WILLIAM GIBSON (Phd, unaffiliated), author of the first scholarly book-length work on keramat in Singapore, explains the often‑tense relationship between keramat and authority, both secular and religious, from colonial to modern times.
In December 2022, an eighteen-year-old Singaporean named Muhammad Irfan Danyal bin Mohamad Nor was arrested by the Internal Security Department. Portrayed as a wayward youth who was self-radicalized by watching YouTube videos by foreign extremist preachers, Muhammad Irfan hatched a plan that was both patently pathetic and potentially lethal. According to the ISD, he planned to found a caliphate called the Islamic State of Singhafura on tiny Coney Island; ambush, stab and kill non-Muslims, Shias and Sufis; detonate a car bomb at the military camp at Amoy Quee; and he planned to blow up the 150-year-old mausoleum of Habib Nuh on Shenton Way. According to one news outlet, Muhammad Irfan “saw the gravesite as ‘un-Islamic,’ as it was decorated and not at ground level,” a reference to specific hadiths in the Sahih Muslim, a collection of the Sunnah (sayings, practices or traditions) of the Prophet. It may have been the only time that a historic building in Singapore has been targeted as an act of terrorism on purely religious grounds.
Known as a keramat, or miracle-working grave, the tomb of Habib Nuh has been an important sacred site in Singapore likely since Habib Nuh died in 1866. Although his identity has been questioned by scholars, we know that the tomb we see today was built in the mid-1880s, and was once popular not only with Muslims but with Chinese and Hindus as well as the occasional European gawker. Both its age and its function as symbol of Singapore’s history as a multiethnic port would make it a likely candidate for some sort of preservation status in the modern city-state. In the 1950s, the British considered listing it as a historic monument, along with other keramat in Singapore such as Radin Mas and Iskandar Shah, but these plans never came to pass. After Independence, as the city developed around it, there was a talk of removing the grave and adjacent mosque in the 1980s, but a popular outcry brought an end to those discussions. Having once again survived an attempt to destroy it, the historic keramat is now undergoing a renovation today for the first time in forty years, yet it remains controversial.
The entrance to the makam of Habib Nuh in 2022. Top photo: Keramat Iskandar Shah photographed in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The masked devotees were chanting the Surah Yasin. [All pictures by W.L. Gibson.]
For many Muslims in the modern Singapore, keramat represent at best a type of old-fashioned superstition or at worst a form of syrik, expressions of polytheism that obscure the Oneness of God, and therefore should be destroyed. For others, not only minority Sufis for whom such shrines have always held high importance, but also for moderate Muslims both Malay and Indian, keramat are an essential element of Islam in Singapore, simultaneously a mark of minority religious identity and a claim to the sacred land of the forefathers and early pioneers. For historians and heritage activists, they constitute important landmarks of an earlier time and in some cases may present important material evidence of Singapore’s pre-colonial or early settlement. Given these wildly varied perspectives, for state administrators, both colonial and post-colonial, keramat cause headaches. In Raffles’ case, this was literal.
In February 1823, Raffles had his secretary pen a letter to William Farquhar, with whom he had a notoriously frosty relationship, to complain that the Resident of Singapore had “allowed” a keramat to be erected on Government Hill. The Chinese had a habit of setting off firecrackers at the shrine, which disturbed the Lieutenant Governor’s repose. In his apologetic reply, Farquhar noted that since the keramat was of a “very ancient date and highly venerated by Natives,” he was averse to removing it, he would, however, take measures to stop the firecrackers. Apparently, this tactic appeased Raffles because this shrine, keramat Iskandar Shah, remains on the hill today.
Flash forward to 1965 and we find Lee Kuan Yew addressing the Sikh community to explain why a shrine to a Sikh holy man — believed by non-Sikh to be keramat — on the grounds of the Singapore General Hospital had to be removed. Located in what was once the Sepoy Lines, the shrine may have dated to the earliest days of the settlement. No matter. LKY dismissed it as a tree shrine and it had to go: “If anyone can get spiritual comfort or psychological release by either striking the four-digit numbers or praying to the Infinite, I say good luck to him. But it is not possible to govern this place with its teeming population without taking some firm and even unpleasant measures.”[1] The shrine was removed, but relics were preserved in the Gurdwara Sahib temple on Silat Road. LKY’s condescending attitude became an unofficial policy.
In the 1950s, there were estimated to be 100 keramat in Singapore. The majority of these were destroyed after independence, between the early 1970s and early 1990s, when the “city in the garden” concept was imposed on the landscape. Keramat were part of what LKY termed the “mudflats” on which dwelled this “teeming population” (of fewer than two million) that needed to be governed and which were destined to be replaced by the shining metropolis that metaphorically beams its message of modernity to the world (and quite literally to the fisherman of Batam). Today, only a handful of keramat remain in Singapore and some of these are in awkward positions as changes in land use and “upgrades” loom toward them. Will they survive? Should they even be preserved?
Most keramat are situated on either private or state land. Those on state land require a Temporary Occupation License which entails an annual fee and which can be revoked without much recourse. The penjaga, or caretakers of keramat, are volunteers — not landowners — whose status is granted by the community, not the state. Yet, it falls upon caretakers to ensure state laws and regulations are being followed. This is not a traditional role for caretakers, who once enforced only standards set by the community, and it is one that essentially co-opts them into acting as agents of government bureaucracy. Several caretakers I spoke with expressed fear that the shrine in their care may be demolished if they do not ensure that they correctly enforce government rules.
