Sufi regional cults in South Asia and Indonesia: Towards a comparative analysis

Abstract

This chapter examines the spread of Sufism from the Near East to South Asia. It then moves on to consider whether Sufism in Indonesia, which has been analysed using vernacular rather than analytic concepts, in fact bears significant similarities in its organizational, ritual and symbolic forms and processes to Sufi practices elsewhere. So too, the chapter argues, the legends and miracles of North African, South Asian and Indonesia holy men and Sufi saints, though set in entirely different historical and ecological contexts, contain remarkable 'deep' mythic structural similarities. In this sense, the chapter argues against Clifford Geertz's comparative analysis of the differences between local Moroccan and Indonesian Islam, that there may be underlying resemblances between the ideological underpinnings of Sufi orders and sacred centers in widely separated geographical localities, which a generate similar symbolic and organizational logics. Taking a fresh look at recent ethnographic studies of Sufi orders and cults in Indonesia, the paper compares them analytically and ethnographically with modes of Sufi thought and religious organization in South Asia, mainly India and Pakistan. In both countries the veneration of saints has come under attack from reformists, but continues to be a living, vital tradition in its reformist modes.