Bibliography, a Treasure Trove on Hadhramis in Southeast Asia: Much to Discover

Librarian Kartini Saparudin highlights resources held by the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library as well as the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies library and the Central Library of the National University of Singapore on the Hadhrami Arabs in Southeast Asia.¹

Introduction

Although there has been increasing interest in the Hadhrami communities of Southeast Asia, there has yet to be a single bibliography dedicated to this subject. Therefore, two years ago, a team comprising librarians and library officers from the National Library, Singapore embarked on a project to compile a bibliography on the Hadhrami Arabs in Southeast Asia. Initially, we thought that literature on the subject would be limited but we were in for a surprise when we found a vast, though scattered, literature on the subject. It was then that we saw the value this bibliography could bring to researchers and scholars in the field.

The bibliography was published in conjunction with the National Library exhibition “Rihlah – Arabs in Southeast Asia”. Entitled The Hadhrami Arabs in Southeast Asia with Special Reference to Singapore, it documents resources held by the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library as well as the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies library and the Central Library of the National University of Singapore. This bibliography is useful as a guide for research but it is not exhaustive. Apart from showcasing the resources in these libraries, it aims to be a resource for academics and librarians to further redefine new areas for research and collection development.

This is not the first listing on the Hadhrami Arabs in Indonesia. There was Hisyam Ahmad’s Bibliografi studi masyarakat Arab di Indonesia (1981).² It comprised a six-page listing with key highlights by specialists on Indonesia such as Snouck Hurgronje, J.M. van der Kroef and Anthony Reid. As his bibliography was written in 1981 and limited to Indonesia in scope, a more comprehensive and updated bibliography seemed timely as scholarship on Indonesia has since expanded greatly.

Apart from Hisyam’s list, there are existing bibliographical listings that capture the scope of publishing efforts in the Malay world. Although these bibliographies were not focused on the subject of Hadhramis per se, they reflect the publishing efforts by Hadhramis in the region, because of the dominance of Hadhramis in the publishing industry in the Malay world. The Hadhramis were involved in publishing both Arab-language materials for their communities as well as Malay publications for the wider Malay market. This is demonstrated in William Roff’s Bibliography of Malay and Arabic Periodicals Published in the Straits Settlements and Peninsular Malay States 1876–1941: With An Annotated Union List of Holdings in Malaysia, Singapore and the United Kingdom (1972); and in Patricia Lim’s Singapore, Malaysian and Brunei Newspapers: An International Union List (1992). Roff lists 15 Arabic periodicals from Singapore and Lim lists 13 such titles, also in Singapore.³

In Indonesia, there is Natalie Mobini-Kesheh’s listing of 36 periodical titles. Her article, “The Arab Periodicals of the Netherlands East Indies, 1914–1942”, includes data of known holdings, in a form consistent with Roff’s bibliography.⁴ The bulk of these holdings are found in the Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (National Library of Indonesia). There are 14 titles which are now also accessible on microfilm at the library of the Royal Institute for Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV) in Leiden. Additional holdings at the library of the Leiden State University (LU), and some private collections in Indonesia, are also included, although Mobini-Kesheh is quick to add that the listing is far from exhaustive.

Over the decade, a few researchers are beginning to provide details on the publishing output of the Hadhrami communities in Southeast Asia, going beyond territories defined by different colonial experiences. Kazuhiro Arai’s “Arab” periodicals in the first half of the 20th century in Southeast Asia in the Journal of Sophia Asian Studies⁵ combines both Roff’s and Mobini-Kesheh’s bibliographic listings. He presents a more holistic way of looking at the publishing industry, while reducing the discrepancies found in Roff’s and Mobini-Kesheh’s data. Arai’s list also includes Jawi literature in Southeast Asia, as do Roff’s and Mobini-Kesheh’s.⁶ However, the writer admits that his list requires further checking for researchers’ accessibility.

