Dreamwork, Art Worlds and Miracles in Malaysia

World Art

ISSN: 2150-0894 (Print) 2150-0908 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwor20

Dreamwork, art worlds and miracles in Malaysia

D.S. Farrer

To cite this article: D.S. Farrer (2020): Dreamwork, art worlds and miracles in Malaysia, World Art, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2020.1725103 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2020.1725103

Published online: 24 Feb 2020.

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Dreamwork, art worlds and miracles in Malaysia D.S. Farrer *

Palau Community College, Koror, Palau

Dreamwork recorded in the Malay art world questions the occult power of artistic agency. As I did participant observation in Malaysia and Singapore, the artist Mohammad Din Mohammad divulged knowledge of Sufi lore, shamanic healing, and Malay martial arts (silat). On a quest to comprehend, discover, create and articulate esoteric skills, secret knowledge and mysterious artifacts, the artist produced fine art paintings, talismanic jewelry and assemblage sculptures. These were to be used in psychic defence, dream incubation, for inspiration, and as medicine. A field site discussion as to whether a reported vision of a mysterious shadow warrior is a true, false, or meaningless dream forms the kernel of a dreamwork dialogue regarding miraculous agency. The artwork raises questions pertaining to sorcery, Islam, agency, and power in Southeast Asia, revealing a political battle of Sufi versus Wahhabi notions in the constitution of Malay modernity. Keywords: agency; art worlds; dreamwork; healing; miracles; power

Her Royal Highness Tengku Aminah, gallery owner, art collector, dealer, and titled descendent of Malay royal lineage recounted her dream to the artist-in-residence, Mohammad Din Mohammad (1955–2007, henceforth ‘Mhd Din’) that I recorded during fieldwork in 2003.1 With a shudder Aminah said that during her dream (mimpi), or midnight vision, she heard scraping noises and feared somebody was trying to break in through the window of her private apartment.2 To her amazement the pro- tective figure of a shadow warrior (Panglima Hitam, lit. ‘black comman- der’) leapt down from one of the two paintings mounted on the wall by either side of her bed (Figure 1).3 The next day Aminah narrated the dream to Mhd Din, and her husband, Ali, which I recorded in my role as participant observer. Malaysia is a conservative, majority Malay Muslim society where figurative representation, tattoos, artistic, sculptural, and photographic depictions of human and animal forms are regarded as occult (ghaib) and forbidden (haram). To discuss art, dreams, and miracles in an Islamic context is to question their power. Art (seni), dreams,

*Email: [email protected]

Figure 1. ‘Silat’. Acrylic on canvas, 92 × 123 cm, 1999. and miracles are entwined in the Malay art world, and their analysis engages a broad dialogue as to what they are (ontology), where they are from (nature/God), and how they come to act (agency/power). The conversation following the dream questioned its nature, origin, purpose, meaning, and signiﬁcance in an interpretative procedure not unlike what Iain Edgar calls ‘dreamwork’4 in ‘Islamic dream cultures’: ‘dreamwork’ being an attempt by a group to make ‘sense’ out of dream imagery ‘nonsense’ (2016, 27, 1995, 1). The Islamic interpretive formula of whether the dream is true, false, or ‘meaningless’/‘unimportant ego (nafs)’ based also applies (Edgar 2016, 100). Central to the dreamwork was the question of the miraculous or magical (sihir, ajaib) source of the artwork’s power. How was this to be understood? Was the apparition sent by God or the Devil? Miracles (keajaiban, ajaib) refer to the evidential proofs of divine power – or sorcery (sihir), because even Shaytan requires World Art 3

Allah’s permission to act. Beyond good and evil, dreamwork encountered in the Malay ‘art world’ lifts the veil on divine/occult agency in artworks (Becker 1982).5 And ‘agency’ begs the question of power. Questions regarding the occult power of art, dreams, and miracles reveal hauntalogical fractures in the ideological and religious constitution of Islam in Malaysia (Edgar 1995, 1; Hollan 2014, 175). This article engages dreamwork from the Malay art world to recast the problem of agency in terms of power. Following Negri (2013), I apprise a dichotomous formation of power as potentia versus potestas, in short, intentionality, agency (potentia) versus legal-bureaucratic structural power (potestas) (Becker 1982; Gell 1998; Edgar 2016). The Spinozan dichotomy of power allows for a reformulation of agency to account for artistic ‘spiritual emanation’, that is, art’s potentia to shape ontological realities (Strassler 2014). A complete summary of the immense literature on agency, dreams, Islam, art, and power is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead I traverse a pathway through an exemplary sample, notably Edgar (2016, 1995), Negri (2013, 1991), Gell (1998), Ingold (2019, 2011), Benjamin (2014), and David and McNiven (2018). Given Spinoza’s([1677] 1996) dual concept of power unfolded in a discussion of Mhd Din’s art it becomes possible to recast ‘the problem of agency’, and better understand the power of art and dreams. The aim of this article, through a discussion of the role of art, dreams, and miracles in the ontological formation of the ‘Malay world’ (alam Melayu), is to reveal the potentia of occult Sufi art as a challenge to the potestas of the dominant Wahhabi ideology.6 To proceed, first I outline the Islamic classification procedures of divine/ occult experience that apply to art, dreams, and miracles in the Malay spiritual marketplace. Next, I introduce the artist, and describe his creative process. A disagreement between artist and dealer illustrates the contested nature of gender and sexuality (polygamy/polyandry), legal-rational obli- gations (divine/human), proof (belief/evidence), and legitimacy (miracles/ sorcery), which leads into an outline of Sufism versus Wahhabism in the hegemonic, ideological struggle to define Malay modernity. Central themes in Malay folk religion, including the shadow, dragons, and spiritual coexis- tence (dampingan), are related to acknowledge the convergence of Sufism with Malay and Orang Alsi (aboriginal) cosmologies. The author’sembodied experience of a waterfall ritual is recounted, which further questions the nature of reality, illusions, and consciousness. In conclusion, a reformulation of agency in terms of potentia versus potestas facilitates an understanding of the power of art, dreams, and miracles to challenge (or uphold) the State.

Art, dreams and miracles Displaying Mhd Din’s artwork in almost every available space, Aminah and Ali’s exquisite mansion in Kuala Lumpur became ‘Galeri Mystique’.Ali 4 D.S. Farrer fulfilled the role of art dealer, in league with the artist. Aminah said that her cousin had attended art school with Mhd Din, which is how they met and became friends, a couple of years prior to the 2003 exhibition. Sub- sequently, their friendship bloomed into a business relationship.7 Fifty dig- nitaries turned up for the exhibition, entitled, ‘Night of the Secret Wine’, which I filmed in my role as budding visual anthropologist.8 The web of art world social contacts expanded during exhibitions, only to contract again to the central nexus according to fluctuations in the business cycle. In Malaysia, the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of artworks forms a spiritual marketplace in an occult capitalist economy where art, dreams, and miracles help to define the nature of reality, consciousness, and truth (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). To reiterate Ziaud- din’s insight:

Since the quest for miracles is essentially a desire for a belief in the necessity of spiritual life, the miracles have to be ﬁrmly outside the boundaries of rationality and material signs, areas Islam rules ﬁrmly within the boundaries of routine normality. So dreams often play an integral part in these miracles (2000, 138; Farrer 2008, 38).

