The Indian Ocean continued to serve as both a commercial and a cultural link between
Indonesia and the countries to the west. Thus Islam, which was established on the Arabian
Peninsula by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D., followed the Hindu and
Buddhist religions into the archipelago. By the late twentieth century, approximately 85
percent of Indonesia's inhabitants considered themselves to be Muslim. Among some
Indonesians, Islam is only an element in a syncretic belief system that also includes
animist and Hindu-Buddhist concepts. Others are intensely committed to the faith. Like the
introduction of Indian civilization, the process of Islamization is obscure because of the
lack of adequate historical records and archeological evidence. The archipelago was not
invaded by outsiders and forcibly converted. Yet states that had converted to Islam often
waged war against those that adhered to the older, Hindu-Buddhist traditions. Religious
lines, however, do not appear to have been clearly drawn in Javanese statecraft and war.
Over the centuries, merchants from Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean ports and mystics and
literary figures propagated the faith. Because commerce was more prevalent along the
coasts of Sumatra, Java, and the eastern archipelago than in inland areas of Java, it is
not surprising that Islamization proceeded more rapidly in the former than the latter.
According to historian M.C. Ricklefs, legends describe the conversion of rulers to Islam
in coastal Malay regions as a "great turning point" marked by miracles
(including the magical circumcision of converts), the confession of faith, and adoption of
Arabic names. Javanese chroniclers tended to view it as a much less central event in the
history of dynasties and states. But the Javanese chronicles mention the role of nine (or
ten) saints (wali in Arabic), who converted rulers through the use of supernatural powers.
Doubtless
small numbers of Muslims traveled through and resided in the archipelago at a very early
date. Historical records of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) tell of Arab traders
who must have stopped at Indonesian ports along the way to Guangzhou and other southern
Chinese ports. Yet the conversion of rulers and significant numbers of indigenous peoples
to Islam apparently did not begin until around the late thirteenth century.
Many
areas of the archipelago resisted the religion's spread. Some, such as Ambon, were
converted to Christianity by Europeans. Others preserved their distinctiveness despite
powerful Islamic neighbors. These included small enclaves on Java and the adjacent island
of Bali, where animist and Hindu beliefs created a distinct, inward-looking culture.
The
first reliable evidence of Islam as an active force in the archipelago comes from the
Venetian traveler Marco Polo. Landing in northern Sumatra on his way back to Europe from
China in 1292, he discovered an Islamic town, Perlak, surrounded by non-Islamic neighbors.
An inscription from a tombstone dated 1297 reveals that the first ruler of Samudra,
another Sumatran state, was a Muslim; the Arab traveler Muhammad ibn-'Abdullah ibn-Battuta
visited the same town in 1345-46 and wrote that its monarch was a Sunni rather than a Shia
Muslim. By the late fourteenth century, inscriptions on Sumatra were written with Arabic
letters rather than older, indigenous or Indian-based scripts.
There
also were important Chinese contacts with Java and Sumatra during this period. Between
1405 and 1433, a Chinese Muslim military leader, the Grand Eunuch Zheng He, was
commissioned by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1643) emperor to make seven naval expeditions, each
comprising hundreds of ships and crews numbering more than 20,000. The various expeditions
went from China to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.
Rather than voyages of exploration, these expeditions followed established trade routes
and were diplomatic in nature and helped expand contacts among and provide information
about the regions visited. Zheng used Java and Sumatra as waystops and, on his first
voyage, destroyed a Chinese pirate fleet based near Palembang on the north coast of
Sumatra. He also is said to have developed close contacts with Melaka on the Malay
Peninsula.
The
major impetus to Islamization was provided by Melaka, a rich port city that dominated the
Strait of Malacca and controlled much of the archipelago's trade during the fifteenth
century. According to legend, Melaka was founded in 1400 by a princely descendant of the
rulers of Srivijaya who fled Palembang after an attack by Majapahit. Originally a
Hindu-Buddhist, this prince converted to Islam and assumed the name Iskandar Syah. Under
his rule and that of his successors, Melaka's trading fleets brought Islam to coastal
areas of the archipelago. According to the sixteenth century Portuguese chronicler Tomé
Pires, whose Suma Oriental is perhaps the best account of early sixteenth century
Indonesia, most of the Sumatran states were Muslim. The kingdom known as Aceh, founded in
the early sixteenth century at the western tip of Sumatra, was a territory of strong
Islamic allegiance. In Pires's time, the ruler of the Minangkabau people of central
Sumatra and his court were Muslim, but their subjects were not.
In
eastern Indonesia, Islamization proceeded through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
often in competition with the aggressive proselytization of Portuguese and other Christian
missionaries. According to Pires, the island states of Ternate and Tidore, off the west
coast of Halmahera in Maluku, had Muslim sultans, and Muslim merchants had settled in the
Banda Islands. In 1605 the ruler of Gowa in southern Sulawesi (Celebes) converted to Islam
and subsequently imposed Islam on neighboring rulers. Muslim missionaries were sent from
the north coast of Java to Lombok, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan until the late seventeenth
century.
Because
of the antiquity of Java's civilizations and the relative isolation of some of its most
powerful kingdoms, the process of Islamization there was both complex and
protracted. The
discovery of Muslim gravestones dating from the fourteenth century
near the site of the Majapahit court suggests that members of the elite
converted to Islam while the king
remained an adherent of Indian religions. The early focus of
conversion was the northern
coastal region, known as the Pasisir (Javanese for coast). Melaka's
domination of trade
after 1400 promoted a substantial Islamic presence in the Pasisir
region, which lay
strategically between Melaka to the west and Maluku to the east.
Muslim merchants were
numerous, although their role in the conversion of royal courts is
unclear. The north
shore state of Gresik was ruled by one of the nine saints. During
the sixteenth century,
after Melaka had ceased to be an Islamic center following its
capture by the Portuguese in
1511, the Malay trading network shifted to Johore and northwest
Kalimantan.
In
the early seventeenth century, the most powerful state in Central Java was Mataram, whose
rulers cultivated friendly relations with the Pasisir states, especially Gresik, and
tolerated the establishment of Islamic schools and communities in the countryside.
Tolerance may have been motivated by the rulers' desire to use the schools to control
village populations. Muslim groups in the interior were often mutually antagonistic,
however, and sometimes experienced official persecution. The greatest of Mataram's rulers,
Sultan Agung (reigned 1613-46), warred against various Javanese states and defeated as
many as he could. Without shedding the Hindu-Buddhist or Javanese animist attributes of
kingship, he sought and received permission from Mecca to assume the Islamic title of
sultan in 1641.
Scholars
have speculated on why Islam failed to gain a large number of converts until after the
thirteenth century, even though Muslim merchants had arrived in the islands much earlier.
Some have suggested that the Sufi* tradition--a mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes
the ultimate reality of God and the illusoriness of the perceived world--may have been
brought into the islands at this time. Given the mystical elements of both Sufism and
indigenous beliefs, it may have been more appealing to Indonesians than earlier, more
austere, and law-bound versions of Islam. Yet according to Ricklefs, no evidence of the
existence of Sufi brotherhoods in the early centuries has been found.
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/indonesian/islam/coming_of_islam.html
