KITA Discourse Series 4/2019: The Arrival of the Ahmadiya-Idrisiyya and the Mecca-based ‘Patani School’

In this seminar, I present some of my findings from a recently completed multi-sited study of Sufism in Thailand. I summarise the range of personalities and historical processes involved in the introduction of the Ahmadiya-Idrisiyya from the Hijaz, to Kelantan and Patani. I point out how this case-study differs from that of the Qaddriya wa Naqshabandiya introduced to Ayutthaya (late 1890s), and the Ahmadiyya-Shadhiliya whose founding sheikh arrived in Bangkok, in 1927. Few studies of Sufism are complete without details of the silsilah of influential Murshid (Ar. Sufi guides). While these will be included, my interests are in what the arrival of the Ahmadiya-Idrisiyya tells us about the Mecca-based “Patani School”, and their agenda in the late 1890s. I argue that this confirms Sheikh Ahmad al-fatani’s reputation as a progressive intellectual force, and offer suggestions for becoming connected to the “juristic Sufism” of Sheikh Ahmad Ibn Idris. I conclude by relating the changes to the Ahmadiya-Idrisiyya in Kelantan and Patani brought about by later Murshid under whose leadership this tariqa developed a changed from that of a reformist order, to an ecstatic one. The presentation will include some visual vignettes of Ahmadiya-Idrisiyya dhikr.

Dr Christopher M. Joll is a New Zealand anthropologist who has been based in Thailand for 18 years. His primary ethnographic subjects since stumbling into anthropology 10 years ago have been Thailand’s Muslim minority. He completed his PhD from the National University of Malaysia in 2009, and his first monograph (Muslim Merit Making in Thailand’s Far South) was published by Springer in 2011. He is affiliated with the Faculty of Anthropology and Sociology at Thammasat University (Bangkok), but has been a research associate at the Religious Studies Program, since July 2017.