A Trust from the Ancestors: Islamic Ethics and Local Tradition in a Syncretistic Ritual in East-Central Sulawesi

Die Welt des Islams (2021) 1-27 A Trust from the Ancestors: Islamic Ethics and Local Tradition in a Syncretistic Ritual in East-Central Sulawesi Zoltan Szombathy Department of Arabic, Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem, Budapest, Hungary [email protected] Abstract Molabot Tumpe is a unique traditional ritual that binds together Batui and Banggai, two geographically distant Muslim communities of East-Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The ritual consists of an annual offering of maleo bird eggs by the inhabitants of Batui to the élite of the old Banggai sultanate. Originating in tribute-giving ceremonies and ancestral cults, the purpose of the ritual is now understood and explained in thoroughly Islamised ethical terms. However, both the general purpose and the precise details of the ritual have been contested by environmentalists, by part of the traditional local élite, and by proponents of Islamic reformism, the last of whom question the accepted interpretation of the ritual’s purpose, as well as its moral foundations, and object to crucial elements of the ceremonies, especially the idea of possession by ancestral spirits. Besides giving an ethnographic description of the ritual, the article addresses the general issue of religious syncretism in Islam. Keywords Islamic ritual – Indonesia – Sulawesi – Banggai sultanate – religious syncretism – ancestral spirits Religious syncretism in Islam tends to be regarded, whether explicitly or implicitly, as a distinct phase in the process of Islamisation. A related assump- tion seems to be that, owing to increasing contacts with the metropolitan centres of Islamic civilisation and increasing familiarity with the authoritative © Zoltan Szombathy, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15700607-61020004 Downloaded from Brill.com10/08/2021 07:55:58AM This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 License. via free access 2 szombathy sources of Islamic law and ethics, syncretistic religious traditions are destined to be gradually displaced by more normative (i.e. text-oriented) forms of relig- iosity and eventually by contemporary reformist versions of Islam. The change is thus seen as unidirectional, moving towards greater conformity with normative, text-oriented religious praxis, and syncretism is implicitly understood as resulting from inadequate knowledge of the textual tradition of Islam.1 To be sure, the existence of such a textual tradition is an extremely impor- tant factor, which must alert us to the particular problems attendant upon the study of complex societies. Even the remotest rural Muslim communities are not entirely isolated from the wider world of Islam, and studying the links to the centuries-old Islamic “grand tradition” must necessarily form part of the research on local culture and religious life, great though the geographical dis- tance from the traditional centres of Islamic civilisation might be.2 Precisely how the “grand tradition” is related to the indigenous elements within a local 1 This model of the development of Islamisation is more often than not assumed rather than clearly stated, but a sample of explicit expositions of the model will better serve to illustrate the tendency. Perhaps the most articulate statement of it is a seminal article by Humphrey J. Fisher, “Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa” Africa 43:1 (1973), 27–40, esp. 31–38, which proposes a model of conversion to Islam through three consecutive stages, which he calls “quarantine”, “mixing”, and “reform” respectively, the whole sequence constituting a general “progression […] towards a purer faith.” Fisher responded to criticism in a later article, “The Juggernaut’s Apologia: Conversion to Islam in Black Africa”, Africa 55:2 (1985), 153–73, insisting on the cumulative and unidirectional nature of Islamisation that leads to the shrivelling of local religious practices and beliefs. Another famous expert on African Islam, Nehemia Levtzion, speaks of “a movement of individuals and groups, departing from any form of traditional religion before its contact with Islam and following a line which ends with normative Islam”; see “Patterns of Islamization in West Africa”, in Conversion to Islam, ed. N. Levtzion (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 207–16, esp. his concluding paragraph. Regarding Southeast Asian Islam in particular, the same assumptions are manifest in Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 65–74, where he describes “the general movement toward an Islam of the book rather than of the trance or the miracle [i.e. traditional syncretic forms of Islam]”, to