Like Arai, David Hirsch created a list of Hadhrami-published periodicals in his article, “Hadrami-Arabic Press in Southeast Asia: A Historical Survey”. From visits to contacts and libraries in Southeast Asia, and even the United Kingdom, he lists and acquires Southeast Asian and Arabic vernacular publications of the Hadhrami communities in Singapore, Penang, Johor, Surabaya, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. This list also reflects 28 Hadhrami titles that are currently housed in the University of California’s library.⁷

In addition to bibliographical listings of Hadhrami periodicals, other basic forms of bibliography exist as reference lists of scholarly literature. Some of them are from theses such as Mohammad Redzuan Othman’s The Middle East Influence on the Development of Religious and Political Thought in Malay Society, 1880–1940 (1994). Theses or reference lists from secondary literature serve as a starting point for this bibliography. Rather than merely building upon existing bibliographies or reference lists, this bibliography includes unexplored articles found in dailies, serials and ephemera published in the 19th and 20th centuries that are in our collection.

We would like to address this growing need for an organised bibliography in the midst of growing scholarship on the subject. In addition, this compilation is possibly the first fully annotated bibliography to bring together different subjects on the Hadhrami community in Southeast Asia.

As evidenced by a compendium of secondary literature from conferences,⁸ the creation of new knowledge on this subject matter is increasingly regional. This is due to a long history of shared sociopolitical experiences in Southeast Asia. Tagliacozzo terms this the longue durée,⁹ an expression referring to the length of shared history of the region, as explained by Fernand Braudelian.

Apart from addressing scholarship based on this regional scale, there are practical reasons for the birth of this bibliography. First, many of the previous listings focused on holdings in overseas libraries. None showcased the richness, or limitations, of the libraries of Singapore. Singapore was a historical point of reference for wealthy Hadhrami Arabs as well as home to their publishing efforts. Furthermore, these Singaporean Hadhrami Arabs are interconnected to the wider network of Hadhramis in Southeast Asia.

Another pragmatic reason, as shown in listings by Roff and Mobini-Kesheh, the literature on the Hadhramis forms only a subset of a larger documentation of works on other ethnic groups such as the Malays. Thus, the tendency is to overlook Hadhrami sources within the larger corpus of Malay-Muslim literature. This bibliography is an attempt to highlight what lies hidden within this body of Malay literature and present it meaningfully.

Challenges

One of the key challenges in the compilation of this bibliography was defining the scope of Hadhrami contributions to Southeast Asia within the vast body of Islamic literature in Southeast Asia. For example, the contributions of Hadhramis to Islam in Southeast Asia and Islamisation in the region in the 19th and 20th centuries are not mutually exclusive. As the oeuvres on Islamisation are too broad to be included in this bibliography, the selected Islamic literature of the region is directed at the role Hadhramis play.

The second challenge was defining the subject categories for the bibliography. No amount of planning or conceiving “standard” categories can replace the arduous process of reading and rereading the annotations for a more systematic, effective and meaningful way of grouping the literature on the subject. The parameters we have used to define the Hadhrami community for the purpose of this bibliography include perspectives from both the academic and the community. Such perspectives are merely guidelines to primarily frame and organise the materials selected for this bibliography. For this reason, we hope others find these subject categories useful.

The next challenge is maintaining consistencies in the spelling of Arabic terms, especially Arabic names in English. Apart from the terms used by authors and editors in the titles, we attempted to standardise these names and terms as much as possible. The different names and terms that were derived reflect the varying transliterations used in numerous time periods and various colonial experiences of Southeast Asian places and civilisations during the longue durée. Annotations follow the spellings that authors employed in their writings. For this, we seek our readers’ indulgence in the inconsistencies they may come across.

