Surau

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The Surau Nagari Batipuh in West Sumatra

Surau is the name of an Islamic and religious assembly building that is widespread in some regions of Sumatra as well as on the Malay Peninsula and is used for worship and religious instruction. In terms of its ritual function, the Surau is similar to a mosque , but Suraus are mostly smaller than mosques, and there are no Friday and holiday prayers in Surau . Suraus are often also attached to a mosque and are then used exclusively for religious instruction. With regard to its religious dual function, the surau is, so to speak, the Southeast Asian counterpart to the Arabic zāwiya .

With the Minangkabau

Mosque and Surau in West Sumatra, 1880–1900, Photographie Tropical Museum

The Surau as a religious institution can first be identified with the Minangkabau . Suraus were an integral part of the socio-religious system here even in pre-Islamic times. They were used for ancestor worship and were houses in which men lived and studied together. The first Islamic Surau among the Minangkabau was probably built in the coastal city of Ulakan at the end of the 17th century by Burhān ad-Dīn, a disciple of ʿAbd ar-Raʾūf as-Singkilī. It developed into one of the most important Islamic educational institutions among the Minangkabau and became the model for many other institutions of this kind. Suraus could have very different sizes. The smaller ones, called Surau Mangaji , mostly consisted of a small room, had up to 20 students and usually only one teacher, who also acted as Imam , and were used solely to learn how to recite the Koran . Large Suraus, on the other hand, had up to 1,000 students during the heyday of the Surau culture in the 18th century, comprised up to 20 buildings and provided the students who lived in the Surau with a complete religious education. The central figure of the surau was the tuanku shaikh , who was usually also considered to be the bearer of baraka . In large Surau he was usually subordinate to a number of teachers who were referred to as guru and mostly had learned from him or were still learning from him. The construction and maintenance of the Surau was usually done through foundations ( waqf ) and donations from parents as well as through the work of the Surau residents. Since the reputation of a Surau largely depended on the charisma and piety of his tuanku shaikh , it could happen that after his death the Surau quickly experienced a decline or disappeared entirely. In all these respects, the Minangkabau Surau shows great similarities with the Pesantren institution, which was originally only common in Java.

A Surau in Aceh , 1890–1930, Photographie Tropenmuseum

Many Suraus were also centers of Sufi orders . In this case the tuanku shaikh was the spiritual leader of the Surau residents and they swore allegiance to him . The Surau of Ulakan, for example, served as the center of the Shattārīya order, into which Burhān ad-Dīn was introduced by ʿAbd ar-Raʾūf as-Singkilī. Other orders that had their own surau among the Minangkabau were the Naqschbandīya and the Qādirīya . Some students visited different suraus one after the other and allowed themselves to be introduced into different orders. The fact that the disciple of a tuanku shaikh is referred to as a Murīd or Faqīr shows the great influence of Sufism on the Surau culture.

Early 19th century was the Surau system of Hāddschis that in Mecca with the doctrine of the Wahhabis , made came into contact radically. They and their followers, the so-called Padris, branded the Suraus as centers of dissemination of un-Islamic teachings and practices and burned some of them down during the so-called Padri Wars (1821–38). Further steps that heralded the decline of the Surau culture were the introduction of a new type of school, the so-called sekolah nagari , by the Dutch around 1870 as well as the intellectual attacks of reformist Muslims around 1900, who denounced the Surau as a haven of backwardness, and their own secular schools erected. Today there are tentative attempts to revive the Surau culture among the Minangkabau.

On the Malay Peninsula

The Surau al-Falah in the city of Banting, Selangor , Malaysia

On the Malay Peninsula, the functional difference between mosque and surau is not always that clear. In rural areas, the Surau was the center of Islamic worship par excellence for centuries and therefore synonymous with the mosque. In today's urban areas in Malaysia and Singapore there are also suraus. Sharifa Zaleha, who has dealt with Suraus in Malaysia, concludes that the difference between the two institutions is that the mosques are built by the state, while the Surau go back to grassroots initiatives and even more the Daʿwa - Serve work. As with the Minangkaba, the meaning of a surau depends very much on the religious scholar who is committed to this institution. During the heyday of the Dakwah movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the Suraus in Malaysia also became centers of student life. Many male and female students spent several nights a month in Surau, praying in the form of itikāf until morning, reciting the Koran and doing devotional exercises.

A newly built Surau in Kedah Province , Malaysia

Like mosques, Suraus are considered sacred places. When the manager of a holiday resort in Kota Tinggi gave Buddhist monks from Singapore a surau for meditation in mid-August 2013, it aroused great indignation among the Muslims of Malaysia. Thereupon M'sia, the head of the Buddhist community in Malaysia, publicly apologized to the Muslims in his country for this "wrongdoing".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See John Renard: Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims . Berkeley 1996. p. 289.
  2. ↑ See Azra 63-67.
  3. ↑ Cf. Azra 67f.
  4. ↑ Cf. Azra 69f.
  5. ↑ See Jeffrey Hadler: Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia Through Jihad and Colonialism. Ithaca 2008. p. 179.
  6. ↑ Cf. Azra 63f.
  7. ↑ See Zaleha 9.
  8. ↑ Cf. Zainah Anwar: Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia. Dakwah among the Students. Petaling Jaya 1987. pp. 46-53.
  9. ↑ http://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/msias-top-buddhist-leader-apologises-over-surau-incident