Auf A. Said
I grew up in the kampung heart of Tanjung Priok district in Jakarta, Indonesia, a place people call pinggiran, yet somehow more cosmopolitan than the polished neighbourhoods that claim the city’s official identity. Here, I lived within my familiar bubble of the Bugis-Makassar community. It was a world built not on doctrine or textbooks, but on everyday rituals that never needed names. Pantang larang (taboo), ancestral memory, the rhythm of Bugis-Makassar traditions, all of it formed the pulse of daily life long before any scholar arrived to give it labels.
Moving out of town in my teens, this intimacy made my later study in pesantren (Islamic boarding school) feel strangely foreign. Suddenly, the discourse shifted to the desert: to the celebration of “Bedouin purity,” to Qur’anic warnings about tribal stubbornness, to scholars insisting that the arid Arabian landscape was the only legitimate cradle of Islamic identity. It presented a contradiction that felt personal. Why was the Bedouin held up as both the raw ingredient of the ummah and its most morally fragile element? Why was my own upbringing, alive and evolving, written off by outsiders as a leftover, a stubborn pre-Islamic residue under a supposedly thin, Arab veneer?
The escape from this rigid narrative came through Mohd Taib Osman. His work revealed something I had felt but could not articulate: indigeneity was not an archaeological layer buried beneath Islam; it was a living system fighting to survive, adapt, and reinterpret itself through Islam. It became clear that the real comparison was not between “pure Islam” and “local belief,” but between two different worlds in which Islam had to negotiate with indigenous imagination.
This essay emerges from that sort of consciousness. It places the Bedouin and the Malay world side by side — not to flatten their differences, but to show the strikingly similar ways both have been shaped, judged, and transformed by Islam. In doing so, it challenges the colonial and reformist impulse to portray Southeast Asian Islam as an exotic deviation from an Arab norm. Decolonizing our understanding requires precisely this kind of comparative confrontation.
Bedouin Indigeneity in the Qur’anic Imagination
The Qur’an does not use the word indigeneity, yet it speaks directly to it through a vocabulary more honest and textured than modern categories. Al-aʿrāb (the Bedouin) appear as a moral paradox: guardians of linguistic purity and ancestral memory, but also those “stronger in unbelief and hypocrisy,” shaped by an environment that fosters suspicion, autonomy, and a fierce loyalty to kin.
Classical scholars systematized this portrait, none more influential than Ibn Khaldun. His contrast between ahl al-badiya (desert) and ahl al-hadar (city) in the book Muqaddimah (1377) framed Bedouin life as the engine of raw political power, forged by hardship and familial solidarity. Yet he also saw this same force as needing discipline, refinement, and ethical reorientation. Urban society, not Bedouin life, became the stabilizing ground for religion and morality.
In this framework, Bedouin indigeneity becomes the internal “other” of Islamic civilization. It is indispensable, yet perpetually in need of moral correction. Islam did not erase Bedouin identity; it bent it, re-channelled it, and rebuilt it through revelation. That pattern of critique, negotiation, and transformation is the template for how Islam would later confront other indigenous worlds.
Colonial Misreadings of Malay Indigeneity
When Islam entered the Malay world, it encountered a landscape very different from Arabia; one thick with spirits, ancestor veneration, ritual specialists, and royal sacrality. Early colonial anthropologists attempted to freeze this world into neat layers and tidy diagrams.
Winstedt in (1947) described Malay religion as a “layer cake”: animism at the bottom, Hindu-Buddhism in the middle, and Islam as a thin, foreign shell on top. Hurgronje saw syncretism “everywhere,” a term that, in colonial hands, always implied impurity (Witkam, 2021). Wilkinson (1906) viewed the belief system as a stratified sequence of primitive animism, overlaid by Hindu-Buddhist and later Islamic influences, and positioned indigenous people as passive recipients of external civilizations.
Skeat (1900) catalogued rituals, spirits, and healing practices as “survivals” from a pre-rational age, freezing Malay cosmology into a static world of superstition rather than a coherent system of meaning. Maxwell, writing from within the colonial bureaucracy, treated adat and ritual life as quaint obstacles to modern governance, interpreting indigenous cosmology as psychological irrationality that impeded legal order (Gullick, 1991).
