Shaykh Yusuf Al-Maqassari: Epistemic Network, Diplomacy, and the Making of Decolonial Thought

Abstract

Scholarly attention to Shaykh Yusuf al-Maqassari (1626–1699) has long been confined to two readings: the Sufi saint and the armed resistance leader. Neither is mistaken, but each leaves out the way his scholarly life itself operated as political action. This study examines how Shaykh Yusuf built transnational networks through the circulation of religious knowledge and how those networks functioned as a structural force against VOC expansion. The argument is reconstructed from Shaykh Yusuf's Arabic and Malay treatises, VOC correspondence from the Cape and Ceylon archives, and Bugis-Makassar hagiographic sources, read against three frameworks: the epistemic network model, which treats knowledge as circulating across geographical and cultural boundaries; the Sufi-warriorism thesis; and the Indian Ocean ulama network framework. The political stakes become legible only when the three are held together. In consolidating five major Sufi orders, Shaykh Yusuf was building authority as much as accumulating spiritual capital. Because the consolidation cut across factional lines, neither colonial administrators nor local rulers found stable ground from which to challenge his legitimacy. His theological shift from Waḥdat al-Wujūd to Waḥdat al-Shuhūd amounts to an epistemological reorientation that prefigures by several centuries what later theorists would articulate as decolonial thought. His successive exiles to Ceylon and Cape Town, far from diminishing his reach, wove him into global circuits extending beyond what the archipelago alone could have afforded. These findings place Nusantara Islam in conversation with cross-cultural liberation theory and offer a fresh angle on scholarship, movement, and resistance under early colonial rule