Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia

The Umma Below the Winds

Michael Francis Laffan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415297578
• eBook ISBN: 9781134430819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Drawing on previously unavailable archival material, this bookargues that Indonesian nationalism rested on Islamic ecumenism heightened by colonial rule and the pilgrimage. The award winning author Laffan contrasts the latter experience with life in Cairo, where some Southeast Asians were drawn to both reformism and nationalism. After demonstrating the close linkage between Cairene ideology and Indonesian nationalism, Laffan shows how developments in the Middle East continued to play a role in shaping Islamic politics in colonial Indonesia.

1

An Ecumene in ‘The Lands Below the Winds’

The Foundations of a Muslim Ecumene: The Islamization of the Bilād Al-Jāwa

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-Idrīsī, 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-Ṣīn) or Sri Lanka (al-Sarandīb). One example is al-Ramhurmūzi’s ʿAjāʾib 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 ʿulamāʾ. 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 Baṭṭūṭa (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 Jihādist 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 Qurʾānic and Arabic sciences were not adopted by an emerging body of local ʿulamāʾ. 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 jāwa, a synecdoche for Southeast Asia derived from the insular toponym ‘Java’, or the bilād al-jāwa (The lands of ‘the Jawa’ people collectively). In a similar manner the Chinese and their homeland were known as al-Ṣīn 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 jāwī, as distinct from things Indian (hindī) or Chinese (ṣīnī). It was for this reason that when Ibn Baṭṭūṭa landed in Sumatra he remarked that the island was the source of benzoin, known as lubān jāwī; that is ‘Jawi incense’ (Tibbetts 1979: 64). On the basis of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s statement, Roolvink (1975) has identified the toponym Jawa with the ancient empire of Śrīvijaya. But in all likelihood Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’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 Nāgarakrṛāgama in 1365, he differentiated ‘the land of Java’ (Yawabhūmi) from the rest of the archipelago (Supomo 1979: 73–74). If a Southeast Asian visiting Yemen or the Hijaz acknowledged that he was,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Plates and figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A note on transliteration and dates used in this book
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. An ecumene in ‘The lands below the winds’
• 2. Arab priests and pliant pilgrims
• 3. The Hijazi experience and direct colonial visions of the heart of the ecumene
• 4. Colonizing Islam and the Western-oriented project of Indies nationhood
• 5. Reorientation among the Jawa of Mecca
• 6. The Jawa and Cairo
• 7. Islamic voices from Singapore, Java, and Sumatra
• 8. Towards an indigenous and Islamic Indonesia
• 9. Indonesia visualized as a fractured umma below the winds
• 10. From the Meccan discourse of a Jawi ecumene to the Cairene discourse of an Indonesian homeland
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index