Muslim kingdoms of northern Sumatra

Foreign Muslims had traded in Indonesia and China for many centuries; a Muslim tombstone in eastern Java bears a date corresponding to 1082. However, substantial evidence of Islam in Indonesia exists only from the end of the 13th century, in northern Sumatra. Two small Muslim trading kingdoms existed by that time at Samudra-Pasai and Perlak. A royal tomb at Samudra-Pasai, dating to 1297, is inscribed entirely in Arabic. By the 15th century the beachheads of Islam in Indonesia had multiplied with the emergence of several harbour kingdoms, ruled by local Muslim princes, on the north coast of Java and elsewhere along the main trading route as far east as Ternate and Tidore in the Moluccas.

The establishment of the first Muslim centres in Indonesia was probably a result of commercial circumstances. By the 13th century, in the absence of a strong and stable entrepôt in western Indonesia, foreign traders were drawn to harbours on the northern Sumatran shores of the Bay of Bengal, distant from the dangerous pirate lairs that had emerged at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca as Srivijaya lost its influence. Northern Sumatra had a hinterland rich in gold and forest produce, and pepper was being cultivated at the beginning of the 15th century. It was accessible to all archipelago merchants who wanted to meet ships from the Indian Ocean. By the end of the 14th century, Samudra-Pasai had become a wealthy commercial centre, but it gave way in the early 15th century to the better-protected harbour of Malacca on the southwest coast of the Malay Peninsula. Javanese middlemen, converging on Malacca, ensured the harbour’s importance.

Samudra-Pasai’s economic and political fame depended almost entirely on foreigners. Muslim traders and teachers were likely associated with the kingdom’s administration from the beginning, and religious institutions were introduced to make the foreign Muslims feel at home. The first Muslim beachheads in Indonesia, especially Pasai, were to a considerable extent genuine Muslim creations that commanded the loyalty of the local population and encouraged scholarly activities. There were similar new harbour kingdoms on the northern coast of Java, several of which—including Cirebon, Demak, Japara, and Gresik—were mentioned by 16th-century Portuguese writer Tomé Pires in his Suma Oriental. These Javanese kingdoms existed to serve the commerce with the extensive Muslim world and especially with Malacca, an importer of Javanese rice. Similarly, the rulers of Malacca, though of prestigious Palembang origin, had accepted Islam precisely in order to attract Muslim and Javanese traders to their port. This profitable network of communication with the Muslim world of Asia, combined with Islam’s assertion of the equality of all believers, helped propel such areas from the fringe of Shaivite-Mahayana culture toward positions of influence within the Indonesian archipelago.

However, events of the 15th and 16th centuries were not merely a consequence of the influence of new ideas; the political ambitions of many regional princes also catalyzed rapid, agitated, and erratic change. Aceh, which succeeded Samudra-Pasai in the 16th century as the leading harbour kingdom in northern Sumatra, became a self-consciously Muslim state, although “Hindu” notions of divine kingship might have persisted locally as late as the 17th century. Aceh had contacts with Muslim India and its own heterodox school of Muslim mysticism; its sultans also sought an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against the Portuguese, who had conquered Malacca in 1511. The Malay princes of Malacca had installed Muslim vassals on the east coast of Sumatra in the 15th century, but when Malacca was captured by the Portuguese, the princes transferred their capital southward on the Malay Peninsula to Johor (Johore) and gradually became involved in a conflict not only with the Portuguese but also with the Acehnese for control of the Strait of Malacca. Aceh, for its part, was unable to impose its faith on the Batak highlanders in the interior. The most notable gain for Islam in Sumatra was in the Minangkabau country, where Shaivite-Mahayana Tantric cults had flourished in the 14th century; by the beginning of the 17th century, Islam had advanced far into Minangkabau territory by way of the Acehnese coast.