It is questionable whether Aminah’s dream visitation from the heroic defending shadow warrior should be considered an outright miracle (keajaiban). No visible evidence of attempted burglary was found in the morning. Nevertheless, the appearance of the shadow warrior did seem miraculous (ajaib) in the sense that ajaib also means ‘magic’. Given the animated conversation between the artist and patron (see below), the emic problem raised by the dream concerns its origins and classiﬁcation, and relates to the mechanism or power of summoning, whether through white (ilmu putih) or black magic (ilmu hitam). Did the dream provide evidence of Mhd Din’s occult arts, where sorceric power provides a medium to summon aid from the unseen realm (ghaib)? Or, adopting Edgar’s(2016, 33) tripartite division, should Aminah’s dream/vision simply be regarded as a ‘true dream’ from God, a ‘false dream’ from the Devil, or as meaningless?9 No straightforward answer to the question of good and evil in divine/occult art is presented here; nor can the whole meaning down to the last secret of the dream be ﬁnally resolved (Freud [1955] 2010, 377). The contested nature of dreamwork and miracles in the Malay artworld provides a lens, however, through which to focus upon power, potentia versus potestas, to reformulate the mysterious ‘agency’ of artworks. First, a brief introduction of the artist’s background and philosophy is necessary to situate the creative process, before turning to his disagreement with the art dealer. World Art 5

Mohammad Din Mohammad Slim, youthfully middle-aged with shoulder length black hair and a wispy beard Mhd Din struck the image of the fifteenth century Malay warriors displayed in paintings in the Melaka History and Ethnography Museum. Graduating from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1976, Mhd Din was also a natural healer, herbalist (pawang), martial arts teacher (guru silat), musician, songwriter, and actor (Figure 2). He made a regular income through healing (tukang ubat).10 Hamidah, the late artist’s wife, said that because figurative art is taboo in Islam, ‘for conservative (Wahhabi) Malays, Mhd Din’s art is considered occult and is forbidden (haram), especially the sculptures’.11 In his diary bequeathed to me upon his death, under a section entitled ‘Experiences and Memories’, Mhd Din wrote: ‘My overall concept has always been appreciating God’s creation on earth’ (60). He regarded Nature and God as one and the same, where every plant in the rainforest ‘speaks’ in the sacred language and style of Islamic calligraphy (khat).12 The artist’s family home in Singapore was piled high with paintings, sculptures, wayang kulit (shadow puppets), and a vast collection of Malay and Indonesian weaponry. Thursday nights were devoted to meet- ings with the Al-Ghazalia tarekat (Sufi Order), of which Din was a murid (roughly translated as ‘disciple’). His master, perhaps tellingly, refused to provide the lineage (silsilah). Mhd Din crashed off-road down a steep

Figure 2. Mohammad Din Mohammad, Galeri Mystique, 2003. 6 D.S. Farrer bank in a motorcycle accident in 1982. He recalled the horror of seeing his foot hanging by a sliver of flesh. The doctor advised amputation due to the danger of gangrene. Declining, Mhd Din discharged himself from the hos- pital to the care of guru silat Pak Hamim, who wrapped his foot with a poultice of turmeric, soot, and spider’s web, and used a special twig to dig out the detritus, everyday for nine months. Should he recover, the artist swore an oath to become an indigenous healer (pawang).13 Mhd Din’s artwork includes several series of fine art paintings, assemblage sculptures, and talismanic jewelry.14 The artwork was crafted with tenaga dalam (inner energy) acquired from his training in silat. Mhd Din painted directly with his bare hands onto the canvas using ‘the stroke of silat’, which was, he said, ‘comparable to the stroke of calligraphy’. This method facilitated an emotional connection with the subject, helping to channel tanaga dalam into the artwork. Following the Nature Series the artist commenced upon a calligraphic study of the ninety-nine names of Allah in the Zikr Series. The paintings of zikr (dhikr, remembrance) present letters from the Qur’an, where each letter is polysemic with five to seven attributes (sifat)’.15 Zikr may be silently intoned, or chanted, as, ‘acts and thoughts that bring one closer to God’ (Hamad 2001). The paintings stimulate visual and auditory experience; chanted, they may empower the viewer (Figure 3). In terms

Figure 3. ‘Manifestation of Greatness – Allahu Akhbar’. Acrylic on canvas, 97 × 126 cm, 2006. World Art 7 borrowed from Wittgenstein, the artist’s task was somehow to show the unsayable and say the unshowable (Collins 1998, 716–716; Das 2020). Silently intoning zikr as he painted onto the canvas, Mhd Din’s artworks were infused with mystical intent (niat). Whether his oeuvre is ultimately to be regarded as occult or divine, however, depends upon the viewer’s perspective. Mhd Din resided in three places – with his wife and children in Singa- pore, at his parental household in Melaka, and as artist-in-residence at suc- cessive galleries in Kuala Lumpur. Born of a Malay mother and Pakistani/ Kurdish father, he married a Malay Singaporean. He complained that Sin- gaporeans disdained him as Malaysian, while Malaysians claimed he had ‘sold out’ to Singapore. Bridging two nations, Mhd Din was a liminar, a man in-and-out of place, oscillating existentially between Muslim piety and the occult. Perhaps a feeling of perpetual liminality drove him to ‘exemplary’ prophecy, to fervently express Islamic Malay cultural identity in his artwork (Weber 1958, 285; Turner 1988). He longed to return to Paris where he was previously artist-in-residence. In Singapore, meanwhile, he sold artworks to politicians, sultans, aristocrats, investment bankers, ‘yuppies’, museums, multinational corporations, international companies, private art collectors. Clutched in the Power (potestas)of two rival states, Mhd Din was determined to resist both though the agency (potentia) of his creative artwork.

A disagreement Mhd Din’s declarations on religion, miracles, and magic sometimes met with resistance. Evans-Pritchard surmised: ‘When informants fall out anthropologists come into their own’ ([1937] 1977, 153). The disagreement between artist and dealer is informative across several registers. Despite the verification that Aminah’s narrated dream/vision confers upon miraculous/occult power (potentia) inhering in the artwork, in their conversation she prioritizes individual readings of the Qur’an over the teachings of a mystical guide (shaykh). With gentle persistence Aminah articulates a series of challenges. First, why should men be polygamous, but not women? Her second challenge regards first-person empirical verification. Can Mhd Din be certain that dragons (naga) exist? Has he seen one? Finally, she enquires whether his art is sihir (black magic/sorcery), which is haram in Islam.