Across all these models ran the same colonial habit: to underestimate Islam’s depth in Southeast Asia and exaggerate its foreignness. Islam was treated as a veneer, the indigenous as an unchanging core, and Southeast Asian Muslims as passive receivers of outside influence.
However, reality looked nothing like this.
Beliefs in the Malay world were not relics that Islam merely sat upon. It was a living vocabulary that Islam actively reshaped.
The Return of the Indigenous Mind
Mohd Taib Osman, in Malay Folk Beliefs (1989), decisively broke from the colonial lens. He argued that Malay indigeneity is not static, not an ancient residue, and not a pre-Islamic fossil. Instead, it is a dynamic, adaptive system constantly responding to new moral vocabularies.
A bomoh (traditional healer) reciting Qur’anic verses is not an example of “mixed religion,” he argued. It is an example of a cosmology that has already been reorganized through Islam, where jinn (genie) replace nature spirits, where rezeki (sustenance) reframes luck, and where silaturahim (social harmony) gives new ethical grounding to communal rites.
In Osman’s anthropology, indigenous beliefs survive not by resisting Islam, but by absorbing and reinterpreting it. Islam becomes the new conceptual grammar, and the indigenous imagination remains the storyteller. This is why rituals with pre-Islamic origins often endure: they gain new legitimacy through Islamic justification. They continue not as fossils, but as transformations.
This insight changes everything. Indigeneity becomes not an obstacle to Islam, but the very terrain through which Islam becomes locally meaningful.
Bedouin and Malay Worlds: Two Negotiations, One Grammar
Bringing together the Bedouin and Malay experiences reveals two very different landscapes shaped by a surprisingly similar logic.
Islam confronted the Bedouin from within; it confronted the Malays from the outside.
One world was defined by tribal lineage, honor, and survival; the other by spirits, ancestral potency, and ritual specialists.
Yet both worlds required translation. Both required critiques—both required transformations. In Arabia, the Prophet redirected Bedouin virtues toward universal ethics. In the Malay world, Islam reinterpreted spirits as jinn, shrines as keramat linked to saints, and rituals as practices legitimized by Qur’anic categories.
And in both regions, indigeneity became a continuing site of tension: the Bedouin resisting moral discipline, Malay folk practitioners resisting reformist purification. But these tensions do not reveal Islam’s weakness. They reveal how Islam historically works, not by erasing cultures, but by interpreting them.
This process, repeated from North Africa to the Swahili coast to Southeast Asia, is why Islam is both universal and intensely local. The Qur’an itself affirms this plurality: “O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may get to know one another.” (Al-hujurat:13)
Indigeneity, then, is not the thing Islam overcomes. It is the material Islam transforms.
Conclusion
To read the Bedouin alongside the Malay world is to see Islam’s encounters with indigeneity in full. The Bedouin supplied the first raw material: the linguistic, ethical, and social context that the Qur’an directly addressed. The Malays supplied a cosmology so layered and dense that Islam reinterpreted it piece by piece, negotiating with symbols older than the sultanates themselves.
Colonial scholars misunderstood this, insisting that Islam in Southeast Asia was a veneer over animism. Mohd Taib Osman overturned that view, showing a world in which rites survive through reinterpretation, in which indigenous imagination finds new life through Islamic concepts, and in which culture and revelation meet in a continuous process of translation.
By placing these two worlds in conversation, we see that indigeneity in Islam is not a threat, not a residue, and not a deviation. It is a hermeneutical space, the ground on which God’s message meets human memory. It is the space where meaning is negotiated, where identity is refined, and where communities decide, again and again, how to live before God.
Islam does not abolish indigeneity. It interprets it. And through that interpretation, it becomes at once universal and unmistakably local; across deserts, across islands, across the shifting landscapes of human experience.
Auf A. Said is an independent researcher and a writer in The Coretanist. His primary interest is Southeast Asian transregional connections and postcolonial studies. He holds a B.A. in Islamic history.
From Vox Ummah via This RSS Feed.