a large extent propelled by influences from the Arabian Peninsula. Elsewhere, too, Geertz evokes “the drift towards orthodoxy”, a trend that he clearly links to increasing communication with the Middle East. See Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 125. Christian Pelras, “Religion, Tradition, and the Dynamics of Islamization in South Sulawesi”, Indonesia 57 (1993), 133–54, contends that the process of Islamisation consists of two characteristic phases: “first, the coming of Islam and its final official acceptance; and then, the long struggle, lasting often until now, for its complete implementation” (p. 134). Accordingly, he characterises the numerous pre-Islamic elements in Bugis and Makassarese culture as vestiges that have “managed to survive” (p. 152). 2 Philip Carl Salzman, “The Study of ‘Complex Society’ in the Middle East: A Review Essay”, IJMES 9 (1978), 539–57. 10.1163/15700607-61020004 | Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com10/08/2021 (2021) 1-27 07:55:58AM via free access a trust from the ancestors 3 context is a crucial yet complicated aspect of all research on Muslim societies. The subject can be studied from various perspectives. One unfortunate yet not uncommon option seems to have been completely oblivious to the presence of Islam: as Thomas Gibson notes, anthropological studies of Indonesian societies in particular show a dismal tendency of “editing out the Islamic bits”.3 When choosing not to be blind to the pervasive impact of Islam, the researcher may grapple with the issue in many fruitful ways. One can focus on the role that written, normative texts derived from the “grand tradition” play in a local context,4 or emphasise the process of a selective adoption of traits from the Islamic cultural repertoire by a local community,5 or stress the historical con- tingencies of the socioeconomic and political processes informing the local practice of Islam,6 or seek to identify distinct local varieties of Islamic belief and praxis7 – although going so far as to speak of “islams” in the plural8 is perhaps ill-advised, – or again one can adopt the widespread emic dichotomy of custom versus religion as the framework of analysis.9 While I recognise the merits of all these approaches, I find none of them to be adequate for the case at hand, a syncretistic ritual in which the very purpose of “tradition” is understood in terms of Islamic ethics. The point is not that Islamic concepts and local traditions of pre-Islamic origin may blend; that is 3 Thomas Gibson, “Islam and the Spirit Cults in New Order Indonesia: Global Flows vs. Local Knowledge”, Indonesia 69 (2000), 41–70, esp. 43, 53–59. 4 Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley etc.: University of California Press 1993). 5 Leif O. Manger, From the Mountains to the Plains: The Integration of the Lafofa Nuba into Sudanese Society (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1994). 6 Robert W. Hefner, “Islamising Java? Religion and Politics in Rural East Java”, Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987), 533–54. 7 Andrew Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and most famously Geertz, The Religion of Java. 8 Abdul-Hamid el-Zein, “Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam”, Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (1977), 227–54. 9 Ladislav Holy, Religion and Custom in a Muslim Society: The Berti of Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In Indonesia, the distinction between adat (custom) and agama (religion) is far from being a clear-cut matter. Although a proper discussion of this issue would go beyond the scope of this essay, it must be noted that these terms tend to be used in malleable, and often manipulative, ways that serve and hide various political and cultural agendas. See for instance Jane Monnig Atkinson, “Religions in Dialogue: The Construction of an Indonesian Minority Religion”, American Ethnologist 10 (1983), 684–96; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Marginality in an Out-of- the Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 29–31, 152–53; and also see Norshahril Saat, “Islamising Malayness: Ulama discourse and authority in contemporary Malaysia.” Contemporary Islam 6 (2012), 135–53, esp. 142–45 and Farouk Yahya, Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016), 31–33 on Malaysia. Die Welt des Islams (2021) 1-27 | 10.1163/15700607-61020004Downloaded from Brill.com10/08/2021 07:55:58AM via free access 4 szombathy true but trivial. Instead, Islam – often treated as a supposedly “foreign” super- stratum over indigenous tradition – can in fact provide most of the vocabulary for elucidating local tradition and even for identifying

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