The foundations of a Muslim ecumene: the Islamization of the bila¯d al-j¯awa
In his history of the sultanates of Maluku, Leonard Andaya (1993: 23) recalls that the European world-view once rested on the Greek paradigm of centre and periphery. This was also a view once shared by the Arabo–
Islamic geographical tradition. Schrieke (1957: 267) observed that descriptions of the archipelago were often ‘shrouded in the mists of para- geography’. (A good example of this vague cartographic knowledge of Southeast Asia is exemplified by the map of al-Idr¯ıs¯ı, made between 1154 and 1192, which shows the archipelago as a random assortment of blobs.) These ‘parageographies’ of Southeast Asia were usually included in treatises on India (al-Hind), China (al-S. ¯ın) or Sri Lanka (al-
Sarand¯ıb). One example is al-Ramhurmu¯zi’s Aja¯ib al-hind (The Wonders of India, compiled c.1000).1 Such works often described Southeast Asia as a unitary region under the cultural influence of India.
It is perhaps for this reason that dispatches sent from the court of Ala al- Din Riayat Shah al-Qahar of Aceh (r.1540–67) to the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman (r.1520–65) were long filed – and long lost – among the correspondence from India (Farooqi 1986: 267).
In a similar manner classical Chinese texts delineated Southeast Asia as a distinct (if somewhat mythical) region under the influence of
Indianized civilization (Coedès 1968: 9). At the same time though Southeast Asians conceived of an overarching geographical unity for their domains, often terming them ‘the lands below the winds’ due to the monsoons that swept across them (Reid 1988, 1993c). For example, in 1612, Sultan Iskandar Muda of Aceh (r.1607–36) described himself in a letter to King James I of England as ‘the lord in power here below the winds who holds the throne of Aceh and Samudra and all the countries adjacent’ (see Schrieke 1957: 254–55).
The Islamization of the lands below the winds should be seen as a process of negotiation between rulers, their subjects (consisting both of local and foreign peoples), and Islamic scholars; the ulama¯. It seems likely that international trade reinforced the conversion process, though it would be a mistake to see trade itself as the sole mechanism or rationale behind conversion itself. After all, Muslim traders – including Arabs, Indians, and Persians – had probably lived in the archipelago since the early years of Islam. Furthermore, as Southeast Asian waters facilitated the trade between India and China (where there was an established Muslim presence in Canton from the ninth century) there is some evidence of the involvement of Chinese Muslims in the process. Perhaps there was even an additional impulse from Muslim communities in Champa (present-day Southern Vietnam), a kingdom with a long history of connections with Java, and remembered in the Javanese epics as the homeland of the first Muslims on that island (De Graaf and Pigeaud 1976: 5).
Some of the earliest outside visions of Southeast Asia’s Islamization are found in the observations of Marco Polo (1254–1324), who visited the region in 1292, and Ibn Bat.t.ut¯.a (1304–77), who followed him in 1345–46. Both observed Islamic centres surrounded by as yet
unconverted kingdoms. Montana (1997) believes that the first evidence which backs up their observations is to be found in the tomb stone, seemingly dated 1211, of Sultan Sulaiman bin Abdullah al-Basir at Lamuri on the northern tip of Sumatra. Harder proof of the gradual Islamization of the island is to be seen in the stone of Sultan Malik al- Salih of Samudra (Pasai), dated 1297, and in the coinage of his
successors (Schrieke 1957: 233–34; Drewes 1968: 436–50; Reid 1993c:
100). Further Islamization was observed in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires (c.1468–c.1540) described the ongoing process of sultans and rajas asserting their control over the once animistic or Indianized archipelago (see Cortesão 1944).
