Keramat: Muḥammad’s Heirs and Nodes of a Multi-Centered Islam in Southeast Asia

Abstract Despite demographic realities, Muslim Southeast Asia remains one of the most marginalized regions in Islamic studies and in popular culture. This article grapples with one of the thorniest of allegations against the Islam of the “peripheries,” that the prevalence of saints and miracle workers, known as keramat in Southeast Asia, is nominally Islamic or syncretic and, thus, it is evidence of regional communities being “less-than-pure” Islamic. In doing so, this article analyzes the texts and traditions of keramat, focusing on Southeast Asian Islamic literature produced in Malay and Tamil from the late nineteenth century to the present. What emerges from a study of these texts, as well as of ongoing Islamic religious practices in the region, is a self-perception of Southeast Asian islands and cities as centers of Islam shaped by the network and circulation of keramat and ʿulamāʾ that operated as nodes of a multi-centered Islam. Arguing against attempts to flatten and essentialize Islam, Southeast Asian Islamic literature associated keramat with Muḥammad, highlighting how regional Islam and its rituals, liturgies, and ṭarīqa were directly passed down by the Prophet. Keramat texts emphasize that Southeast Asia’s saints and ʿulamāʾ were heirs of Muḥammad and enforcers of Muḥammad’s norms through bloodlines and other forms of intimacy. These texts, moreover, propose that some of the keramat buried in the region were the most consummate of Sufis, the Quṭb, or eschatological restorers, or Mahdi, and surpassed prophets in their miraculous powers. Overall, this is a story of miraculous narratives, devotional cultures, social memories, and sacral centers of the Islamic world that are often pushed to the peripheries of Islamic studies but refuse to be marginalized and forgotten.