A: How come a woman can’t have several husbands? MD: It’s the law. A: But who makes the law? MD: God made the law. A: Is that in the Qur’an? 8 D.S. Farrer

MD: [Silence]. A: Because I only trust what is in the Qur’an. What’s in the hadiths is man-made … 16 MD: [interrupting] Muhammadur Rasululla. A: … but hadiths change, the Qur’an stays the same.

A short while later Mhd Din mentions Pak Yang, his teacher for zikrullah (remembrance of Allah), to claim dragons are to be found in Gunung Jela- pang, Perak:

‘Once the dragon appears a whole hive of bees or wasps will emerge, forcing you to run for your life’, said Din. ‘And everything turns golden. He took a gold mushroom when he was running. I have it. Dragons are real. First it was a snake, a python or anaconda, and then when it gets old scales grow, and the skin hardens, then, batu gamulah [bezoar stone], it changes to a dragon’ (from ﬁeldnotes 2003).

Mhd Din would brook no denial of the actual existence of dragons. Aminah, however, was part of a woman’s group doing a course in reading the Qur’an, where her teacher says: ‘Modern people need proof’ (see also Jamil 2019). Speaking in a slow, gentle, conﬁdent manner Aminah issued the following challenge:

A: [Is] there proof they are real? MD: No listen to me […] they found two eggs … A: Dragon eggs? MD: … in the sea. This is the start of the story. Place called Martapura in Indonesia. A: But did you see? MD: No my friend was sick, too weak to run, but I was on the way.

Attempting to evade Aminah’s question, the artist became increasingly agi- tated. Boxed into a corner, eventually he had to deny seeing the dragon’s egg with his own eyes. Next she raises the question of necromancy, and whether, by implication, his artwork and the shadow ﬁgure that appeared in her dream/vision is sihir:

A: How do you stay in touch with the dead? MD: If you think dead is dead then it’s dead. But it’s not dead. Why do you think you say hello to Muhammad in the selawat [prayer]? It’s not because he is dead. Death is a transformation. MD: If it’s good intention then not sihir. But if it’s bad intention, then it’s bad sihir. Magic must not be mistaken for sihir. If you lose your money and I say wait a moment, I will ﬁnd it for you, and it appears, that is hikmat, not sihir.17 A: But what if they call a jinn? World Art 9

MD: Then that’s sihir.[…] you have to be very watchful of that particular person. [… .] A: [… .] It’s the same as sihir. MD: Most people come to me for matters of the heart: love problem[s]. Some people think I am bad for making love charms. But there is a love charm in the Qur’an, and in nature. A: Yes … by using ayat Qur’an. MD: That’s the basic use of the Qur’an. But the serious reason is to bring the name of God into your life. But if you are unsuccessful then you must not blame God. It’s very interesting to have a teacher who can show you the reading of the Qur’an from a use value, not just reading.

Towards the end of breakfast, Aminah speaks of her father being arrested, and taken to a mufti (Islamic jurist) for questioning. Mhd Din said, ‘There are no contradictions between sharia and hakikat.18 These people who reported him don’t know a thing’. Being arrested for religious offenses in Malaysia is commonplace, including for drinking alcohol, unmarried liai- sons, and gay sex. The conversation above makes apparent Aminah’s sus- picions of black magic (sihir, the dead, jinn) in the artwork affecting her dream. Mhd Din tries to allay her suspicion by making a distinction between sihir and hikmat, yet Aminah, who has demolished his proclama- tions concerning the reality of dragons, is having none of it.

Sufism versus Wahhabism? Mhd Din’s artwork responds to the rise of the dakwah (literally, to summon or call to Islam) movement, a radical call to fundamentalist Islam, in a social environment dominated by Muslim puritanism, in short, ‘Wahhabism’ (Peacock 1978; Nagata 1984; Shamsul 1997; Kreinath 2012). Challenging disenchanted Wahhabi official formulations of Islam in society and the state (potestas), Mhd Din projects an enchanted Sufi perspective (potentia) into the art world. An outcrop of ancient Gnosticism, Sufism permeates Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and New Age religions. Sufism is a mystical journey to ‘polish the heart’ by overcoming the inner animal, the ego (nafs), in order to return to God (Edgar 2016, 55). Sufis are involved in a quest to obtain divine powers to show proof of contiguity to God. The ability to walk on water, appear simultaneously in two or more places, make contact with prophets, saints, and friends of God, to time travel, achieve astral projection, and to predict future events all preconfi- gure the ultimate goal of immortality. Night dreams and visions play a vital role in decision-making, goal orientation, and as proof of ascension along the correct path. The interpretation of dreams is done by a Sufi shaykh for the murid. Engaged in prolonged bouts of sleep deprivation, sleeping for one hour or less a night, Sufis spend time in isolation, the khalwa, where the person remains shut in a cave, room, or tower for 10 D.S. Farrer forty days (Özelsel 1996). Personal possessions are almost entirely absent in what amounts to incarceration in solitary confinement. Diet is minuscule – ahandfulofolives,afewdates,oracrustofbread each day. A starvation diet, absence of social interaction, and insomnia stimulates dreams, lucid dreaming, visions, and hallucinations where the initiate is encouraged to find and follow their spirit-guide. Part of an archaic shamanic complex, contacting the spirit-guide ‘familiar’ in human, plant, insect, or animal form is widespread throughout world religions (Eliade 1972). Sufism is known to be more tolerant of indigenous spiritual practices than the more austere Wahhabism. It is interesting to note that Temiar religion in Malaysia also initiates contact with a spirit-guide (gunig), as brilliantly documented by Geoffrey Benjamin in his 48-year ethnographic magnum opus (Benjamin 2014,159).Mhd Din learned healing arts from Orang Asli (possibly Temiar) teachers, and there is a significant convergence of Orang Asli and Sufi ideas in his artwork. Sufism fused with Malay folk religion retains a firm foothold in Malaysia under the protection of the aristocracy and nobility (Werner 2002). Islamic religious matters in Malaysia fall ultimately under the remit of the Sultan (the paramount position is rotated through the Malay royal families every five years). While some of the royal families remain powerful and wealthy, the déclassé aristocracy have limited influence on industry, government, and the State. During fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur, I attended Haqqani (Naqshbandi) ‘power nights’ on Thursday evenings. H.R.H. Raja Ashman led the prayers, chanted the ninety-nine names of Allah (zikr), and pre- sided over a generous feast. A Malay ustaz (religious teacher) was invari- ably in attendance, castigated behind his back as a ‘government dog’ sent to report on ‘deviationist’ religious teachings.19 Members of the ‘congrega- tion’ (jemaah) referred to themselves as ‘Bandits’, ‘Outlaws in Islam’, and described the Wahhabis as a ‘tribe of Shaytan’ who had wrecked ‘a beautiful religion’ (Farrer 2009, 155). Following the Iranian revolution, Sunni Islam in Malaysia fell under the influence of the dakwah movement to shift from the more tolerant, mystical, ecstatic versions of Sufism, towards Wahhabism. In other words, there was a ‘pendulum swing’ towards austere, ‘fundamentalist’ teachings and discipline (Gellner 1969). Shamsul (1997, 212) delineated the rise of the dakwah movement in four ‘periods’: (1) reawakening 1969–1974, (2) forward movement 1975– 1979, (3) mainstreaming 1989–1990, and, (4) industrial. ‘Reawakening’ and ‘forward movement’ saw radical students on scholarships return from the Middle East, to go ‘mainstream’, where the leaders of the movement (such as Anwar Ibrahim) and their ideals were incorporated into mainstream politics. This led to the widespread dissemination of the dakwah movement, incubating an overt, self-righteous, and politicized Islam, visible through the ever-increasing adoption of the ‘mini telekung’, World Art 11 a headscarf for women that covers the hair, neck and the chest (Shamsul 1997, 217). The Malaysian government’s successful response to the dakwah movement paid off through booming trade relations with Iran and the Middle East (Farrer 2009, 8). It would appear the ‘mainstream period’ has extended into the present with the 2018 re-election of Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohamed. In Weberian terms, the legal/rational turn to asceticism versus mysticism, self-denial versus techniques of ecstasy, corresponds to State sanctified Wahhabism over Sufism (Weber 1958, 285; Peletz 2002). An example of the socio-historic tightening of the fundamentalist screw can be seen in photograph collections of Malay families. In the 1970s, youth in flares and miniskirts mingle freely. Forty years later, veiled Malay women adopt conservative attire, and are segregated from men in social functions. Mean- while, urban teenage girls subvert the dress code in figure hugging long- sleeved shirts and tight jeans, topped with a black hijab (veil). Mhd Din disdained the Wahhabification of Malay culture in countless ways, most especially through his art, philosophy, and aesthetics. Having laid out elements in the cultural politics of some version of Sufism versus Wahhabism, it is informative to delve deeper into Malay animism, the shadow ontology, dragon journey, and dampingan to appreciate the power (potentia) Mhd Din’s artwork attempts to channel. This is followed by a waterfall experience that questions illusions and consciousness. Finally, the language of spiritual ‘agency’ emanating from artworks, weapons, or dreams is rejected in favour of potentia versus potestas, doing versus being, spirit versus the State.

