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CHAPTER 3

SAINTS AND WINNERS:

THE ARRIVAL OF ISLAM

They had sighted the land when they were still far out at sea: a long, grey-green stain stretching out across the horizon of the Andaman Sea. It took shape as they edged steadily towards it over the course of the morning: a range of mountains rearing inland under banks of creamy cloud, and a strip of pale foreshore under an infinite rank of palms. Eventually the ship—a Bengali merchantman that had been lumbering southwards for twenty-five days since its last landfall—came to anchor in the shallows. There was a large village of thatch-roofed houses onshore, and as the ship swung to her anchor rope, small boats swarmed around it with villagers clamouring for a sale and holding up bunches of ripe bananas, fat mangoes, bulbous green coconuts and bundles of dried fish.

As the merchants and crewmen reached down from the deck and embarked on their first bout of commerce after a month at sea, one of the passengers looked out on the scene, noting its detail in his formidable memory and wondering what he would find here, in yet another strange land. He was forty-one years old and seven thousand miles from home. His name was Ibn Battuta, and now, after twenty years of travel, he had reached the Sumatran state of Samudra Pasai. It was 1345.

Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan Muslim, born in 1304 in Tangier—a town at the mouth of the Mediterranean and in view of the sierras of southern Europe. He was clearly a man afflicted with a truly spectacular case of wanderlust, for at the age of twenty-one, ‘swayed by an overmastering impulse within me’ and ‘finding no companion to cheer the way’, he had left his sobbing parents and headed eastwards. He was planning merely to complete the Haj, the mandatory Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. But once Ibn Battuta was on the road, there was no stopping him. He wandered right, left and centre through the swelling realms of fourteenth-century Islam, eventually winding up as a qadi—an administrator of Islamic jurisprudence—at the court of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq in Delhi.

Many years later, back at home in Morocco after three decades on the road, Ibn Battuta would dictate the tale of his travels. It was a story full of colour, rich in the detail of life in far-off lands—and rich also with insights into the author’s own character. He was a man thoroughly interested and engaged in the world around him, taking careful note not only of the dynastic and theological arrangements in far-flung sultanates, but also of what was sold in the markets, of how the people dressed and ate, and of what they said. He was, in short, a travel writer par excellence.

In 1345 Ibn Battuta had left India for Sumatra, where, once the babble of bargaining with the local hawkers had died down, an official came aboard the ship with the news that the local ruler would be delighted to make Ibn Battuta’s acquaintance—for he, too, was a Muslim. Ibn Battuta was led inland between banks of lush greenery and wooden houses built on stilts. Several miles from the shore he came to the capital—‘a large and beautiful city encompassed by a wooden wall with wooden towers’—where he was told to swap his Arab robes for a local-style sarong. Once the costume change was complete he was installed in a house in the middle of a garden and provided with a pair of slave girls. The custom of the country, he was told, was that he must bide his time for three days before meeting the sultan. The wait was hardly onerous. Food, he noted, was ‘sent to us thrice a day and fruits and rare sweetmeats every evening and morning’; the locals seemed to be good Muslims of the Shafi’i school of Law, and the slave girls were excellent company.

The following Friday he finally met the sultan, Mahmud Malik az-Zahir, in the royal enclosure of the grand mosque. Once prayers were over there was a lavish entertainment laid on for the ruler and his guest:

Male musicians came in and sang … after which they led in horses with silk caparisons, golden anklets, and halters of embroidered silk. These horses danced before [the sultan], a thing which astonished me…

Ibn Battuta stayed with the sultan for two weeks before travelling onwards to China. He was very impressed with what he had seen. Samudra Pasai—a pocket of territory on the far northeast littoral of Sumatra in what is now the province of Aceh—was a hive of tropical commerce. Locals traded using tin cash and pieces of unrefined gold, and the hinterlands were rich with areca, aloes, camphor and all manner of fruits. Above all, as a sometime theologian and a part-time zealot, Ibn Battuta was particularly pleased to find a small Muslim territory here at the ends of the earth. Sultan Mahmud, he declared, was ‘a most illustrious and open-handed ruler, and a lover of theologians’:

He is constantly engaged in warring for the Faith and in raiding expeditions, but is withal a humble-hearted man, who walks on foot to the Friday prayers. His subjects also take pleasure in warring for the Faith and voluntarily accompany him on his expeditions. They have the upper hand over all the infidels in their vicinity.

