ISLAMIC KINGDOMS

The Rise of Coastal Sultanates

The year AD 1300 saw the beginning of a shift in political cultural importance from the south to the north of Sumatra, linked with the arrival of a new religion-Islam. Until the 14th century, the great kingdoms of Sumatra had been located at Palembang or Jambi. Now a number of small Islamic kingdoms began to appear at the mouths of the short, fast-flowing rivers which disgorge into the Malay language, the Islamic religion and a literary tradition using the Arabic script were first elaborated. Yet in the interior of Sumatra, protected by the marshes to the east and the mountains to the west, people continued to speak a dozen mutually unintelligible languages and retained their own religious and cultural traditions.

Along the northern coasts of Sumatra are numerous small rivers where ships from India and the Middle East for food and water. In the 13^th and 14^th centuries, trading ports began to appear on the banks of these rivers, and it was in these ports that Islam first gained a foothold in the Indonesian archipelago.

Up to this time, the island of Sumatra had been called “Jawa” or Java Minor by travelers and traders, but now the whole island took on the name of the flourishing ports of the northeast, known as Samudra (Sanskrit for “ocean”)__or Sumatra.

In 1292, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo sojourned of Samudra for five months waiting for the monsoon to change before continuing his journey back to Europe. His expedition disembarked, and “for fear of these nasty and brutish folk who kill men for food we dug a big trench round our encampment, and with in these fortifications we lived for five months.” In Marco Polo’s time, Samudra was a small kingdom practicing the same shamanistic animism as the people of the interior. He reported, however, that the neighboring kingdom of Peurlak (near modern Langsa) had already become Muslim, “owing to contact with Saracen merchants, who continually resort here in their ships.

An Islamic trade network

Ibn Battuta, an Arab traveler, also visited Samudra in 1323. By then it had become a sophisticated Muslim sultanate, trading with places as distant as south India and China. Many south Indian Muslim traders made their home in the city. Inder is preferred Muslim name of Pasai, its rulers issued gold coins, and a system of writing Malay using the Arabic script was developed. Pasai was the earliest center of Islamic scholarship in lacca (on the Malay peninsula), Patani, Aceh and Johor, regarded it as a model of Islamic learning and behavior.

            From Samudra-Pasai, Islam traveled with Muslim traders down the east and west coasts of Sumatra, as well as to the Malay Peninsula and to the trading ports of the north coast of Java. By the 16^th century, all the important Sumaatran ports were under Islami authority, and Islam had begun to make inroads in the Minangkabau region, the heavily-populated, gold-producing area in the central mountains where the halft-Javanese, half-Sumatran Adityavarman (1356-1375), claiming descent from both Majapahit and Sriwijaya, had established his own Tantric Buddhist kingdom.

            Sumatra rulers eagerly accepted Islamic legends woven around Alexander the Great, who for Muslims was the world-conquering hero Iskandar Zulkarnain (or “Alexander the two-horned”). Soon after adopting Islam, the kings of Pagarruyung in the theory that Alexander had sent his three sons to rule the world-one in China,one in “Rum” (the Roman/Byzantine empire, and its heir in Ottoman Turkey), and the third in Minangkabau.

            The Chinese imperial eunuch Cheng Ho (himself a Muslim!) visited Samudra with a huge fleet of ships in the early 15^th century, and it may have been the information suppliedny him regarding China’s needs which prompted Sumatrans to introduce the cultivation of pepper from India. By the late 15^th century, Sumatra was the main exporter of pepper to China. Pepper remained Sumatra’s principal export until the 19^th century, and for much of this periodit was the world’s major supplier.

The politics of pepper

Samudra-Pasai was just one of the kingdoms on the northern coast of Sumatra. When the Portuguese arrived in Southeast Asia in 1509, there were independent states at Barus, Daya and Lamri (near modern Banda Aceh), Pidie (near Sigli), Pasai and Aru (near Medan). After conquering Malacca and driving out its Muslim merchants, the Portuguese attempted to gain influence in Pasai and Pidie by intervening in their frequent succession disputes. The effect of this was to drive wealthy Muslim merchants to Aceh, where a new and virulently anti-Portuguese sultanate formed at the beginning of the 16^th century, on the ruins of the ancient kingdom of Lamri. With the wealth generated through trade, Sultan Ali Munghayat Syah-the first ruler of this new kingdom-was able to conquer Daya, Pidie and Pasai, drive the Portuguese out of northern Sumatra, and begin a century of bitter conflict with the Christian intruders.

            Portuguese attacks against Muslim trade, and Aceh’s hostile respons, introduced an element of holy war into the expension of Islam in Sumatra. From 1540 to 1630, Aceh launched more than a dozen large expeditions against the Portuguese at Malacca. During on siege in 1547, St. Francis Xavier galvanized Malacca’s defenders and was credited with miraculously prophesying the Portuguese naval victory.

            The las and greatest of the fleets sent against Malacca contributed to the decline of both powers. In 1629, the Aceh fleet of 19,000 men and several hundred ships was trapped and destroyed by a Portuguese fleet which arrived unexpectedly from Goa in India. Few of these ships returned after the fight and  the hostile weather encountered on the way. Aceh never fully recovered from this blow.

Aceh’s golden age

During the latter half of the 16^th and early part of the 17^th century, Aceh supplying Europe with half its pepper. Venetian envoys in Cairo and Costantinople noted with satisfaction-and the Portuguese with dismay-that ships from “Assi” were arriving regurarly in Jiddah or Suez laden with pepper. Aceh was then known as the “doorstep to Mecca” (serambi Mekkah), because it was from all countries “below the winds” (i.e. Southeast Asia) embarked for their voyage to the Holy Land.

