke spirits with Muslim/Malay names and iconography.

Some keramat are known for special powers such as helping to conceive children or granting winning lottery numbers, and specific offerings, like tying stones to nearby trees or railings, are made at these shrines.

Types of Keramat

Living Keramat
Keramat hidup, literally “living keramat”, are not magicians but rather a type of saint who can perform miraculous feats such as teleportation, mind-reading, fortune-telling and healing the sick. C.O. Blagden mentioned a living keramat in his letter published in Walter Skeat’s seminal (if problematic) 2005 study Malay Magic:

“I remember, in 1895, hearing of a little girl, living with her parents at Sungei Baru in the Alor Gajah district of Malacca, who was reputed to be kramat.² People used to travel considerable distances to visit her, and thereby gain some benefit or other. I was informed that the modus operandi was to swallow a small quantity of her saliva in a cup of water, but I never verified this statement”.³

Within the Islamic tradition, living keramat may be considered as wali, friends of God. Some of these people are known to be pious ascetics, while others merge with a South Asian tradition of “mad fakirs”, holy men who behave outrageously yet whose behaviours are tolerated as acts of the venerable. After death, the graves of such men may become keramat, the wali continuing to meditate and hear requests for intercession after his or her demise. It is said that keramat never die – energy cannot be destroyed.

In Singapore, the most famous keramat hidup is Habib Nuh, the “grand saint of Singapore”.⁴ The biography of this man is vague. At his death in 1866, newspapers referred to him as “an old Kling man” who styled himself as Nabi Noah (Prophet Noah), who died in a house at Tanjong Pagar and was buried on a hill in the nearby cemetery.⁵ In 1880, the owner of this burying ground declared a wakaf (land donated by a pious person and maintained by trustees) in the name of Habib Nuh bin Muhammed Puteh Alhabshi. Later that decade, an elaborate tomb was erected by Syed Mohamed bin Ahmad Alsagoff (1836–1906), a leading figure in the Muslim business world of Singapore and one of the original trustees of the wakaf. This tomb near Palmer Road remains the largest and most popular keramat on the island and attracts visitors from around the Muslim world.

Habib Nuh was not the only keramat hidup found in Singapore, nor were they always Muslims. In 1939, the Sunday Tribune featured an article about a 65-year-old Hindu man considered “Kramat Idop”. He was known as Swamy Kalian, and devotees, both Chinese and Malay, thronged his domicile on Mohamed Sultan Road. The article noted that “[e]verything in the kramat is primitive in the extreme. Three little bamboo huts and a pen about 15 feet long and just broad enough for two people to stand abreast in, are the only semi-permanent structures that this kramat contains”.⁶ After living at this location for 30 years, it was said that one day the Swamy received “a visitation from the deity who watches over the premises during which he was told that from that day he would have the power to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, make the dumb talk, set cripples erect and raise the bedridden.” The deity instructed him not to accept money from his patients – a noble endeavor, although the treatments often involved slapping and hair pulling.⁷

While it is unclear if the deity who appeared to Swamy Kalian was a keramat or a Hindu god, it was believed that people could become keramat hidup through their interaction with a wali, often through a dream in which the saint revealed the location of his tomb. These people then became the caretakers of the wali’s keramat and could even become keramat themselves.⁸

One such person was Oli Chivli Kutti Mamoo, an Indian immigrant to Singapore who opened an unani pharmacy (a form of traditional medicine practiced by South Asian Muslims) on Arab Street in the 1920s. He named the pharmacy Bismillah Wali* (friend of God most merciful), a moniker he took on after a wali named Syed Mustapha revealed in a dream the location of his grave at an isolated bend of Upper Changi Road. Bismillah Wali bought the land in the 1930s and built an elaborate keramat for Syed, then moved his pharmacy to the site. He soon acquired a reputation as a keramat hidup. The sort of miracles attributed to Habib Nuh are lacking in the Bismillah Wali story, which took place well into the era of radio and television: his powers were more attuned to his knowledge of esoteric pharmacology and prognosticating winning lottery numbers.⁹ After he died in 1962, Bismillah Wali was given special permission to be buried beside Syed Mustapha, and both were exhumed and reburied together in one grave at Pusara Abadi cemetery at Chua Chu Kang when the land was cleared for a public housing estate in 1979.