Away to the south in Java, Hayam Wuruk had not yet ascended to the throne of Majapahit and Hindu-Buddhist priests were still traipsing along the pilgrimage trails of Gunung Penanggungan. But here in Sumatra a new chapter in Archipelago history was already unfolding.

Islam had emerged from central Arabia in the early seventh century. Forged of a mixed Judaeo-Christian heritage and a desert Arab culture, it had swiftly spilled out from its Meccan wellspring, filling the Arabian Peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean, seeping up into central Asia, and leaching across North Africa. By the time Ibn Battuta was born, his native Morocco had been Muslim for some six centuries.

Even beyond the fringes of the territory under direct Muslim rule, the faith continued its journey. Sailors from the baking shores of Arabia had long ruled the waves of the Indian Ocean, and they carried the new confession out across clear blue waters. By the early eighth century, there were already communities of Muslims on the coasts of India. On land, too, trade and travel carried Islam eastwards, between the caravanserais of Oxiana and across the Hindu Kush and Tien Shan into China. Muslims of mixed Turkic and Chinese descent were soon settled in pockets across the Middle Kingdom—and also in its coastal cities, where the tribute ships from Southeast Asia came to anchor.

Obviously, then, there must have been Muslims visiting the ports of the Archipelago from an early stage. Way back in 671 the Chinese traveller Yijing had reached the capital of Srivijaya aboard what he called a ‘Persian’ ship—and by that time Persia was already under the sway of the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate. In subsequent centuries, a number of envoys from Buddhist Srivijaya were recorded in the Chinese annals under suspiciously Muslim-sounding names. These men were almost certainly not locals: Srivijaya was a cosmopolitan place, and if there were Buddhist monks from the east camping out there to learn Sanskrit on their way to India, then there would likely have been a good few Muslim foreigners from the west too, offering their seafaring services to the king.

In Java, meanwhile, the oldest palpable trace of a Muslim presence comes in the form of a grave where an unnamed woman, daughter of a man called Maimun, was laid to rest some twenty miles inland from the north coast of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Kediri in 1082. Who she was and what she was doing there is anyone’s guess, but in the decades and centuries that followed, more of these incongruous tombs appear—a headstone and a footstone marking a narrow strip of earth and angled east– west in a best-guess approximation of the direction of Mecca. They stud the Archipelago in a cryptic pattern like the pins on some vast incident map.

By the early thirteenth century, there would certainly have been Muslim communities living in ports around the Straits of Melaka, out along the northern littoral of Java, and perhaps elsewhere, too. These maritime Muslims would have been of foreign origin. Some were probably Arabs, but others—probably the majority—hailed from elsewhere: Persia, Gujarat, Bengal and China. Like other traders and travellers before them they would probably have taken local wives, and these long-forgotten women would have been the very earliest converts to Islam in the Archipelago. They did not, however, start a trend, and the pockets of coastal Islam stayed quiet and inconspicuous as Hindu-Buddhist temples sprouted across Java, as Srivijaya rose and fell, and as Majapahit blossomed on the Brantas delta.

This all sounds rather familiar, and there are clear parallels between the arrival of Islam in the Archipelago and the arrival of the Indian faiths a thousand years earlier: the early presence of foreign traders professing a new religion; the old-established commercial communities in the ports; a centuries-long imperviousness on the part of the locals to their religious offerings; and then a sudden shift and a rush of state conversions.

