“TO SEUNAGAN SEEKING HAS SPREAD”: THE TRANSMISSION OF ESOTERIC TRADITION AND HISTORY AS PROPHECY

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore accusations of heterodoxy, as well as rebuttals of these accusations, leveled at Sufi groups in late‐colonial and independent Aceh, the last region of what is today Indonesia to fall under Dutch colonial rule. What has been at stake in debates about the orthodoxy of such groups has not simply, or even primarily, been questions of proper belief or practice but concerns over historical and interpersonal relationships among participants in esoteric traditions. Following Nancy K. Florida's attentiveness to the ways in which “prophetic history” entails engagements with the past that entwine people across temporalities, I argue that accounts contesting the alleged heterodoxy of esoteric traditions in Aceh have been infused with an emphasis on seeking active and ongoing relationships across time and space, a mode that I identify as an intercessionary form of prophetic history. The proponents and detractors of any particular tradition make their claims not simply by referencing authoritative precedents but by cultivating relationships with those who populate the pasts that they invoke. This reframes orthodoxy as an ethical act of prophetic historiography.