The Historical Process of Islamisation
There are few historical facts available about the early history of Islam in the archipelago. Epigraphical and other material evidence is rare and late and the very early history of Indonesian Islam remains obscure as far as Western scholarship is concerned.
Yet, it is particularly with this early period that Indonesian Muslims, scholars and theologians have concerned themselves intensely and therefore it seems appropriate to quote their conclusions, last formulated at a seminar held in 1963 and reaffirmed in 1978 in Aceh. The 1963 seminar in Medan (North Sumatra) stated with regard to the early history of Islam in Indonesia:1. That following the sources known to us, Islam entered Indonesia for the first time in the first century Hijra (seventh to eighth century Christian Era) and came directly from Arabia.
2. That the area first reached by Islam was the Sumatran coast; and that after the establishment of an Islamic community, the first Islamic Raja was to be found in Aceh.
3. That in the further process of Islamisation Indonesians played an active part.
4. That those early muballigh, apart from spreading Islam were also active as traders.
5. That Islam spread in Indonesia in a peaceful manner.
6. That the arrival of Islam in Indonesia brought high learning and culture to the shaping of the Indonesian national identity.
(A final point demanded the setting up of a research body in order to study further the history of Islam in Indonesia.)
Apart from the first point, academic research and opinion appear to agree broadly with the spirit of these resolutions. There is little that can be said in comment on the first resolution from a historical point of view as we lack non-circumstantial evidence in its support. While the presence of Muslims prior to the dates suggested by archaeological and epigraphical evidence is undisputed, there exists uncertainty about the direction, nature and extent of this initial contact with Islam.
In opposition to this reservation on the part of Western scholars, however, we have to record the view of a distinguished Indonesian theologian, Kiai Haji Saifuddin Zuhri, who, as a Minister of Religious Affairs, took part in the 1963 discussions and who wrote recently that the fact which distinguished Western Orientalists from Indonesian believers was that those Western Orientalists did not share the Indonesians’ faith and, hence, might approach the question of the arrival of Islam in a biased manner.To date, the available recorded evidence presents itself as follows:
Earliest archaeological proof of the presence of Muslims is provided by a tombstone imported from southern India and dated 1082 or 1102 ce. It was found in Leran near Gresik in Central java. The stone commemorates Fatima bint Maimun who appears to have been a foreigner but of whom nothing else is known. The fact that there should be the tombstone of a foreigner is not surprising given the great commercial attraction of the archipelago by itself as well as its role as a natural staging-post between the Middle East and India on the one side, and China on the other. There had been Islamic communities in southern China since the ninth century and settlements in Champa date from the eleventh century onwards. Tenth-century envoys from Srivijaya to the Sung court of China seem to have been recruited from among the nonIndonesian, foreign Muslim merchants.
The first known and confirmable eyewitness account of parts of the island of Sumatra is given by Marco Polo who visited North Sumatra in 1292. Of the eight kingdoms of Sumatra, to which he refers as Lesser Java, only one, Ferlec (Perlak), which appears to have been situated in present-day Aceh, was Islamic. Marco Polo, who provides us with the first description of any Islamic state in the Malay world, writes that ‘the people of Ferlec used all to be idolators, but owing to contact with Saracen merchants, who continually resort here in their ships the people in the city have all become Muslims’.
Those in the mountains, according to Marco Polo, do continue to ‘live Eke beasts’. In addition to Marco Polo’s account we have the evidence of the tombstone of the founder of the (Acehnese) kingdom of Samudra-Pasai, Malik as-Saleh, which is dated 1297 ce.The first known Malay inscription usingJawi, the slightly modified Malay version of the Arabic script in use throughout the archipelago, unfortunately cannot be dated precisely as part of its date is no longer there. The inscription, which is of an Islamic and legal nature, was written in either 1303 ce or 1387 ce and hails from Trengganu, a place on the Malay Peninsula. Interesting is the use of Sanskrit words where one might expect Islamic terms to be chosen, as in the reference to Allah, here called dewata mulia rava (noble, exalted god(s)).
