Islam in the Nusantara

Islam came to the islands of Southeast Asia not by conquest but along the sea lanes. Each year the monsoon winds carried ships from Arabia, Persia, Gujarat and Hadramawt to the ports of Sumatra, the peninsula and Java, and Muslim merchants settled, married and built mosques there.

The earliest traces are gravestones: one at Leran in Java is dated 1082. When Marco Polo passed northern Sumatra in 1292, he found the port of Perlak already Muslim. A few years later, in 1297, Sultan Malik al-Salih of Samudera Pasai was buried under a carved stone brought from Gujarat, and when Ibn Battuta visited Pasai in 1345 he found a sultan who followed the Shafi'i school and loved to debate with scholars after the Friday prayer.

Around 1400 a prince from Palembang named Parameswara founded a settlement at Melaka, on the narrow straits between Sumatra and the peninsula. Within a generation its ruler had embraced Islam, and Melaka grew into the great market of the region, where ships from Arabia, India, China and Java met. Admiral Zheng He's Chinese fleets called there, and its harbour-masters spoke a dozen languages.

Melaka's court made Islam and the Malay language the marks of a ruler's prestige, and kings across the archipelago copied its ways. Its laws, the Hukum Kanun Melaka, joined the Shari'a with Malay custom, and its chronicle, the Sejarah Melayu, became the classic of Malay prose. Meanwhile, on the north coast of Java, the preachers remembered as the Wali Songo were at work.

In 1511 a Portuguese fleet under Afonso de Albuquerque took Melaka after a fierce siege. Sultan Mahmud Shah fled, and his heirs founded the kingdom of Johor. The Muslim traders who had made Melaka rich took their business elsewhere: to Johor, Banten, Brunei, and above all Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra.

Aceh grew rich on pepper and fought the Portuguese for a century. Its sultans sent envoys to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, who sent cannon and gunners in return. As ships for the Hajj sailed from its harbour and scholars gathered at its court, Aceh came to be called Serambi Mekah, the Verandah of Makkah.

Hamzah Fansuri came from Barus, the old camphor port on the west coast of Sumatra that the Arabs called Fansur. He travelled to the Hijaz and to Baghdad, where he joined the Qadiri path, and returned to teach. His exact dates are uncertain, but he lived in the 16th century.

He was among the first to put deep religious thought into Malay. His syair, rhymed poems that often end with his own name, speak of the soul's search for God in images of the sea, the ship and the pearl, and they are among the oldest Malay poems known. In prose works such as Asrar al-'Arifin he taught the unity of being (wujudiyyah) in the tradition of Ibn 'Arabi. His follower Shams al-Din al-Sumatrani became the leading scholar of Aceh under Iskandar Muda.

Nur al-Din al-Raniri, a scholar of Hadrami descent from Rander in Gujarat, arrived in Aceh in 1637 and won the favour of the young Sultan Iskandar Thani, who made him Shaykh al-Islam. He wrote tirelessly in Malay: al-Sirat al-Mustaqim, the first full book of Shafi'i law in the language, and Bustan al-Salatin, a vast history of the world and of Aceh.

He condemned the wujudiyyah teaching of Hamzah Fansuri and Shams al-Din as contrary to sound belief, and during his time some of their followers were persecuted and their books burned. Scholars then and since have judged the dispute differently. In 1644 a scholar from Minangkabau defended the older teaching before Sultanah Safiatuddin, and al-Raniri left Aceh suddenly, returning to Gujarat, where he died in 1658.

'Abd al-Ra'uf was born in Singkil on the west coast of Aceh. He spent some nineteen years studying in Yemen, Jeddah, Makkah and Madinah, where Ahmad al-Qushashi initiated him into the Shattari path and Ibrahim al-Kurani taught him. When he came home in 1661, Sultanah Safiatuddin appointed him chief judge, and he served four queens in turn.

