Decolonizing the Digital Manuscript: Local Islamic Archives, Codicological Materiality, and the Remapping of Malay-Islamic Intellectual Worlds

Abstract

This article examines how digitisation changes the intellectual visibility of Islamic and Malay manuscript traditions in Southeast Asia. It analyses a curated dataset of 99 records covering manuscript collections, digitisation projects, literary works, oral traditions, inscriptions, and institutional archives from Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, and selected transregional sites. Instead of treating digitisation as a neutral technical act, the study reads the dataset as an archival ecology shaped by custody, material form, language, institutional power, and scholarly access. The findings show that the corpus is dominated by Brunei state-cultural and literary collections (55 records) and Indonesian local/community digitisation clusters (35 records), with smaller but analytically important entries from Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and transregional Malay collections. Four evidence fields structure the dataset: literary/oral worlds (41 records), Islamic learning (28), archive and polity (18), and language/knowledge infrastructure (12). The article argues that local digitisation remaps Islamic Southeast Asian writing traditions by shifting attention from colonial collection bias toward surau, pesantren, private, royal, and community-held materials. Its contribution is a model of archival visibility that links codicological materiality, local custody, digital access, and decolonial manuscript interpretation.