On Not Reading Manuscripts in Makassar

9 December 2015

In early June this year I travelled to the village of Borong Calla in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, to participate in an important religious ceremony marking the date of Nisfu Sha’baan, or the halfway point in the month of Sha’baan. An hour by car from the capital city Makassar, Borong Calla is a small fishing community consisting of roughly 30 households. As locals - especially older residents - remark, the village is special because it is a place of tarekat (tariqa). According to oral history sources, the community was established several generations ago as a centre of Islamic learning, where people could further their knowledge in the Sufi traditions of the Naqshabandiyya and Khalwatiyya. As a resident in her 80s explained to me, when she was younger Borong Calla was an extremely important, respected place; not just anyone could enter the area, there were rules regarding modesty of dress and conduct and only those seeking knowledge would be accepted into the community. While the village ‘isn’t like it used to be,’ with an influx of outsiders holding new and contradicting ideas of Islamic knowledge, the remnants of certain traditional learning practices can still be found, especially around the time of local religious festivals such as the Moulood an-Nabi and at Nisfu-Sha’baan.

Prior to June, I had visited Borong Calla regularly as part of my dissertation research. My project is a trans-Indian Ocean exploration of the travelling narratives of Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar, the seventeenth century Sufi scholar and political exile who was sent from the Indies to the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company in 1694. While in South Sulawesi, I became interested in manuscripts associated with Shaykh Yusuf - both local stories about him and texts attributed to him. Through my fieldwork I had learned of the people of Borong Calla, who not only claimed to practice Shaykh Yusuf’s teachings and to possess relevant manuscripts, but also claimed genealogical descent from him.

The first few times I had visited the village, I became acquainted with the family of Daeng Rala, a particularly learned man in his late 80s. Following two or three visits, the family became comfortable enough to show their manuscripts - much revered and safeguarded - to me. After organising a pasa’bi ceremony to bless the texts, Daeng Rala’s eldest daughter carefully carried out three of the dozen or so books for me to inspect. At first I could look only at their covers, then I was able to open them and eventually I was permitted to page through them. As the books were written mostly in the Arab Serang script, namely Makassarese in the Arabic script, I could not understand their contents. In fact, only Daeng Rala was able to read the texts fluently, his children not literate in Arab Serang either. At this stage, it was therefore only possible to look at the manuscripts as material objects. While I was allowed to photograph them, there was no time to read them with Daeng Rala. However, this was not to be a problem as he was planning to recite from the manuscripts, as he did every year, at the time of Nisfu Sha’baan. 

Just two weeks before the festivities, Daeng Rala sadly passed away. Following the official mourning period, his children decided to hold the activities as planned, and chose another learned elder from the family to take on Daeng Rala’s role.

The activities of Nisfu Sha’baan usually occur over several days. At sunset on the evening of the 15th of Sha’baan, the family and students of the tariqa shaykh gather to pray together, they then recite Surah Yaseen and the zikri jum’at, a litany attributed to Shaykh Yusuf. The shaykh then sits up all night, reciting from his manuscripts consisting of teachings of jurisprudence, Sufi teachings and prayers, and answering questions posed by those who have gathered to learn from him. This process usually goes late into the night and is followed by communal feasting on specially-prepared festive foods like spice-infused rice, chicken and fish. The following day, the group goes to ziarah at the tombs of their ancestors, the main stop being the grave of Shaykh Yusuf in the district of Lakiung, Gowa. 

On the day of Nisfu Sha’baan, the women started to prepare the house and the festive meal from the early hours of the morning. By late afternoon the men began to arrive, some carrying copies of Surah Yaseen, all dressed in their best sarongs and shirts. After maghrib prayers, the proceedings carried on as I was informed they would. Then, after the zikri jum’at was recited, the new chosen leader, an imam now living in Makassar, approached the manuscripts that were supposed to be read on the night. They had been especially taken out and placed on a carved, wooden bookstand in front of the ceremonial foods. Everyone gathered around to listen to the texts being recited. The imam picked up the first book, flipped through the pages and put it back. He said something quietly to Daeng Rala’s daughter and she nodded, and then it was decided that we should all eat. The texts would not be read.

In conversation with me, a few days after the event, Daeng Rala’s children lamented the fact that the manuscripts were not read on the night. They had broken family and cultural tradition. However, the issue was out of their hands: the imam was unprepared and unable to read the manuscripts, as were they. Hardly anyone in the region could fluently read these texts anymore and Daeng Rala had not appointed a particular student of his to continue the tradition in the event of his death. The manuscripts were returned to their special, guarded place at the back of the house. It was unlikely that they would be taken out and read for a good while.

The problem of ‘lost literacy’ is not one faced by people in Makassar, or even in Indonesia, alone. There are examples of communities throughout Africa and elsewhere, where individuals and families hold on to inherited Arabic and ajami texts that they are unable to read. Literacy in ajami scripts is often acquired in traditional madrasah education and because such learning systems are replaced by other Latin script-based systems, the ability to read manuscripts becomes highly specialised. In some cases the skill eventually dies out, as do the activities related to the reading of manuscripts.  In light of the inability to access the content of manuscripts, the value of the texts shifts, usually to their materiality. The manuscripts are therefore revered for what they look like or the histories they represent, not for what they say.

As researchers engaging with Arabic and ajami texts, it is our business to approach manuscripts as vessels of information and as texts read and circulated (currently and in the past). However, it can be equally enlightening to view them as documents that are no longer read - indeed, at times some of us are forced to do so. The hows and whys of the dusty, unread books safeguarded in trunks in family homes can lead to informative and helpful understandings of the contemporary state of textual culture and of the place of Arabic and ajami texts in local reading practices.

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