In 1345/6, according to Ibn Battuta, Malik az-Zahir ruled over the North Sumatran state Sumutra. An Islamic cemetery in Troloyo in East Java covers a period between 1371 and 1475 ce. To be noted here is the presence of Chinese Muslims in the region.
Early in the fifteenth century the rulers of Melaka (Malacca) adopted Islam and it is said that as a result of the conversion of Malacca many other places within its sphere of influence on the Malay Peninsula and on the eastern coasts of Sumatra also adopted the new religion. Unfortunately we know nothing about the connections between Trengganu, which had received Islam prior to Malacca, and Malacca itself at that crucial time at the beginning of the fifteenth century, nor do we know more about the even earlier relationship between Samudra-Pasai and the Kedah region of the Malay Peninsula. Thus it may well be that the role of Malacca as an instigator of Islam in its nearest neighbourhood will have to be reconsidered.
In 1518 the first Islamic state in Java, Demak, emerged on the island’s northern coast. Further states were to develop soon among the port-cities of Java which seem to have been more enthusiastic in their acceptance of Islam than the people in the interior of Java.
In the course of the sixteenth century many of the coastal regions of Kalimantan (Borneo) which were in close contact with the port-cities of Java adopted the religion too. Early in the seventeenth century South Sulawesi (Celebes) was converted but not before its major rulers had had a very close look at what Christianity might have to offer in reconciliation with their traditional beliefs. Aceh, which during that century had assumed a leading role among the Malay states after the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511, developed into a centre of Islamic culture and learning. Towards the second half of the eighteenth century all of East Java turned to Islam.
The process of Islamisation of the archipelago is widely considered to have come to its conclusion by the beginning of this century.
Given what seems an accelerated process of Islamisation from the sixteenth century onwards, it has been argued that, following the fall of Malacca in 1511, Christianity and Islam were in competition for the favour of the peoples of the archipelago and that, in the struggle against the Europeans, Islamic rulers forced their faith on their dependent territories. Also, it is argued, the V OC neglectfully and out of mercantile interests threw away a real opportunity and failed in its statutory duty ‘to foster the progress or propagation of the true Christian religion’ and thus left the archipelago to Islam. This may well be so as far as the VOC is concerned; however, as this brief chronological survey aims to show, the other arguments need specific proof in every single case. It is conceivable that some rulers weighed up both Islam and Christianity as shown so well by Pelras (1985) in the case of seventeenth-century South Sulawesi but, when the Europeans first sailed into Malay waters, Islam had already been present in parts of the region for several centuries. In places Islamic knowledge and learning had reached such heights that the Portuguese, during the very brief period of influence they enjoyed in the sixteenth century, would have found it difficult to offer a serious spiritual alternative to Islam with their own brand of Christianity.
The Dutch, who only emerged early in the seventeenth century, and then only as one group of foreign traders among others, were not at this point very interested in the question of converting the heathen.It is correct that forced conversions to Islam did occur, but this is no reflection on the peaceful penetration of Islam from outside. Where there was coercion, it would seem that at times the concept of jihad offered a welcome means of carrying on traditional interethnic rivalries and settling commercial conflicts.
Theories of the Islamisation of the Archipelago A number of equally attractive, yet unsatisfactory and incomplete theories and hypotheses have been put forward to explain the conversion of the archipelago in a logical and coherent fashion (Drewes, 1968). The formulation of a satisfactory general theory has not been helped by the diverse nature of the societies and cultures met in the archipelago nor by the chronologically and geographically uneven evidence which at close range does not fit into any one general pattern.
Al-Attas, for example, has formulated a general theory of the Islamisation of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago (al-Attas, 1976). In it he recognises three stages, each characterised by its own particular features and broadly supported by historical evidence. The first stage according to al-Attas is characterised by a marked stress onftqh (jurisprudence). Legal scholars play an important role, particularly at court. This phase is set between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the second phase (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) mysticism (tasawwuf) and Sufism play the key role in taking Islam to the people. The third phase (nineteenth century onwards) saw the integration and consumation of both. Phase One, still following al-Attas, saw the conversion of the body; Phase Two that of the soul; and Phase Three the consolidation of both.