The hows and the whys of the Archipelago’s move into Islam ought to be much clearer than those of the earlier Indic change. There had been many centuries of literacy in the island courts, and if we know what they ate on feast days in Hindu-Buddhist Java, then surely we should have clear accounts of just why and when it was that they stopped eating pork. But a state conversion usually came with the rise of some new dynasty, and the rise of a new dynasty required the fall of an old one. The move from Hindu-Buddhism to Islam, then, almost always came at the point when conditions were at their most unsettled and when no one was bothering to take notes. In future centuries, local people would have to gather the small fragments of folk memory and make of them fabulous stories to explain just why they were Muslims.

It was the far north of Sumatra that offered Islam its first proper toehold in Southeast Asia. For a start, it was closer to the Muslim states on the other shores of the Indian Ocean than anywhere else in the Archipelago, and it would eventually come to be known as ‘Mecca’s Veranda’ for its orthodoxy and its links with Arabia. The legend of how Islam came to Samudra Pasai, the north Sumatran sultanate that Ibn Battuta visited in 1345, is anything but orthodox, however.

According to the tale, the change came by way of a miracle as a heathen king named Merah Silau lay sleeping one night in his palm-thatched palace. The Prophet Muhammad appeared to him in a dream and—of all the strange things—spat in his mouth. When the baffled royal (who was presumably some sort of Hindu-Buddhist) woke, he found strange words spilling from his tongue. This was startling enough, but he had a still bigger shock when he examined himself and discovered that he had somehow been circumcised in his sleep! Merah Silau’s subjects were understandably a little bemused by their king’s bizarre new demeanour (he perhaps did not share with them the details of his alarming physical modification). However, all became clear shortly afterwards when a ship from Arabia arrived. Its captain informed the locals that the apparent gobbledegook Merah Silau had been babbling was in fact the Shahada, the Islamic Confession of Faith, and that their king was a ready-made Muslim.

Merah Silau—who ruled as Sultan Malik as-Salih—was a real king. His grave, not far from the modern city of Lhokseumawe, is dated to 1297. But tales of strange dreams aside, what exactly prompted these early conversions is unclear. There were certainly no conquests by alien armies under the banner of Islam. And though the presence of foreign Muslims in the ports obviously gave local kings and commoners their first sight of the new religion, the fact that they had been there for several centuries before the large-scale shift began suggests that they do not deserve sole credit for the change. As with the earlier introduction of Hindu-Buddhism, it was probably kingly pragmatism that provided the ultimate impetus.

By the end of the thirteenth century Islam had become increasingly ubiquitous across Asia, just as Hindu-Buddhism was beginning to go out of fashion. Ships sailing into the Archipelago from all corners of the Indian Ocean—and from ports to the northeast, too—were as likely as not to be captained by Muslims. In India, the original Hindu-Buddhist lodestar, more and more states were headed by Muslim kings. Even the emperors of China were despatching Muslim eunuchs on missions to the wider world. There was no other entity so obviously universal, and by signing up to Islam an Archipelago king would allow himself an obvious connection with many distant rulers—a natural bond of trade and sympathy, and a membership card to a new kind of internationalism. Soon, there were little pockets of Islam popping up all over the Archipelago. On the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, Melaka was under Muslim rule by the late fourteenth century—after the local king underwent a similarly miraculous conversion to that of Merah Silau, if the stories are to be believed. Brunei, on the northern slant of Borneo, was officially Muslim from 1363. By the mid-fifteenth century, Islam had reached as far east as Maluku, where the ruling families of the tiny island seats of Ternate and Tidore converted in the 1460s. Before long, there were so many Muslim chiefs ruling so many tiny islands in this eastern region that Arab spice traders began to call the place Jazirat al-Muluk, ‘The Islands of Kings’—from which Maluku takes its modern name.

By the dawn of the sixteenth century the Archipelago was undergoing a formidable change in complexion, and while we may not know exactly why or how it was happening, we do have a remarkable snapshot of the details on the ground—for it was at this point that an altogether new set of foreigners arrived in Southeast Asia—confessing, as it happened, yet another new religion.

On 20 May 1498, a fleet of four strange ships came to anchor off the coast of Kerala in the deep palm-clad south of India. The ships were broad-bellied, high-prowed carracks, square-rigged fore and lateen-rigged aft, with wind-shredded banners trailing from their topmasts. Their commander was a bull-chested man by the name of Vasco de Gama, and with this steamy landfall—six years after his compatriot Christopher Columbus accidentally stumbled upon the New World—he had completed the first successful European voyage to Asia.

