An Introduction

Summary

This book is about Islamic miracle workers and the connections between miracles and material life. To be more precise, it is about historical societies and economies where the production and extraction of natural resources, as well as the uses of technology, were intertwined with the ‘ilmu and barkat of the pawangs of the Malay world. Such miracle workers have consistently been dismissed as ‘magicians’ throughout the scholarship of the Malay Peninsula; this academic attitude was just as noticeable in the early nineteenth century as it is now. And yet, European travellers and Orientalists sometimes perceptively recognised that such miracle workers dominated many spheres of socio-economic life in modern Malaya and Sumatra, and were involved in and influenced political practices in the region. The writings of European journeymen and scholars thus reveal how nineteenth-century Malay society included a universe of peripatetic and professional pawangs.