While the designation keramat hidup is usually reserved for humans, animals can also be living keramat, although the distinction could be blurry as there are stories of keramat hidup who could transform into tigers and even lead an entire village of were-tigers.¹⁰ Tigers and crocodiles – big predators who could also function as guardian spirits – were often considered keramat. However, any animal could be especially so if they were albino, deformed (such as being club-footed) or able to escape easily from traps.

Animals in both corporeal and spirit forms are frequently seen near keramat, including a three-legged tiger at Radin Mas, a white tiger at Iskandar Shah, a white crocodile at Jangal Pir, a black cobra at Keramat Maliki, a snake half-brother of the caretaker at Keramat Siti Mariam in Kallang, and a fierce black turkey at Dato Mulia. Keramat are also known for attracting huge flocks of pigeons.

Datuk Keramat
Natural objects charged with semangat are said to have a keramat spirit that dwells within them. Another type of nature spirit in Malay folklore is known as penunggu, a type of unfriendly guardian spirit that should be avoided. Datuk keramat, on the other hand, are Islamic jinn (spirits), and deference must be paid to them. Datuk, the Malay word for grandfather, is also a generalised honorific for an elder male, and the word is used by both Malay and Chinese in Malaya to refer to such spirits (also transliterated as datok, Dato or Tok).

Datuk keramat is closely linked to the Malayan Chinese tradition of datuk kong (拿督公, nadu gong) where localised nature spirits are often represented by icons that resemble older Malay men, although in some cases they appear as other ethnicities and even animals. Kong is the Hokkien word for grandfather, yet there is also a tradition of datuk nenek, or female datuk spirits (nenek is the Malay word for grandmother and more generally for ancestors).

Intriguingly, these spirits are often given names and personalities. Sometimes these figures are semi-mythical ancestors, and in other cases they are the embodied spirits of wali. One current example is Keramat Datuk Syed Sulieman, a datuk kong shrine at Dempsey Hill at the base of a large banyan tree. This is primarily a Chinese shrine that includes an icon of Guanyin, yet devotees are asked not to offer pork or alcohol as the resident spirit is Muslim.¹¹

Sometimes these datuk shrines include a “grave” for the keramat spirit. One such shrine, known as Rumah Miskin (after the nearby Tan Tock Seng charity hospital), developed beneath a jackfruit tree (descriptions vary) within the grounds of the police station, which once stood at the corner of Balestier and Serangoon roads. Descriptions of the keramat shrine at the base of the tree date back to at least 1939, and intriguingly an older name for this area was mang ka-kah, which in Hokkien and Teochew means “jackfruit leg”, or “in the shadow of the jackfruit tree”.¹²

In 1954, this shrine was identified as the grave of one Siti Mariam, the eldest of the Tiga Adik Beradik Keramat, three sisters buried within or beside police stations along Serangoon Road. “The feature of Siti Mariam’s tomb is that a bole of an old jackfruit tree grows out its center and protrudes through the zinc roof. The tree rarely bears fruit but when it does, the fruit is said to be the sweetest one can eat”.¹³ Yet another story has the grave belonging to an Arab wali named Syed Zahid, though this version appears not to have been very popular.

The keramat sisters of Serangoon Road were joined in the 1980s by another named Siti Subaida, whose “grave” located nearby was a large mound of earth, shaped like a frog, also marked as a datuk kong. This expanding keramat family was said to include the datuk keramat at Kusu Island, Syed Abdul Rahman, and the adjacent datuk nenek shrines of his wife and sister (or mother and daughter, depending on the version).

