Muhammad’s Guns: Islamic Histories of the Past and Present from the Malay World

This talk focuses upon Malay-Islamic historical texts concerning firearms that were passed down, physically, by the Prophet Muhammad to his heirs in the early modern and modern Malay world. Particular attention is paid to how these texts serve as microcosms of broader Malay social worlds wherein guns and their metals were believed to have Islamic genealogies and be inhabited with spirits. Despite the centuries of temporal difference, Muhammad and his Malay heirs were pivotal to propagating guns, gun expertise and the use and domestication of ‘foreign’ metal and guns from the west. In exploring these texts, this paper is concerned with the following questions: what can an engagement with Islamic texts reveal about linearity and time, the writing and rewriting of the past, understanding of the present, and the creation of Muslim futures?

Beyond genealogies, the texts that this talk focuses on also introduce Sufi masters in Southeast Asia as individuals who were plugged into circuits connecting them to a range of historical actors across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean. These historical actors included other masters, gun-makers, smugglers, hunters, enslavers, and revolutionaries, all of whom were employed for their arts of bullet craftsmanship, Islamic marksmanship, and arts of mediating the spirits of firearms. As these texts tell us, the continuing resonance of the supernatural lies in its evolution in time and space, making the supernatural unproblematically historical. Its basis of constant renovation and innovation in the substance of miracles and the spiritual is evident in the emergence of new technology. On the whole, this talk presents explorations into the histories of supernatural technologies, Islamic genealogy, and the interlinkages of Sufi sainthood and war across the early modern and modern Indian Ocean world.