The Coming of Islam

Chapter 1

The Coming of Islam

The spread of Islam is one of the most significant processes of Indonesian history, but also one of the most obscure. Muslim traders had apparently been present in some parts  of Indonesia for several centuries before Islam became established within the local communities. When, why and how the conversion of Indonesians began has been debated by several scholars, but no definite conclusions have been possible because the records of Islamisation that survive are so few, and often so uninformative. In general, two processes probably occurred. On the one hand, indigenous Indonesians came into contact with Islam and made an act of conversion. On the other, foreign Asians (Arabs, Indians, Chinese, and so on) who were already Muslims settled permanently in an Indonesian area, intermarried and adopted local lifestyles to such a degree that in effect they became Javanese or Malay or whatever. These two processes may often have occurred in conjunction with each other, and when a piece of evidence survives indicating, for instance, that a Muslim dynasty had been established in some area, it is often impossible to know which of these two processes was the more important.

There must have been an Islamic presence in maritime Southeast Asia from early in the Islamic era. From the time of the third Caliph of Islam, ‘Uthman (644–56), Muslim emissaries from Arabia began to arrive at the Chinese court. By at least the ninth century there were several thousand Muslim merchants in Canton. Such contacts between China and the Islamic world would have been maintained primarily via the sea routes through Indonesian waters. It is therefore not surprising that Muslims seem to have played an important role in the affairs of the great Sumatran Buddhist trading state of Srivijaya, which was founded in the later seventh century. Between 904 and the mid-twelfth century, envoys with Arabic names came from there to the Chinese court. In 1282 the king of Samudra in northern Sumatra sent two emissaries with Arabic names to China. Unfortunately, the presence of foreign Muslims in the Indonesian area does not demonstrate either that local Islamic states had been established or that a significant level of local conversions had occurred.

The most reliable evidence for the spread of Islam within a local Indo-nesian society consists of Islamic inscriptions (mostly tombstones) and a few travellers’ accounts. The earliest surviving Muslim gravestone on which the date is clear is found at Leran in East Java and is dated Anno Hijrae (AH) – the Islamic era – 475, Anno Domini (AD) – the Christian era – 1082. This was the gravestone of a woman, a daughter of someone named Maimun. It has, however, been doubted whether the grave to which the stone belongs was actually in Java, or whether the stone was for some reason transported to Java (for instance, as ballast on a ship) some time after the lady’s death. In any case, since the deceased appears to have been a non-Indonesian Muslim, this stone sheds no light on the establishment of Islam among Indonesians.

The first evidence of Indonesian Muslims concerns the northern part of Sumatra. In the graveyard of Lamreh is found the gravestone of Sultan Sulaiman bin Abdullah bin al-Basir, who died in AH608/AD1211. This is the first evidence of the existence of an Islamic kingdom in Indonesian territory. When the Venetian traveller Marco Polo touched at Sumatra on his way home from China in 1292, he found that Perlak was a Muslim town, while two nearby places which he called ‘Basma(n)’ and ‘Samara’ were not. ‘Basma(n)’ and ‘Samara’ have often been identified with Pasai and Samudra, but this identi-fication is open to question. It is possible either that ‘Samara’ is not Samudra, or if it is that Polo was wrong in saying that it was non-Muslim. For the grave-stone of the first Muslim ruler of Samudra, Sultan Malik as-Salih, has been found, and is dated AH696 (AD1297). Further gravestones demonstrate that this part of North Sumatra remained under Islamic rule. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta passed through Samudra on his way to and from China in 1345 and 1346, and found that the ruler was a follower of the Shafi’i school of law. This confirms the presence from an early date of the school which was later to dominate Indonesia, although it is possible that the other three Orthodox schools (Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali) were also present at an early time.

Two late-fourteenth-century gravestones from Minye Tujoh in North Sumatra appear to document the continuing cultural transition there. The two stories are in the same form, but one has an Arabic inscription and the other an Old Malay inscription in paleo-Sumatran (Indian-type) characters, both inscriptions being Islamic. They both date the death of a daughter of a deceased Sultan Malik az-Zahir, but although they have the same month, date and day of the week, they differ by ten years (AH781 and 791/AD1380, 1389). It seems likely that there is an error in one of the years, that both inscriptions refer to the same woman and that she was therefore commem-orated with inscriptions in two languages and two scripts. After this time, the documents from North Sumatra are wholly in the Arabic script.

