Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784-1847

Christine Dobbin's academic study of the Padri movement, the Wahhabi-influenced Islamic revival among the Minangkabau of central Sumatra that began among clerics returning from pilgrimage in Mecca around 1803 and escalated into decades of conflict against traditionalist adat chiefs and, from 1821, Dutch colonial forces. Dobbin situates the movement's religious reform program within the economic transformation of the Sumatran highland coffee and gold trade, treating the war's causes as inseparably economic and religious rather than reducing it to either alone.