Kinship, Islam, and Raiding in Maguindanao, c. 1760–1780woman whom he married should be freed along with her children. He
argued before the Dutch Political Council (Raad van Politie) that his
wife and her children “had to be freed by virtue of the marriage and of
the Islamic laws.” The Sultan of Ternate concurred but was countered by
the Company who opposed implementing an Islamic proscription.^43
From these examples one could glean information of how an an-
cient (pre-Islamic and pre-Christian) practice of slavery,^44 albeit now
intensified and more widespread, became viewed on religious terms.
Both Islam and Christianity proffered theological pathways to slave
liberation.^45 But the question as to which individuals such liberation
would be granted was not only a religious but also and more important,
a political issue.^46 That slavery became refracted through the religious
lens seems to follow a broader trend in which essentially non-religious
social phenomena came to be understood in simplified, often in binary
opposition with another religion. Such religious dichotomy seems to
have been particularly convenient in expressing political antagonism
and economic competition.
Throughout the archipelago, resistance and expansion was long
expressed through Islam. Anthony Reid has noted that in seventeenth-
century Sumatra and Java, Islam “helped to invalidate non-Muslim rivals
...[and] provided an honorable motive for conquest.”^47 During the ex-
pansion of Dutch influence in Maluku and Sulawesi in the 1680s, Islamic
teachers from Banten were recorded as having been brought to Maluku
- NA, VOC 3759, Meeting of the Political Council, 25 September 1786, fols. 22–24.
- See Junker, Raiding , Trading and Feasting.
- Despite their reputation, as Kiefer notes, the Tausug “had always been am-
bivalent about slavery for religious and theological reasons.” Thomas Kiefer,
“An Anthropological Perspective on the Nineteenth Century Sulu Sultanate”, in
John A. Larkin (ed.), Perspectives of Philippine Historiography: A Symposium (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1979): 60. See also Thomas
M. Kiefer, The Tausug : Violence and Law in a Philippine Moslem Society (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972): 84; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam
and the Abolition of Slavery (London: Hurst and Company, 2006): 35. - Reid, “The Decline of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia”, 70.
- Anthony Reid, “Kings, Kadis and Charisma in the 17th-Century Archipelago”, in
Anthony Reid (ed.), The Making of an Islamic Political Discourse in Southeast Asia
(Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1993):
90.