From the fourteenth century survives evidence of the spread of Islam to Brunei, Trengganu (in what is now northeast Malaysia) and East Java. An Arabic inscription on a tombstone from Brunei praises a dead ruler called both Sultan (Arabic) and Maharaja (Sanskrit) of Brunei; although the stone is undated, Chen argues that it must have been made in Quanzhou (Kwangchow), South China, and imported from there early in the fourteenth century, in any case before 1366. Another gravestone records in Chinese the death in Brunei in 1264 of a Chinese who was apparently a Muslim. The Trengganu stone is a fragment of a legal edict. The date at the end appears to be incom-plete, however, and the possible range of dates for this inscription is between AD1302 and 1387. The stone appears to represent the introduction of Islamic law into a previously non-Islamic area, as is suggested by the predominance of Sanskrit over Arabic words, even for such an important word as God, which is given in one case as dewata mulia raya rather than Allah.

A particularly significant series of gravestones is found in the East Javanese graveyards of Trawulan and Tralaya, near the site of the Hindu-Buddhist court of Majapahit (see Chapter 2). These stones mark the burial of Muslims, but with one exception they are dated in the Indian Saka (s) era rather than the Islamic Anno Hijrae and use Old Javanese rather than Arabic numerals. The Saka era was used by the Javanese courts from Old Javanese times down to AD1633, and its presence on these tombstones and the use of Old Javanese numerals mean that these are almost certainly the tombs of Javanese, as opposed to foreign, Muslims. The earliest is found at Trawulan, bearing the date s.1290 (AD1368–9). At Tralaya is a series of gravestones extending from s.1298 to 1533 (AD1376–1611). These stones carry Qur1anic quotations and pious formulae. From the elaborate decoration on some of them and their proximity to the site of the Majapahit capital, Damais concluded that these were probably the graves of very distinguished Javanese, perhaps even members of the royal family. 

 

These East Javanese stones therefore suggest that some members of the Javanese elite adopted Islam at a time when the Hindu-Buddhist state of Majapahit was at the very height of its glory. These were, moreover, the first Javanese Muslims of whom evidence survives. Since evidence is so scanty, of course it cannot be said with certainty that these were the first Javanese adherents to Islam. But the Trawulan and Tralaya gravestones certainly con-tradict, and therefore cast grave doubts upon, the view once held by scholars that Islam originated on the coast of Java and initially represented a religious and political force which opposed Majapahit.

The likelihood or otherwise of Javanese courtiers embracing Islam before Javanese coastal communities did so is influenced by one’s view of the relative importance of traders and Sufis as the bringers of Islam; this issue is discussed below. There can be little doubt that Majapahit, with its far-flung political and trading contacts outside Java (see Chapter 2), would have seen foreign Muslim traders. The problem is whether its sophisticated courtiers would have been attracted to a religion of merchants. Mystical Islamic teach-ers, perhaps claiming supernatural powers, seem a more plausible agent of conversion in Javanese court circles, which had long been familiar with the mystical speculations of Hinduism and Buddhism.

When Islam began to be adopted among the communities of the north coast of Java is unclear. During a voyage of 1413–15, the Chinese Muslim Ma Huan visited the coast of Java. He reported in his book Ying-yai sheng-lan (‘The overall survey of the ocean’s shores’, published in 1451) that there were only three kinds of people in Java: Muslims from the west, Chinese (some of them Muslims) and the heathen Javanese. Since the Trawulan and Tralaya gravestones show that there were Javanese Muslims at the court some fifty years before this time, Ma Huan’s report suggests that Islam was indeed adopted by Javanese courtiers before coastal Javanese began to convert. An early Muslim gravestone dated AH822 (AD1419) has been found at Gresik, one of the most important East Javanese ports. It marks the burial of one Malik Ibrahim, but since this gentleman was apparently not Javanese it merely confirms the presence of foreign Muslims in Java, and sheds no further light on the question of coastal Javanese conversion. Local traditions, however, say that Malik Ibrahim was one of the first nine apostles of Islam in Java (the wali sanga), a tradition for which there is no documentary evidence.

