Can Anyone ID This Coin? | Islamic Hajj Token

That's an odd one, for sure.

It's not a "coin" in the sense of money officially issued by a government. The design is a bit too crude for a current circulating coin, and the manufacturing quality is too good for it to belong to an earlier time period.

The script is Arabic or (given it's provenance), a local Malay variant of Arabic. On one side, we've got a butterfly, with the names "Mohammed" on the left wing and "Allah" on the right wing. The word up the top between the antennae is the Arabic word "yasin" (Oh man), a key word from a key verse of the Qur'an. There are numbers at the base: "121".

On the other side, we've got a somewhat crudely rendered ship bearing a name something like "Nawa", and a word or two beneath, something like "wahid larna"; "wahid" is Arabic for "one".

I'm afraid that's the best I can do with out-of-a-book translating. You'd need a native speaker to get all the words correct, but enough is readable to get the gist of the purpose of this piece.

It's a token given to folks heading off on the Hajj to Mecca, partly as a charm to ward off evil, partly as a reminder to the pilgrim of why he's travelling. The Islamic parts of Southeast Asia have a long tradition of giving these pieces.

Zeno.ru is an excellent website for referencing anything Asian or Islamic, and has lots of examples of these tokens here.

Cool...I suspected it a pilgrimage token as well, so it's nice to get confirmation.