            Because of Aceh’s abundant pepper, and its  known aversion to the Catholic Portuguese, Protestants Europeans made the sultanate their first Asian port of call. The Dutch were welcomed in 1598 and the English  in reception at the palace, they were honored with gifts of sarongs and krisses. However, relations between the Dutch and the Aceh-nese were not always smooth; as an example the first Malay dictionary and phrasebook was written during a year’s captivity in Aceh by the Dutch Admiral de Houtman.

            Aceh reached its peak of power and wealth under the brilliant but ruthless Sultan Iskandar Muda (“the young Alexander,” 1607-1636). Throughout the first half of the 17^th century, Aceh’s court astonished visitors with its lavish feasts and public rituals. Hundreds of richly-caparisoned elephants and thousands of pikemen accompanied the Sultan in the  weekly Friday procession from the palace feast days and at receptions for foreign guests, the processions were even grander-there were contests between pairs of fight-ing elephants, buffaloes and rams.

            In the early 17^th century, Aceh was one of the major powers in Asia. Its effective authority stretched along the coast to Padang in the west and Tanjung Balai (on Karimun Island) in the east. Acehnese viceroys were appointed to rule over the Karo and Simalungun Batak and the Minagkabau. In the Malay peninsula, Aceh ruled Kedah and Perak, and conquered states as far away as Johor and Pahang. Victorious naval expeditions brought back thousands of captives to populate the city, man the war galleys, and carry out heavy contruction work in the capital. Three thousand woman waited on the sultan in his palace, and meals were served on plates of gold.

            Warfare and the impermanence of building materials have left little trace of this former splendor. The city was never walled, a fact which an Acehnese chronicler attributed to the bravery of its people and the ferocity of its war elephants. In 1874,  the palace complex was destroyed by the invading Dutch, and the great mosque, which was built of wood, was also destroyed. All that now remains is the curious limestone gunongan and pintu khob, ornaments built in the 1630s as part of the royal pleasure garden along the banks of the Krueng Daroy, just south of the palace. Today, the style of the parished great mosque can be seen in the mosque of Indrapuri, originally built in the period of Sultan Iskandar Muda, about 20 km upriver from Banda Aceh.

            Iskandar Muda’s declining years were marked by signs of madness. He killied many of those closest to him, including his own son. His son-in-law, Iskandar Thani, succeeded him in 1636, but died in 1641. A violent succession dispute arose, and the leading men of the kingdom decided to place on the throne Iskandar Muda’s daughter (Iskandar Thani’s widow), Taj al-Alam (“Crown of the World,” 1641-75). During her reign, the stern personal autocracy intstituted by her father was relaxed. Traders enjoyed more predictable conditions in the capital, and local lords were able to establish hereditary lineages throughout the country.

            Despite being at odds with Islamic law and tradition, to experiment with female rule was deemed so successful that three more queens were successively placed on the throne. As an English visitor explained, “the very name of a king is long since become nauseous to them through the Tyrannical Government of their last king.” Not until 1699, when one of the factions was able to produce a decree from Malacca judging female rule unacceptable to Islam, was a king again on the throne of Aceh.

            After the defeat  that destroyed its entire fleet at Malacca in 1629, Aceh went into a slow decline. The Dutch were able to prise from Aceh’s control both the pepper-growing areas on the west coast of Sumatra and the tin-producing areas on the Malay Peninsula. The major sources of Aceh’s continued wealth were then the items  that had once been regarded as non-exportable royal treasures-gold and elephants.

Literature and theology

Malay was the language spoken in the cities of Aceh in the 17^th century, and it was here that much of the best classical Malay literature was written. Then earliest Muslim Malay syair (poetry in 4-line verses) still extant is the work of Hamzah Fansuri (Hamzah of Faansur, i.e. Barus) who lived and worked in the late 16^th century. Syech Syamsuddin of Pasai, who was the chief kadi (Muslim judge) of Aceh until his death iin 1630,was influential with Iskandar Muda. Both he and Hamzah were adherents of the wujuddiya school of mysticism, which in the eyes of its critics so emphasized union with God that it erased the distinction between God and man.

            In the reign of Iskandar Than, a rigidly orthodox current of though gained the upper hand, the works of Hamzah and Syamsuddin were burned and several of their adherents were executed. This orthodox reaction was led by the most prolitic of classical Malay writers, Nuruddin ar-Raniri (of Ranir, in Gujerat), who wrote numerous theological works, and the greatest encyclopedic work of politics and history in Malay, the Bustan al-Salatin. He was unpopular with the people of Banda Aceh, and when his patron Iskandar Thani died, ar-Raniri was chased out of Aceh by an angry crowd.

            The most influential religious scholar of the second half of the century, Abdur’rauf of Singkel, managed to combine orthodoxy with a tolerant approach to pre-Islamic beliefs and mystical ideas, and today he is revered as the mouth of Aceh river is still honored and he is remembered as Syech Kuala (the Syech of the river mouth). Aceh’s state university is named in his honor.

Economic decline

World demand for pepper reached  peak in the middle of the 17^th century. From 1650 onwards, the port-states which had dominated Sumatra since the 15^th century began to decline along with the trade which had sustained them. Aceh embarked on a long period of internal conflict, and the uleebalang (local chiefs) who controlled the river mouths of Aceh coast became virtually independent of the capital. Acehnese gradually replaced Malay as the language of literature, and the weight of state authority was lightly felt by the majority of highland Sumatrans.

            The lack of any major political authority encouraged adventures such as the Bugis from Soulth Sulawesi, the Arabs from West Sumatra to seize power by warfare, by marrying into the ruling families, or by strategic alliances. Increasingly, European and south Indian merchants were appointed as shahbandars or trade officials in the island sport. By the 18^th century the Europeans emerged as the biggest economic backwater.