Datuk keramat also inhabited rocks and whirlpools. In the 1920s, R.O. Winstedt noted a Dato Berhala near a whirlpool on the Perak River. While mourning his wife, Embun, who had disappeared after going to bathe near a big rock, the Dato also disappeared. For boatmen, prayer at the keramat rock ensured safe passage through this rough stretch of water, while forgetting to propitiate the datuk could bring disaster.¹⁴

In 1960, the Singapore Free Press reported the existence of Dato Sungei Bangkong at Pasir Panjang. Local Malay and Chinese fishermen believed this “old Malay kramat laut (sea saint)” protected them from storms and granted good luck with lottery numbers. His shrine was in a whirlpool near the mouth of Sungei Bangkong, where fishermen “offered him their gifts and prayers”.¹⁵

While propitiating natural threats, be they whirlpools or crocodiles, seems like an obvious social use of datuk keramat, English doctor and curator and director at Raffles Museum Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill (1911–63) suggested yet another function – as navigation marks. Gibson-Hill was keenly interested in nautical technology and cartography, and his notion has merit.¹⁶ In her study of sacred rocks in Southeast Asia, Monica Janowski points out the frequency of coastal areas with megalithic sites – and to this I would add oddly formed or monumental natural objects – that are said to be keramat graves of princes or princesses. Janowski also notes the gendering of such places, with recumbent stones near water often considered as female.¹⁷

Much like indigenous Australian songlines, assigning stories and identities to natural features creates an oral map useful for navigation, as if to say “this island marks the entrance to the strait but is surrounded by dangerous shallow coral around the tanjong on which the Javanese princess is buried”. One such site was a stone outcropping on the southern coast of Pulau Ubin that resembled a recumbent figure. It was later identified as Keramat Puteri Jawa*, the grave of a princess from Java who fled to Pulau Ubin a hundred years before.

This shrine was also considered datuk by the local Chinese. After the rocky outcropping was blasted away by quarrying works, the shrine was rebuilt and dedicated to an entity identified as a datuk maiden (拿督姑娘, nadu guniang) named Yantikakak. The name Yanti is traditionally associated with pretty girls, while kakak (meaning elder sister) is an honorific for older women of a high status. However, she is better known today as the German Girl, who supposedly fell to her death when her parents were taken prisoner by British soldiers during the First World War. An urn said to hold her mortal remains stands on the altar beside a Buddha and a Barbie doll: a perfect fusion of datuk worship and local folklore.¹⁸

However, not all datuk shrines in Singapore began as keramat nature shrines. Shrines to datuks could be built far from their original keramat. A shrine was built in Siglap for Datok Machap, a keramat near Malacca (in Malaysia) popular with Baba Chinese. Devotees brought earth from the original keramat grave and constructed a grave-shrine. The shrine also included icons for deities named Kramat Ga’ong Sembilan and Datok Siti Esah.¹⁹ These were spirits from the Baba Chinese mambang pantheon that often bore names with Muslim connotations, such as Datok Nenek Semilan Puloh Semilan Lengkong, translated roughly as “old fairy of 99 crescents”. There are 99 holy names for the Prophet, and the crescent motif has long been a symbol of Islam.²⁰

Not far away in Katong in Singapore, a shrine was built for a popular datuk keramat from Pulau Besar, near Malacca. In this instance, the deity was renamed as Sam Poh Neo Neo, and the shrine included an icon for his sister and another related entity named Datuk Bakul, or “datuk of the basket”, which was represented on the altar by an anthropomorphized cloth-covered basket.²¹

Grave-shrines and Pseudo Keramat
In his 2003 study, P.J. Rivers uses the term “pseudo keramat” to describe artificial graves.²² The word “pseudo” suggests a degree of authenticity, with some keramat more or less authentic than others, but who is to judge this quality? As noted, grave shrines may be placed at datuk keramat such as trees or rocks, and observers may go away believing they are either real graves or deliberate fakes. This situation is not new.

