He could appeal to long local precedent in this respect, though matters had not always been thus. They did so in the name of broader orthodoxy and their putative founders alike, whether as Shattaris, linked to the heritage of Siraj al-Din ya). With the global spread of Western power and the ensuing decline of indigenous polities in monsoonal Asia throughout the nineteenth century, members of key transregional Sufi brotherhoods, known individually as tariqa (from the Arabic word for 'way' or 'path') and divided by specific techniques and genealogies, engaged in active competition across the Indian Ocean. Placing Southeast Asia in a Global Umma and a Sufi Century The Modern Spread of the Sufi Orders in Southeast Asia