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.