At times Southeast Asian Muslims may have felt an orientation to the wider community of believers and at others more specifically to their
own rulers. Perhaps many of the peoples of Southeast Asia first joined the Muslim world in a process Levtzion (1979: 19) – following Knock (1930) – calls ‘adhesion’. Hereby a people accepts Islam yet does not adhere absolutely to its prescriptions. Southeast Asian adhesion may have taken the form of forsaking pork, widely consumed in traditional Austronesian societies; the destruction of idols; cutting men’s hair short;
circumcision; and the adoption of Arabo–Islamic names (Reid 1993c:
141–43; Azra 1999a: 51). In such cases the behaviour of the monarch would have set the standard to be followed. But once this adhesion occurred, Muslim communities began the slow process of incorporation within the fold of religious orthodoxy. This incorporation could have been through the media of translations of Arabic manuals for converts (Drewes 1978), or indeed by the further active support of rulers (Ricklefs 1979; Reid 1993c; Azra 1999a: 68). Such would have served to more deeply implant an Islam defined by the centre above the winds.
Ongoing conversion in the archipelago was also a process driven primarily by local peoples, as in West Africa and East Bengal. Levtzion (1979: 207) has proposed that Islamization in West Africa proceeded as a ripple through a chain of different peoples and vernacular languages.
Similarly the conversion myths of several ‘Indonesian’ states, whilst emphasizing a divine connection between the Prophet and local ruler, or the role of Indian and Arab divines, hint at the transmission of Islam within the archipelago by local Muslim peoples (see Jones 1979). And unlike in the Fertile Crescent or Mediterranean World, the Islamization of Southeast Asia did not accompany an Arabic conquest and was not identified with the acceptance of Arabic culture (see Levtzion and Voll 1987; Azra 1999a). This is not to say that Islam was never spread in the peripheries by conquest, as the wars of the West African Jiha¯dist states of the nineteenth century (Levtzion 1987) or the forced conversion of the Buginese by the Makassarese in 1610 demonstrate (Reid 1993c: 150).
Neither should the vernacular spread of Islam suggest that the Quranic and¯ Arabic sciences were not adopted by an emerging body of local ulama¯. Rather the civilizational models of West Asia began the same process of assimilation undergone by all peoples in the Muslim world (Goldziher 1981; Levtzion 1979; Lapidus 1991).
These increasingly Muslim ‘lands below the winds’ had long been known to Arabic speakers as either ja¯wa, a synecdoche for Southeast Asia derived from the insular toponym ‘Java’, or the bila¯d al-j¯awa (The lands of ‘the Jawa’ people collectively). In a similar manner the Chinese and their homeland were known as al-S. ¯ın and Indians al- Hind. And when Marco Polo visited Southeast Asia in 1291, he called
Sumatra ‘Java Minora’ (Coedès 1968: 203). I would suggest that this most likely reflected the usage of the Muslim crew of the vessel on which he sailed. Certainly such terminology also finds an echo in the writings of both Chinese visitors (Reid 2001: 297) and later European travellers. Tomé Pires, following ‘Moorish charts’, called the Eastern islands of Indonesia ‘the Javas’ (Cortesão 1944: lxxxi) and an English sailor, Ralph Fitch, used the same term for the entire archipelago (c.1591) (Schrieke 1957:
259).
Further, among Arabic speakers, individual Southeast Asians and Southeast Asian products were referred to adjectivally as ja¯w¯ı, as distinct from things Indian (hind¯ı) or Chinese (s.¯ın¯ı). It was for this reason that when Ibn Bat.t.ut¯.a landed in Sumatra he remarked that the island was the source of benzoin, known as luba¯n j¯aw¯ı; that is ‘Jawi incense’(Tibbetts 1979: 64). On the basis of Ibn Bat.t.ut¯.a’s statement, Roolvink (1975) has identified the toponym Jawa with the ancient empire of Sr¯ıvijaya. But in all likelihood Ibn Bat´ .t.ut¯.a’s usage simply reflects the ambiguity in Arabic describing Southeast Asia and Java as geographic entities.