Dreams, folk religion and magic In the alam Melayu, dreams (mimpi-mimpi) are central evidentiary proofs used to conﬁrm miraculous or magical occurrences. Dreams foretell impending fortune or misfortune, may denote spirit invasion, or provide a glimpse a ‘soul’s’ journey as it separates from the sevenfold soul (semangat) (Endicott 1970, 73; Roseman 1991, 21, 40–45; Skeat [1900] 1984, 50; Farrer 2009, 139). Malays show great reluctance to awaken a sleeping person. The ‘head-soul’ is safe to wander in dreams provided it may return to the sleeper, otherwise, if the sleeper is startled, the soul may become lost, resulting in drowsiness, diminished appetite, delirium, weak- ness, and in a few days, death (Benjamin 2014, 112–113). A dream of the loss of a tooth means a family member will die. Entiti (entities) such as genies (jinn), ghosts (hantu), birth demons (toyol), faeries (pari-pari, orang bunian), and female vampires (pontianak) may cause nightmares. The barrier between the alam ghaib and the quotidian world is especially thin at dawn and dusk. In the depths of the night all sorts of spirits and fearsome animals roam free. 12 D.S. Farrer

The ascription of miraculous ontological proofs, whether through dreams or reported uncanny experience, is not so much a given as a contest. Aminah, for example, says there is a house on a nearby hill that is kept beautifully clean; the garden and ﬂowers are in bloom, but the owners are in Australia, and nobody takes care of it. She attributes the gar- dening work to Puteri Bunian. ‘One of those spiritual entitis’, Mhd Din supplies, ‘half jinn and half human, jinn in the mind, but human in the ﬂesh. But transparent: you can see their veins’. He jokes, ‘Actually’, the gar- dener is, ‘Datok Jinn, his name is Jins Shamssudin’. Mhd Din’s mischie- vous riposte, replacing the faery princess (puteri bunian) with a Malay actor/politician, demonstrates a subtle duel between artist and dealer in establishing miraculous proofs. To establish such proofs requires detailed knowledge of a complex mystical terrain, suffused with the myths and legends of the various peoples that have inhabited the alam Melayu. Malay ‘folk religion’ (magic) shares ‘animist’ concepts with the Orang Asli, including Temiar, Semai, Jakun, Lanoh, Jahai, Menriq, Dayak, and Orang Laut (Benjamin 2014, 44).20 Ancient Hindu, Tantric Buddhist, and Islamic cosmologies also underscore Malay animism.21 An indigenous explorer and worldly traveller, Mhd Din surveyed the entire pantheon of Southeast Asian, Chinese, Indian, Native American, and Middle Eastern rituals, beliefs, and practices. Unlike the appropriations of Western artists, or neo-pagans, however, Mhd Din was medium as artist rather than ‘artist as shaman’ in artwork that communicates with plant and animal spirits, demons, and ghosts (Walters 2010)(Figure 4). Mhd Din’s artwork explores the garden of souls (sekebun) wherein the dreamer sojourns with the souls of plants and trees, mountains and rivers, the ocean, sunlight and rocks, fantastic creatures, mystical beasts, and the ancestral dead. Appearing invulnerable to mosquitoes and corpse ants, Mhd Din said the trick is to catch one and ask it not to bite. He continued:

You can talk to the sun, to the rain, to God, to anything! They will listen to you. All living things are made for you, even the earth, and the colossal cosmos. So if everything is for you, why can’t you talk to them?

The magical properties of Mhd Din’s seni (art) resonate with Western occult practices, particularly, ‘Wicca, the neo-pagan nature religion founded by Gerald Gardner [1884–1964] around the mid-twentieth century’ that incorporated ‘Malay knife-work’ [silat] (Waters 2019, 152, 218). Gardner lived in Malaya from 1911 to 1936, during which time he established a rubber plantation in Perak, then working in Singapore and Johor as a civil servant. An amateur anthropologist, albeit Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Gardner was fascinated by Malay and Senoi (Temiar) beliefs, and published a book on keris prior to coming out as English witch (Gardner [1936] 2009). Mhd Din was an avid keris World Art 13

Figure 4. ‘Nature’s Energy’. Acrylic on canvas, 76 × 106 cm, 2001. collector, and kept a well-thumbed copy of Gardner’s book on his shelf alongside books on Malay magic by Endicott (1970), Shaw (1976), Win- stedt ([1925] 1993), and Skeat ([1900] 1984). Collecting jampi (spell) for the waterfall ritual (recounted below), I was impressed when the artist recited an entire section by Skeat. Reservoirs of secret knowledge depos- ited in past anthropological studies reverberate in Malay culture, where they continue to nourish, inform, and sustain arcane crafts.

