HistoriCity | From temples to trade routes: The Indo-Indonesian civilisational bond

Ancient texts such as the Tamil epic Manimekalai and even the Ramayana refer to regions in Indonesia as being under the sway of kings from the Indian subcontinent. The Buddhist religion and Shaiva worship were later followed by that of Vishnu, and numerous inscriptions written in Pallava scripts (4th and 5th centuries CE) attest to a continuum of conquest and co-existence. The Srivijaya maritime empire propelled the spread of Buddhism in Southeast Asia between the 7th and 11th centuries. Evidence of the prosperity of trade during this time is also found in Tang dynasty records and the Pala records of Bengal. The Srivijaya empire also had trade links with the Middle East, which would later become a carrier of a new religion: Islam.

Indonesia and Islam

The Islamisation of Indonesia in the second millennium CE was a historically transformative event for the region. While Muslim merchants frequented various Indonesian ports centuries before Islam took root in the 15th/16th centuries CE on islands such as Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, the scarcity and limited detail of historical records have prevented definitive conclusions about the precise nature of this transformation.

The spread of Islam likely occurred through two intertwining pathways. The first involved indigenous Indonesians embracing Islam through direct exposure and voluntary conversion. The second pathway saw Muslim foreigners—including those from the Indian subcontinent—settle permanently in Indonesian territories. There, they married locals and gradually adopted indigenous customs until they essentially became part of local ethnic groups like the Javanese or Malay.

According to Cornelis Dijk and Jajat Burhanuddin in their edited volume Islam in Indonesia: Contrasting Images and Interpretations, varying accounts claim that it was brought in by Arab traders from the Middle East between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries CE, while others assert that it was spread by Sufi traders. A third point of view states that it was brought to Indonesia by Gujarati traders. Either way, these processes often occurred simultaneously, making it difficult for historians to determine their relative importance when examining surviving evidence, such as records of Muslim dynasties establishing themselves in particular regions.

M. N. Pearson writes in Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: “Around 1500 CE, there were in Asia a number of well-defined international trade routes, the most important of which were: from China and Indonesia to Malacca; from Malacca to Gujarat; from Gujarat to the Red Sea, etc. The long-distance ‘international’ trade of Asia around 1500 was thus largely handled by Muslims of various origins. The Arabs, as they expanded south and east in the early years of the Hijrah, tended to convert mostly people who lived on the coasts and so were most accessible. This was certainly the case in Gujarat and Indonesia.”

In the early 13th century, Islam was established in North Sumatra; by the 14th century, in northeast Malaya, Brunei, the southern Philippines, and among some courtiers in East Java; and finally, in the 15th century, in Malacca and other areas of the Malay Peninsula.

In A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, M. C. Ricklefs spotlights how different Islamic styles received patronage across different dynasties. Syamsuddin of Pasai, for instance, delved deep into mysticism and found favour with the Acehnese king. Another scholar, Nuruddin al-Raniri, under the patronage of the sultan, went on to persecute the previously favoured mystics, provoking the burning of their books.

Absorption of Existing Cultures

Hindu-Buddhist stories, however, coexisted with this growing Islamisation and were preserved. The Hikayat Sri Rama (“The Story of Lord Rama,” based on the Ramayana) and the Hikayat Pandawa Jaya (“The Story of the Victorious Pandawas,” based ultimately on the Mahabharata) were examples of these. Hindu stories are also said to form the basis for the plots of the shadow-puppet plays known as wayang.

Beyond this, archaeology also demonstrates this cultural co-presence. Two late-14th-century gravestones from North Sumatra document this cultural transition: one bears an Arabic inscription, and the other has an Old Malay inscription in what Ricklefs terms “paleo-Sumatran (Indian-type) characters.”

Another significant series of gravestones is found in East Java, near the site of the court of the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire. These stones mark the burial of Muslims but with one notable feature: they are dated in the Indian Śaka (Ś) era rather than the Islamic Anno Hijrae and use Old Javanese rather than Arabic numerals. This suggests that the elite adopted Islam at a time when the Hindu-Buddhist state of Majapahit was at the very height of its glory.