Onomastics, and Taxonomies of Belonging in the Malay Muslim World1
Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University, New York Hon. Fellow, Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, Edinburgh University
E-mail: william.roff{at}btinternet.com
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Abstract |
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In Japan's Name Culture (1995), Herbert Plutschow noted that ‘Nomenclature is a subject to which recent scholars and thinkers have paid little attention or none at all. This is surprising because names, like other aspects of culture, contain discourses that link them to social, political, economic and religious institutions’. Southeast Asia's Muslim communities, with which the present paper is concerned, are no exception to these observations. Research carried out in the 1970s and 1980s on Arabic Islamic names by the Onomasticon Arabicum group in Paris and by Richard W. Bulliet at Harvard used the compendious Arabic biographical dictionaries to explore issues relating to the social history of the medieval Middle East, conversion to Islam, and the construction of Muslim communities. Southeast Asia possesses no such convenient repertoire of biographical and onomastic data for either early or later periods. The paper therefore discusses other possible ways of studying systematically the giving, adoption and deployment of Islamic personal names in the Malay world and of using data so derived to add to our knowledge of the history and sociology of Muslim communities in the region.