ABSTRACT
Since the seventeenth century, the Hadrami diaspora has forged connections between southern Arabia and the Malay world, the largely Muslim archipelago within Southeast Asia, and constituted a transcultural network made up of people of enormously diverse cultural origin. Members of the diaspora placed importance on their descent from the Prophet Muhammad and thereby offered a model of human interaction beyond racial or national vocabularies. The diaspora’s creole histories – narratives of interconnection and intermixing – have been neglected in favour of racialised narratives that arose with colonialism and are sustained by independent nation-states of the region such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Hadramis, as Arabs, have also been identified with the flow of an orthodox Islam from west to east. Rather than a one-way conduit of conservatism, this chapter takes the position that Hadrami connections with the Malay world have resulted in a transcultural Islamic bridging space that allows for a variety of multiscalar circulations of people, politics and ideas. Hadrami connections, even if largely in the past and superseded by racialised narratives, continue to point to an alternative vocabulary of belonging and identity in the world.