Shadow ontology The shadow realm is an enchanted ontological ‘reality’ through which the living must sojourn before arriving at the truth of life beyond death, possibly in the garden of souls, fairyland (kanyangan), paradise (firdaus), or heaven (langit, syurga). Mhd Din insisted upon the ‘afterlife’ as reality, and this world, the shadow realm, as chimera. From his perspective, we must see beyond the shadow (bayang), that is, beyond the light. Life leads not simply to death, but to the afterlife. Cikgu Razak, another inter- locutor in Kuala Lumpur, provided a straightforward explanation. Pulling 14 D.S. Farrer my hand across the table in a café, with an air of mystery he said: ‘Look at your hand, do you see that it casts a shadow? You yourself are just like that, a shadow, being cast by something else’. He revealed, ultimately, the shadow is cast by a greater reality, that of Allah. Mhd Din said: ‘In the shadow realm the real is not real, only an appearance, an illusion, where the true reality is that we are bestowed with the shadow, born with it’. In this hall of mirrors the shadow possesses its own reality, given alongside echoes, reflections, and doubles. In the front matter for the Paris exhibition Vers Mon Unite (Towards Self-Unification) brochure, Dr. Sian E. Jay explains:

[T]he figurative imagery from the shadow world of the Javanese puppet theatre, draw the viewer into the twilight world of the seeker about step onto the path towards self-unification. The quadtich [sic.], Dancing Shadows has multi-layered meanings [see Figure 9]. On one level the shadow figures represent our egos, which may enhance or destroy us, depending on our nature. On another level they serve to remind us that just as the puppet master guides the fate of the figures behind the flickering screen, so too do we all exist in a shadow world until we submit to the guidance and will of the human puppet master. Whatever we choose to call that puppeteer or dalang, Din leaves up to each individual (Jay, in Moham- mad 2001).

Mhd Din’s artworks were designed to act as bridges for entiti to travel to and from the unseen realm (alam ghaib). Fearsome entiti, Angels of Death (malaikat), jinn, ancestral warriors, animal, plant, and nature spirits may be summoned (berseru, seru) using zikr, ayat,orjampi (Figure 5). The dreamt form taken by an entiti is not necessarily a correspondence: the shadow or double may appear as itself, or an entiti may appear in animal form, frequently as a tiger (harimau), or crocodile (buaya). As Aminah recounted in her dream, the unbidden entiti may spontaneously leap into action to assist the person in need.

Dragon journey The essential philosophy here is that death is a transformation and not an end in itself. Accordingly, the assemblage sculpture ‘Cintamani’ (small ﬂying snake), among other mysteries, symbolizes a dragon journey (Figure 6). ‘Dragon’ is the human spirit, the ‘journey’ a metaphor for the travel from birth to death and beyond. Mhd Din taught silat through arduous variations of tolosana (lotus position), a yogic practice he called ‘ﬂying lessons’. For Eliade (1970) the purpose of yoga is to attain ‘immortality and freedom’, similarly the starting point for Mhd Din’s healing practice, love magic, and artwork. World Art 15

Figure 5. ‘You Are My Shadow’. Acrylic on canvas, 90 × 90 cm, 2000.

The artist regarded life as a ‘dragon journey’ into death. He said:

[M]y assemblage sculptures … communicate the idea of transformation. Every found item that goes into the sculpture has come to its seeming end of use and is no longer useful for its intended purpose. Putting the different items together into a beautiful sculpture lends an extension of life to them. This concept will help explain the transformational nature of our lives. When we have come to our seeming end, we have actually just been trans- formed to another dimension of our being, for another purpose. I call it ‘the mystical journey of life’ (video recording 2003).

The dragon (naga) refers to the urobos, the Gnostic symbol of immortal life and self-regeneration that plays an important role in Malay folk religion (Skeat [1900] 1984). The ‘dragon’s egg’ is a polysemic symbol for potency, power, encirclement, the urobos, creation, self-regeneration, immortality, and truth in the alam Melayu, where all creation derives from the One; the calligraphic line of nature from its beginning in the dot (Benjamin 2003,5–7; Waterson 1997, 95).22 The artist’s ‘quest’ may 16 D.S. Farrer

Figure 6. ‘Cintamani’. Woodcarving, 2001. be understood as an artistic, epistemological, ﬁgurative, and literal journey, or line, by means by which to locate the dragon’s egg, the beginning, or dot. For Mhd Din, everything starts with the dot. More than a symbol, the search for the ‘dragon’s egg’ was Mhd Din’s literal quest, taking him to remote coastal areas and deep into the rainforests of Tereng- ganu and Kelantan in search of magical jewels, enchanted wood, and wish fulﬁlment.

Dampingan Dampingan refers to entiti, and may be defined as co-existence, contiguity, intimate (friendship), and sword-dance play (silat).23 Dampingan is an occult concept that refers to the entiti residing in a Malay dagger (keris), like a genie in a lamp. Before drawing the keris from the sheath the keeper may politely knock on the scabbard three times and hail the entiti within with asalaamualaikum (peace be upon you). Keris are placed under the keeper’s pillow to facilitate dream communication with the entiti, and must be occasionally be ‘fed’ so as not to create mischief, bring misfortune, disaster, or death. Offerings could include eggs, blood, even the sacrifice an unborn child. Such is the ‘deal’ (Figure 7). Mhd Din explains to Ali, Aminah, and myself that dampingan is fine so long as it stays in the keris and does not enter into the person. He continues that some people wrap keris in yellow (kuning) cloth as a mark of respect. Black (hitam), red (merah), green, and gold covering is also acceptable. World Art 17

Figure 7. ‘A Deal’. Acrylic on canvas, 90 × 90 cm, 2000.

‘Entiti play with colours’, says the artist, ‘Jinn Hitam loves darkness, Jinn Kuning loves sunlight, and Jinn Merah loves blood’. But what happens when an entiti enters the person?

Becoming-river The Waterfall painting in the Flower Series offers a glimpse into the garden of souls (sekebun). Waterfalls have a great signiﬁcance in the origin myths of silat, where part of the training is to climb the waterfall on a vision quest (Farrer 2009, 33). In Malaysia, there is ilmu (knowledge, science/magic) regarding the ‘mystical’ ability to breathe under water. As part of my training in silat, Mhd Din instructed me to go to a waterfall, ‘repeat zikr seven times, and wait for it to come’.24

Ali: So what do you get? MD: You get thicker skin […] that can help you for martial arts or whatever. Nobody is supposed to see you. A few things you can train down there to revitalize your inner strength and your inspirational strength. And I love to look at the jungle, its calligraphy.