Around the beginning of the fifteenth century, the great Malay trading state of Malacca was founded. Its history will be considered briefly in Chapter 2. Malacca was the most important trading centre of the western archipelago, and therefore became a centre for foreign Muslims and apparently a supporter of the spread of Islam. From Malacca and elsewhere survive gravestones show-ing this spread in the Malay Peninsula. The gravestone of Malacca’s sixth Sultan, Mansur Syah (died (d.) AH822/AD1477), has been found, as has the gravestone of the first Sultan of Pahang, Muhammad Syah (d. AH880/AD1475). From Pengkalan Kempas in Negeri Sembilan survives an inscription which appears to show that this region was in transition to an Islamic culture in the 1460s. The stone is in two parts, one written in Malay with Arabic script, and the other in Malay with Indian-type characters like those found on the Minye Tujoh inscription. The stone uses the Indian Saka era, and apparently records the death of a local hero named Ahmat Majanu in s.1385 (AD1463–4).

Returning to North Sumatra, late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century graves document the establishment of further Islamic states there. The first Sultan of Pedir, Muzaffar Syah, was buried in AH902 (AD1497), and the second, Ma’ruf Syah, in AH917 (AD1511). At the very tip of North Sumatra, the state of Aceh was founded in the early sixteenth century; it was soon to become the most powerful North Sumatran state and one of the most powerful states of the Malay-Indonesian area. The first Sultan of the Acehnese ‘empire’ was Ali Mughayat Syah, whose tombstone is dated AH936 (AD1530).

Outside of Java, Sumatra, Brunei and the Malay Peninsula, there is noevidence of the adoption of Islam by Indonesians before the sixteenth cen-tury. It is quite clear, however, that Islam had spread to some points farther east, for near Jolo (in the Sulu archipelago, southern Philippines) there was a tombstone dated AH710 (AD1310) marking the grave of a Muslim who was apparently of foreign origin but who had become some sort of local ruler. Much later legendary sources from Mindanao and Sulu, the Islamic areas of the Philippines, describe the bringing of Islam by Arabs and Malays from the western archipelago. It seems probable that Chinese Muslims also played a role in the spread of Islam in this area.

Before the sixteenth century, the fragmentary evidence shows that the spread of Islam began in the western archipelago. There does not, however, seem to have been a continuous rolling wave of Islam, with one contiguous area after another adopting the new faith. The evidence provides only a few brief hints of the process which was under way, but it was apparently compli-cated and rather slow. By the end of the thirteenth century, Islam was estab-lished in North Sumatra; in the fourteenth century in northeast Malaya, Brunei, the southern Philippines and among some courtiers in East Java; and in the fifteenth century in Malacca and other areas of the Malay Peninsula. A few gravestones or travellers’ accounts can only provide evidence about the pres-ence of indigenous Muslims in a certain place at a certain time. The fact that no evidence of Islamisation happens to have survived from other places does not necessarily mean that there were no Muslims there. And the surviving evidence cannot answer more complex questions – such as, for instance, how many of the people of Lamreh other than the ruler were Muslims in 1211, or how deeply the lifestyles or religious ideas of the first Indonesian converts were affected by Islam. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, Islamisation is a process which has continued down to the present day. It must not be assumed that once an area is known to have had a Muslim ruler, the process of Islamisation was complete. Indeed, this probably symbolises more the beginning than the end of Islamisation among the populace.

In the early sixteenth century, an extraordinary European source makes possible a general survey of Islam in the Indonesian archipelago. Tomé Pires was an apothecary from Lisbon who spent the years from 1512 to 1515 in Malacca, immediately after its conquest by the Portuguese in 1511. During this time he visited Java and Sumatra personally, and avidly collected informa-tion from others concerning the entire Malay-Indonesian area. His book Suma Oriental reveals a discriminating observer, whose descriptions are far super-ior to those of other Portuguese writers. It is full of invaluable material of many varieties, but in this chapter attention must be focused upon what Pires observed regarding Islam. His evidence cannot be presumed to be accurate in all details, of course. But so much of what he wrote seems consistent with the other fragments of evidence described above, and his description is so free of obviously erroneous statements about the area, that it seems to stand as one of the most important documents on the spread of Islam in Indonesia.