In 1845, an anonymous contributor wrote to the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser to complain about the practice of setting up “pretended” keramat. This “knavery” was often perpetuated under the “pious care of Klings” who took advantage of “credulity and superstition” to reap a “handsome subsistence from the offerings of devotees at the [false] tombs”.²³ The writer described a recently erected keramat in the Tanglin District on which the plaster was not yet dried:

“It is in full operation, however: a large flag staff has been erected, and a box for the receptable of donations established. […] The parties in attendance said that the spot had been revealed lately to a just man in a dream by the shade of the deceased saint who had indicated the spot where his bones rested”. ²⁴

The writer concluded indignantly that the “police ought really to look sharp after such imposters”.²⁵

Important information lurks beneath the condescending colonial tone. The mention of “Klings”, or South Asians, in the newspapers is particularly intriguing. This would suggest the grave-shrine was not a datuk keramat but originated within a South Asian tradition of building roadside shrines that resembled graves. This could be done deliberately for an existing saint, or, as in the case of Bismillah Wali discussed earlier, indicate the grave of a saint who had visited a devotee in a dream.

As Torsten Tschacher has shown, “saint-veneration was already an established practice among the various ethnic groups that came to form Singapore’s Muslim community”, and further, that “in contrast to the more rural areas of the Malay world, Singaporean saint veneration developed in a truly transnational context, and it reflects this context through the large number of non-Malay Muslims that came to be venerated as saints on the island”.²⁶

An example of this phenomenon is the elaborate grave-shrine built at Telok Ayer Street (which at the time faced the sea) by Chulia (Tamil-Muslim) traders for the saint Shah al-Hamid of Nagore between 1828 and 1830. A national monument since 1974, this shrine, called Nagore Dargah, was considered a keramat by some devotees before the grave-shrine was revamped as a museum.²⁷

There were other less elaborate grave-shrines, built not by prosperous South Asian traders but rather by convicts employed in building infrastructure or by Bengali troops stationed here. The keramat at the 8th milestone on Bukit Timah Road* likely began as such a shrine. South Asian convict labour was used to build Bukit Timah Road in the early 1800s, and residential quarters specially constructed for convicts appeared in an 1844 map near modern Bukit Panjang, not far from the keramat site.²⁸ S. Ramachandra, who visited the site as early as 1919, believed the keramat “existed before Bukit Timah Road was completed in 1848”.²⁹

Dedicated to a saint named Habib Ismail, it was also known as “Nasoor”, “Nagol” and “Nagoor”, connecting it to Shah al-Hamid of Nagore. One of the earliest Islamic devotional poems written in Tamil in Singapore, dating from 1886, eulogises a Shaykh Isma’il whose keramat grave can be found on Pulau Besar in Malaysia.³⁰ This name was also associated with a keramat at Ann Siang Hill* that was South Asian in form.

There was also a large Hindu following at this shrine. A photo essay in the Malayan Saturday Post in 1928 marvelled at Hindu workers walking all the way from the Tanjong Pagar docks to visit a “Mohamedan shrine”.³¹ The shrine remained popular with Hindus until its exhumation and relocation to Pusara Abadi cemetery in 1992.

Another vanished keramat that was likely built by either convicts or soldiers was found on a slope overlooking Pulau Saigon, which was an island in the Singapore River near present day Clemenceau Bridge, near a government gunpowder magazine. The keramat first appeared on a map dated 1842, making it one of the oldest on historical record. In 1939, it was named as the keramat of Jangal Pir.³² The 1954 Singapore Street Directory described the keramat as “Indian in form”. Pir is the South Asian word for a Sufi spiritual guide, and there was shrine to a Jangal Pir in Boalkhali, Bangladesh in 1725.³³ Yet this long-lived keramat took on other identities. It was the grave of Tukang Jala, “master fisherman” in Malay (jala is type of fishing net), an apt name given its proximity to the river. Intriguingly, both names were in use when the keramat was demolished to make way for public housing in the early 1970s.