The Portuguese were the first European nation out of the colonial starting blocks. They had advanced seafaring skills—borrowed in part from the Arabs of the Mediterranean—and a meticulous approach to navigation and record-keeping. As one English missionary who hitched a ride on an early voyage to India noted, ‘there is not a fowl that appeareth or sign in the air or in the sea which they have not written down’. They had crossed the Equator in ships before anyone else, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope in an era when much trade with Asia still travelled along the Silk Road. What prompted these improbable voyages was the heady scent of spice.

Spices from the Archipelago had been finding their way into Europe since at least the Roman era. But while Srivijaya and Majapahit had grown fat on shipping spice to all points of the Asian compass, the onward flow into Europe had always been controlled by ocean-going Arabs and their Venetian trading partners. The fortunes that these middlemen accrued were astronomical, thanks to market demand for spices. Nutmeg was particularly prized; it was touted not only as a flavouring but also as an aphrodisiac and a plague cure, and at times it was worth more than its weight in gold. Cloves and pepper, too, were rare and valuable commodities. In the mid-fifteenth century, under the energetic patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese sailors began their efforts to tap into the source of all these spices.

Within a decade of de Gama’s first voyage, the Portuguese had set up a modest empire of mildewed white churches in Goa, and soon they were edging even further eastward. In 1511 they captured Melaka, the post-Srivijaya linchpin of trade in the narrow strait between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. It was, according to one of their number, the premier port on the planet: ‘I believe that more ships arrive here than in any other place in the world, and especially come here all sorts of spices and an immense quantity of other merchandise’. Once they had established their base on the Straits, the Portuguese headed east to Maluku in search of the source of the spice.

On the side-lines of the trade, the Portuguese were making records of what they saw around them, and these accounts form the earliest European primary sources about the Archipelago. One Portuguese document was particularly remarkable. It was written by a pharmacist with an exceptional talent for journalism, and it offered a detailed outside view of Islamisation in action.

In 1512, an apothecary from Lisbon arrived in the new Portuguese outpost of Melaka. He had been sent out to Goa the previous year to take charge of issuing ineffectual fever cures to the nascent Catholic community there, and had then shipped out further east. His name was Tomé Pires, and though he was a medicine man by trade, his real forte turned out to be reportage. During the three years he spent based in Melaka, he visited many corners of the Archipelago and noted down everything he saw. He also listened carefully to the reports of other Europeans and of the locals in the ports he visited. What really marked Pires out from virtually every other scribbling traveller of the age—from Ibn Battuta to Marco Polo—was his remarkable journalistic insistence on corroboration and fact-checking. This was not a writer to pass on as fact a third-hand tall tale of men with heads like dogs. If he heard a story, he needed it to be credible before he would credit it—and he needed to hear it from more than one mouth. His finished write-up was an astounding document called the Suma Oriental que trata do Mar Roxo até aos Chins, the ‘Summation of the East from the Red Sea up to the Chinese’. Incredibly, the document was never published in his own lifetime. It was bundled away and forgotten after Pires left Melaka for China—where he seems to have died a mysterious death in a dungeon—and it would be four centuries before this mighty trove of humbly presented but scientifically gathered information was uncovered.

The first thing that Pires’ account makes clear is just how spectacularly cosmopolitan the ports of the Archipelago had become by the sixteenth century. Melaka itself was a veritable human zoo:

Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Ormuz, Panees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomans, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Lucoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga (they have a thousand other islands), Moluccas, Banda, Bima, Timor, Madura, Java, Sunda, Palembang, Jambi, Tongkal, Indragiri, Kappatta, Menangkabau, Siak, Arqua, Aru, Bata, country of the Tomjano, Pase, Pedir, Maldives.