As a term applied wholesale by outsiders ‘Jawa’ itself was not initially used by Southeast Asian peoples to denote their home world below the winds, or indeed themselves in a wider sense. The use of the word could only cause confusion given that it signified the island Java in both Malay and Javanese. Indeed, when Prapañca, poet laureate to King Ayam Wuruk of Majapahit (r.1350–89), composed the Na¯garakr.ta¯gama in 1365, he differentiated ‘the land of Java’ (Yawabhu¯mi) from the rest of the archipelago (Supomo 1979: 73–74). If a Southeast Asian visiting Yemen or the Hijaz acknowledged that he was, like the famous incense, Jawi, he would not have been claiming any connection with the princely court of Majapahit. Rather he would have been affirming a relationship with the ecumene viewed by outsiders – whether West Asian, Chinese or European – as unitary. Still, it was an ecumene that others could join if they became Muslims, much as it has become possible to speak of becoming a Malay by converting to Islam, although I would suggest that, as a meta-ethnic term, Malayness has devolved from an older sense of Jawiness.2 Indeed, in his discussion of the term Melayu, Reid (2001: 299) has put forward evidence that I believe points to a process by which foreigners within the archipelago could mix in and become Jawi – whether their parents were Javanese, Chinese or Arab. This ascription remained well into the twentieth century, when the locally-born children of Indian Muslims in Singapore were known as the jawi peranakan.
External ascription or birth alone were not the only significations of being jawi. Although the Acehnese scholar Abd al-Rauf al-Sinkil¯ı (¯
c.1615–c.93), who spent nineteen years in Arabia (1642–61), was often specified – like his predecessors H.amza al-Fans.ur¯ı and Shams al-D¯ın of Pasai (d.1630) – as being¯ of the people of Pansur (al-Fans.ur) and further a Jawi person (Ja¯w¯¯ ı); he defined another part of his identity as ja¯w¯ı. This was the language in which he wrote, being Malay in the Arabic script, the Sumatran Jawi language (al-lughat al-ja¯w¯ıya al- samat.ra¯ıya) (Snouck Hurgronje 1906: II, 19, 129 n. 2).3
But Malay, known locally as bahasa jawi, was not merely confined to Sumatra. As the lingua franca of the archipelago, it was also the natural vehicle for the spread of Islam. Hence Shams al-D¯ın, writing in his Mirat al-mumin (The Mirror of the Believer, 1601), had declared that he had written his work ‘in the Jawi language (dengan bahasa jawi) in order to render words of theology (perkataan usul al-din) for those people who do not understand Arabic or Farsi’ (quoted in Werndly 1736: ii). Malay as the key Jawi language of Southeast Asia also made an impression on many Western travellers. These included Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–
89), who was told once in Isfahan that the languages of the cultured world included:
Latin, Greek, High-German, English, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Persian, Arabic, Indian (sic.), Syriac and Malay . . . which is the language of educated people, from the flooding Indus to China and Japan, and in most of the Eastern isles, much like Latin in our Europe.
(quoted by Werndly 1736: xxxvii) Francois Valentijn also paid tribute to this same fact when he wrote c.1725 that Malay could be understood ‘from Persia to the Philippines’
(Soedjatmoko 1965: 160). Malay was thus imagined by outsiders, both Western and Muslim, as the language of educated people in an
archipelago united by an Indic tradition that had accommodated the recent advent of Islam.
The consequent usage of an ascriptive nomenclature based on common appearance, geography, and use of a lingua franca is by no means unique to Southeast Asia or the Muslim world. People in West Asia made much the same assumptions about the Franks (al-Ifranj) as the Europeans did for the ‘Saracens’. This process of cultural blurring can also be seen in John Lewis Burckhardt’s (1784–1817) observations regarding West
African Muslims arriving at the Red Sea coast in the early part of the nineteenth century.