According to Pires, most of the kings of Sumatra were Muslims by his time, but there were still non-Islamic states. From Aceh in the north down the east coast as far as Palembang, the rulers were Muslims. South of Palembang and around the tip of Sumatra up the west coast, most of them were not. At Pasai there was a thriving international trading community and Pires attrib-uted the original establishment of Islam in Pasai to the ‘cunning’ of these Muslim merchants. The ruler of Pasai had not, however, been able to convert the people of the interior. Similarly, the Minangkabau king and a hundred of his men were reportedly Muslims, although the remaining Minangkabau people were not. But Pires said that Islam was winning new adherents daily in Sumatra.

The Sundanese-speaking region of West Java was not yet Muslim in Pires’s day, and indeed was hostile to Islam. Although Pires did not mention the name, this was the area ruled by the Hindu-Buddhist state of Pajajaran, concerning which there are hardly any reliable records. The Islamisation of this area by conquest in the sixteenth century is discussed in Chapter 4.

Central and East Java, the areas where the ethnic Javanese lived, wasstill claimed by the Hindu-Buddhist king living in the interior of East Java at Daha (Kediri). The coastal areas as far east as Surabaya were, however, Islamised, and were often at war with the interior, except for Tuban, which remained loyal to the Hindu-Buddhist king. Some of the coastal Muslim lords were Javanese who had adhered to Islam. Some were not originally Javanese, but rather Muslim Chinese, Indians, Arabs and Malays who had settled on the coast and established trading states. Pires described a process of Javanisation under way among these latter groups, who so admired the culture of the Hindu-Buddhist court that they attempted to emulate its style and were becoming Javanese thereby. The fourteenth-century gravestones of Trawulan and Tralaya discussed above suggest that for its part the Hindu-Buddhist court was able, at least at times, to tolerate Muslims within its own circle. The warfare which Pires describes between coast and interior should not, therefore, be seen as necessarily a product of irreconcilable religious and cultural differences, for there was a process of cultural assimilation at work as Islam encountered the powerful high culture of Old Java. This process of assimilation and accommodation continued long after the vast majority of Javanese were at least nominally Muslim, and has made the Islam of Java rather different in style from that of Malaya or Sumatra. The warfare between coast and interior also continued long after both regions had adopted Islam, and its origins are probably to be sought more in the political and economic differences between the two areas which are discussed in following chapters. East of Surabaya, the Javanese coast was still pre-Islamic, and apparently Hindu, for widow-burning was practised. ‘Thus,’ said Pires, ‘they lose their bodies in this life and their souls burn in the next’ (Cortesão, Suma Oriental, 198).

In Kalimantan (Borneo), Pires reported that Brunei had a king who had recently become a Muslim. The rest of Kalimantan was non-Muslim, as were also the islands of Madura, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Solor and Timor to the east of Java. The Bugis and Makasarese of South Sulawesi (Celebes) were also not yet Islamised.

Islam was, however, spreading in the ‘Spice Islands’ of Maluku in East Indonesia. Muslim Javanese and Malay merchants were established on the coast of Banda, but there was no king there and the interior still contained non-Muslims. Ternate, Tidore and Bacan had Muslim kings. The rulers of Tidore and Bacan used the Indian title raja, but that of Ternate had adopted the title of sultan, and the Raja of Tidore had taken the Arabic name al-Mansur.

All the evidence taken together gives a general picture of the progress of Islam from the early thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. From a starting point in the north of Sumatra, it had spread as far as the spice-producing areas of East Indonesia. The areas where it was most firmly established were those that were most important in international trade: the Sumatran shores of the Straits of Malacca, the Malay Peninsula, the north coast of Java, Brunei, Sulu and Maluku. Yet not all important trade areas had, on Tomé Pires’s evidence, been Islamised. For example, Timor and Sumba, which produced sandalwood, were still non-Islamic. And the presence of international trade does little to explain why there should have been Muslim aristocrats at the court of Majapahit in the fourteenth century, or why Trengganu is the earliest area of Malaya where Islamisation is documented. Some kind of link between trade and Islam is none the less apparent.