Back in 1845, the writer’s concern was that caretakers built “pretend” keramat graves (“pseudo” in Rivers’s terminology) to profit from superstition, but there are other reasons for building such keramat. The most recent keramat in Singapore can be found in a carpark off Turf Club Road. Said to be the grave of an unnamed holy woman who died in the 16th century, it only appeared in the mid-2010s.³⁴ It has since grown considerably and now includes electric lights and a refrigerator. The caretaker of this site, a young woman who calls herself Putri, told the Urban Explorers of Singapore that after a groundskeeper at the Turf Club told her about the grave, she took it upon herself to build the keramat, explaining that after a difficult youth, she was dedicating her life to Islam.³⁵

For the writer in 1845, this would have been clearly a “pretend” keramat, merely a cynical cash grab. However, for the caretaker who claims a closer relationship with Islam through her devoted work, the spirituality of the keramat she built is both vital and valid.

Graves
Grave keramat come in several varieties: graves of founders; graves of wali, pious mystics, or descendants of the Prophet; old graves of unknown origin; and graves associated with stories of a mythical past. The distinctions between them can be slippery, as is the nomenclature.

Signage at both keramat Habib Nuh and Radin Mas refer to the graves as makam. From the Arabic maqam, the word means the grave of a holy or respected person. The nuance would seem to be that makam has less of an occult connotation than keramat and therefore seems more suitably Islamic.

Whether a grave is a makam or a keramat also depends on the community. As offerings and practices of visiting a makam are often the same as those at a keramat, the two may be easily confused by outside observers. For example, the grave of Hajjah Fatimah (c.1754–c.1852?) in the compound of the mosque named after her is labelled as keramat in a 1979 study.³⁶ Some of the graves in the old royal cemetery at Jalan Kubor may be considered keramat, depending on whom you ask.³⁷

The Chinese sometimes follow the practice of preserving the graves of Malay founders. The grave of Panglima Prang, the founder of a kampung on a hillside overlooking the Singapore River in the earliest days of the settlement, was preserved when the site was turned into a sprawling estate. The grave site was also named Panglima Prang in the mid-1800s by businessman Tan Kim Seng (1805–64). A large mango tree grew from the middle of the grave site, which had its own Malay caretaker, and “none but Malays” were allowed to enter it. “At certain times of the year, the residents of the imposing Chinese mansion in this compound ask their Malay drivers to prepare suitable food, and this is placed in the enclosure as an offering to the spirits of the place”.³⁸ The graves were removed when the estate was developed for a condominium in the early 1980s.

Graves of wali and pious men can also become keramat. The grave of the first imam of Sultan’s Mosque in Kampong Glam, Fakeh Haji Abul Jalil, was located in a courtyard behind a row of shophouses on Arab Street. It was once regarded as historically important: the first Master Plan for Singapore in 1958 listed it as a potential historic monument along with several other keramat. However, it was not granted this status and was exhumed and demolished around 1980 to make way for the Golden Landmark hotel and retail complex. Today, Keramat Fakeh Haji Abul Jalil is nearly forgotten and not mentioned in popular histories of Kampong Glam.

In contrast to the graves of historically verifiable persons such as Fakeh Haji Abul Jalil, the kubor panjang, or “long grave” phenomenon is somewhat more variegated. Said to be the resting place of extremely pious persons, these tombs lengthen each year due to the spiritual strength of the interred.³⁹ There were two such graves documented in Singapore, one at Ringwood Road* in Katong and the other at Siang Lim Park* in Geylang. Each was over 12 m long. The identities of both were unstable, with names, ages, ethnicities and genders changing frequently over the decades. At one point, they were said to be husband and wife. Such rapid shifts in identity suggest these kubor panjang may have been the graves of long-forgotten founders of settlements in the marshy ground around Kallang Basin. As Mohammad Zain bin Mahmood pointed out in his groundbreaking 1959 study, older unnamed graves discovered in remote places that inspire awe can become keramat.⁴⁰ The implication here is that their original identities are forgotten and thus present a tabula rasa for new stories.

