A good deal of the scant scholarship on Arab Indonesians has placed special emphasis on the community's significance to the history of Islam in the archipelago, and particularly to the< Alawi-Irshadi conflict that arose at the turn of the century. A notable example is the section devoted to the Arab community in Deliar Noer's study of modernist Muslim movements in Indonesia. 2 In contrast, few works relate the community's culture and political economy, the brief and exploratory report by Charles Coppel on Arabs and Chinese in Java being an exception to this general rule. 3 Undoubtedly, the Arab role in the modern rise of Islamic movements, and indeed in the earliest proselytising of Islam in the region, deserves attention. However, the tendency of scholarship to focus on Islamic matters to the near total neglect of the community's political and economic history leaves many pertinent questions unanswered.

For the purposes of this chapter, I assume that the scholarly association of Arab Indonesians and Islam had its origins in Dutch colonial scholarship and policing. Two principal scholar-bureaucrats deserve mention in this context. In 1884, concerned about the possibility of a pan-Islamic uprising in the Dutch Indies, the Dutch government commissioned L. W. C van den Berg to tour and study the urban quarters to which Arabs had been officially assigned throughout the colony. The result of this investigation was the publication in 1886 of the very first book-length work on Arab Indonesians, Le