Sacred Resilience and Social Cohesion: The Integration of Islamic Values and Indigenous Tradition in the Ukuala Mahiyat of Mamala, Maluku
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Abstract
Religious traditions in Muslim societies are frequently interpreted through a binary opposition between scriptural Islam and indigenous culture. Such an approach inadequately explains communities in which Islamic commitment and customary identity have become historically interdependent. This article examines Ukuala Mahiyat, more commonly rendered in the scholarly literature as Ukuala Mahiate, a ritual tradition of the Mamala in Central Maluku, Indonesia, to investigate how Islamic values, indigenous knowledge, embodied ritual, and collective memory interact to produce social cohesion and community resilience. The study employs qualitative video-based ethnographic document analysis, triangulated with published ethnographic research, historical accounts, and scholarship on Islam, ritual, social cohesion, resilience, and Moluccan customary institutions. The findings identify five interconnected mechanisms: the sacralization of communal memory through the mosque and the Islamic calendar; the integration of prayer, Qur’anic symbolism, and Nyuwelain Matehu within indigenous ritual knowledge; controlled bodily reciprocity as an enactment of trust and collective discipline; intergenerational reproduction of Mamala identity; and the conversion of customary continuity into adaptive social capacity. Rather than describing the ritual simply as religious syncretism, the article conceptualizes the process as negotiated sacred integration. It proposes sacred resilience as a framework for understanding how communities draw on religiously authorized cultural memory to reproduce belonging, mutual obligation, and adaptive continuity under changing social conditions. The study further argues that the cohesive effects of tradition are neither automatic nor normatively uncontested: bodily injury, commercialization, orthodoxy, generational change, and cultural representation remain sites of negotiation. Ukuala Mahiate therefore demonstrates how local Islam can become simultaneously a theology of belonging, an archive of collective memory, and a social infrastructure of resilience.
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