The general timing of the beginnings of Islamisation can thus be established to some degree, but there remain important questions which have provoked considerable controversy. After several centuries during which foreign Muslims had been passing through or residing in Indonesia, why was it that significant Indonesian conversions began only in the thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Where did the Islam of Indonesia come from? And how did Islam succeed in becoming the majority religion of Indonesia?

To attempt an answer to such questions, some scholars have thought it appropriate to turn from the primary historical records discussed above to the Indonesian legends which record how Indonesians themselves told the story of their conversion. All these legends are much later than the coming of Islam; although they may contain old stories, most of the texts are known only in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions. These are not reliable historical accounts, but in their shared emphasis upon the roles played by esoteric learning and magical powers, upon the foreign origins and trade connections of the first teachers, and upon a process of conversion which began with the elite and worked downwards, they may reveal something of the original events.

Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai (‘Story of the kings of Pasai’) is one such legendary source. The text is in Malay, but was copied at Demak (North Java) in 1814. It tells how Islam came to Samudra; the gravestone of the first Sultan, Malik as-Salih, of 1297 was discussed above. In this story, the Caliph of Mecca hears of the existence of Samudra and decides to send a ship there in fulfilment of a prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad that there would one day be a great city in the East called Samudra, which would produce many saints. The ship’s captain, Shaikh Ismail, stops en route in India to pick up a sultan who has stepped down from his throne to become a holy man. The ruler of Samudra, Merah Silau (or Silu), has a dream in which the Prophet appears to him, magically transfers knowledge of Islam to him by spitting in his mouth, and gives him the title Sultan Malik as-Salih. Upon awakening, the new Sultan discovers that he can read the Qur’an, although he has never been instructed, and that he has been magically circumcised. His followers are understandably mystified by the Sultan’s recitations in Arabic. But then the ship arrives from Mecca. When Shaikh Ismail hears Malik as-Salih’s Confession of Faith, he installs him as ruler with regalia and state robes from Mecca. Ismail goes on to teach the populace how to recite the Confession – that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His messenger. He then departs, but the Indian holy man stays behind to establish Islam more firmly in Samudra.

Sejarah Melayu (‘Malay history’) is another Malay text known in several versions. One text carries the date AH1021 (AD1612), but this exists only in an early-nineteenth-century copy. As well as a story about the conversion of Samudra which is like that of Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai, this text contains a tale about the conversion of the king of Malacca. He, too, has a dream in which the Prophet appears, teaches him the Confession of Faith, gives him the new name Muhammad, and tells him that on the following day a ship will arrive from Arabia carrying a teacher whom he is to obey. On waking, the king discovers that he has been magically circumcised, and as he goes about con-tinually repeating the Confession of Faith the rest of the court (who cannot understand the Arabic phrases) become convinced that he has gone mad. But then the ship arrives, and from it Sayyid Abdul Aziz steps down to pray upon the shore, much to the wonderment of the population who ask the meaning of his ritual movements. The king announces that this is all as it was in his dream, and the court officials there upon join him in embracing Islam. The king now takes the title Sultan Muhammad Syah and commands all the populace to embrace Islam. Sayyid Abdul Aziz becomes the teacher of the king.

These two Malay texts are different from the Islamisation legends con-cerning Java which have so far been studied. Whereas the Malay texts see Islamisation as a great turning point, marked by the formal signs of con-version such as circumcision, the Confession of Faith and the adoption of an Arabic name, the Javanese legends do not present Islamisation as such a great watershed. This seems consistent with the evidence discussed above, suggesting that a process of assimilation was at work in Java. But in Javanese stories, magical events still play a prominent role.

Babad Tanah Jawi (‘History of the land of Java’) is a generic title covering a large number of manuscripts in Javanese, which vary in their arrangement and details, and none of which exists in copies older than the eighteenth century. These texts ascribe the first Javanese conversions to the work of the nine saints (wali sanga), but the names and relationships among these nine differ in various texts. It is impossible to reduce these variations to a list of nine per-sons upon which all texts would agree; indeed some manuscripts accept the convention that there were nine, but none the less proceed to list ten. The following names would, however, be fairly widely found in the manuscripts: Sunan Ngampel-Denta, Sunan Kudus, Sunan Murya, Sunan Bonang, Sunan Giri, Sunan Kalijaga, Sunan Sitijenar, Sunan Gunungjati and Sunan Wali-lanang. A tenth wali, Sunan Bayat, is also often found.

