Berikut adalah suatu tulisan sejarah tentang masuknya Islam ke Nusantara -terutama Sumatera, Semenanjung Malaysia, Jawa, Borneo, Maluku, dll- tulisan ini adalah kutipan langsung dari buku History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1300 second edition. Semoga bermanfaat.
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 which 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, etc.) 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 north 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 Indonesian 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 AH 475 (AD 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) sometime 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. 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 identification 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 gravestone of the first Muslim ruler of Samudra, Sultan
Malik as-Salih, has been found, and is dated AH 696 (AD 1297). This is the
first clear evidence of the existence of a Muslim dynasty in the
Indonesian-Malay area, and further gravestones demonstrate that from the late
thirteenth century 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 oflaw. 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 stones 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 (AH 781
and 791/ AD 1380, 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
commemorated with inscriptions in two languages and two scripts. Mter 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 EastJava. 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
incomplete, however, and the possible range of dates for this inscription is
between AD 1302 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 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 AD 1633, 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 (AD 1368-9). At Tralaya
is a series of gravestones extending from S 1298 to 1533 (AD 1376-1611). These
stones carry Qur'anic 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 EastJavanese stones therefore suggest that
some members oftheJavanese 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 contradict, 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 teachers, 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. In 1416, the Chinese Muslim
Ma Huan visited the coast of Java and left a report 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 Java- nese. 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 AH 822 (AD
1419) 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 ofthe
first nine apostles ofIslam inJava (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 showing this spread in the Malay Peninsula. The gravestone
of Malacca's sixth Sultan, Mansur Syah (d. AH 822/ AD 1477), has been found, as
has the gravestone of the first Sultan of Pahang, Muhammad Syah (d. AH 880/ AD
1475). 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 M~anu in S 1385 (AD 1463-4).
Returning to North Sumatra, late fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century graves docu- ment the establishment of further Islamic states
there. The first Sultan of Pedir, Muzaffar Syah, was buried in AH 902 (AD
1497), and the second, Ma'ruf Syah, in AH 917 (AD 1511). 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 AH 936 (AD 1530).
Outside of Java, Sumatra, Brunei and the Malay
Peninsula, there is no evidence of the adoption of Islam by Indonesians before
the sixteenth century. 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 AH 710 (AD 1310) marking the grave of
a Muslim who was apparently of foreign origin but who had become some sort
oflocal 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 complicated and rather slow. By the end of the thirteenth century,
Islam was established in North Sumatra; in the fourteenth century in northeast
Malaya, Brunei, the southern Philippines and among some courtiers in EastJava;
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
presence 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 Samudra other than the ruler were Muslims in 1297, 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. Tome Pires was an apothcary 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 information from others concerning the entire Malay-Indonesian area.
His book Suma Oriental reveals a
discriminating observer, whose descriptions are far superior 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 wne not. At Pasai there was a thriving international trading community and
Pires attributed the original establishment of Islam in Pasai to the 'cunning'
of these Muslim meIThants. 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 ill Pires's day, and indeed was hostile to Islam. Although Pires
did not mention the name, this was the area ruled by the Hindu-B;lddhist 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 EastJava, the areas where the ethnic
Javanese lived, was still claimed by the Hindu-Buddhist king living in the
interior of EastJava 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 neces- sarilya 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 hoth 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' (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
ai-Mansur.
All the evidence taken together gives a general
picture of the progress of Islam from the late 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 which 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 Tome Pires' 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 oflink between trade and Islam is nonetheless apparent.
The general timing of the beginnings of
Islamisation can thus be established to some degree, but there remain
ihlportant questions which have provoked consid- erable 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 appropri- ate to turn from the primary historical
records discussed above to the Indonesian legends which record how Indonesians
themselves told the story of their conver- sion. All these legends are much
later than the coming ofIslam; 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 first area where an Islamic state
was founded; 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.
Sijarah Melayu (‘Malay History') is another
Malay text known in several versions. One text carries the date AH 1021 (AD
1612), but this exists only in an early- nineteenth-century copy. As well as a
story about the conversion ofSamudra 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 continually 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
thereupon 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 concerning Java which have so far been studied. Whereas
the Malay texts see Islamisation as a great turning point, marked by the formal
signs of conversion 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 playa 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 persons upon which all
texts would agree; indeed some manuscripts accept the convention that there
were nine, but nonetheless 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 Sun an Walilanang. 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 honour to', here
in a passive form meaning 'honoured'. Several, but not all, of the walis are
said to have been of non:Javanese desc~nt, 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, etc.) 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 conver- sion
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, etc. The story of the origins of Sunan Giri
is of interest. According to Sijarah
Banten, a foreign holy man named Molana Usalam comes to Balambangan in the
Eastern Salient (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 sura 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 Indo- nesian 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
something 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 toJava (1595-7)
and are therefore prior to that time in date. Neither is a connected work of
theology. One is a primbon (handbook)
containing attributed by notes C. W. made J. by one or more students of some
teacher. The other is Drewes to a teacher named Seh Bari, and contains consi-
derations 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, oflittle
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 attacking heretical doctrines. In particular, it
denounces any identifica- tion of God and Man, 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 in the twentieth 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 nonetheless valuable for depicting the strains in a
society in the midst of Islamisation. Its author repeatedly denounces the practices
of those who still clung 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 anony- mous Malay-language manuscript dating from before
1620 which demonstrates that non-mystical Qur'anic 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 influence 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 Cam bay 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 Malik as-Salih's gravestone and Tome Pires's
account over two 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
Islamisation 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 centuries? 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 subsequent 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 die 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 ofthe faith. Although this view has much
logical force, it does lack evidence, for no organised Sufi brother- hood 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 Pasai story
described above. And the Sufi theory seems irrelevant to those cases such as
Tome Pires described, where foreign Muslims settled and became Javanese, so
that the question is more one of Javanisation than Islamisation. Nonetheless,
the strong mystical strain in Indonesian Islam is perfectly 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 perfectly 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 Indonesia. 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 nonjavanese Muslims on the coast emulated
its style. It is symptomatic of this difference that in North Sumatra there
were Sultans since the end of the thirteenth century, whereas no Javanese
monarch is known definitely to have adopted that title until the seven- teenth
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. Seven centuries later, this process is still
continuing.
One final point needs to be made. The debates
about the relative importance of traders and Sufis, and about the foreign
sources of Indonesian Islam, obscured an important aspect oflslamisation. 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 struggles 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.
