Living tradition · Indonesia

Indonesia and the Malay world

In Indonesia the Rifāʿī name lives in two places that are easy to confuse: in performing arts of Aceh and Banten that grew from the order's gatherings, and in a nineteenth-century Javanese movement that shares the name but not the founder.

I. Aceh: the rapa'i

The rapa'i is the great frame drum of Aceh. One of its forms, rapa'i dabôh, is traced by Acehnese tradition to the Rifāʿiyya: begun as a means of preaching, it became a popular art. Twelve performers sing to the drum while doing dangerous feats with knives, swords, chains and sharpened bamboo. Groups such as Rincong Pusaka and Putra Naga in South Aceh still perform it. The Dutch scholar Snouck Hurgronje described these displays of invulnerability in Aceh in the late nineteenth century.

II. Banten: debus

In Banten, west Java, the debus is now a celebrated regional tradition. Rohman's 2015 study argues that it joined with the practices of the Sufi orders, and the literature it draws on ties dabus to the Rifāʿī order by name. As with the Balkan and Kerala forms of burhān, a performance's link to the order does not make every performer an initiate.

III. A name that is not a branch: the Rifaiyah of Kalisalak

Central Java's Rifaiyah movement traces itself to KH Ahmad Rifaʿi of Kalisalak (1786–1876), a Javanese scholar — not to the twelfth-century Iraqi Pîr. Its communities are a living movement in their own right. This site does not place them on the Rifāʿī map on the strength of the name alone.