It is obvious that the theory of al-Attas mainly reflects events as far as they are documented locally for separate parts of North Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.
Java seems to play a smaller role in his considerations. The theory assumes an initial Islamisation from above, from the court and ruler, and leaves the conversion of larger numbers of the common people to the second phase. This does not seem to have been the case everywhere, however, and the absolute chronological framework proposed by al-Attas does not fit in with developments elsewhere in the archipelago. The stoutly Islamic region of South Sulawesi was not converted until the seventeenth century, for example. Finally, if one were to disregard the absolute chronology proposed and were to look at the principle behind al-Attas’ theory, while one would agree that Islamic law plays a vital role in the consolidation of any Islamic community, and that adherence to the law is part of the conversion of the ‘body’, yet it may not always have been the first step in the process of conversion, unless the meaning of law is reduced to that of obedience to some basic ritual obligations. In many cases this first phase may well have come second thus making the theory less applicable in a general way.Johns has stressed recently that speculation on the origins of Indonesian Islam, on its precise where and when, sidesteps the far more important issue of how Islam established itself in the archipelago within the religious framework of Islamic learning and teaching; not following any grand design but developing slowly and at times rather laboriously, establishing itself in one community and another, its own fate tied in with the economic rise and decline of its environs. According to Johns there is no single scheme of Islamisation, and what holds true for one place at one moment quite often is inapplicable at another, since the particular ethnic, social, political, historical and economic aspects of a town, state, region and island have differed considerably in time and place. Moreover, many theories disregard the actual process of transmission of Islamic learning from master to pupil and fail to see the important spiritual link between the heartlands of Islam and the archipelago (Johns, 1980:181), overlooking the religious character of Islam in favour of theologically less relevant issues.
The problem of dealing with Islam in the region has been aggravated further by a modern inclination to look at the territory of the Republic of Indonesia as a self-contained unit and to see the development of Islam in the past within the boundaries of the modern state. However, political unity, it has been pointed out, is a development of the recent past and it is probably more helpful to look at the archipelago (together with the Malay Peninsula) as a larger unit irrespective of modern political boundaries. Hence the term ‘Indonesian’ is used here in a broad cultural and anthropological sense rather than in a political one without, however, forgetting that behind the single term Indonesian a wide range of diverse societies is hidden.
At close range conditions do not only differ from island to island but also from one (ethnic) region to another. The ‘religion of Java’ as described by Geertz, to take one example, does not extend to West Java. Java as an ethnic and cultural entity only covers the centre and the east of the island in geographical terms. West Java is inhabited by the Sundanese who in their cultural expressions and in their language differ markedly from their Javanese cousins. And even in present-day Java, the island most exposed to outside influence among the islands of the archipelago, we still find small communities in the mountainous interior which have been able to isolate themselves from the rest of the island for centuries. Until today the Badui of West Java and the Tenggerese of eastern Java seem to have avoided the major impact of Islam and Christianity alike.
Aceh, the inhabitants of which feature so prominently in most accounts for their uncompromising religious stand, and which frequently functions as a paradigm for Islamic Indonesia, only covers the northern tip of Sumatra.
The Minangkabau on Sumatra’s west coast, whose commitment to Islam is equally beyond doubt, have struggled more than any other ethnic group over the relationship between adat and syaria, between traditional law and custom as reflected there most conspicuously in a matrilineal kinship system on the one hand and Islamic law on the other.
A study of the process and nature of Islamisation is made even more difficult by the fact that serious gaps in our empirical knowledge of almost all regions have to be admitted. Only for the twentieth century do we come across a larger body of well-documented studies (Boland and Farjon, 1983). However, one criticism (Boland, 1982:1-6; Johns, 1980) which has been levelled against these more recent studies is their narrow disciplinary viewpoint and concentration on particular aspects of social life which are only a result of developments within Islam at the expense of a study of the actual dynamics in Indonesia itself.