The term wali which is applied to all these figures is Arabic (meaning ‘saint’), but the title sunan which they all carry is Javanese. The origin of the latter is somewhat unclear, but it may derive from suhun, meaning ‘to do hon-our to’, here in a passive form meaning ‘honoured’. Several, but not all, of the walis are said to have been of non-Javanese descent, and several are said to have studied in Malacca (notably Sunans Giri, Bonang and Walilanang). Several are also said to have had commercial connections, Giri as the foster child of a female trader, Bayat as the employee of a woman rice merchant, and Kalijaga as a grass salesman.

The Babad Tanah Jawi story of how Sunan Kalijaga was brought to the rightful path is instructive. It is notable that the formal signs of conversion (circumcision, Confession of Faith, and so on) are so entirely absent that it is not in fact clear whether Kalijaga is already nominally Muslim at the time of his ‘conversion’. In this story, Kalijaga is said to be the son of a Tumenggung Wilatikta in the service of Majapahit, whose religious affiliation is unspecified. The young man, however, has the name Said, which is Arabic. Having lost at gambling, Said becomes a highway robber on the north coast. One day Sunan Bonang passes and is accosted by Said, but Bonang tells him that it would be much better to rob a person who will later pass by, dressed entirely in blue with a red hibiscus flower behind his ear. Said takes this advice, and three days later this other person appears. It is, of course, Bonang himself in disguise. When Said attacks him, however, Bonang turns himself into four persons. Said is so shaken by the experience that he gives up his bad ways and adopts the life of an ascetic. He takes the name Kalijaga, becomes a wali and marries a sister of Sunan Gunungjati.

Sejarah Banten (‘History of Banten’) is another Javanese text containing conversion stories. Most manuscripts of this chronicle are late-nineteenth-century, but two are copies of originals written in the 1730s and 1740s. As is the case with the Babad Tanah Jawi legends, there are many magical events here, but conversions are not very explicitly described and there is no emphasis on the Confession of Faith, circumcision, and so on. The story of the origins of Sunan Giri is of interest. According to Sejarah Banten, a foreign holy man named Molana Usalam comes to Balambangan in the Eastern Sali-ent (Oosthoek) of Java, an area where Islam was not in fact established until the late eighteenth century. The ruler of Balambangan has a daughter who is incurably ill, but she recovers when Molana Usalam gives her betel-nut to chew. She is then given in marriage to Molana Usalam, but when he also asks the ruler to adopt Islam the latter refuses. Molana Usalam therefore departs from Balambangan, leaving behind the princess who is already pregnant. When she bears a son, he is thrown into the sea in a chest, as in the story of Moses (which is found in surah XX of the Qur’an as well as in the Bible). The chest is fished out of the sea at Gresik, where the boy is raised as a Muslim and later becomes the first Sunan of Giri. It is worth noting that, so far as is known at present, Malay legends are devoid of stories such as that of Balambangan, where the supernatural powers of a foreign holy man are insufficient to cause conversion.

These kinds of legends cannot tell much about the actual events surrounding the coming of Islam, but they do at least reflect how later generations of Indonesian Muslims looked back upon Islamisation. There is a clear and significant difference between the Malay and Javanese legends, with Islamisation being a major turning point defined by clear outward signs of conversion in the former, but a much less clearly marked transition in the latter. There are also important consistencies between the two sets of traditions. Both reflect memories of the foreign origins of some of the early teachers, of magical events which attended Islamisation, and of the conversion process as some-thing which began with the ruling elite of the area.

From the north coast of Java came two further documents which help to add substance to the story of Islamisation. These two manuscripts in Javanese contain Islamic teachings as they were being given in Java in the sixteenth century. Although neither manuscript is dated, both were brought back to the Netherlands by the first Dutch expedition to Java (1595–7) and therefore clearly pre-date 1597. Neither is a connected work of theology. One is a primbon (handbook) containing notes made by one or more students of some teacher. The other is attributed by G. W. J. Drewes to a teacher named Seh Bari, and contains considerations upon a series of disputed points. Both texts are orthodox, and both are mystical. That is to say, they do not reflect the austere legal interests associated with the four Orthodox schools of Islam, but rather the metaphysical considerations and ascetic ethos associated with the mystics of Islam, the Sufis, who by this time were accepted as part of the orthodox Islamic world.