Bibliographic Survey

The study of Arabs in Southeast Asia is a study of Arab diasporas and communities living across the region. These diasporas are transnational or, for the precolonial era when nation-states had yet to exist, translocal.¹⁰ These Hadhrami diasporas retained their cultural identity based more on kinship and nasab (lineage) which formed the basis of a unique type of ‘asabiyya and less on language. According to Bajunid, the maintenance of this ‘asabiyya varies through three distinctive time periods in Southeast Asia: the precolonial, colonial and the postcolonial. Sources written on the subject also reflect this maintenance of identity, or threats to such displays of identity.¹¹

Arabs in Precolonial Southeast Asia

During the pre-colonial period, Islam played a dominant role in the traditional centres of the Muslim world in Southeast Asia. Arabs were looked upon as custodians of Islam. General recognition of this paved the way for Arabs to intermarry with locals from the upper-class communities.¹² This did not in any way dilute the core Arab identity that was based on patrilineal descent as projected by the existence of Arab clan names at that time. Who these Arabs were, is still open to question.

Although sources from the period acknowledge the presence of Arabs in the region during the precolonial period, most sources do not reflect Arabs of this period as predominantly Hadhramis.

Definition

A Hadhrami Arab is a person who belongs to a sub-grouping within the wider race or ethnic group known as “Arab” and originates from Hadhramaut, Yemen. Hadhramis are known for their entrepreneurial traits and their role in propagating Islam in Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia.¹³ Their mass migration to these areas reportedly occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. Abushouk mentions that many Hadhrami migrants during this time went to Southeast Asia.¹⁴

There is a general consensus among scholars that permanent overseas Hadhrami emigration into Southeast Asia was a fairly recent phenomenon in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, for Yusof A. Talib, who wrote a comprehensive bibliographical essay in French reviewing European writings on Hadhrami emigration, the occurrence of Hadhrami emigration into parts of the Indian Ocean such as the islands of Zanzibar, Madagascar, Comores and the Malay archipelago, was not a recent trend.¹⁵

However, this hypothesis remains to be established because of a lack of statistical data and the impermanence of small-scale Hadhrami movements. In addition, even if small migration occurred before the 19th century, the very scale would not warrant this human movement as a historical event or prominent enough to be recorded in the history books. G.R. Tibbetts posits such human movements as “semipermanent settlements [that] were established by roving merchant populations”.¹⁶

Tibbetts’ own life-long work strengthens this hypothesis as he acknowledges the Arabs’ presence and trade in Southeast Asia was as early as in the 5th and 7th centuries. Gleaning from Arab and Chinese sources documentary evidence proved that there were conclusive trade relations between “South Arabia” and China via the sea route. While Tibbetts establishes the presence of Muslim settlements in Southeast Asia, he remains doubtful that permanent Arab colonies were set up in Southeast Asia for trade or missionary work. Instead, he posits that these were semi-permanent settlements. Without going into the argument of Islamisation of Southeast Asia here, the foundation of Tibbetts’ work, which was largely based on Arabic and Chinese sources, proved that there were other alternatives to European sources. These sources pinpoint Arabs’ existence in Southeast Asia pre–19th century.

Tibbetts’ work on this type of Arabic travel literature was laudable, as it did not dismiss the value of these Arab literary works in illuminating the presence of Arab traders in Southeast Asia. However, these sources would be considered doubtful by Rankean scientific standards. These sources were based on interviews with Arab merchants and sailors who made long voyages between Malaya and ports of the Persian Gulf. These were fanciful tales woven by sailors, while some were even more difficult to verify with other comparable foreign works. Tibbetts concedes that European scholars only began to recognise the Arab contributions to the study of this period of Malayan history in the last hundred years.

The issue of whether these Arabs were Hadhramis still remains. There are scholars who refrain from commenting on this. Ulrike Freitag notes the tendency in “some Hadhrami literature to retrospectively claim a major role in Islamisation, notably of Southeast Asia, which was earlier ascribed to Muslims of Indian and Persian origins”.¹⁷ Furthermore, Abdul Rahman Tang Abdullah states that the Malay Annals does not associate Islamisation in the Malay courts with Hadhrami Arabs but with Arabs who came from Hijaz. He posits that the local royal families had already established their superior royalty prestige from the Hijaz clan,¹⁸ and hence were not invested in such claims that Hadhramis took Islam to the royal courts in Southeast Asia.

