Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalof283018951897roya).pdf/140

 small district a holy place known as a kramat, at which vows are paid on special occasions, and which is invested with a very high degree of reverence and sanctity.

These kramats abound in Malacca territory; there is hardly a village but can boast some two or three in its immediate neighbourhood, and they are perfectly well known to all the inhabitants.

Theoretically, kramats are supposed to be the graves of deceased holy men, the early apostles of the Muhammadan faith, the first founders of the village who cleared the primeval jungle, or other persons of local notoricty in a former age; and there is no doubt that many of them are that and nothing more. But even so the reverence paid to them and the ceremonies that are performed at them savour a good deal too much of ancestor-worship to be attributable to an orthodox Muhammadan origin.

It is certain, however, that many of these kramats are not graves at all: many of them are in the jungle, on hills and in groves, like the high places of the Old Testament idolatries; they contain no trace of a grave (while those that are found in villages usually have grave-stones) and they appear to be really ancient sites of a primitive nature-worship or the adoration of the spirits of natural objects.

Malays, when asked to account for them, often have recourse to the explanation that they are kramat jin, that is, "spirit"-places; and if a Malay is pressed on the point and thinks that the orthodoxy of these practices is being impugned, he will sometimes add that the jin in question is a jin islam, a Muhammadan and quite orthodox spirit!

Thus on Bukit Nyalas, near the Johol frontier, there is a kramat consisting of a group of granite boulders on a ledge of rock overhanging a sheer descent of a good many feet; bamboo clumps grow on the place, and there were traces of religious rites having been performed there, but no grave whatever. This place was explained to me to be the kramat of one Nakhoda HUSSIN described as a jin (of the orthodox variety) who presides over the water, rain and streams. People occasionally burned incense there to avert drought