After the bitter disputes of al-Raniri's time he chose a gentler way, warning against declaring fellow Muslims unbelievers. He wrote Tarjuman al-Mustafid, the first complete commentary on the Quran in Malay, and Mir'at al-Tullab on law for judges. His students, among them Burhan al-Din of Ulakan, carried his teaching to Minangkabau and Java. The gold lines lead back to his teachers in Madinah.

Shaykh Yusuf was born in Gowa in south Sulawesi in 1626 and left as a young man to study, travelling through Banten and Aceh to Yemen, Makkah, Madinah and Damascus, and receiving several Sufi paths along the way. Returning east, he settled in Banten, married a daughter of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa and became his adviser.

When the Dutch East India Company backed the sultan's son in a civil war, Shaykh Yusuf led a guerrilla resistance in the hills of west Java until he was captured in 1683. The Dutch exiled him to Ceylon, where pilgrims passing to Makkah sought him out, and then, fearing his influence, to the Cape of Good Hope. There, with his family and followers, he formed the first Muslim community in southern Africa. He died in 1699; his shrine at Faure is still visited, and part of his remains were later brought home to Gowa.

Muhammad Arshad was born in 1710 near Martapura in south Borneo. The Sultan of Banjar, impressed by the boy, took him into the palace and later paid for him to study in the Hijaz. He stayed about thirty years, with a close circle of Malay friends that included 'Abd al-Samad al-Palimbani, and studied law with Muhammad al-Kurdi and Sufism with Muhammad al-Samman.

Returning in 1772, he founded a centre of learning outside Martapura, trained scholars, and helped reform the courts and religious offices of Banjar. At the sultan's request he wrote Sabil al-Muhtadin, a two-volume work of Shafi'i law in Jawi Malay that is still studied across the Malay world; Banjarmasin's grand mosque is named after it. He died in 1812, aged over a hundred.

Dawud ibn 'Abd Allah was born in Kerisik, Patani, in the second half of the 18th century, in years when Patani was at war with Siam. As a young man he went to the Hijaz, and he spent the rest of his long life there, studying and then teaching in Makkah.

He became the leading teacher of students from the Malay world, who came to him from Patani, Kelantan, Terengganu, Sumatra and beyond. He wrote dozens of works in Jawi on law, belief and Sufism, among them Furu' al-Masa'il and Munyat al-Musalli, clear and careful books meant for ordinary believers as well as students. Copied, then printed in Makkah and Cairo, they became staples of the pondok schools and are still taught today.

Muhammad Nawawi was born in Tanara in Banten, the son of a village imam, and went to Makkah at about fifteen. After a few years teaching at home he returned for good, and settled in the quarter of Shi'b 'Ali, where students from Java, Sumatra, the peninsula and Patani gathered around him. Admirers called him the master of the scholars of the Hijaz.

The Dutch scholar Snouck Hurgronje, who met him in Makkah in the 1880s, described a modest, gentle teacher. He wrote more than a hundred works in Arabic, among them the Quran commentary Marah Labid, and commentaries on short texts of law, belief and Sufism that became the core of the pesantren syllabus. By most accounts his students included Hasyim Asy'ari, who later founded Tebuireng and the Nahdlatul Ulama.

Ahmad al-Fatani was born in Patani in 1856 and taken to Makkah as a child. He studied there and at al-Azhar in Cairo, where he also learned medicine. Back in Makkah, the Ottoman authorities put him in charge of the Malay section of the government press, and he edited and printed the works of earlier scholars such as Dawud al-Fatani, making the classic Malay kitab widely available for the first time.

Among his many students was Muhammad Yusuf of Kenali in Kelantan, who studied with him for some twenty years. Returning home in 1908, Tok Kenali opened a pondok that drew students from across the peninsula, and helped guide the new Majlis Agama Islam Kelantan and its magazine Pengasuh. Through such teachers the learning of Makkah reached the pondok of the peninsula well into the 20th century.