Across the water, meanwhile, Sumatra was in the grip of a great cultural change. A century and a half since Ibn Battuta’s visit, the east coast of the island between Aceh and Palembang was entirely under Muslim rule. The far south was mostly still ‘heathen’, but that, too, was rapidly changing. Samudra Pasai—which had, Pires noted, given its name to the whole island: Samudra, or ‘Sumatra’—had done well from the Portuguese seizure of Melaka. The Catholic conquest had displaced many of the expat Muslim traders based there, sending them scurrying away to seek out new footings in the Archipelago (and probably accelerating the speed of Islamisation in the process). Many had gone to Samudra Pasai, where there were now ‘many merchants from different Moorish and Kling [Indian] nations, who do a great deal of trade’. Inland, the people of the Bukit Barisan mountain ranges had long resisted conversion, but even that was now rapidly changing: ‘In these kingdoms there are in the island of Sumatra, those on the sea coast are all Moors [Muslims] on the side of the Malacca Channel, and those who are not yet Moors are being made so every day, and no heathen among them is held in any esteem unless he is a merchant’.

Much is often made of the peaceful nature of Islam’s entry into the Archipelago—the faith, it is said, spread here through trade and missionary zeal rather than through the sword. But both Ibn Battuta and Tomé Pires recorded Sumatran kings ‘warring for the Faith’. The real significant point is not that holy war was unknown in the Archipelago, but that it was never carried out by foreigners. Initial conversion came at the foreshore; later on, local kings might push inland, conquering and converting as they went, and adding a new element in a manifold process made up of missionary work, settlement, intermarriage, trade and mysticism.

In the second decade of the sixteenth century, as Tomé Pires was scribbling away at his desk in Melaka, the process was at its height in Sumatra, and was rapidly gearing up in other parts of the Archipelago too. Within a decade Banjarmasin, on the underbelly of Borneo, would be Muslim. Buton, off the southeast promontory of Sulawesi, would convert in 1580. At the start of the following century the hub of eastern maritime power at Makassar, on the other southern leg of Sulawesi, would change its faith. According to subsequent legends, Makassar’s seemingly rather slow conversion was down to a particularly passionate local penchant for pork. The Makassar chieftain insisted that he would never convert to a faith that banned the eating of succulent slabs of pig meat as long as the creatures were to be found roaming the forests of his realm. In the legend, an instantaneous extinction of porcine wildlife miraculously ensued, which was more than enough to convince the Makassarese to join the new religion. This was a particularly significant moment in the Islamisation of eastern Indonesia, for Makassar’s influence was strong throughout this region, and within a few short years it would have shunted the westernmost islands of Nusa Tenggara—Lombok and Sumbawa—into Islam too.

These were all places that had come within the broader sphere of Majapahit in earlier centuries—and indeed the final stamp of Islam in the Archipelago would closely match the footprint of the earlier formal Hindu-Buddhist influence. The network of trade, the sophisticated courtly culture, and the swelling internationalism that had welled up out of the Brantas delta ultimately provided the essential fertiliser for the new faith. In Java itself, however, the shift into Islam was unfolding rather differently.

Java on the eve of Islamisation was a land of beauty and sophistication. It was a place where an advanced farming culture had existed for thousands of years in a landscape of towering mountains and deep forests. Villages had taken on a timeless form—a refined rendering of the Austronesian prototype—and there was plenty of space for art and literature. A Majapahit poet in the fifteenth century described the scene in the Siwaratrikalpa, a tale of a sinful hunter wandering the forests of the island:

His journey took him to the northeast, where the ravines were lovely to look down into;

The gardens, ring-communities, sanctuaries, retreats and hermitages aroused his wonder.

There lay large fields at the foot of the mountains, with crops of many kinds growing along the slopes;

A large river descended from the hills, its stream irrigating the crops.

Now there was a village which he also viewed from above, lying below in a valley between the ridges.

Its buildings were fine to behold, while the lalan roofs of the pavilions were veiled in the drizzling rain.

Wisps of dark smoke stretched far, trailing away in the sky,.

And in the shelter of a banyan tree stood the hall, roofed with rushes, always the scene of many deliberations.