The orthodoxy of these two manuscripts is significant. The Islam of Indonesia has been full of heterodoxy and heresy, a fact which later encouraged major reformist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These texts are therefore important for showing that entirely orthodox Islam was being taught, at least in some areas, from an early time. These texts do reveal some adaptation to Javanese surroundings. For instance, God is referred to with the Javanese term pangeran, and asceticism is described with the Javanese word tapa. Both texts use the Javanese script, which had originally developed from an Indian script, although in later centuries religious works in Javanese sometimes employed the Arabic script. These adjustments to the Javanese environment are, however, of little significance; the teachings of these texts could have been found in any orthodox mystical community in the Islamic world. The book ascribed to Seh Bari suggests that this orthodox viewpoint may not have been dominant throughout Java, for it has long passages attack-ing heretical doctrines. In particular, it denounces any identification of God and humankind, which is one of the worst heresies in Islam, although it is excellent Hinduism and a doctrine that has persisted in some Javanese Muslim circles into the present century.

G. W. J. Drewes proposes that a third Javanese manuscript, a ‘code of Muslim ethics’, is also to be dated to the early stages of Islamisation in Java. The antiquity of this text is, however, less certain than is true of the sixteenth-century primbon and Seh Bari works. The ‘code’ could be as late as the final wave of conversions in East Java in the eighteenth century. It is none the less valuable for depicting the strains in a society in the midst of Islamisation. Its author repeatedly denounces the practices of those who still cling to the traditional religion (called agama Jawa, ‘Javanese religion’). This text, too, belongs within a generally mystical understanding of Islam, but there also survives an anonymous Malay-language manuscript dating from before 1620 which demonstrates that non-mystical Qur1anic exegesis was practised as well in the Indonesian region.

The evidence concerning the coming of Islam to Indonesia which has been discussed above does not easily lead to firm conclusions. It is for this reason that scholars have differed sharply in their views of Islamisation. One rather lengthy debate has concerned the area from which Islam came. Gujerat in northwest India has been one favoured candidate; Gujerati influ-ence is suggested by the fact that the tombstone of Malik Ibrahim (d. 1419) at Gresik and several stones at Pasai are believed to have been imported from Cambay in Gujerat. The Malabar coast of southwest India, Coromandel in southeast India, Bengal, South China and of course Arabia, Egypt and Persia have all been suggested as the source of Indonesian Islam. Too often this debate seems to presuppose an unjustifiably simplistic view of events. This was, after all, a process of religious change which occupied several centuries. In this chapter, only evidence for the initial stages has been examined, yet between the time of Sultan Sulaiman bin Abdullah’s gravestone and Tomé Pires’s account three centuries elapsed. The area concerned is the largest archipelago on the earth’s surface, and at the time in question it was already involved in international trade. It seems highly improbable that the Islamisa-tion of Indonesia can be explained with reference to only one source. Nor is it acceptable to consider only external sources, for it seems clear that Islam was introduced in many areas by Indonesians themselves, especially by Malay and Javanese Muslims travelling in East Indonesia and by Muslim rulers who conquered non-Islamised areas. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that foreign Muslims from many areas and Indonesian Muslims themselves all played important roles in various areas at various times.

But the major question remains: why was Islam adopted by a significant number of Indonesians only in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth cen-turies? There was at one time a widely accepted stereotype which described Islamisation solely in terms of foreign traders who intermarried locally and formed Islamic communities in this way; these grew as Indonesians were attracted to the new faith, whose egalitarian ethos supposedly provided relief from the Hindu caste system. This idea is now, quite rightly, almost entirely rejected. There is no evidence whatsoever that there was anything egalitarian about Islam in practice; all the evidence in this chapter points to Islamisation from above, and none of the Islamic societies which will be discussed in sub-sequent chapters was in any sense egalitarian. Nor can the presence of traders alone explain Islamisation, for it seems certain that Muslim traders had been present in Indonesia long before significant Indonesian conversions began. On the other hand, conversion is inconceivable without trade, for it was the international network of commerce that brought Indonesians into contact with Islam.