To Ali’s forthright question, Mhd Din’s answer was typically cryptic, partial, and evasive, merely hinting at the power of invisibility, silat ghaib. The occult secrets of silat are closely guarded. Following Mhd Din’s instructions, and gift of ‘mantra’ (jampi), I visited Jeriau Waterfall, Frazer’s Hill, to perform the tanaga dalam ritual.25 The mountainous 18 D.S. Farrer rainforest was blanketed in thick mist as I trekked to the dark pool before dawn. Legs astride in ‘horse stance’ (kuda) my feet sank into the black sand. As prescribed, my palms faced upwards to ‘open the chakras’, and protect my head from the cascade. Returning to the bank, I discovered that two hours had passed. It had felt like twenty minutes, so I was sur- prised at the time lapse. The ritual triggered a lucid dream that the water poured straight through my flesh as the boundaries of my skin dissolved. In a sudden expansive awareness I felt that I had become the river, the river had become me, combined as one entity. My sentience felt encapsulated in the flow, no longer in the flesh, and I could perceived the entire course of the river from source to ocean, every drop, rock, and floating leaf. This vision quest provided a remarkable sense of my own individual consciousness existing outside of the human body, in an experience of the divisible soul, semangat. The Malay and Orang Asli ontology of free-floating head-souls combining in dreams with plant, animal spirits, or nature spirits had become apparent. The waterfall ritual challenged my embodied consciousness to question the nature of illusion and reality. This led me to wonder, with Deleuze, if ‘[c]onsciousness is only a dream with one’s eyes open’ (1988a, 20).

Illusions and consciousness Chung Tzu’s fourth-century BCE parable tells of a person dreaming of being a butterfly, awakening to wonder if they are a butterfly dreaming. Freud ([1955] 2010) suggested that dreams express unconscious repressed ideas, wish-fulfilments, secret desires, and uncomfortable truths. From this perspective, dreaming of being a butterfly reveals a secret desire to become sexually promiscuous, and the question of whether a person awake is a butterfly dreaming reveals an unconscious wish for sadomaso- chistic loss of control. Against psychologistic interpretations, in Deleuzian terms consciousness is a social and environmental assemblage, the pack ‘becoming-animal’, and not an individual revelation (Goh 2011). Following Bateson ([1972] 2000, 135), the question of how consciousness is achieved is far more pressing than interpreting the unconscious, in that consciousness, like language, does not exist inside the individual’s head, and is better regarded as a social arc over time. Emotional Lover, a painting of shadow puppet (wayang wong) heads conjoined together by ether, may be viewed as a beautiful illustration of the social arc of intersubjective consciousness (Figure 8). Mhd Din has made visible the invisible emotional force linking the beloved, where the apparent separation of consciousness is an illusion. During Night of the Secret Wine we slept late on the floor in Mhd Din’s room. Awakening at 11.00 am, he sat crossed-legged, and spoke of his silat master, Pak Hamim: World Art 19

Figure 8. ‘Emotional Lover’. Acrylic on canvas, 82.5 × 80 cm, 2000.

The old man slept for eleven years on a plank of wood with a coconut for a pillow. He only slept for twenty minutes a day. The old man’s father was famous in the village (in Pakil, Philippines) for black magic. He once slept on a grave for twenty-one days, and at the end a dragon came to him. But, he was far from the sea so the old man said he knew it was illusion. He stepped into the mouth of the dragon.

Above, Mhd Din reveals his lineage to an occult legacy of ‘black magic’, detailing an embodied practice of sleep discomfort and deprivation that results in profound visions, or lucid dreams. The acknowledgement of ‘illusion’ arising from the prolonged grave ritual does not undermine theexperienceofstepping‘into the mouth of the dragon.’ In Bahasa Melayu, illusion (bayangan)alsomeans‘shadow’ (Figure 9). The ontology of the shadow (bayang), as we have seen, is integral to his artwork in the play of light and colour. Fascinated by Gestalt, Mhd Din regarded the perception of death ‘as a ﬁnal end’ as merely an illusion of consciousness.

Potentia versus potestas That ‘agency’ (artistic, occult, or otherwise) inheres within or adheres to works of art has been controversial since the publication of Gell’s(1998) Art and Agency (Farrer 2008; Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini 2010; Ingold 2011). In a previous article, I utilized examples from Mhd Din’s oeuvre 20 D.S. Farrer

Figure 9. ‘Dancing Shadow’ [Quadriptych]. Acrylic on canvas, 19 × 33 cm, 2000. to illustrate the workings of Art and Agency (Gell 1998;Farrer2008). I showed how Mhd Din created artworks as ‘indexes’ to themselves exer- cise agency upon the world (Bowden 2004;Farrer2008). The vantage of ‘slow research’ (Banks 2014)gavemetimetoquestionphenomeno- logical accounts that iterate agency as embodied inside objects, religious statues, icons, paintings, and suchlike. In response to Ingold’s(2011,28) frustrated rejection of agency as ‘magical mind-dust’, I considered agency and embodiment as emic attributions, as ‘enchanted’ or ‘re- enchanted’ notions from the ﬁeld that entered into ‘disenchanted’ anthropological scholarship via etic theorization (Farrer 2015,37, 2018,39–40). In their introduction to an impressive new volume on rock art, David and McNiven (2018,16–17) say that Wandjina cave paintings are regarded by local Australian aboriginals as powerful sentient beings in their own right who are aware of visitors (see also Blundel, in David and McNiven World Art 21

2018). Because the rock art signals the ongoing living presence of ancestral forces, and is important in the reproduction of culture, it may be said to possess ‘agency in its own right’. David and McNiven’s comments on Gell are instructive:

If we take Alfred Gell’s(1998, 123) conceptualization of agency, the agency of sentient paintings rightly is seen as operating through a ‘network of social relations’. However, Gell takes a Western rationalist viewpoint and sees the agency of objects as an extension or expression of of agency ascribed or projected by people. Yet this etic perspective clashes with an emic ontology whereby objects, such as certain categories of rock art, possess inherent and autonomous agency and intentionality because they are sentient life forces in their own right. (2018, 17)

