Academic journal article Southeast Asian Studies. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the history of Islam in pre-modern Southeast Asia through the critical examination of previously under-utilized source material. I will then introduce the main character of our story,? Abd al-Samad al-Jawi "al-Palimbani," with a focus on his scholarly pedigree, and the place of his work in the reconfiguration of Sufi thought and practice in Southeast Asia.
From there the focus shifts to the site where his Arabic biography was composed, the "scholars' city" of Zabid in the Yemen-and thence to a close reading of the text that reveals?
Abd al-Samad's position in contemporary debates on Sufi thought and practice that established his place in the global scholarly networks that came together in Arabia during his lifetime. The article concludes with reflections on how documents like this tabaqat text might be approached by historians working on intellectual and cultural histories of early modern Southeast Asia. There attention turns to frameworks for the interpretation of such biographical texts of individual scholars, and how they might be read in relation to the magisterial macro-histories of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world produced by scholars like K.
Chaudhuri , Anthony Reid ; , and Denys Lombard These works have helped us immensely in identifying some of the most significant broad historical patterns across the region during the early modern period. Moving back and forth between such "oceanic" perspectives and the individual focus presented by documents like this Arabic biographical text can, I argue, help us to better appreciate the specific character of inter-personal network linkages crucial to developing more nuanced understandings of the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Southeast Asia.
For that, however, a brief introduction to this genre of Arabic biographical texts is first necessary. Tabaqat are collections of individual biographical entries in a more or less standardized format, and arranged in one of a number of ways, including alphabetically, by generation, or chronologically by one's year of death.
