Iḥsān b. Muḥammad Daḥlān (1901–52), also known as Kyai Iḥsān Jampes, was a prominent Javanese Muslim scholar ( kyai) and a prolific writer, recognised especially for his Arabic writings on Ṣūfism. He was born in Jampes, Kediri, East Java. His father was also a Muslim scholar and the founder of the Jampes pesantren (Islamic boarding school). Iḥsān Daḥlān grew up in the pesantren milieu and began his education under the tutelage of his father. He then went on to study with a number of prominent Muslim scholars in different pesantrens in Java, including his uncle, Kyai Khazin of Pesant…

Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan (1868–1923) was a Javanese religious official attached to the Yogyakarta sultanate, who founded the reformist Muhammadiyah movement in Yogyakarta in 1912. He was born in the kauman, the quarter for devout Muslims near the Great Mosque, in the royal city of the sultanate of Yogyakarta, into a family of the upper class of the sultanate’s religious apparatus. At birth he was given the name Muhammad Darwish. His father, Kyai Haji Abu Bakar bin Kyai Mas Sulaiman, was a religious scholar (Javanese kyai), who worked as a preacher (Jav. ketib) of the royal palace, and hi…

Aḥmad b. Zaynī b. Aḥmad Daḥlān (d. 1304/1886) was a sayyid of the Ḥasanid line (that is, a descendant of the prophet Muḥammad through his grandson al-Ḥasan) and one of the most influential scholars in Mecca through the 1870s until his death. He was born in Mecca sometime between 1231/1816 and 1233/1818 and died in Medina. He completed his education in the jurisprudential tradition of the four schools of law ( madhhab, pl. madhāhib) in Sunnī Islam solely in Mecca, where he also made a career as a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school. A moderate Ṣūfī (mystic) in the style of …

The Idrīsiyya of Indonesia is a Ṣūfī order belonging to the intellectual and spiritual tradition associated with the North African master Aḥmad b. Idrīs (d. 1253/1837, in Ṣabyā, Yemen), which is generally known as the Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya. The teachers of the Indonesian order claim that their primary affiliation is with the Sanūsiyya but there are also considerable similarities with the Dandarāwiyya branch of the Aḥmadiyya-Rashīdiyya, which is active in Malaysia. The first Indonesian shaykh of the Idrīsiyya, ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ (1884–1947), was born into a religious famil…

Muhammadiyah (or Muhammadijah, from Ar. Muḥammadiyya) is the largest Muslim modernist movement in Indonesia. Founded by Ahmad Dahlan (d. 1923) in Yogyakarta in 1912, it has, as of 2017, more than twenty million members and sympathisers and is second in membership only to the traditionalist movement Nahdlatul Ulama (Bush). The modernist character of Muhammadiyah is reflected in its systems of education and medical treatment and in its organisational management and leadership. It emphasises egalit…

Ayisyiyah, or ʿAisyiyah, the women’s section of Muhammadiyah, is one of the two largest Muslim women’s organisations in Indonesia. Exact membership numbers are unknown, but in 1996 were estimated at over two million. The organisation has branches throughout the archipelago and is active in social welfare, health, education, economic development, and the propagation of Islamic teachings. Ayisyiyah was founded in 1917 in the kauman (Muslim quarter) of Yogyakarta, where Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan had established Muhammadiyah five years earlier. Dahlan and his foll…

Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Zayn al-Faṭānī (1856–1908), was a Southeast Asian scholar and publisher based in Mecca. Born in the town of Yaring in Patani, then a semi-autonomous sultanate on the Malay-Thai Peninsula, he came from an reputable family of shaykhs and had been taken to Mecca while still a boy. He received an eclectic education by studying with many of his countrymen, who were numerous in Mecca at the time, as well as a number of esteemed ḥadīth scholars, leaders of the Aḥmadiyya ṭarīqa (Sufi order), anti-Salafī figures such as Sayyid Aḥmad b. Zaynī Daḥlān (d. 1886), and well…

Aḥmad b. Ḥasan a l-ʿAṭṭās (1257–1334/1841–1916) was a prominent ʿālim and manṣab of the al-ʿAṭṭās family (a branch of Ḥaḍramī sāda). Born in Ḥurayḍa, a village in Wādī ʿAmd and the family centre in Ḥaḍramawt, he became blind in infancy and was nicknamed al-Baṣīr, “the Seer.” His education began in Ḥaḍramawt, though his most famous teacher was Aḥmad b. Zaynī Daḥlān, under whom he studied while in Mecca from 1274 to 1281/1858 to 1864–5. The correspondence between the teacher and the disciple continued until the death of the former in 1304/1886. Later he succeeded his father as one of two manṣabs…

The Hāshimīs (Hashemites) were a dynasty of Ḥasanī descendants of the prophet Muḥammad (sharīfs) who ruled Mecca as amīrs almost without interruption from the fourth/tenth century until 1924. After the First World War, the dynasty provided kings for Syria and Iraq, which later became republics, and gave its name to the territory that became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The dynasty was named after Hāshim b. ʿAbd Manāf, the paternal great-grandfather of the prophet Muḥammad. The majority of the Shīʿa recognised as their Imāms descendants of ʿAlī’s younger son al-Ḥusa…