This would appear to be the situation at the most intriguing of the extant keramat in Singapore, the grave of Radin Mas Ayu at Telok Blangah. The name Bukit Radin Mas first appeared on maps from the 1880s, after the Temenggong Abu Bakar (1833–95) built a large bungalow just down the slope with that name. “Radin” is the title used to denote Javanese royalty, but it is also a type of padi rice that ripens quickly, that is, turns “golden” (mas, from emas, or gold). There was a cemetery on this hill, and in the early 1930s, after the British cut a road through it, a sacred spring appeared nearby.

In the mid-1930s, a bangsawan (Malay opera) that used elements of the popular Malay epic Hang Tuah was produced. Set in the 15th century, the story follows a princess named Radin Mas Ayu who is taken from Kediri (Java) to Malacca. By the end of the 1930s, a prominent grave in the cemetery at Bukit Radin Mas was said to be the keramat grave of this same princess, an identity it maintains to this day. The bangsawan story and the legend of the grave were frequently featured in Malay-language media for decades, with book, film and comic adaptations appearing regularly.

The keramat at Radin Mas still generates passionate arguments, with factions forming around individuals such as the long-serving caretaker, heritage enthusiasts and online commentators. The question of whether there is a Javanese princess buried on Mount Faber seems less important than why the identity of the grave creates such foment. It points to the important role played by keramat in forming a Singaporean-Malay identity, distinct from that of the peninsula. Many of the keramat here are said to be the graves of pious people who came before the British (and in some cases, before Islam arrived). Such stories reify ethno-religious pride – a claim to the land of the forefathers that posits Malays as the authentic people and Islam as the authentic religion and show how easily social traditions can take on a political hue.

Keramat and Authority

On 21 January 1823, Sir Samford Raffles wrote a letter to William Marsden from Government House, atop what is now Fort Canning Hill, describing how if he were to die there, he would pleasurably mingle his bones with those of the “Malay Kings” whose tombs he believed were located on the hill.⁴¹

Less than a month later, on 10 February 1823, Raffles sent a complaint to William Farquhar (Singapore’s first British Resident), with whom he had a notoriously frosty relationship, in which he railed that the Chinese were setting off fireworks “at the Kramat you have allowed to be erected”. The Lieutenant Governor regretted “exceedingly that any such Establishment should have been permitted” by Farquhar, whom he trusted “would see the propriety of causing the discontinuance of the Nuisance”.⁴²

Given Raffles’s comments about mingling his bones with those of long-dead Malay royalty, this response to the keramat that Farquhar had allowed to be erected is particularly stark. The keramat of Iskandar Shah represented a “nuisance” to Raffles’s idea of colonial order in which colourful expressions of native religions had no place near edifices of British state erected on the grounds of ancient nobility.

Despite Raffles’s objections, the British tended to leave keramat alone during the next century and a half of their dominion, even if they were inconveniently placed. The extant and little-known keramat grave inside what is now Toll Offshore Petroleum Services in Loyang* is an example: the area was originally developed as a naval defense base in the 1920s, where the keramat sat in the middle of the junction of the dock and the main roads. It has been preserved since the 1960s largely because it sits within private property.