Like the photographic portraits of Ratu Kidul in Strassler’s(2014) ‘Seeing the Unseen’, and Wandjina rock art, the artworks of Mhd Din were created to be ‘spiritual emanations’, forces in their own right, and not merely artistic representations. In understanding this artwork, and its ‘agency’, however, I don’t think the bifurcation of emic versus etic is particularly helpful. Such dualism oscillates between rationalism and phe- nomenology, anthropomorphism and piety, and may be flipped ‘right side up’ or held as wrong depending on the viewer’s perspective. Pak Hamim stepped into the mouth of the dragon even though he rea- lized it was an illusion. Illusions are real. The either/or dichotomy of either consciousness or illusion is not helpful. It is better to regard consciousness as a product of illusions, where illusions themselves create consciousness.26 You know you are awake when you have forgotten what you were dreaming. This Spinozan maneuver holds both poles of the copula con- stant, like the opposing ends of a magnet, and is referred to as ‘parallelism’ (Deleuze 1988b, 86). My point is not to prioritize one understanding at the expense of the other, but to examine both, in tandem, not collapsing one into the other, and not seeking transcendence. This is because I regard anthropology as a relationship, as a correspondence where I seek to describe and explain emergence from immanence. Deploying Spinoza’s dual concept of power my intention is not to impose an alien interpretive framework drawn from Western political philosophy onto the dreamwork of a non-Western art world. From the outset my research with Mhd Din (2002–2007) was an active collaboration of artist and ethnographer. We both took an avid interest in each other’s work, sharing a social ‘field of concern [and] common discursive points of reference’ (Rothenberg and Fine 2008, 32). It was because of Mhd Din’s talk of God and Nature that I read Spinoza in the first place. Anthro- pology must describe and explain. Anthropology does not simply hold up a descriptive ethnographic mirror to an ‘Other’ culture, but peruses diverse social, theoretical, philosophical, historical, and ontological conversations 22 D.S. Farrer to address problems haunting literature and society (see also Ingold 2019). Art seems inherently magical, from the oldest examples of the cave paintings of Lascaux, to the contemporary oddity of a banana duct taped to a wall. A major problem in Western art is, ‘the essential paradox of painting, which is that it represents depth on a surface’ (Gombrich [1950] 2006, 446). Great works of art may appear sentient, eyes shining forth from painted faces to gaze directly upon the viewer, following them everywhere, no matter how they try to escape by moving around in space. In the anthropology of Southeast Asia, considerations of national, social and political formation have tended to dominate the discourse surrounding power (potestas)(Errington1989). Meanwhile, the power to act, agency, intentionality (potentia) has been framed in terms of container theories of phenomenological embodiment (Hellman 2009). Reframing agency in terms of potentia brings forth the challenge of art, dreams, and miracles to hegemonic State formation in Malaysia, and provides a better understanding of the sorceric or divine power of occult artworks. Drawing from the legacy of Spinoza, Antonio Negri (2013, 1991) formu- lates power as ‘potentia versus potestas’.27 Potentia (might, force, strength) refers to the immanent, emergent quality of power, versus the transcendental, frozen, structural power of potestas (authority, control). The notion of power (potentia) against Power (potestas) provides an anti- dote to container theories of agency. Agency, in my view, potentia, is not simply a matter of individual psychology, or some mysterious property inherent in objects, their sentient life force, but is a form of power that operates thorough a social and environmental arc of illusions and consciousness to challenge social structure, potestas. Potestas refers to the power of the State, overarching fixed beliefs, frozen national, bureaucratic, and legal structures. Potentia is the immanent, emergent power arising from human and non-human interaction, where people’s experience, dreams, hopes, desires, flux, and flows are fomented, expressed, and enacted in their ongoing relationships with each other and the environment. Power, potentia versus potestas, provides an alternative to ‘agency’ in comprehending the power of art, dreams, and miracles in a way that closely aligns to, illustrates, and corresponds with the Malay art world.

Spirit versus the State Applying acrylic paint directly onto canvas with his bare hands, the Malay artist Mohammad Din Mohammad purposefully channelled tanaga dalam (inner power) from silat into his artworks to facilitate dream interactions with the invisible realm (alam ghaib). These artworks are to be called upon to serve people in need, to assist them during moments of crisis, insecurity, World Art 23 madness, and grief, and to guard over, protect, and reassure the vulner- able, fortify the weak, heal those in suffering and sickness, and to animate the spiritually insensible to the reality of God and the unseen realm. This art world case study reveals dreams and the attribution of miraculous/occult power as contested in dreamwork, in the production of religion and ideology, agency and the State, where consciousness is regarded as an illusion, and miracles demand verification. Aminah offers up her dream vision as proof of the ability of the shadow warrior, Panglima Hitam, to leap down from the artwork to protect her against home invasion. The ‘manifest content’ of the dream disturbs her, leading her to question the occult power of the artwork, to ask whether it is sihir (magic/sorcery), and therefore forbid- deninIslam(Freud[1955] 2010). In a move typical of the Malaysian shift towards a more fundamentalist approach, Aminah enunciates a distrust of hadith, dismissing oral traditions based upon the words and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad, in favour of a literal reading of the Qur’an. A member of a ‘modern’ woman’s reading group, she is taught to insist upon proof, as established in the Qur’an, and not by oral tradition under the guidance of a Sufi shaykh. The stage is set for a contest between typifications of Wahhabism and Sufism, albeit these ‘ideal types’ are imperfect.28 Aside, perhaps joking, she tells me she is in ‘an open relationship’. Doubting the reality of dragons, insisting upon empirical verification, Aminah questions the reason why Muslim men may be polygamous, yet women may not be polyandrous. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to surmise the ‘latent content’ of her dream (Robb 2018,17). Given the ethnographic materials gathered in the fieldwork, and the artist expressing God and Nature as One, my position inexorably shifted towards Spinoza, philosopher par excellence of Deus et Natura. Adopting the notion of anthropology as ‘philosophy with the people in’, I supply an illustrated ethnographic montage of Mhd Din’s art world (Ingold 2018). A new orientation to the artwork arises by engaging Spinoza’s ‘practical philosophy’ (Deleuze 1988a). The Spinozan concept of ‘power’, potentia versus potestas, provides an alternative to phenomenological theories of embodied agency (Gell 1998; Farrer 2008; Negri 2013; Ingold 2018). Mhd Din’s artwork articulates potentia against potestas, that is, free, indi- vidualistic, creative power, positioned against Islamic fundamentalism, Wahhabism, and the dakwah movement entrenched in Malaysian society and the state. ‘Practical philosophy’, read in tandem with the ethnographic materials, provides an explanatory lens beyond phenomenological description to cast light upon a battle of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. In Malaysia, art, dreamwork, and miracles fabricate ontology, consciousness, and religious identity (Deleuze 1988a; Spinoza [1677] 1996; Graham 2010). 24 D.S. Farrer

Trained as anthropologist, not art critic, I have held back from a rigor- ous evaluation of Mhd Din’s aesthetics. Nevertheless, anthropologists do learn from the virtuosos of ‘subtle crafts’ (Marcus 2010, 94). A good example is provided by Deleuze (2005) regarding the shadow in a painting by Francis Bacon. Given insight from ‘slow research’, a question arises for future research (Banks 2014). Is Mhd Din’s silat figure, the black comman- der entiti from Aminah’s dream vision, painted in the spirit of Francis Bacon’s shadow-art? Referring to Triptych, 1976, in the chapter ‘Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming-Animal’, Deleuze says, ‘the man’s shadow itself assumes an autonomous and indeterminate animal existence’ (2005, 16). According to Hamidah, Mhd Din was a trickster who enjoyed being ‘ten steps ahead’ of the educated elite. In sum, the artist was on a quest to find and show the truth, a truth beyond or outside of potestas (the Power of State sanctified Islam, Wah- habism, fixed beliefs) and located in potentia (‘spiritual’ power emanating from human interactions with each other and nature, through fears and dream encounters, where the actual is driven by and drives the virtual). Yet, of course, Aminah is also on a journey, to reconcile evidence with faith, her modern privileged lifestyle with tradition. Their conversation reveals discrepancies between his and her Islamic worldviews, indicative of a wider battle for the heart, mind, and soul of the Malays. With Sufi Islam, Mhd Din resists aspects of Malay hegemonic modernity that to him appear Wahhabi, elements of which are resisted in turn by Tengku Aminah.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor D. S. Farrer is Visiting Scholar at Palau Community College, and has published: Shadows of the Prophet: Martial Arts and Suﬁ Mysticism (author, 2009), War Magic: Religion, Sorcery and Performance (editor, 2016), and Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World (co-editor, 2011).