[W]e had with us eighteen or twenty Takayrna, or Negro pilgrims. Takruri, the singular of this name, is not derived from a country called ‘Takrur,’ as is generally supposed in the East, and which has misled all the Arabian geographers, but from the verb takarrur, to multiply, renew, to sift, to purify, to invigorate, i.e. their religious sentiments, by the study of the sacred book, and by the pilgrimage. The appellation is bestowed on all Negroes who come [from the] west . . . [despite the fact that]
they do not call themselves by this name of Takruri, which many assured me they had not heard of till they reached the limits of Darfur.4
If the peoples of the Hijaz imagined that the Takru¯r¯ı came from the land of Takru¯r, then, as I have noted above, the Malay-speaking Jawa were just as readily imagined to have come from a unitary land. Once abroad then, and like the Takayrna, the Jawa resorted to a cultural definition imposed on them by others, whether subject of Sultan Agung of Java or Sultan Mahmud Shah of Melaka (r.1488–1511).
Whilst the Jawi kingdoms – and there were many – had a long heritage as a unitary region with strong local traditions (cf. Reid 1988 etc.), perceptions of Islamic orthodoxy among the Jawa were nevertheless tied to West Asian models; especially in terms of script, language, and regal terminology. Johns (1988: 260–61) has shown that the great H.amza al- Fans.ur¯ı demonstrated¯ remarkable fluency and adaptability with his use of Arabic in his mystical poetry. Schrieke (1957: 24, 54), when speaking of Aceh in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, observed that official correspondence with foreign states was conducted in Arabic as well as Malay. And in Aceh in 1602, Sir James Lancaster noted that the ‘chiefe bishope’ of that city, perhaps Shams al-D¯ın Pasai, spoke with another nobleman in ‘the Arabicke tongue’ (see Ito 1984: 250 f.;
Azra 1992: 348). Still, this does not mean that many Southeast Asians were as fluent in Arabic as H.amza al-Fans.ur¯ı or Shams ¯ al-D¯ın.
Indeed a contemporary letter, sent from the court of Banten to James I in October 1605, exhibits Arabic that is far from correct, if comprehensible (see Gallop n.d.: 22).
Tomé Pires had already watched as the web of these Jawi sultanates adopted the calligraphy, literary traditions, and titles of Islamic statecraft.
The most common title assumed was that of sultan (Ar. sult.an¯ )
(Cortesão 1944). According to classical Islamic political theory, the office of the sultanate (Ar. salt.ana) is confirmed by the Caliph (Ar.
Khal¯ıfa), he being the ‘successor’to the Prophet as head of the Muslim community (ummat al-isla¯m) (see Lambton 1981). In return the sultans, as the real power in the Muslim lands, pledged an oath of allegiance (baya) to the Caliph. This had evolved from the days of the earliest Caliphs whereby the Muslims were required to give their personal pledge to Muh.ammad’s successors (Madelung 1998). However not all
Southeast Asian rulers followed the lead of Sultans Sulaiman of Lamuri or Malik al-Salih of Pasai; Tomé Pires indicates that the rank of sultan was generally accorded to major kings with their lesser neighbours taking the older Indic form raja (Cortesão 1944: 214). Fewer still went to the trouble of pledging allegiance to a distant Caliph. Indeed, given that most Southeast Asian courts were Islamized well after the murder of the last Abba¯sid Caliph of Baghdad at the hands of the Mongols in 1258, it is not surprising that the Caliph did not loom large in Southeast Asia. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 even saw the
vanquished Sultan Mahmud direct complaints to his suzerain in Peking rather than the Ottoman Sultan (Cortesão 1944: xxxviii–xlv).