These rules are not only secular regulations regarding sanitation or crowd control but also religious obligations. The Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS), the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore, has an uneasy relationship with keramat. In MUIS’s view, they may be considered a form of syrik, yet Muslims are allowed to visit them. In a state that has enshrined religious plurality, where Sufis can openly gather without fear of reprisal from other Islamic groups, keramat put MUIS in a bind. Each site seems to be handled differently, often depending on the caretaker. Thus, the long-serving caretaker at keramat Radin Mas on Mount Faber has posted irsyad printed in English and Malay, official religious guidance issued by the Office of the Mufti of Singapore, the most senior Islamic authority in Singapore. These guidelines remove many of the traditional forms of keramat worship. Proscribed activities include circumambulating the grave or stroking its soil, any form of supplication directed to the deceased, going into a trance or reciting mantras, and making offerings of food, drinks or flowers.
The message of syrik is explicitly enforced:
Each and every Muslim must remember that the deceased are normal beings and servants of Allah. Thus, actions which have no basis in Islam or resemble worship of entities besides Allah s.w.t. are prohibited.
The keramat of Radin Mas in March 2021. The irsyad from MUIS is hanging in the black frame on the fence at right.
These irsyad give MUIS de-facto management over a site that it explicitly considers to be a non-Islamic grave; in the folktale, Radin Mas Ayu was a Hindu princess from Majapahit (devotees believed she converted to Islam in Singapore). In this instance, MUIS is not managing the site but rather the actions of the devotees while relying on the elderly caretaker to ensure the rules are followed. This is not a sustainable solution to the wider problems keramat present to the secular state.
Destroying the shrine would be a simple way to solve these issues, but the attitude toward keramat as heritage sites has evolved since LKY’s comments to the Sikh community. The destruction of sacred graves in historic cemeteries in Kallang in 2009-2010 prompted a exhibition at the National University of Singapore Museum in 2011 of artifacts collected from a rubbish tip. The accompanying catalog presented academic essays and gorgeous black and white photographs; titled The Sufi and the Bearded Man: Re-membering a Keramat in Contemporary Singapore, it is available online. More recently in 2019, a group of heritage activists and academics were able to stop the demolition of an enigmatic keramat shrine that juts out from a godown on Moonstone Lane.
Exterior of the mysterious keramat at Moonstone Lane, 2022. The godowns were built in the 1950s by a Hindu man who preserved the shrine.
It is safe for now, but what should the government do with it? The land is very valuable. The godowns are old and out of place in a district dominated by landed properties and high-rise condominiums and it would seem inevitable that the godowns will be demolished sooner rather than later, but what of the shrine itself? It is at least one-hundred years old, so does its age alone mean that it merits preservation or conservation in some form? What would preservation at such a site look like in modern Singapore? The tale of keramat Iskandar Shah — the one that gave Raffles headaches — is instructive.
In the 1820s, it was said to be the grave of the founder of Melaka, though scholars find its identity problematic. The shrine we see today was built by the government. A large community-built shrine was removed in stages in the 1970s and in the early 1980s replaced with the black sarcophagus-like structure we see today. The wooden pavilion above was added in 1990 to coincide with the 600th anniversary of the founding of Melaka, an effort that imbricates the shrine into a historical narrative. In the 1980s, a team of landscape architects from California proposed turning Fort Canning Park into an outdoor museum of Singapore’s history. The keramat became part of the Temasek portion of the history walk, effectively appropriated into a state-driven narrative of 700 years of progress.
The site continues to be recontextualized as the park continues to be developed. Opened in 2019, the Sang Nila Utama Garden constructed directly behind the keramat is a “reimagining” of Southeast Asian gardens from the fourteenth century, a pleasant simulacrum that nearly drowns the authentic shrine in a pool of kitsch.
A keramat grave in an abandoned shipyard at Pulau Samulun, 2022. The name on the stone is Daeng Awang Sulong and it was emplaced on 25 October 1965, one month before the shipyard opened. However, the year of death is given as 1790, suggesting this is a shrine erected for a keramat in the village the shipyard displaced. This shrine may mark the last trace of a settlement that existed before the coming of Raffles.
As the shrine was appropriated into a state-driven narrative, religious observance was discouraged, with signs at the site — posted by NParks, not MUIS — prohibiting the burning of incense, performing religious gatherings, feeding birds and leaving “food materials and other objects” at the shrine. In other words, the keramat on Fort Canning Hill is considered as an outdoor museum piece with a fixed identity washed clean of local faith. Nonetheless, the keramat remains an active shrine and prayer still occurs, a characteristic that sets it at odds with its official designation as a spiritually-neutral historic “point of interest.” Tourists snap Selfies with devotees in the background. This situation angers some Muslims with whom I spoke, yet they feel powerless to do anything about it.
While the fate of keramat Iskandar Shah seems fixed, there are other keramat scattered across Singapore for whom a different fate may await. City planners are turning their attention from producing heritage spaces that foster a singular vision with a unifying message and instead strive to cultivate “urban imaginaries” with diverse living stories. Beyond their value as markers of material culture, keramat offer instances of freedom in a landscape otherwise dominated by a unitary narrative that extols the secular virtues of consumer capitalism and of an all-encompassing unity of purpose in an effort of perpetual nation building. As instances of a vernacular tradition that pre-dates the arrival of the British, for Muslim and non-Muslims alike, keramat offer sanctuaries of quiet reflection that are not burdened by the economic and ideological imperatives of the present.
— William Gibson’s book, Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore, will be published by Routledge this month. It is the result of four years of research on the topic (www.williamlgibson.com).
Note
[1] Why Shrine Must be Moved – Lee Explains to the Sikhs” 1965, The Straits Times, 3 November.