The clear evidence of a mystical bias in much of Indonesian Islam has led to the suggestion that the Sufis were the primary agents of conversion. A. H. Johns is the main supporter of this argument, and he points out that the Islamisation of Indonesia coincided with the period when Sufism came to dominate the Islamic world, after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. He sees the Sufis, of all nationalities, as travelling to Indonesia aboard trading ships and there successfully propagating their more eclectic and less austere version of the faith. Although this view has much logical force, it does lack evidence, for no organised Sufi brotherhood is documented in Indonesia from this early period. On the other hand, there is of course little documentation to support any theory. Moreover, in India, where Islamisation also occurred within previously Hindu communities, some scholars have argued that Sufis were not normally the initial agents of conversion, but rather a second wave of Islam which deepened the orthodox commitment of already Islamised areas. This is similar to the role ascribed to the Indian holy man in the Hikayat Raja-raja Pasaistory described above. And the Sufi theory seems irrelevant to those cases such as Tomé Pires described, where foreign Muslims settled and became Javanese, so that the question is more one of Javanisation than Islam-isation. Nevertheless, the strong mystical strain in Indonesian Islam is per-fectly clear in the two sixteenth-century Javanese religious texts and in later, better known, centuries. Mysticism is therefore clearly a part of Islamisation, but its precise role remains unclear.

Given the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence, great caution is essential in drawing conclusions. It seems clear that trade was an essential element in bringing Islam to Indonesia. It may also have been an incentive to conversion, for Indonesian rulers involved in trade may have thought it expedient to adopt the same religion as the majority of the traders. But traders are unlikely to have been intimates of the nobility of the Majapahit court, who would probably have regarded themselves as being far above merchants in social standing; they are more likely to have been influenced by learned Muslim mystics and holy men with claims to supernatural powers. And the problem remains of explaining why conversions only began several centuries after Muslim traders had been known in the region. Distinctions must probably be drawn between different areas of Indo-nesia. There were parts of Sumatra and the Javanese coast of which nothing is known before Islamisation; in some cases towns emerged here as a result of foreign Muslims settling, in other cases Indonesians living there may have been little influenced by Hindu-Buddhist ideas and were therefore attracted to Islam for the cultural paraphernalia it brought, such as literacy. But in the ancient centres of high culture this was not true: in Majapahit and Bali Islam met profound cultural barriers. Majapahit’s cultural influence was such that even non-Javanese Muslims on the coast emulated its style. It is symptomatic of this difference that in North Sumatra there were sultans since the early thirteenth century, whereas no Javanese monarch is known definitely to have adopted that title until the seventeenth century. It would be wrong, however, to overemphasise the superficiality of Islamisation in Java. Although Islam had a very limited impact on Javanese philosophy, it altered some fundamental social customs: eventually all Javanese converts accepted circumcision and burial, for instance, in place of Hindu-Buddhist rituals such as cremation. Entrance into this new religious community was, thus, clearly marked. In Bali, for reasons which are not clear, the cultural barriers were insurmountable and Bali has remained Hindu until the present day. In all areas of Indonesia, Islamisation was the beginning, not the end, of a major process of change. Eight centuries later, this process is still continuing.

One final point needs to be made. The debates about the relative import-ance of traders and Sufis, and about the foreign sources of Indonesian Islam, have obscured an important aspect of Islamisation. It is often thought of as a peaceful process, since there is no evidence of foreign military expeditions imposing Islam by conquest. But once an Indonesian Islamic state was founded, Islam was sometimes spread from there to other areas by warfare. Examples of this in sixteenth-century Sumatra and Java and in seventeenth-century Sulawesi will be seen in Chapter 4. This does not necessarily mean that such wars were fought primarily in order to spread Islam; the roots of these strug-gles were perhaps more commonly dynastic, strategic and economic. But Islamisation often followed upon conquest. Islam was spread in Indonesia not only by persuasion and commercial pressures, but by the sword as well.