Azra (1999a: 91–92) suggests that the use of such titles as Sultan and Caliph, as well as in some cases terming Jawi sultanates Islamic territory (da¯r al-isla¯m), symbolized the commitment of Jawi sovereigns to a wider Muslim world. Yet this was a world without a clear political centre. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was generally little mutual interest in the caliphate, or indeed in political unity among the Muslims of Southeast Asia. The continuing rivalries of the great Sultans of Turkey, India and Persia were mirrored by the contests between the sovereigns of Aceh, Banten and Mataram. Of course Southeast Asia’s rulers knew about the Ottomans; the ‘Raja Rum’ is often mentioned in the Malay epics (hikayat). Three Acehnese sultans of the sixteenth century – Ala al-Din Riayat Shah al-Qahar (r.1537–71), Mansur Shah (r.1577–88) and Ala al-Din Riayat Shah (r.1588–1604) – even addressed the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman (r.1520–65) as Caliph in official correspondence, although they were seeking aid as much as recognition. And whilst they placed great store in their relationship with Rum, this did not stop them also taking the title of Caliph, or caliphal epithets, for domestic consumption (see Farooqi 1986: 267; Azra 1992:
110–15). By way of further regional comparison, we may note that in the following century Abd al-Qadir of Banten (r.1626–51) and Agung of Mataram (r.1613–46) sent emissaries to Mecca, in 1638 and 1639 respectively. However, this was to gain symbols of investiture from the
Shar¯ıf as descendant of the Prophet and Ruler (Am¯ır) of Mecca.5 It was far more important, for these rulers at least, to connect with the
legitimacy of the decendants of the Prophet than to pledge themselves as vassals to the Ottoman state with the hope of gaining an edge over the Portuguese, or their own local rivals.
As in West Asia, Southeast Asian rulers were often styled ‘God’s shadow on earth’ (Lambton 1981: 121; Milner 1981, 1983: 34–39) with their inviolability enshrined in court texts (Santoso 1971: 16; Raja Ali Haji 1982), or the palace architecture that separated them from the populace (Reid 1993c: 82–83). Yet whereas a sultan may once have relied on the spiritual legitimacy of a connection with Mecca and the counsel of key ulama¯, in the emerging colonial context the European interlopers needed to be considered. The pattern was first set in places like the spice-producing sultanates of Maluku in the sixteenth century, where local rulers were forced to balance the ‘advice’ of a European ally or ‘older brother’ against that of the
ulama¯.
Given the rise of European influence in Southeast Asia, Schrieke (1957:
230–67) argued that Islamization began to take the form of a race for conversion with Christianity. The principle of broad oppositional sentiment is found in a history written by Raja Ali Haji of Riau, who has the Malays referring to the Malaccan allies of the Dutch as kaum nasrani (‘the Nazarenes’ or ‘Christians’) (Raja Ali Haji 1982: 108). Furthermore several Southeast Asian terms for the Portuguese or for Europeans in general – in Thai (farang), Burmese (barang), and Malay (feringgi) – all derive from the Arabic word for the Franks (al-ifranj) (Reid 1994: 281).
Such polarization between Christianity and Islam could only reinforce the ongoing generation of the idea of a wider Muslim ecumene.
The impression of the ‘lands of the Jawa’ (bila¯d al-j¯awa) as a distinctly Muslim ecumene was also reinforced by the interaction in Mecca and Medina of significant numbers of Jawi ulama¯. They included the aforementioned Abd al-Rauf and Shams al-D¯ın. This heightened awareness is underlined ¯ in the seventeenth century by a number of important works composed in Medina by one of the teachers of Abd al-Rauf. These were the treatises¯ addressed to a Jawi audience by Ibra¯h¯ım bin H.asan al-Ku¯r¯an¯ı (1616–90), a disciple of Ah.mad al-Qusha¯sh¯ı (1583–1661), the head of the Shat.t.ar¯ıya order. Al- Ku¯r¯an¯ı’s Jawi-focussed works included the Masa¯il al-ja¯w¯ıya (The Jawi
Questions); the Jawa¯b¯at al-ghiraw¯ıya an al-masa¯il al-ja¯w¯ıya al- jahr¯ıya (The Binding Answers to the Spoken Jawi Questions); and his