breathed its last—but the Hindu-Buddhist centuries were coming rapidly to an end and the scene was set for the next great sea change in Southeast Asia.
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