Most keramat tracked in my study were demolished during Singapore’s rapid and massive development following independence. The government’s position is best articulated by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew himself. Explaining to the Sikh community why a grave-shrine in the grounds of the General Hospital (the former Sepoy Lines) had to be removed, Lee explained: “[Gamblers] go to a tree and the word spreads around that if you go and pray by that tree and offer penance you will be a rich man… I am not against anybody wanting to seek solace from spiritual sources. If anyone can get spiritual comfort or psychological release by either striking the four-digit numbers or praying to the Infinite, I say good luck to him. But it is not possible to govern this place with its teeming population without taking some firm and even unpleasant measures”.⁴³

Lee’s words echo those of the 1845 writer complaining about the “knavery” of “pretended” keramat. All three voices – Raffles, the complainer and Lee – considered keramat as a “nuisance” that stood in the way of progress and development: go they must no matter how “unpleasant” for the community.

This is a purely administrative view – pragmatic, secular and ultimately cynical. The current religious view of keramat as articulated by Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS) is more nuanced. In a strict view, keramat are shrik, idolatrous polytheism that is forbidden.⁴⁴ However, unlike in neighbouring Malaysia, where state religious organisations have been directly involved in the demolition of keramat because they are shrik, in Singapore, MUIS seems content, for now, to post signs in English and Malay (but not Tamil) at keramat that explain how Muslims should behave in order to avoid idolatry.

These signs are announced as irsyad, religious guidance issued by the Office of the Mufti of Singapore, and range from advice such as “visitors are strongly discouraged to express sadness by wailing hysterically in a loud voice as this goes against the etiquette of visiting graves” to outright admonishment: “Each and every Muslim must remember that the deceased are normal beings and servants of Allah. Thus, actions which have no basis in Islam or resemble worship of entities besides Allah s.w.t. are prohibited.”

Proscribed activities include circumambulating the grave or stroking its soil, any form of supplication directed to the deceased, going into a trance or reciting mantras, and making offerings of food, drinks or flowers to the spirit of the deceased.⁴⁵ Such prohibitions effectively render the keramat as non-keramat without physically demolishing it. From personal observation, I can say devotees at these shrines simply ignore these irsyad. So where does this leave the handful of keramat extant in Singapore today?

Their best chance of survival lies in their role as a heritage objects, as exemplified by Keramat Iskandar Shah in Fort Canning Park. While not a national monument, a sign beside the keramat indicates that it is a “designated Singapore historical site”, an ambiguous status that would seem to allow official rules to apply. The sign also prohibits religious activities, while not granting any official protection. In other words, the keramat on Fort Canning Hill is considered as an outdoor museum piece washed clean of local faith.

Yet, the keramat remains an active shrine, a characteristic that sets it at odds with the official rhetoric of both MUIS and the state-led heritage industry, which seeks to preserve it as a historic point of interest. This paradoxical fate is worth remembering as discussion of preserving other keramat as heritage sites gains traction.

Conclusion

The keramat of Singapore now face a second vanishing as memories of them fade. The studies that have appeared over the decades were often recorded in ephemeral media such as newspapers, unpublished fieldnotes or dissertations, academic exercises or conference proceedings, with only a few published journal articles or book chapters. My in-depth study of keramat provides a foundation for further research into the phenomenon for academic studies and urban planning policy. However, the study of social use of keramat across Singapore and the region, addressing questions such as the patterns of use and exclusivity of devotees from various ethno-social groups, are beyond the scope of this study.

Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore by William Gibson was published by Routledge as part of their Contemporary Southeast Asia series in 2024. This work is an outcome of Gibson’s 2022 Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship at the National Library of Singapore.

William L. Gibson is an author and researcher based in Southeast Asia since 2005. A former Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow of the National Library Singapore, his most recent book is Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore (2024), published by Routledge as part of their Contemporary Southeast Asia series. His book Alfred Raquez and the French Experience of the Far East, 1898–1906 (2021) was published by Routledge as part of its Studies in the Modern History of Asia series. Gibson’s articles have appeared in Signal to Noise , PopMatters.com, The Mekong Review , Archipel , History and Anthropology , the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient and BiblioAsia , among others. He is also behind a trilogy of hard-boiled crime novels set in 1890s Singapore, the Detective Hawksworth series, published by Monsoon Books.

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