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This paper examines the ?dueling reed pens?, or the rival versions of history presented by the Hikayat Siak and the Tuhfat al-Nafis, as a means of understanding the Bugis diaspora, identity and Islam in the Malay world of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The period of political turmoil in the Malay world in the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, coupled with the systematic study by Dutch administrators in the nineteenth century of the indigenous traditions and histories of kingdoms that they intended to rule, serve as the historical context for the duel. The Malay-Minangkabau descendants of the Siak kingdom and the Malay-Bugis descendants of the Riau-Lingga (formerly Johor) kingdom offer competing narratives of their origins in their attempts to justify to the Malay world and to the Dutch their legitimate right to rule.
In the Tuhfat?s historical reconstruction of Bugis involvement in the affairs in the Malay world beginning in the early decades of the eighteenth century, actual Bugis sources must have been consulted judging from the description given in the Tuhfat itself. It is the compelling arguments advanced for Bugis legitimacy which have misled scholars to regard the author Raja Ali Haji and the intellectual elite based on the island of Penyengat in Riau as ?Bugis?. What this paper argues, however, is that these ?Bugis? by the late nineteenth century were in fact strongly Malay and the acknowledged experts of Malay court protocol and traditions. Nevertheless, their examination of their past had also strengthened their identification with their Bugis culture. In addition, through their writings and close links to the wider Islamic world, they self-consciously adopted an overarching Islamic identity in keeping with the flourishing pan-Islamic, anti-Western/Christian colonization of the Islamic world at the time.
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Jointly organized by IIAS the Netherlands and The State Institute of Islamic Studies, Makassar