Forests of Islam : territory, environment and holy war in Terengganu, Malaya, 1928

Abstract

In 1928, a small forest uprising in Terengganu, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, became a Holy War. The rebels—shifting cultivators from the Terengganu River system, coalesced under an Islamist leadership of rubber smallholders, mosque functionaries and Islamic scholars. They were responding to a power struggle between two elite forces within the colonial government after 1919—represented by the Sultan and the British Adviser. These two forces were engaged in a contest to subject the hinterland’s landscape and population to government, resulting in overlapping claims to the Terengganu forest. These claims prevented forest-based smallholders from cultivating rice or rubber—their two main crops. Aggrieved by displacement from their swiddens, hundreds of cultivators began to defy government forest regulations. They attacked forest guards and police officers, accusing them of being kafir—unbelievers. Then on 21 May 1928, rebels occupied a police station in Kuala Berang, a regional administrative centre. From this police station and its surrounding government offices, the colonial government exercised its claim to exist as the sole regulator of land and forest use in the hinterland. Yet the rebels’ defiance was not based solely on their land and forest counterclaim. They raised the red flag of the Ottoman Caliphate over the police station, generalising their local demands into one for sovereignty as Muslims. In doing so, the rebels demonstrated their location in a set of regional and global connections beyond their local environment. They were building on a series of Islamising political precedents. These precedents, established by Islamic scholars, responded to a larger territorial contest—between Britain and Siam for control over the Malay Peninsula. The contest for the peninsula drove a logic of territorial delimitation which bounded Terengganu and the states around it—formerly Siamese tributaries. A series of treaties signed over the nineteenth century eventually culminated in the 1909 Siam- Malaya border, locking Terengganu on the British side. Terengganu was colonised in 1919, and was incorporated into the emerging Malayan geo-body. Yet Islamic scholars from the Siamese tributaries were not locked in place, continuing their patterns of mobility around the region, and between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Together, these scholars forged a political solidarity with the global community of Muslims—the umat. They began to authorise a politics of Holy War against Britain, using Islamic metaphors to create a political language which the Terengganu rebels later used. In this intensely Islamic political climate, the Terengganu rebels wove their local land and forest claims into a bold defence of the umat. In doing so, they momentarily negated the logic of the territorial bounding to which they were being subjected. The uprising became a Holy War, not only for the Terengganu forest, but for the umat against the kafir colonisers. Show more