Southeast Asia Spotlight | Miracles and Material Life

A new book on Southeast Asia: Miracles and Material Life
Teren Sevea, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Harvard Divinity School

Teren Sevea’s new book is about the connections between miracles, Islamic miracle workers and material life. To be more precise, it is about historical societies and economies where the production and extraction of natural resources, and the use of technology, were intertwined with the charismatic religious powers of miracle workers and spirit mediums of the Malay world. Such miracle workers have often been represented as mystical ‘magicians’ but this book shows these men and women were prominent agents of economic, environmental, and religious worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Sevea analyses documents that are informative about how many of these miracle workers cleared forests, produced rice, trapped elephants, mined for tin and gold, or mediated guns and bullets, paying attention to how these aspects of material life were linked to the Unseen.

Sevea had grown up in a universe of miracle workers in Southeast Asian cities. He speculates that it was growing up in such a universe that had subconsciously prevented him from ‘studying these men and women as a subject of academic inquiry’ for a period of time before working on Miracles and Material Life. He describes his initial education about the spirit world and miracle workers coming from stories about miracle workers who had been ‘employed to exorcise malignant spirits’ and miracle workers who ‘received gifts and sacrificial animals to cure drug addiction, or to get their clients acquitted in legal proceedings, or to render auguries’ and ‘prophecies of winning lottery numbers’. The miracle workers he first encountered healed with spirit mediation, recipes and rituals instead of biomedicine that was ‘perceived to be impersonal and driven by deductions that physicians made of visible symptoms’. Sevea notes that he had been ‘bracketing bomohs off as childhood curiosity’ for decades before recognizing the need to write a history of miracles and Islamic miracle workers.

Although Sevea studied nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Malay manuscripts as a scholar of Islam in this book, he highlights that he could not have accessed the deep esoteric content of these texts without the guidance of twenty-first century miracle workers from diverse ethnic origins known as pawangs, bomohs and gurus. He sat with dozens of these men and women and at times witnessed the places in which he had sat with miracle workers being trampled by bulldozers. He ruminates on some of the shrines, graveyards, sacred trees and small libraries that were being removed as he was writing this book and how he occasionally shuttled between ruins and archives to conduct research. Sevea remains indebted to the miracle workers he sat with, who encouraged him to be more creative as a scholar of Islam, of ‘ruins’ and textual traditions, to engage the complexity of oft-used categories including ‘Sufism’. He recounts this experience in the following terms:

“Years of sitting with living pawangs, bomohs and gurus make me disavow any pretensions of being an omniscient observer. It has been humbling to sit with men and women who have devoted anywhere between two and seven decades of their lives towards a path of acquiring knowledge and disciplining their bodies to be able to function as Islamic miracle workers. While the manuscripts I study in this book and the pawangs’ narratives regularly portray miracle workers as friends of God (awliya’) who had been preordained with elite status and miraculous powers at the moment of Creation, bomohs dedicated years to attaining ‘ilmu [esoteric knowledge]. They studied at the feet of masters and senior bomohs, partook in extraordinary ascetic rites, prolonged fasting, meditation and abstinence, and indulged in regular practices of self-mortification to refine their bodies and souls. […] While the bomohs and their lieutenants were content to meet with me as an academic historian, they always remained conscious of what they considered my flaws, including my tendency to ask overly academic questions while missing pertinent spiritual matters, […], and finally my abject failure to sense the spirits and pawangs of the past, even though I sat through many seances and observed many rituals. My scepticism seems to have prevented me from seeing, smelling and touching spirits and only allowed me to hear them speak when they possessed the bodies of living humans. […] Bomohs also taught me sophisticated norms of comportment (adab) for sitting with Islamic miracle workers and reading the textual traditions of historical pawangs. Although their extraordinarily meticulous performances of adab varied across different groups of bomohs, they all agreed that they followed the codes of social etiquette, Islamic laws and taboos used by pawangs to correct and regulate the behaviours of farmers, miners and mineworkers, mahouts, hunters and shooters in the past. In the end, the bomohs I sat with provided me with an education in how the material, visible realm was connected to imagined, unseen, non-material realms in all religious systems. I was methodically introduced to how individuals, animals, miracles, spirits, technologies and frontier traditions of the Malay world and Java are connected to larger oceanic and spiritual networks, and how Sufi ideals were and remain embedded in pawang practices. Every bomoh I listened to emphasised that the path of being a bomoh was best represented by the Arabic verbal noun, tasawwuf (path of ‘making oneself into a Sufi’). All bomohs (including a non-Muslim one) stressed that they had to adhere to Shari‘a as the first step to perform as a bomoh and had been initiated into Sufi tariqas through the hands of senior bomohs. The bomohs invoked the term, tasawwuf, to legitimise their individual and groups’ ways of being Islamic and Sufi and to chastise the practices of rivals as deviations from Sufism. In writing this book, I was reminded that it is futile to conceive of a pawang or Sufi fraternity. Pawangs and Sufis of the past and the present have always been […] rivals and have disagreed with each other over definitions of Sufism. They have debated each other’s opinions on the Islamic legitimacy of amulets, talismans, seances, trances, invocations of Hindu divinities, prophecies, lotteries, offerings to spirits and rituals of repeating religious formulae loudly. Although Miracles and Material Life focusses on a certain place and time in history, the pawangs I encountered regularly reminded me that any such study of the past could serve as a broader reflection on Islamic cosmology, ontology and Sufism and serve as a window into understanding contemporary Islamic society.”

Sevea’s Miracles and Material Life might be focused on the Malay world, but it is not disconnected from American settings. This is apparent in his discussion of miracle workers mediating American guns as much as in the reflections with which he concludes:

“Although I was primarily preoccupied with textual analysis, my fieldwork led me to discover widespread paideias of bomohs across the Indian Ocean and beyond. For example, while inquiring about Sufi networks in Philadelphia in September 2017, I met three self-professed bomohs of African American origin who had lived in Pahang, Perak and Aceh. They stayed in zawiyas and were initiated into branches of the Qadiri and Naqshbandi tariqas, where they acquired the ‘ilmu of healing and mediating American guns and bullets while practising Malay-Islamic martial arts (silat). These bomohs had returned to the United States to initiate other Muslim and non-Muslim devotees into their tariqas and to serve as semi-professional spirit mediums, healers and silat gurus. They described their return as being in line with other pawangs of the past who healed societies plagued by epidemics and calamities. In their words, they had returned at an opportune time, just when they were needed to restore the spiritual and material health of a society suffering from a new pathology (penyakit): ‘Trump’. Like all the pawangs I met, these American bomohs reminded me that all aspects of the visible world were connected to the unseen. Material life, economic production, extraction of resources, uses of technology, inclement weather and even political elections (e.g. Brexit, Trump) were intertwined with the ‘ilmu’ and charismatic religious authority of miracle workers.”