The Malay sultanates

The Hikayat Raja Pasai tells how Merah Silu, a chief on the north coast of Sumatra, dreamed that the Prophet ﷺ taught him the declaration of faith, and how a ship from Makkah then arrived with a teacher who confirmed it. He took the name al-Malik al-Salih and founded the kingdom of Samudera Pasai.

His gravestone, carved in Gujarat and dated 1297, still stands at Pasai. The kingdom struck its own gold coins, among the first Islamic coins of the region, and sent scholars to other courts. A later chronicle tells of an even older sultanate at nearby Perlak, which historians treat as tradition; Marco Polo, passing in 1292, did find Perlak already Muslim.

In 1887, after a flood on the Tersat river at Kuala Berang, a carved stone was found at the water's edge. When its four faces were read, they turned out to record, in Malay written in Jawi script, a ruler's command to his people to hold fast to Islam, followed by laws on debt, theft and adultery and their penalties.

Its date, a Friday in Rajab 702 AH (1303), makes it the oldest known Malay text in Jawi and among the earliest proof that Islam was the religion of a state on the peninsula. Its language mixes old Malay with Sanskrit and Arabic words, showing a society in the middle of change. The stone is kept in the Terengganu State Museum and is listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

Muzaffar Shah, the first ruler of Melaka to take the title Sultan, made Islam the religion of the state. With his chief minister Tun Perak, who served four sultans, he beat back Siamese attacks. His son Mansur Shah brought Pahang, Kampar and Siak under Melaka, and its port became the busiest in the region.

Melaka's court valued learning. The Sejarah Melayu tells how Mansur Shah sent a question on a point of theology to the scholars of Pasai, and how carefully their answer was received. The tales of Hang Tuah and his companions are set in these years. Melaka's laws, court ceremonies and Malay language became the model that later sultanates followed, from Johor to Brunei.

As the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit weakened, Muslim communities grew in the ports of Java's north coast. At Ampel in Surabaya, Sunan Ampel taught a generation of students: his sons Sunan Bonang and Sunan Drajat, Sunan Giri, and Raden Patah, who founded Demak, the first Muslim kingdom on the island.

The Wali Songo, the nine saints of Java, are remembered for spreading Islam gently, through teaching, trade, marriage and the Javanese arts. Tradition says they built the Great Mosque of Demak together, Sunan Kalijaga raising one of its pillars from joined wood chips. In 1513 Demak sent a fleet against Portuguese Melaka. Most of what is known of the Wali Songo comes from later chronicles, which differ on dates and details.

When the Portuguese took Melaka in 1511, they hoped to control the trade of the whole region. Instead, Muslim merchants avoided their port. At the northern tip of Sumatra, Ali Mughayat Syah united the small states around Banda Aceh and, by about 1524, had driven the Portuguese from Pedir and Pasai.

The Sultanate of Aceh Darussalam became the new gateway for the Muslim trade of the Indian Ocean. His successors sent envoys to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul asking for help against the Portuguese, and received cannon and gunners. Meanwhile, on the Johor river, Melaka's royal line set up a new court, and the two kingdoms became rivals for the Straits for a century.

Cloves grew in only a few small islands of Maluku, and the world wanted them. The sultans of Ternate, Muslim since the late 15th century, grew rich on the trade, and the Portuguese built a fort on the island to control it. In 1570, during peace talks, the Portuguese murdered Sultan Khairun.

His son Baabullah swore revenge and besieged the fort for five years until its garrison surrendered in 1575. Under him Ternate became the strongest power of the eastern archipelago, claiming lordship over islands from Sulawesi to the southern Philippines, and Islam spread with its influence. In 1579 he received the English captain Francis Drake, who wrote of the splendour of his court.

Three preachers from Minangkabau in Sumatra, remembered as Datuk ri Bandang, Datuk ri Tiro and Datuk Patimang, came to south Sulawesi around 1600. In 1605 Karaeng Matoaya, ruler of Tallo and chancellor of Gowa, embraced Islam through Datuk ri Bandang, and then the young king of Gowa, who took the name Sultan Alauddin. The first Friday prayer was held at Tallo in 1607.