Notes 1. This research is based upon participant observation, in-depth interviews, and video recorded in Singapore and Malaysia from 2002 to 2007, funded by a doctoral research grant and teaching assistant position with the Depart- ment of Sociology, National University of Singapore; a ﬁeld visit in 2012 funded by National Geographic; and concluded with follow-up semi- structured interviews via social media in 2019. Participation at Iain Edgar’s Dream Literacy Workshop at the Association of Social Anthropology Conference on Symbiotic Anthropologies: Theoretical Commensalities and World Art 25

Methodological Mutualisms, University of Exeter, 2015, was made possible through a College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, University of Guam Travel Award. Some personal names have been changed throughout. 2. When the apparition appeared, Aminah was unsure if she was awake or asleep, and was uncertain if her experience was a dream or a vision. Dreams and visions have an important place in Islam as they provide divine revelation in an otherwise closed ‘belief system’ where Prophet Mohammad was the ‘seal of the Prophets’ relaying the final word from God (Edgar 2016). 3. Panglima Hitam is the warrior spirit summoned by silat masters to protect the martial arts training ground (gelanggang) (Rashid 1990). 4. Freud’s([1955] 2010) ‘dream-work’ concept is different, referring to psychological processes occurring in dreaming, including condensation, displace- ment, the transformation of dream-thoughts into dream-content, the suppression of affect, etc. 5. For Becker: ‘Art worlds consist of all the people who are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art’ (1982, 34). 6. The alam Melayu or ‘Malay World’ refers to the collective areas historically ruled by a Malay sultanate, including: Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, the Isthmus of Kra, Riau, Sumatra, Aceh, the Sulu Archipelago, Kalimantan and the Southern Philippines (Benjamin 2003, 5 note 2; Milner 1981; Farrer 2009,26–27). 7. Personal communication by Facebook Messenger (October 2019). 8. Mhd Din gave twenty-one solo exhibitions from 1978 to 2007, in Singapore, Malaysia, Paris, Turkey, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. His artwork also featured in group exhibitions in art centres, galleries, consulates, and museums in New York, London, Cologne, Bahrain, Dubai, Holland, Manila, Adelaide, Perth, Macau, and Hanoi. Mhd Din’s artworks are held in the collections of Bank Negara, Maybank, Petronas, Yayasan Seni Perak, Malacca Youth Museum, Singapore Art Museum, National University of Singapore Museum, and The Travel Lodge, Brunei Darussalam. 9. Edgar’s(2016,32–33) list of the principles of ‘dream interpretation methods’ in Islam regarding the status of the interpreter and of the dream is unfortu- nately misnumbered and is unclear. 10. https://www.4life.com/corp/about/science 11. Personal communication, November 17, 2019. 12. This resonates with Spinoza’s declaration that, ‘God is Nature’, Dues et Natura (Spinoza [1677] 1996). 13. Due to their pre-Islamic animist origins the roles of bomoh (medium, faith healer), bomoh silat, and pawang (medicine-man, healer, witch doctor) are controversial, being forbidden in Islam. Mhd Din accepted the labels of guru silat, tabib (Sufi healer), and pawang (see also, Werner 1986, 17 note 1; Tuan Ismail 1991). 14. The complete inventory and cataloging of Mhd Din’s artwork has yet to be completed. 15. Zikr, is the ‘remembrance’ of God through individual or group chanting, or silently intoning the ninety-nine names of Allah. 26 D.S. Farrer

16. Hadith: oral traditions based on the words and deeds of the Prophet Moham- mad, collected after his death. 17. Hikmat is ‘knowledge, wisdom, magic, sorcery, supernatural power’–https:// ms.oxforddictionaries.com. 18. To attain mystical transcendence, Sufis must ascend four ‘planes’: (1) sharia (adherence to basic Islamic norms and legal requirements) (2) tarekat (spiritual guidance; discipleship of murid to shaykh), (3) hakikat (truth), (4) marifat (perfect gnosis) (Winstedt [1925] 1993, 75, diacritical marks removed; Farrer 2009, 153). 19. Haqqani interlocutors used the terms ‘bandit’ and ‘dog’ after Barber (1971). 20. Benjamin (2014,26–33) says the Senoi Dreamwork Therapeutic movement have misrepresented and mythologized the Temiar (Senoi) through the supposed discovery of ‘dream control’, and should drop the term ‘Senoi’ from their title. 21. Malaysia has a ‘multimodal ontology’, or better still, a combined and uneven ontology constructed, contested, and variational over time, context, and cir- cumstance (David and McNiven 2018). 22. Compare also with the dream of Vishnu, who dreams the universe into existence ‘while sleeping on the coils of the giant serpent Ananta’, as Lakshmi mas- sages his legs (Kleiner 2010, 22). 23. http://malaycube.com 24. Muslim Malays have long since displaced magic spells (jampi-jampi) with Islamic prayer (ayat) and chant (zikr) (Farrer 2009, 236 note 14). 25. In Malaysia tanaga dalam (inner energy) is also referred to as yoga prana, and nafas batin, revealing ancient Indic and Arabic overlays on an indigenous animist ritual (see also Farrer 2009, 127–128). 26. Deleuze, following Spinoza, identifies three illusions in consciousness: ‘Nor does it suffice to say that consciousness deludes itself: consciousness is inseparable from the triple illusion that constitutes it, the illusion of finality, the illusion of freedom, and the theological illusion’ (Deleuze 1988a,20). 27. Antonio Negri claims that, for Spinoza, ‘Politics is the realm of the material imagination’ (1991, 188), where the realist foundation of politics lies in ‘free necessity’. Negri (1991, 189) demarks the principal features in the ‘constitution of reality’ for Spinoza (prudentia-multitudo, libertas-securitas, condi- tio-constitutio) to observe: Potentia as the dynamic and constitutive inherence of the single in the multiplicity, of mind in the body, of freedom in necessity – power against Power – where potestas is presented as the sub- ordination of the multiplicity, of the mind, of freedom, and of potentia (Negri 1991, 190–191). 28. Weber points out that ‘ideal types’ need not be perfect. Employed as a methodological device, ideal approximations demark social phenomenon to facilitate analysis (Weber 1958).

ORCID D.S. Farrer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9898-8330 World Art 27

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