To the west of this were mountain ridges covered with rice fields, their dykes running sharp and clear.

Tomé Pires recorded something not dissimilar—though in rather more prosaic terms—when he sailed from Melaka to Java for the first time. It was, he wrote, ‘a land with beautiful air, it has very good water; it has high mountain ranges, great plains, valleys’. There were fish aplenty in the surrounding seas; the forests teemed with wild pigs and deer, and the people were ‘very sleek and splendid’. It was, in short, ‘a country like ours’. Javanese produce was magnificent too, and the rice was the best in the world—though there was ‘no butter nor cheese; they do not know how to make it’. The women also impressed him: ‘When they go out, they go in state looking like angels’. He was less sure about the men, however: ‘The Javanese are diabolic, and daring in treacheries and they are proud of the boast of being Javanese’. They were also well-armed, with every man, rich or poor, obliged by Javanese custom to keep a traditional kris dagger in his house. And just as Zheng He’s men had discovered a hundred years earlier, the Javanese were very sensitive about being touched: ‘Do not make a gesture towards a Javanese from the navel upwards’, Pires wrote, ‘nor make as if to touch [his] head; they kill for this’. Tomé Pires also noted that in the second decade of the sixteenth century Java did not yet have anything like a Muslim majority.

The ports on the north coast of Java were true melting pots, however, full of Javanese becoming Muslim, and Muslims becoming Javanese. There were, Tomé Pires wrote, merchants of all nations settled in these ports: ‘Parsees, Arabs, Gujeratis, Bengalese, Malays and other nationalities, there being many Moors among them’. But when it came to the interior, it was still the realm of a ‘great heathen king’ who went about his countryside with ‘two or three thousand men with lances in sockets of gold and silver’. This, of course, was Majapahit, still lingering eight generations after the glory days of Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada.

The Hindu-Buddhist kingdom’s power was much diminished; indeed, Pires noted that the Muslim rulers of the coast, even if they were of foreign origin, had ‘made themselves more important in Javanese nobility and state than those of the hinterland’. But Majapahit could still lay a greater claim to represent the majority culture of Java. The island was still studded with active temples, and was still crawling with Hindu-Buddhist holy men: ‘There are about fifty thousand of these in Java’, Tomé Pires wrote; ‘Some of them do not eat rice nor drink wine; they are all virgins, they do not know women’. Such was the hold of these wandering mystics, Pires declared, that even the coastal Muslims were inclined to pay them passing obeisance: ‘These men are also worshipped by the Moors and they believe in them greatly; they give them alms; they rejoice when such men come to their houses’.

And yet within a century, Majapahit would have vanished altogether, and by far the greater part of Java would be Muslim. Just how this came to pass is unclear, but the local legends give all the credit to a clutch of shadowy figures who seem to have been following in the footsteps of Tomé Pires’ army of ascetics. There were just nine of these new men, however, rather than fifty thousand; and they professed Islam rather than Hindu-Buddhism.

Javanese tradition today ascribes the Islamisation of the island to the exploits of the mythical Wali Songo, the ‘Nine Saints’. Most do seem to have been real people: they have tombs that remain major pilgrimage centres in Java today. However, the presence of saintly bones in modern mosque courtyards is just about the only certainty in the tale of the Wali Songo; even pinning them down to a definitive list of nine is impossible. Some are clearly historical figures, even if they are thickly swaddled with later folklore. Amongst these is Malik Ibrahim, a foreign Muslim with purported origins oscillating from Persia to China, who settled at Gresik on the northeast coast of Java a full century before Tomé Pires’ time and who found fame under the saintly name of Sunan Gresik. Others could be dismissed as a confection of ancient myths salted with a small pinch of Islamic lore—were it not for the fact that they have verified tombs of their own.

Perhaps the best way to look at the Wali Songo is as a metaphor for the early Islamisation of Java: a diverse array of men, some the temporal chiefs of little harbour kingdoms, some authentic ascetics wandering the byways touting Koranic quotations; some of Indian, Chinese or Arabic origin, some true sons of the Javanese soil; each doing his own little bit for the new faith.