o - Aceh Books website

586 ORISSANS
is an occasion for the transaction of official village affairs as well as an act of
obedience to God.
The key intersection of social life and religious ritual is at the sedekah, the
meal and prayer session held to celebrate a birth, commemorate a death, ward
off danger or give thanks for a crop. At every sedekah there is a two-way
transmission of spiritual goods between men and God. The assembled community
recites prayers that are offered to the spirits of the dead ancestors, who in turn
pass on the merit (pahala) of the prayers to God. The return is a blessing by
God for the subject of the ritual: a newborn child, a crop or the spirit of the
recently deceased.
In its village forms, both the doctrine and the organization of religious life
are oriented towards the otherworldly rather than towards social or political
action. No concrete blueprint for social reform emerges from the combination
of tarekat, worship and sedakah that shapes traditional village religious life.
Although reformist teachers have challenged this view and Muhammadiya schools
have been established in some areas, neither the Muhammadiya organization nor
the Nahdlatul Ulama have won substantial followings. Rather, villagers see their
social identity and uniqueness as mediated by intervillage ties to the major
Sumatran religious schools (pesantren), by links through kinship and marriage
to other districts and by a common sense of shame (maluan) and the preservation
of custom (adat).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Jaspan, M. A. "Rejang Complex." In Insular Southeast Asia: Ethnographic Studies,
Section 1, Sumatra, compiled by Frank M. LeBar. New Haven: Human Relations
Area Files, 1975.
Marsden, William. The History of Sumatra. 1783. Reprint ed. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford
University Press, 1966.
Unpublished Manuscript
Collins, William. "Besemah Concepts: A Study of the Culture of a People of South
Sumatra." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1979.
John Bowen
ORISSANS The Muslims of the Indian state of Orissa call themselves Mahomedan
or Muslim. Non-Muslims call them Musalman or Pathan. They number
perhaps 400,000, only 1.5 percent of the state's population of 26.8 million,
based upon 1971 figures.
Orissan Muslims were converted from among the local population during the