author of A brief history of Indonesia , Tim Hannigan travels, in time, the history of Islam in Indonesia to explore back.
The hamlet Leran is located north of Gresik in East Java amid the low fields, just a few kilometers inland from the muddy banks of the Madura Strait. One day in December in 1082, a funeral party gathered there under leaden monsoon sky.
Leran was in the kingdom Kediri, a kingdom of a raja ruled that claims to be an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, and in the surrounding countryside there were temples where priests bald headed Hindu worship. But there was no such priests among members of the funeral party, and there was no pyre scented wood. Instead, there was a hole in the damp earth dug and aligned so that the body bound in pale cloth and laid on its side, would be to the northwest. When the mourners gathered at the grave, she cupped her hands and whispered words of Arabic prayer. They buried a Muslim. Your name highlighted later in Kufic calligraphy on a carving grave, was Fatimah binti Maimun, Fatimah daughter of Maimun.
The grave of Fatimah binti Maimun, the "first" known Muslim in Indonesia
We know nothing about it - at their age, their race, their place of birth or death. But among the various flotsam of history, along the Indonesian coast aufschütten her is the oldest identified muslim tomb dating back nearly 1000 years fully two centuries before the rise of Hindu Buddhist Majapahit Empire.
Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority nation on earth, but the story of how exactly this situation have come is as cloudy as a cup of kopi Tubruk , poured with myths and misinformation in heaps. Yet flickers in the first centuries of Islamization, there are flashes of light: a casual comment in a Chinese chronicle; an inappropriate grave stone; a fabulous tale wrapped around an elusive fact; and here and there an enigmatic name - like that of Fatimah binti Maimun
There was the trade that brought the first Muslims to Indonesia .. straddling the space between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, which has always been the ultimate international shipping crossroad. The estuary ports around the Straits of Malacca were places where you could get from Timor, rice from Java Indian Ceramics, Chinese silk, cloves and nutmeg from Maluku, sandalwood - and perhaps occasionally slaves from Bali. Needless to say, all these heady business opportunities attracted outsiders, and the earliest expats in Indonesia were traders from China and India, stray in places like Srivijaya base -. The legendary Buddhist trade status of southern Sumatra
We know that the first Muslim travelers had already reached China from the mid-seventh century (only a few decades after the death of the Prophet Muhammad); it seems more than likely that some of their coreligionists made it as far as Indonesia around the same time. In fact been to some of the early Muslims emissaries of Srivijaya seem to China - judging by the way their names were recorded in Chinese records. They were probably internationally itinerants who had offered services to the Buddhist king their seafaring, and in the decades and centuries that followed, there were many more like them - Muslim travelers from China, India, Persia and Arabia, the burgeoning in Indonesia ports unwound, whereby little communities of expat Islam in the process. Fatimah binti Maimun, whoever she was, was probably part of this scattered but diverse population of international Islam Prime Indonesia.
You are a curious mirror this story today in the small Indonesian-Arab communities in the find old quarters of port cities such as Surabaya, dealers in perfume and agarwood. They are the descendants of settlers from Yemen, who arrived in the last few centuries, but with their particular identity, apart from the Indonesian mainstream, they are likely to carry more than a passing resemblance to their predecessors in Srivijaya.
In the light of all these reasons, it is not so much the fact that Indonesia was Muslim, that seems strange; it is the fact that it took so long to make the change. Some historians used to give much of the credit for the subsequent conversion to the merchant. But the fact that there are foreign Muslims by - and almost certainly residing in - began Indonesia for hundreds of years before major transformations which suggests that they probably did not have much influence with the locals. If really have to go change, it seems to have come from the top down.
The first Muslim King in Indonesia was a man named Malik al-Saleh. He died in 1297, and he ruled a small state called Samudera Pasai in the extreme northeast of Sumatra (where Marco Polo reported in about the same time Muslim areas), but according to local legend, he had as "Gentiles" began with the name Merah Silau. His conversion to Islam was not conventional:
Prophet Muhammad appeared to him in a dream and spat in his mouth, and when he awoke, he found that he had somehow learned to speak Arabic - and had circumcised!
It is narrated conversion on the other side of the Strait of Melaka in Melaka a very similar story of a magical dream, and the archipelago local legends create miracles in the heart of the transformation process. The King of Makassar, Sulawesi seat of powerful sailors, converted after visiting holy man magically rid the surrounding forests of wild pigs. The local preference for pork was a major stumbling block on the way to Islam, but once it was no longer pigs there was no resistance!
farfetched though these legends could be, they all have an Indonesian king include transformation - and that's how things really unfold in most places. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Islam was by far the biggest club in Asia, with a uniform standard, that people were everywhere from the Taklamakan Desert on the Coromandel coast a common vocabulary. For an Indonesian king to preside over an economy that the International Trade, made the application very good sense indeed. And where kings, followed commoners. These small communities of foreign Muslim traders littered around Indonesia - which had probably regarded with benign bafflement by the locals for generations - suddenly found themselves surrounded by coreligionists
The Menara Kudus Mosque. on the north coast of Java has a minaret style of the temple of Majapahit Echo. This region was where Islam first gained a foothold in Java
The only place where things unfolded a little was different -. Inevitably - Java. When the first Portuguese traders in Southeast Asia turned up - in the early 16th century, when the process of Islamization on Full Tilt was - they found that the internal Java still the realm of "a great pagan king" was none other than Brawijaya VII , Emperor of Majapahit. Along the northern coast of the island, but there was a fief of Muslims ruled that took on Javanese customs, but from from Chinese, Persian and Indian immigrants. And somewhere in the space between these feeds, the "made themselves more important Javanese nobility and state than that of the hinterland", and the master of fading had Hindu-Buddhist kingdom, Islam began its way into the fabric of Java to thread itself , tangled with other strands as it did so; a mysterious process represented today by the stories of the semi-mythical Wali Songo credited the "Nine Saints" in the traditional stories with Java to convert to Islam.
In the early work of the 17th century was finished, and almost all areas of Indonesia that have a Muslim majority had converted today - at least officially. On the floor was just beginning the process of forging the many different and distinctive Indonesian versions of Islam, of course - but that's another story ...
But wait. Rewind for a moment: the first Muslims to visit Indonesia - and in all probability the first Muslims life in Indonesia, even if only temporarily - was probably about 00 years arrived earlier, and in this simple fact, it is a hidden history.
The merchants, travelers, vagrants and imperialism that have come to Indonesia over the centuries have been predominantly male. Yet many of them created small communities on the edge of the ports of the archipelago. Communities have the women and the women, of course, were locals; they were Indonesians. The Chinese migrants who have been since the first millennium CE Shop in Indonesia means married local women, and the unmistakable Peranakan Chinese-Creole culture of maritime Southeast Asia created this way. The Portuguese and the Dutch who followed them even married Javanese, Sundanese and Malay girls and gave rise to the huge population Indo - now largely forgotten, but an outstanding feature of Indonesia by the end of the colonial era. would have done this early Muslim settlers exactly the same - and in the name of marriage their Indonesian women would have been normally, Muslims
Long before an internationally minded king had a strange dream, in perhaps a. Century of Arab origins of Islam, a girl from Sumatra or Java opened his mouth, said the melodious syllables of Shahada , and joined the faith of their strange man. The first Indonesian Muslim was almost certainly a woman ...
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