130 Islam and Modernity
Umar had made the pilgrimage to Mecca; during his stay there he was initiated
into the Tijaniyya, and after years of training received an ijaza or licence to
teach the tariqa in his homeland. He is the author of one of the most important
Tijaniyya texts. On the return journey he spent time in Sokoto, took part in
its wars and married the khalifa’s daughter. Converting people to the Tijaniyya
wherever he went, he returned to his native region, where he fi rst preached
against animism and bida and then took up arms, fi rst against pagans and
later, defensively, against Muslim chiefs, who saw him as a dangerous rival.
The core of his forces consisted of talaba, disciples of the Tijaniyya; in this case
it was clearly the tariqa that structured the military power of his movement.
His rapidly increasing power also brought him into confl ict with the French in
Senegal, although he never directly targeted them and apparently even sought
some form of accommodation with them. Perceiving this movement as a threat,
the French attacked and defeated Umar’s forces, but could not prevent his
establishing a large Muslim state further east. In the following decades, there
were various other confrontations between Tijaniyya shaykhs and French
colonial power, though it would probably be wrong to attribute a strong anti-
colonial attitude to the order (Hiskett 1976; Martin 1976; Triaud and Robinson
2000).
At the other end of the Muslim world, in South East Asia, Dutch colonial
expansion encountered activist Sufi orders playing a part in local resistance. It
was especially the Sammaniyya and later the Qadiriyya wa-Naqshbandiyya that
were repeatedly found to be involved in uprisings against traditional indigenous
authorities and occasionally the Dutch. These were the fi rst orders to fi nd an
organised mass following in South East Asia; before their arrival, the spiritual
exercises of other orders appear to have been practised mostly individually or
in small elite groups, gradually merging into folk belief and magic (Bruinessen
1994). The Sammaniyya was a new order, initiated by the Medinan teacher
Muhammad Samman (d. 1775) by combining the Khalwatiyya with elements
from other orders and adding new, loud and ecstatic recitations. Within decades,
the order found a rapidly increasing following in various parts of the Indonesian
archipelago, introduced by local men who had studied with the master himself
or his fi rst successor in Medina. When the Dutch attempted to occupy the city
of Palembang in South Sumatra in 1819, they were fought by men dressed in
white, who worked themselves into a frenzy with the loud Sammaniyya dhikr
and fearlessly attacked them. In the 1860s they met similar resistance in South
Borneo. The largest uprising of the nineteenth century took place in Banten in
1888; here it was the Qadiriyya wa-Naqshbandiyya, a similar composite order,
that was involved (Bruinessen 1994).
The Sammaniyya combined a number of seemingly contradictory traits: it
was a ‘popular’ order in the sense both of having a mass following and of endors-
ing loud and ecstatic rituals, but it also stressed strict compliance with the sharia.