Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiato “foment revolt against the Dutch.”^48 Meanwhile, the Muslim peoples
of Weda (Halmahera) were known to have invoked Islam to resist their
Dutch overlords. Their planned participation in a hongi (spice eradication
campaign), as Leonard Andaya points out, had to be postponed “since that
particular day was the Islamic Sabbath”. They likewise denied possessing
highly prized tortoiseshell which the Company would like to acquire, be-
cause Islam “forbade the catching tortoises” or so they claimed.^49 Closer to
Maguindanao, the Muslim inhabitants of Kendahe in Sangir were known
to have resisted the influence of local Christianized rajas “favored” by the
Company.^50 In Banten, where both Maguindanao and Sulu had religious
links, the notion of a “holy war” against the Company had been particu-
larly rife. One of the popular leaders of the Banten Rebellion (1750–1752)
against the “infidel” Dutch named Kyai Tapa “raised an Islamic legal
principle that Muslims should not be subjected to a non-Muslim ruler.’^51
Azyumardi Azra opines that while the “European challenge” should not be
exaggerated, “there is little doubt that it contributed to the growing con-
cern among [...] Malay-Indonesian scholars about the future of Islam.”^52
In the eighteenth century, the scholar Abd al-Samad al-Palimbani had not
only been “most responsible for the further spread of neo-Sufism in the
archipelago” but also was an “exemplary activist against Dutch colonialism
[and] encouraged [...] jihad against the Dutch”.^53
In Maguindanao, James Warren has passingly remarked that the
raiders before 1768 considered their activity in the Philippines as “an
- Andaya, The World of Maluku, 182.
- Ibid., 100; Muridan Satrio Widjojo, “Cross-Cultural Alliance-Making and Local
Resistance in Maluku during the Revolt of Prince Nuku, c. 1780–1810” (PhD
Dissertation, Leiden University, 2007): 109. - NA, VOC 8141, Ternate 3, Copia dagregister gehouden door den onderkoopman
Hemmekam gedurende zijne commissie naar de Sangirsche eilanden (ontvangen
anno 1780), fol. 89. - Atsushi Ota, “Orthodoxy and Reconciliation: Islamic Strategies in the Kingdom of
Banten, c. 1520–1813”, in idem, Ahmad Suaedy, & Okamoto Masaaki (eds), Islam
in Contention: Rethinking Islam and State in Indonesia ( Jakarta: Wahid Institute
2010): 410–11. - Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of
Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ‘Ulama’ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004): 127. - Ibid., 130–133.