1 Malay, spoken in Malaysia, was coopted by traders and Europeans as a lingua franca in the archipelago in the fifteenth century and adopted in the mid-twentieth century by the new Indonesian state as its national language, Indonesian. Andaya, Leonard Y., ‘The search for the “origins” of Melayu’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, 3 (2001): 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3 Geertz, Clifford's Religion of Java (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar influenced many anthropologists to associate dukun with abangan which he defined as ‘traditional’.

4 Contemporary dukun, such as those I worked with in the 1980s, were regarded more positively (see Nourse, Jennifer, Conceiving spirits: Birth rituals and contested identities among Laujé of Indonesia (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Since 1998, dukun have once again become the subject of attacks by religious reformists and orthodox Muslims: Woodward, Mark, Islam in Java: Normative piety and mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Daniels, Timothy P., Islamic spectrum in Java (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009)Google Scholar; Ferzacca, Steve, Healing the modern in a Central Javanese city (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

5 Bowrey, Thomas, A Dictionary, English and Malayo, Malayo and English … (London: Sam. Bridge, 1701), p. 367Google Scholar. It actually says ‘a Phifitian, a Surgion, an Apothecary’ in the Bowrey dictionary.

6 I have used dictionaries here as my primary historical sources due to the peculiar circumstances of Malay / Indonesian and its development as a language. There was little written literature in Malay, the exception being the 1303 Terengganu stone (Andaya, ‘Search for “Melayu” origins’). It was not until the seventeenth century that a number of Malay literary texts began to appear (Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, The oldest known Malay manuscript: A 16th century translation of the ‘Aqa'id of al-Nasafi (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1988Google Scholar). These texts relied heavily on Persian stylistic modes and loan-words. Muhammad Abdul Jabbar Beg, Persian and Turkish loan-words in Malay (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1982), p. 16Google Scholar.

7 While there may have been many short jottings in the Malay language prior to this, most notes about everyday life were written on palm leaves, lontar, few of which have survived. (Behrend, Timothy E., ‘Small collections of Javanese manuscripts in Indonesia’, Archipel 35, [1988]: 23–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Most early Malay literature like Hikayat Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai spoke about the court-based elite, not dukun. Of those remaining manuscripts, none, to my knowledge, spoke about dukun, since most people in the region wrote in their primary languages, not Malay. To circumvent the lack of primary sources, Michael Laffan's work has served as inspiration. Laffan, Michael, ‘New charts for the Arabic Ocean: Dictionaries as indicators of changing times’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 159, 2/3 (2003): 351–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 At the time, surgeons were untrained barbers, or sailors, so the gloss is not necessarily affirmative. Boomgaard, Peter, ‘The development of colonial health care in Java: An exploratory introduction’, BKI, 149, 1 (1993): 82Google Scholar.

9 Dennys, Nicholas Belfield, A descriptive dictionary of British Malaya (London: London and China Telegraph Office, 1894), p. 104Google Scholar.

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11 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar; Foucault, M., ‘Two Lectures’, in Power / Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78–108Google Scholar.

12 The nineteenth-century spelling for dukun; Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay: Compiled by the Indonesian Etymological Project, ed. Jones, Russell (Leiden: KITLV, 2008), p. 68Google Scholar. Technically this is not an etymological dictionary, but a book on foreign loan-words in Indonesian and Malay.

13 Jones did not differentiate Arabic and Persian; this was not the purpose of his project. However, Hamarneh makes a persuasive argument that Jones's listing of dukun as an Arabic loan-word had made a ‘linguistic mistake’; it had relied on a twentieth-century, modern Arabic dictionary, and not one appropriate for the period in which dukun would have been absorbed into Malay.

14 Lane, Edward William, Arabic–English lexicon, vol. 1, repr. (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, [1863] 1968), p. 924Google Scholar. This is based upon Muhammad ibn Mukarram Ibn Manzur's fourteenth-century lexicon, Lisan al-‘Arab [The Arab tongue]), (Bayrut: Dar Sadir, 1955 [c.1302])Google Scholar.

15 Persians are Farsi language speakers. Here Farsi is glossed as Persian.

16 Lane, Arabic–English Lexicon, p. 924.

17 Guillot, Claude, ‘La Persé et le monde Malais: Échanges commerciaux et intellectuels’, Archipel 68, 1 (2004): 164CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 162.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Guillot, ‘La Persé et le monde Malais’: 177.