Scholars from the other side of the camp, notably of Hadhrami origins, however, further ask who these Arabs, who intermarried and established tarīqa-s in the region before the 19th century, were.¹⁹ This calls into question the so-called historical myth of the wali songo (nine saints of Java), to which the Babad Tanah Jawi attributes the conversion of Java to Islam. Douwe Adolf Rinkes, the Dutch scholar, revisited the burial sites and also re-examined classical Indonesian literature that purportedly pointed to the existence of the nine saints of Java, but he did not come to any concrete conclusions about the identity of these nine saints. This departs from the opinion held by some scholars that some, if not all, of the saints were Hadhrami Arabs.²⁰

Farid Alatas asserts his position from a sociohistorical standpoint that “the question of Hadhrami origin is important not merely for the sake of historical accuracy, but because it laid the foundations for the tarīqa which was firmly established by Hadhramis during the 18th century”.²¹ Alatas demonstrates that Hadhrami sources contain genealogies of the wali songo who lived in Java during the 15th and 16th centuries. Moreover, he argues that many indigenous works portray these “saints” as historical personalities.

The Hadhrami Arabs were not the only groups of people from the Middle East who appeared to enjoy the lucrative trade in Southeast Asia. There were Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Muslim Druze and Oriental Jews who also arrived on the scene.²² Still, the question of whether the Hadhramis continued Islamisation from the work of others since the 19th century remains a source of contention among scholars in Hadhrami studies. In general, scholars tend to agree that Indians, Indians of Arab origin and Arabs who came to the region by India, carried out large-scale Islamisation of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago.²³

The Colonial Era: 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The colonial period was marked by the growth of Hadhrami diasporas in the Malay world, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Steamships plying the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca further facilitated travel and communication. Paradoxically, it was colonial geopolitics that provided the documentation on the history of Hadhramaut and other polities across Southeast Asia. This is certainly true in the 19th and 20th centuries of Hadhrami emigration. More importantly, literature from this period made explicit mention of Hadhrami Arabs in the region.

The Dutch civil servant and scholar of the 19th century, L.W.C. van den Berg, prepared the seminal report “Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l’archipel Indien”.²⁴ It was in French as French was the more popular European language than Dutch. Although the volume was based on interviews of overseas Hadhramis living in Batavia (Jakarta) and travel literature on Hadhramaut, Le Hadhramout provides a vivid description of the geography and history of Hadhramaut as well as the history of the Hadhrami emigration into Southeast Asia. Berg did not visit Hadhramaut when he published the report at the end of 1886 in Batavia, but his report was an important reference for European powers at that time. This report remains as one of the most cited sources on the history of Hadhrami emigration into Southeast Asia for its methodology. This was also a landmark report, being the first time that the Arabs in the Malay Archipelago were identified as Hadhramis. In addition, Berg had the support of reputable Hadhramis based in Batavia, especially the well-known Sayyid ‘Uthmān who, at the time of Berg’s publication, had 38 publications to his name.²⁵

Fifty years after Berg’s report, the British published “A Report on the Social, Economic and Political Conditions of the Hadramawt” in 1936. It was written by William Harold Ingrams, a first political officer in the British colonial service before the three-year British occupation of Hadhramaut. Subsequently, written reports on the socio-economic and political conditions of Hadhramaut were published regularly in the Colonial Reports series by the British Colonial Office.²⁶ Three years after the report, Ingrams toured Malaya, Java and Hyderabad in 1939 and came to Singapore specifically to speak with members of the Hadhrami community. He was there to allay any anti-British sentiments that could have resulted from British intervention in the affairs of Hadhramaut in 1934. Before 1934, the British were only interested in preventing other foreign powers from staking their interests over Hadhramaut.²⁷ This dialogue distinguished Singapore as a site for highly political discussions and negotiations.

