Singapore's Islamic Pasts: Alexanders in an Island Below the Winds

by Teren sevea, harvard university

This essay focuses on Singapore’s first king and karamat, and heir of the pre-Qur’anic prophet and king Iskandar Dhu al-Qarnayn. As the island's first Islamic king, Iskandar Sahib marks the beginnings of Singaporean Islamic history in the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Alexandrian-Abrahamic dynasty memorialized in Malay court chronicles (hikayat) and manuscripts. Hikayats and orally transmitted histories have guided Islamic communities as they strive to reclaim histories of Iskandar Sahib and Persianate conceptions of divinely sanctioned kingship, along with accounts of peripatetic saints in Alexandrian Singapore, within a society wherein Islamic pasts have been marginalized and obliterated. Chapter 1 of this book focuses on Singapore’s ‘Alexanders’, or genealogies of Islamic descendants of Alexander, and examines the accounts of Malay historians (muwarrikh) from the authors of sixteenth/seventeenth-century chronicles, to present-day storytellers writing about their research methods, including oral traditions, dreams, and visions, within a ‘grammar of possibility’. In appreciating history by diverse storytellers, this essay is as much concerned with Sufi masters and miracle workers as it is with the members of Sufi communities, such as boatmen, laundrymen (dhobi), weavers, dock-workers, mill-workers, horse-carriage riders, soldiers, watchmen and tea, tobacco and opium dealers and smugglers. Histories of Singapore’s first king, Iskandar Sahib and his Alexandrian dynasty, remain disputed by academic historians but have been upheld by chroniclers, genealogists and storytellers, as well as Tamil and Malay poets. Moreover, Iskandar Sahib has narrated Singapore’s Islamic past amidst urban redevelopment, protecting his grave as a sign of the city’s ineradicable Islamic history, while appearing to muwarrikhs (from the 1820s to 1990s) to educate the community about Singapore’s Islamic past and present. 

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