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.
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