R.B. Serjeant’s The Sayyids of Hadramawt is another noteworthy source for its refreshing and original presentation for its time.²⁸ This work was based on an inaugural lecture that was given at the University of London on 5 June 1956. Academic monographs rely heavily on colonial reports, but Serjeant departs from this methodology as he also employs a healthy range of published and unpublished sources of the Sayyid families. What arises from this study of hagiographies, genealogies and sources in the British archives is a convincing and lively tale of the well-organised Sayyid groups. The study also clarifies the relationship between the Sayyid and the non-Sayyids. The understanding of such intra-group psychology and organisation in Hadhramaut helps us understand intragroup dynamics and politics in Indonesia.²⁹

Serjeant’s other work, “Historians and Historiography of Hadramawt”, for the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies presents the author’s knowledge of printed historical literature of Hadhramaut, which he saw during his first tour to Hadhramaut in 1947–48. These include source materials from pre-Islamic inscriptions, documents on the Islamic period, Hadhrami chronicles, genealogical works, historical materials of the 19th century, materials on the Alawi-Irshadi dispute, historical works by Sayyids, social history, works thought to be no longer extant, and historical manuscripts of the Awlāqi territory. Some of these materials reside in Southeast Asia and/or were produced by Hadhramis who were connected with Southeast Asia.³⁰

The Hadhrami elites were active in politics and international relations before the arrival of Europeans. Hadhrami individuals achieved powerful positions in Riau, Melaka, Aceh and Minangkabau.³¹ These elites collaborated with indigenous rulers and acted as intermediaries between them and European colonisers. Because of their connections, the colonial powers feared that the emergence of pan-Islamism would threaten their stake in the region.³² As a result, Arab loyalty to the colonial powers was questioned from time to time and essentially, politically motivated movements were seen as products of Pan-Islamism and, therefore, essentially anticolonialist in nature. Such suspicions motivated a corpus of Orientalist works by Dutch and British officers.³³

The increase of Hadhramis in the region during the colonial period produced a sharp dichotomy between overseas Hadhramis and “pure” Hadhramis living in Hadhramaut. The need to retain their genealogies further reinforced this sense of separateness among the overseas Hadhramis. British and Dutch policies also contributed to this segregation between the Hadhramis and other racial categories. The Dutch policies of segregation divided the Dutch East Indies into three broad racial categories: Europeans, Vreemde Oosterlingen (Foreign Orientals) and natives. The Arabs were part of the Foreign Orientals category. The British had their own categories for the natives. In British Malaya, the context was slightly different from the Dutch East Indies, as the Arabs were not forced to live in special neighbourhoods. What further distinguished Arabs in British Malaya and Arabs in the Dutch East Indies was that Arabs in the Dutch East Indies drew heavily on the idea of Hadhramaut as a source of inspiration with the rise of Indonesia’s national consciousness.³⁴

Postcolonial period

After the emergence of Southeast Asian independent nation-states, the Hadhrami identity remained visible despite a certain level of indigenisation that had taken place over the decades. The Hadhramis were involved in the process of nation-building as they forged a role as citizens of resident states. Due to the legacy of their predecessors and partly because of their colonial heritage, the Arabs retained their ethnic identity through the maintenance of ethnic associations, clan names and intermarriage. The success of assimilation according to Milton Gordon‘s proposed seven variables provides the most comprehensive criteria for discussing the case of Hadhrami diasporas in Southeast Asia. As a result, there is a proliferation of articles on the subject of assimilation of different Arab communities in Southeast Asia, written by scholars as well as Hadramis.

Islam plays a major in the Hadhramis’ assimilation in the communities they reside in. In the past, the Hadhrami elites were looked upon as custodians of Islam. However, after the evolution of the nation-states, Hadhramis shared this important role with other Muslim groups.³⁵ Sources that deal with the establishment of Muslim bodies and Islamic leadership within the state reflect such power dynamics between Muslims within a state.

