Miracles and Madness

A “Prophet” of Singapore Islam

Abstract

This article analyzes the hagiographies, poems, oral traditions and miracle stories of an Islamic miracle worker (keramat) buried in Singapore named Sayyid Nuh ibn Muhd al-Habshi (ca.1788–1866). In his physical lifetime and beyond, he was described as a wandering ecstatic who adored children and burgled businesses, yet attained a reputation as “prophet” and keramat by performing miracles, healing the incurable and flying in and out of prisons and across the Indian Ocean. With appreciation for the historicity embedded in miracle stories, this article examines the Tamil devotional poems and songs, and the Malay hagiographies and oral traditions that commemorate this keramat. Attention is also paid to the historical concerns of his hagiographers, many of whom attempted to appeal to audiences informed by secularism, rationalism and “Wahhabism” by writing Islamic histories about this “Arab” Sufi master and the Sufi networks that operated in the Southeast Asian port city of Singapore at a time when it was dominated by western power. This article is thus concerned as much with the storytellers as with the miracle workers and members of devotional communities in nineteenth-century Singapore, all of whom are susceptible to being forgotten in academic historiography. By drawing upon ethnographies and newspaper reports about this prophet, saint, felon and “madman,” and discussing his mausoleum, which has remained intact in the face of war, colonialism and post-colonial infrastructural development, the article argues that the story of Sayyid Nuh is a history of Singapore Islam. A history that is interwoven with histories of the Indian Ocean, maritime Sufism, colonialism, capitalism and structural inequalities that were temporarily overcome by miracles. This is moreover a story of miraculous narratives, devotional cultures, social memories and sacral places that are often pushed to the margins of religious studies but refuse to “fade into folkloric oblivion.”