Interlinear Malay Islamic Texts and the Rethinking of Religion as an Anthropological Category: Reading Sayr al-Salikin in Twenty-First- Century Aceh

• In Event: Reading between the Lines: Islamic Interlinear Translation in Indonesia

Abstract

How might the ethnographic treatment of interlineal Islamic translations from Arabic to Malay help scholars rethink the history of religion as an anthropological category? This paper takes this question as its focus, turning to ethnographic research among Acehnese villagers studying the eighteenth-century Sayr al-Salikin by ‘Abd al-Samad al-Falimbani. The paper pays special attention to the ways in which villagers studying this text encounter and interpret the Sanskrit-derived term agama in manners that mediate their recognition of religious difference.

Scholars have widely come to understand “religion” as a post-Enlightenment category, one that gained purchase outside of the Euro-American world, and at times within it, through the colonial encounter. In postcolonial Indonesia, post-Enlightenment notions of religion as parallel and discrete entities concerned with belief and symbolic ritual have been closely associated with the term agama, deployed by the state to indicate a limited number of world religions.

For Acehnese Muslims studying interlineal Arabic to Malay translations, a second, pre-Enlightenment genealogy for agama emerges. This is one in which agama translates the Arabic dīn, a path to salvation through proper ritual and ethical practice. This paper examines how both notions of agama—that is, as post-Enlightenment religion and as dīn—continue to manifest in contemporary social and religious practice. It illustrates that notions predating the post-Enlightenment category of religion continue to congeal within terms such as agama that have been pressed into representing religion in postcolonial contexts, and asks how such terms undergo on-going transformations as a result of histories of translation.

Author

• Daniel Birchok, Vanderbilt University