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A surau is an Islamic assembly building in some regions of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, used for worship and religious instruction. Generally smaller physical structures, their ritual functions are similar to those of a mosque, they admit men and women, and they are used more for religious instruction and festive prayers. Surau mostly depend on grassroots support and funding and can be compared to the Arab zawiya. In the Minangkabau society of West Sumatra, Indonesia, they are built on high posts and maintain pre-Islamic traditions of a men's house.
In contemporary usage, "surau" is often used to refer to either a small mosque or a designated room in a public building (such as a shopping mall, a university, or a rest stop along a highway) for men or women to perform salah.
Smaller establishments are known as surau mangaji and mostly consist of a small room for 20 students and one teacher, who is usually also the imam and teaches recitation. Large surau, during the heyday of surau culture in the 18th century, accommodated up to 1,000 students and included up to 20 buildings.
The central figure of a surau was the tuanku shaikh, who oversaw a large number of teachers. The establishments were maintained by foundations ( waqf) and funded through donations from parents. Minangkabau surau have similarities with the institution of the pesantren, which initially only occurred in Java.Azyumardi Azra, Islam in the Indonesian World: An Account of Institutional Formation. Bandung 2006, S. 63–69.
Many surau were simultaneously centers of Sufism orders. The surau of Ulakan served as a center of the Shattariyya order, which had been introduced by Burhanuddin Ulakan, a student of Abd al-Rauf al-Fansuri. Other orders, which had their own surau in Minangkabau, were the Naqshbandi and Qadiriyya. Some students visited various surau in succession and could be members of different orders.RA Core, The Origin of the Malay Surau. The Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 29/1 (1956) 179–181.
The early 19th century witnessed the surau system of Hāddschis in Mecca, which came in contact with the teachings of the Wahhabism. They and their followers, the so-called Padris, denounced the surau as centers of dissemination of un-Islamic teaching and practices, and they burned some of them during the so-called Padri War (1821–1837). Other events that heralded the demise of surau culture was the 1870 introduction of a new type of school, the so-called sekolah nagari, by the Dutch, and in 1900, the intellectual attacks of reformist Muslims who denounced surau as signs of backwardness and established secular schools.Kerstin Steiner. Madrasah in Singapore: Tradition and Modernity in Religious Education. Intellectual Discourse, 19 (2011) 41–70. Today, there are tentative attempts to revive surau culture within Minangkabau communities.
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