The Jawi press: connecting script, language and faith These days there are people who believe that the illnesses of nations may be cured with the publication of journals.
(al-Urwa al-wuthqa¯, al-Busta¯n¯ı 1957: 15) We natives must fight and fight hard. Not with cannon, rifles, machetes or bayonets, but with the power of our ideas. There is no freedom without struggle.
(Kaoem Moeda, 29 October 1918 No. 217/IPO 1918, 44) Newspapers and the printing press opened up the world to the reader, and communicated a new view about how that world was configured.
They also allowed people to activate the power of their ideas in the public sphere. As Khalid (1999) notes for Central Asia, reformism was made possible by print. In Cairo al-Afgha¯n¯ı had urged his followers to write and publish in journals, so long as they wrote as Muslims and not
‘materialists’. However, at the time al-Afgha¯n¯ı and Abduh were collaborating, Southeast Asia was still largely insulated from their reformist ideas, despite van den Berg (1886: 174, n. 1) noting that the Arabs of Southeast Asia read al-Urwa al-wuthqa¯. I do not dispute that a few copies of al-Urwa al-wuthqa¯ managed to filter through the Muslim world to the Indies. Perhaps the fame of the journal even preceded it
below the winds when, in 1884, the Chief Penghulu of Cianjur warned the government about anti-colonial sentiments found in an Arabic journal printed in Paris (see Mr. 1885, no. 647c). Still, circulation numbers quoted by Ochsenwald (1984: 59) indicate that no copies were ever sent there directly. 152 copies were sent to Cairo, where there were very few Southeast Asians, and a mere five went to the Hijaz, where there was no independent journal of any sort until 1908 (Ochsenwald 1984: 80). It is also worthwhile noting that Snouck Hurgronje, who was on the lookout for evidence of pan-Islamism in Mecca in 1885, did not allude to the journal’s existence there or in Cairo, which he passed through on the way home in 1885.
Although Abduh’s Parisian vehicle did not engage Southeast Asians at large, from the 1890s it is clear that Cairo became for them a centre of a new modernity and Muslim print-culture. For despite Abduh having pronounced his distaste for the ‘materialist’ belief that salvation lay in newspapers and Western learning without reference to religion (see al- Busta¯n¯ı 1957: 15), aspects of the secularist discourse in Cairo would prove attractive to many Southeast Asians. The power of the printing press – initially rejected by Muslims in part because print removed the personal interaction between teacher and student (Mitchell 1988: 92, 152; Robinson 1993) – began to be realized. By the late 1890s some newspapers began to augment, and even supplant, the authority of Mecca’s scholars as Jawi readers began to refer to al-Muayyad for news of the Muslim world or to al-Mana¯r for fata¯w¯a (Bluhm 1983).
In Egypt, the relatively relaxed attitude of the British towards the press allowed both Rash¯ıd Rid.a and Mus¯ .t.afa¯ K¯amil to prosecute their respective programmes; the first religious and the second nationalist.
This is not to say that each set of ideologies was mutually exclusive there. Rash¯ıd Rid.a was a ¯ committed Syrian nationalist, and Mus.t.afa¯ K¯amil also called for religious unity under the Ottoman Caliphate. Nevertheless, their parties disagreed on the methodology for obtaining independence or religious reform and were antagonistic to each other. Rid.a, for example, accused Ka¯mil of reviving the¯ fanatical as.ab¯ıya of the pre-Islamic period (see Federspiel 1977: 67). On the other hand, Mus.t.afa¯ K¯amil’s successor, Muh.ammad Far¯ıd (1868–
1919), regarded the relatively quiescent Rash¯ıd Rid.a as a British spy (Gershoni 1993:¯ 334). Rid.a could even appear pro-British in certain contexts, as in his keynote¯ address to the Lucknow convention of ulama¯ in 1912, when he remarked that ‘[I]n India and Egypt [Muslims were] indeed fortunate to enjoy freedom of the press’ (al-Muf¯ıd, 27 May 1912). This same speech also contained an attack on such
colonizers as the French, Russians, and the Dutch (but not the British) and an exhortation to remember the Muslims of Java and Malaya.
As for the Muslims of Java and Malaya, their condition is the worst of all! Holland has already surrounded them with
insurmountable barriers of ignorance. [Therefore] if you want to learn something about them then consult English works and translate and disseminate them in your papers. And thank the grace of God and work and struggle to make education and learning common among you.