23 Ibid.

24 Pollock, Sheldon, The language of the gods in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture and power in premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 133Google Scholar.

25 Persian became the cosmopolitan supra-language replacing Sanskrit. Malay served as lingua franca for more than seven hundred indigenous and a host of foreign language-speakers.

26 Pires' diary was written in 1515; quoted from Guillot, ‘La Persé et le monde Malais’: 177.

27 Laffan, Michael, ‘Finding Java: Muslim nomenclature of insular Southeast Asia from Srivijaya to Snouck Hurgronje’, in Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, movement, and the longue durée, ed. Tagliacozzo, Eric (Singapore: University of Singapore, 2009), p. 38Google Scholar.

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29 Ibid., p. 341.

30 Elgood, Cyril, A medical history of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 173Google Scholar.

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33 Guillot, ‘La Persé et le monde’: 177. Malay was first written in the Persian / Arabic script.

34 Ibid., p. 178. On Persians as bullies, see Cornell, Vincent, ‘Ibn Battuta's opportunism: The networks and loyalties of a medieval Muslim scholar’, in Muslim networks from hajj to hip hop, ed. Cooke, Miriam and Lawrence, Bruce (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 31–50Google Scholar.

35 After Genghiz Khan attacked Samarqand in 1220, Persian remained the language of administration and medicine. By 1247, Arabic medical manuals were regularly transcribed into Persian. Buell, ‘How did Persian and other Western medical knowledge move East?’, p. 290.

36 Islam had entered the Malay/Indonesian archipelago centuries before, but Wali Gresik and the other eight saints were revered because they ushered in the era of mass conversions to Islam. Bashah, Abdul Halim, Wali Songo dengan Perkembangan Islam di Nusantara (satu kajian), (Sungai Buloh: Pustaka al-Hijaz, 1993), pp. 72–5Google Scholar.

37 Ras, J.J., ed. Babad Tanah Djawi: De prozaversie van ngabehi kerta pradja voor het eerst uitgegeven door J.J. Meinsma (Dordrecht: Foris, 1984)Google Scholar. This was quoted in Ricci, Ronit, ‘Conversion to Islam on Java and the book of one thousand questions’, BKI 165, 1 (2009): 23–4Google Scholar. Ricci says Maulana Ibrahim Walik became known as Sunan Ampel for his dwelling place (p. 24). Gade says Sunan Ampel's father came from Samarqand and the father, Ibrahim Asmarkandi, died in transit from Champa. Gade, Anna M., ‘Sunan Ampel of the Javanese Wali Songo’, in Tales of God's friends: The Islamic hagiography in translation, ed. Renard, John (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 341–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Laffan, Michael, The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and narration of a Sufi past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 8Google Scholar. Laffan's sources in Central Java identify Wali Gresik as Wali Maghreb and Arab. I argue they do so from the vantage of more contemporary Arab-centric perspectives from the nineteenth century. All of these authors, like myself, are relying on written versions of oral tales or copies of original palm leaf manuscripts that have long ago disintegrated. Most of the Indonesian authors I have read, though, acknowledge Wali Gresik as Maulana Ibrahim Asmarkandi and as the first Wali Songo. Simon, Hasanu, Misteri Syekh Siti Jenar: Peran Wali Songo dalam mengislaman tanah Jawa (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2004), p. 168Google Scholar.

38 Bashah, Wali Songo, pp. 72–5.

39 Ibid.

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41 Tomé Pires remarked that when the Muslim king of Malacca ventured out of the palace, he wore regal clothing and parasols shaded him (Cortesão, Armando, The ‘Suma Oriental’ of Tomé Pires: An account of the East, from the Red Sea to China 1512–1515, vol. 2 (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Chambre des Deputes, [1944] 1990Google Scholar), p. 265.

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52 Ibid; Buell, ‘How did Persian and other Western medical knowledge move East?’, p. 288.

53 Chipman, ‘Islamic pharmacy’, p. 269; Buell, ‘How did Persian and other Western medical knowledge move East?’, p. 288.

54 Walid Hamarneh, personal communication, 7 Oct. 2012.

55 Bashah, Wali Songo, pp. 72–5.

56 Javanese villages named Dukun still exist near Gresik. Other villages named Dukun are near former kingdoms, like Majapahit, Demak, and Mataram, while Duku in Malaysia, is near the former Johor kingdom.

57 Foucault, Discipline and punish, pp. 25–6.

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