Gowa-Tallo, the rising power of Makassar, called on its Bugis neighbours to accept Islam, and after a series of wars Bone, Wajo and Soppeng had done so by 1611. Makassar became a great open port where Malay, Portuguese, Danish and English traders all did business, a refuge for those shut out by the Dutch.

Iskandar Muda came to the throne of Aceh in 1607, still in his twenties. Over the next decades his fleets brought most of Sumatra's coasts and the peninsula's pepper ports, Pahang, Kedah and Perak, under Aceh. In 1629 he sent a great armada against Portuguese Melaka, but it was destroyed.

His court at Banda Aceh was magnificent. He exchanged letters with King James I of England, built a garden with the Gunongan pavilion for his queen from Pahang, and gave the scholar Shams al-Din al-Sumatrani the highest religious office. Aceh's laws and customs from his reign, the Adat Meukuta Alam, were remembered for centuries. He was a strong and often stern ruler, and Indonesia counts him among its national heroes.

In the interior of Java, the kingdom of Mataram rose as Demak's power passed inland. Sultan Agung, who ruled from 1613, conquered Surabaya and Madura and united most of the island. Twice, in 1628 and 1629, his armies marched on the Dutch fortress of Batavia, but the sieges failed when the Dutch burned their stores of rice.

In 1633 he joined two traditions in a new calendar: it follows the Hijri lunar months, but continues the old Saka count of years. Court festivals were held on Islamic feast days, and Javanese literature took up Islamic themes. In 1641 envoys he sent to Makkah brought back the title of Sultan. He lies at Imogiri, the royal cemetery he built on a hill south of Yogyakarta.

When Sultan Iskandar Thani died in 1641, the nobles of Aceh chose his widow Safiatuddin, daughter of Iskandar Muda, as ruler. She reigned for 34 years, through the loss of Melaka to the Dutch that same year and their growing pressure on Aceh's trade, and kept her kingdom independent. Three more queens followed her, until 1699.

The queens' courts were centres of learning. Under Safiatuddin, al-Raniri served until 1644, and 'Abd al-Ra'uf al-Singkili, chief judge under all four queens, wrote his manual of law Mir'at al-Tullab at her request. The era ended in 1699, when the last queen was replaced by a male ruler; accounts say a ruling from Makkah was cited against rule by women, though historians weigh the politics behind it.

From its headquarters at Batavia, founded in 1619, the Dutch East India Company set out to control the trade in spices and pepper, by treaty where it could and by force where it could not. Makassar's open port stood in its way. Sultan Hasanuddin of Gowa refused to shut out other traders, and from 1666 fought the Company and its ally, Arung Palakka of Bone. Defeated, he signed the Treaty of Bongaya in 1667, and the fortress of Somba Opu fell in 1669.

In Banten, Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa resisted too, until his son, Sultan Haji, seized power with Dutch help. In the war that followed, Shaykh Yusuf al-Maqassari fought beside the old sultan; both were captured in 1683. Many Bugis and Makassarese left their homeland after these wars, settling around the archipelago; their descendants later founded the Sultanate of Selangor.

By the early 19th century Britain held Penang, Melaka and the new port of Singapore, and the Netherlands ruled Java and much of Sumatra. In 1824, in London, the two powers drew a line through the Straits of Melaka: the peninsula to Britain, Sumatra and the islands south of Singapore to the Netherlands. The old kingdom of Johor-Riau was split in two, and the line still runs between Malaysia and Indonesia today.

But the line could not divide the Malay Muslim world it cut across. The sultanates of the peninsula and Brunei lived on; students still sailed from both sides to study in Makkah and returned to teach in the same pondok and pesantren; and the Jawi kitab of Dawud al-Fatani and Arshad al-Banjari were read on both shores. Aceh, left independent, kept its freedom until the Dutch invaded in 1873.