The Spiritual Process of Islamisation
As has been said, it seems generally agreed that Islam came in a peaceful manner and that it was carried into the archipelago by traders in a slow process which continued over many centuries.
Conversion myths indicate that everywhere Islam met with established systems of government. However, the suggestion implied in some conversion myths that Islamisation was initiated from the top should not be generalised.Islam spread along the main sea and trade routes and blossomed first, it appears, within the less Indianised communities of the archipelago. North Sumatra and especially Aceh Darussalam, the porch of Mecca (serambi Mekah), as it was known over centuries to all those Muslims who set out for the hadj via Acehnese ports, played an important role.
There is scarcely any hard evidence of a direct and sustained contact with the Islamic heartlands in that early period. Evidence tends to point more to a closer contact with India. Here Gujarat features prominently. Widely used terms such as lebai (mosque official) which comes from the Tamil for trader (labbai') also indicate southern India as a connecting point in the transmission of Islam. Other terms often referred to when stressing the Indian link are inconclusive evidence as their use may have grown out of the Indonesians’ already established familiarity with Indic concepts. So, Sanskritpntraders and craftsmen who, as members of their respective guilds, followed the one or the other mystical tradition.
Johns, who has been most persistent in his study of South-east Asian Islam as a religion, attributes the initial success of Islam to the fact that Sufis more than others were able to accommodate traditional, pre-Islamic mysticism, which is still strong in Java, in their own doctrines and teaching. He writes:
It is possible to characterize the Sufis as they presented themselves to the Indonesians as follows: they were peripatetic preachers ranging over the whole known world, voluntarily espousing poverty; they were frequently associated with trade or craft guilds, according to the order (tarikah) to which they belonged; they taught a complex syncretic theosophy largely familiar to the Indonesians, but which was subordinate to, although an enlargement on the fundamental dogmas of Islam; they were proficient in magic and possessed powers of healing; and not least, consciously or unconsciously, they were prepared to preserve continuity with the past, and to use the terms and elements of pre-Islamic culture in an Islamic context (Johns, 1961:15).
The citizens of those newly developing and obviously thriving urban Islamic communities considered themselves not so much as members of any local state but as members of a community stretching from the Middle East to China with the Arabian Peninsula as its spiritual centre and with Arabic as the main medium of international communication.
Indonesian scholars who had spent years of their life studying in Arabia stayed in constant contact with their teachers and there seems to have been a regular and frequent exchange between theologians on both sides of the Indian Ocean. Theological doctrines and religious orders seem to have risen and fallen in the archipelago echoing developments in Arabia. Doctrinal controversies in the Middle East were fought in the archipelago with equal zest. The heterodox mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri and that of his follower Syamsuddin al-Sumatrani or Syamsuddin of Pasai which followed the Wujudiya concept of Ibn al-Arabi was fiercely contested later in the seventeenth century by Nuruddin ar-Raniri who upheld a more orthodox teaching of the Wujudiya.Again there exists only a fragmentary record of the intellectual network and the dominant silsilah or chains of transmission existing over the centuries between the archipelago and Arabia. Yet from what we know so far, we gain the impression of a regular and intensive interchange. The Jawah, as the pilgrims, students and teachers from the archipelago were referred to in Arabia, constituted a considerable body of semi-permanent settlers in Mecca and other places of Islamic learning, as was described so clearly by Snouck Hurgronje for the rather late period of nineteenth-century Mecca. And, as can be gleaned from the correspondence sent to the reformist journal Al-Manar in Cairo from various parts of the archipelago, which has been studied recently by J. Bluhm, the religious queries of the Muslims of the archipelago were given serious theological consideration by authoritative scholars, right down to the twentieth century.