The status of the Arabs in the communities differs from state to state. In Malaya, and later Malaysia, the Hadhramis are recognised as bumiputeras (indigenous people of Malaysia) and enjoy the same privileges conferred upon Malays under the Federal Constitution. Similarly, in Indonesia and Brunei where Hadhramis still qualify for special privileges under the respective constitutions. In Singapore, however, Singapore Hadhramis maintain their special position in the republic’s social landscape but are not accorded the same rights as the Malays based on its policies of meritocracy, positive discrimination and multiculturalism.³⁶ Several debates were held through the Singapore media in the 1980s that saw Arabs positioning themselves apart from the Malay community in Singapore.³⁷

Nevertheless, the contributions of the Arabs towards their “host societies” have been tremendous. This has paved the way for further assimilation of the Arabs into the different communities. The economic impact of the Arabs on Hadhramaut was once tremendous; Ingrams estimated in 1934 that the total remittances pouring into Hadhramaut from abroad annually was a staggering total of 630,000 pounds sterling (equivalent to SGD 1.3 million). It was said that Hadhramaut became dependent on remittances from the diasporas, particularly from Southeast Asia.³⁸

The impact of the Hadhrami emigration on the introduction and spread of commercial laws and techniques in the diasporas is evident. The setting up of Islamic institutions such as the Shariah court in Southeast Asia, for instance, was partly encouraged by legislative history of colonial powers. The establishment of the Shariah court in Singapore and Malaysia was also greatly influenced by Hadhrami Shafi’i legal texts at a time when other Muslims in the region preferred to be ruled by the Hanafi school of jurispudence. Rajeswary Brown starts in this direction of scholarship,³⁹ although more could be done to examine if influence originated from the Hadhrami Shafi’i legal texts.⁴⁰

Limitations

Due to time constraints, it was not possible to include articles from important primary documents such as the Utusan Melayu and other Malay and English sources published in Singapore. We made the decision to focus on Berita Harian and Arabic newspapers that were published in the 1920s–30s. Utusan Melayu would have had interesting insights for us as it was seen as a deliberate attempt to wrest power from Arab dominance in Malay publishing in Singapore.⁴¹

In addition, we would recommend for future projects to include documents from the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) containing information on the Arabs. This bibliography only includes bibliographical references on oral interviews done by the archives and a reference to Paul Kratoska’s index to British official records.⁴² We also recommend Jane Priestland’s Records of Islam 1908–1972: British documentary sources (Vols. 1–12) which has a plethora of British official documents for areas such as Indonesia and Africa but little on Singapore.⁴³

There are vast collections of Dutch sources which we lacked access to. The Dutch sources chosen reflect the holdings in Singapore libraries and are often primary documents on the subject of Arabs and Islam in Indonesia. It would be good if a bibliography focusing on the Netherlands East Indies or Indonesia could be published in the future.

Journals that indicate statistics on population and demography of Singapore are too numerous to be included in this bibliography.

Apart from the publishing efforts by the Hadhrami communities in Southeast Asia, many of these sources that are available are manuscripts. These can be found in the Al-Ahqaf Library in Tarim, Hadhramaut; Jam’iyyat Khayr Library in Jakarta, Indonesia; and the Arabic legal documents of the Koh Seow Chuan Collection in the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library Singapore. The collection in Singapore comprises powerof-attorney documents, title deeds and wills. As mentioned earlier, many of these sources are still in private hands. This bibliography is a call for private donors to come forth and deposit their valuable copies with us or to provide them on loan for digitisation.

Conclusion

We hope scholars and heritage seekers interested in the Hadhramis in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia can benefit from this bibliography. In time, a more comprehensive, more organised, well-indexed and extensive bibliography may better reflect the true breadth and depth of works written on the subject.

This article was first published in the above mentioned bilbliography.

NOTES