Four years later, during the H. ajj of 1916, Rash¯ıd Rid.a would address
¯ the crowd at Mina on the evils of French colonialism while the newly independent King H. usayn (r.1908–25) was courting French support in Jeddah. Rash¯ıd Rid.a even distributed a tract, printed before the war, detailing¯ an improbable plot to remove the black stone and exhibit it in the Louvre (Peters 1994a: 326–27). Through his journal, and by
distributing such tracts, Rash¯ıd Rid.a continued to make use of the press to advance the idea of an¯ Islamic community united by the threat of spiritual and temporal decline.
Once again I would seek to compare this use of the press for an Islamic purpose with Anderson’s secularist model of print capitalism. For, while Rash¯ıd Rid.a’s tract may not have been comprehensible to the Jawi pilgrims at¯ Mina, the use of Arabic script would have allowed them to feel addressed by it as Muslims (cf. Anderson 1991: 13). But whereas Anderson points out that languages do not, of themselves, generate nationalism, and that the (romanized) print medium replaced a ‘dead’
language of the divine, I would stress that the arabic script was an important signifier of alterity and nationhood not so readily erased by the modern newspaper. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the Jawa had recourse to two ecumenical languages – Arabic and Malay – each able to be written in the one sacred script making Anderson’s (1993: 36) view, for that time at least, a gross overstatement. And neither was Arabic simply a symbolic unity without enunciation. Setting aside the feelings of difference that indeed existed, we need only recall the community still felt by Southeast Asians in the presence of other Muslims as they recited, not read, the Quran, mystical hymns or other key Islamic texts.¯ Still, within the larger Islamic tradition, there remained the Malay-language Jawi ecumenism which would continue to feed a growing political awareness. And although the jawi variant of Malay did ultimately fade in Indonesia, the shift from sacred to vernacular involved more a
bifurcation of communalisms than the assertion of one over another.
Arabic continues to retain sacred force for all Muslims as both revealed and enunciated speech while Malay continues to unite members of the largest Muslim nation in the world.
Throughout the Indies colonizer and colonized alike continued to use Malay, the Jawi ecumenical language par excellence (Maier 1993).
Siegel (1997: 33–37) has argued that Malay was a weak force for identity as it did not belong to any one people. Moreover he asserts that, as a lingua franca, it was intrinsically incapable of supplying its speakers with a true sense of self. However, Siegel’s argument is founded on an examination of the writings of the mestizo population who sought to resolve their status between native and Dutch worlds. Islam is but a weak, and undescribed, force in the background irreconcilable with true nation creation. Yet by ignoring the alliance between Islamic identity and Malay as a language of Islamic ecumenism, writers like Siegel have missed the essential shift from a native Islamic to a native Indonesian consciousness. Although the Dutch also used Malay, they increasingly emphasized their mother-tongue in an effort to distinguish themselves as race and class (Stoler 1995). And, while Dutch was a language within the physical competence of most Indies subjects, until the advent of the Policy of Association, the lack of educational opportunities barred them from it as a means of expression. Even when sons of the native élite, like the Djajadiningrats, received Dutch education they were not accepted by Dutch society (Djajadiningrat 1936: 241–42). The counterpoint to this tendency was therefore to affirm Malay as a native possession. It both remained the ecumenical language and increasingly became that of a native Indies consciousness.
Of course if Malay was to be the language of nativeness, then there was no questioning which script the Dutch preferred them to use. In 1860, the Leiden academic J. Pijnappel (1822–1901) made the case for the
replacement of the arabic script in the Indies. By imposing Western script, he argued, the Dutch could ensure the ultimate replacement of (hostile) Arab influences by their own Western culture (Mandal 1994:
112–14). The echoes of this policy are to be found in Holle’s
championing of a Sundanese script (van den Berge 1998: 113ff.) or by an official circular of 1894 urging all penghulus to employ Latin script (see Mr. 22 May 1894, no. 468). In 1905, a junior official with the Office of Native Affairs, J.E. Jasper, argued that the Javanese should be
supplied with books in roman script rather than (hostile) Arabic or (obsolete) Javanese characters (Jedamski 1992: 24). With rising literacy, the Commissie voor de Volkslectuur/Balai Poestaka emerged from the