Muḥammad Nawawī b. ʿUmar al-Jāwī al-Bantanī (1813–97), known in present-day Indonesia as Nawawi Banten, was born in Tanara, in the province of Banten in West Java, into a religious family. He received his early religious education from his father, who was the penghulu (head) of the local mosque, and continued his education with other Javanese Muslim teachers. In 1828 he went to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage and continue his studies. Three years later he paid a short visit to his home country but soon returned to Mecca, where he spent …

Mawlānā Abū l-Ḥasanāt ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm b. Amīnallāh al-Laknawī (26 Dhū l-Qaʿda 1264–29 Rabīʿ I 1304/24 October 1848–26 December 1886) was an eminent Indian theologian and legal scholar. He was born at Banda, in Uttar Pradesh, into the distinguished Farangī Maḥall family from Lucknow, which claims descent, through the Ḥanbalī scholar and Ṣūfī poet al-Anṣārī (d. 481/1089), from Abū Ayyūb Khālid al-Anṣārī (d. c. 52/672), host of the prophet Muḥammad at Medina. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy studied, with his father Mawlawī ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm (d. 1285/1868), a renowned teacher and …

Hans Bague Jassin (1917–2000), usually referred to as H.B. Jassin, was an Indonesian literary and cultural figure whose polemics often brought him criticism from both the Marxists and the religious traditionalists. Born in Gorontalo, Sulawesi, he studied in Dutch colonial schools in Balikpapan, Kalimantan, and in Medan, Sumatra, where he became an avid reader of the new Indonesian journalism and literature being created there in the 1930s. He later took up an editorial position with Balai Pustaka …

Aḥmad Khaṭīb of Minangkabau (1860–1916) was a prominent scholar of Islam of Sumatran origin, active in Mecca from the last decade of the nineteenth century until his death. He was considered the most knowledgeable teacher of his day in the Jāwī community in Mecca, a term used for Southeast Asians who come to the Holy City for devotional purposes or study. Aḥmad Khaṭīb was also known for his hostile attitude towards the Dutch. He was born in Kota Gedang, Minangkabau (West Sumatra), in 1860. His grandfather ʿAbdallāh had migrated from the Ḥijāz to West Sumatra to trade…

Fatayat, established in 1950, is the young women’s section of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s traditionalist and largest Muslim organisation, which was founded in 1926. Pressed by Kyai Haji Muhammad Dahlan (1909–97), NU’s executive chief, a small group of young women in East Java, mostly daughters of kyais (the Javanese term for ʿulamāʾ, Muslim religious scholars), set up the organisation, despite fierce opposition from some charismatic kyais who hampered its progress. Three young women are credited with taking this initiative: Murthosiyah, Khuzaimah Man…

Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (d. 13/634) was the first caliph, the successor to the Prophet Muḥammad in his political function as leader of the young Muslim community in Arabia. He was known as ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUthmān and was probably born after 570, the year of the Prophet’s birth, as he was said to be almost three years younger than the Prophet. His father, ʿUthmān, was known as Abū Quḥāfa b. ʿĀmir, and was a member of the Qurashī clan of Banū Taym. His mother, Salma bt. Ṣakhr, was also of Qurashī origin, a…

Evidence of Islamisation in Java first appears in the fourteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, Islam was the majority faith of Javanese. 1. The early stages of Islamisation in Java The earliest surviving evidence of Islam amongst the Javanese is in the form of gravestones at Trawulan and Tralaya, in East Java, near the site of the Hindu-Javanese court of Majapahit (late thirteenth-early sixteenth centuries). They are Muslim gravestones, since Hindus were cremated. The stones have quotations from the Qurʾān and piou…

Aḥmad Rizā Khān Barelwī (1856–1921) was a Sunnī Muslim scholar of the Ḥanafī school, born in Bareilly, Rohilkhand, in north India. He was born just a year before the failed Indian revolt led in the name of the aged Mughal ruler, Bahādur Shāh Ẓafar, against East India Company rule. Its failure ushered in Crown rule in 1858 and led in 1877 to the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. Aḥmad Rizā's life was thus lived out in the context of British colonial rule in India. Barring two pilgrimages to Mecca and some brief visits to cities within India, Aḥmad Rizā lived out h…

Badr, the site of an important battle in 2/624 between the early Muslims and the Meccan clan of Quraysh, is a small town about 150 kilometres southwest of Medina, almost fifty kilometres inland from the Red Sea. 1. The place It lies in a rectangular plain surrounded by steep hills and sand dunes. While the surrounding region is arid, Badr itself was built on a fertile plain, with abundant springs and wells of fresh water and large areas covered with palm trees, bananas, vineyards, and other fruits. The name Badr originated, according to genealogical reports, with a certain tribal …