Article

The coming of Islam to the East Indies

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The coming of Islam to the East Indies

G. E. Marrison published this article in 1951 in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, addressing the thirteenth-century introduction of Islam to the Malay Archipelago. His central thesis is that Malaysian Islam originated from the Coromandel Coast of southern India rather than from Gujarat, a conclusion he reaches by dismantling the prevailing Dutch scholarly theory and reasserting the credibility of Malay literary tradition.

Summary

The article engages a specific historiographical dispute: whether the first Muslim missions to the Archipelago came from the Coromandel Coast, as Malay literary sources maintain, or from Cambay in Gujarat, as Dutch scholars had inferred from the discovery of imported tombstones at Pasai. Marrison’s strategy is to show that the Gujarat theory rests on a non sequitur. Moquette’s 1912 and 1913 publications demonstrated that certain fifteenth-century royal tombs at Pasai were copies of Cambayan originals, and that the tomb of Malik al-Saleh (d. 1297) was also imported from Cambay. But Moquette himself noted the stones were presumably brought “a considerable time after his death.” Later Dutch writers such as Kern and Bousquet leapt from this material fact to the conclusion that Gujarat was the source of the religion itself, a step Marrison argues is unsupported.

The decisive evidence Marrisson marshals is chronological and institutional. Gujarat was not a Muslim polity until Alauddin Khilji subdued it in 1297, the very year Malik al-Saleh died, and Marco Polo’s 1293 description of Cambay presents it as a Hindu kingdom. More tellingly, the characteristic madhab of Malay Islam is the Shafi school, which matches the tradition of southern Indian Muslim communities but is alien to Gujarat, where the Hanafi school or Shia affiliation predominates. Marrison further identifies the “Ma’abri” of the Sejarah Melayu conversion narrative with the Arabic name for the Coromandel Coast, and draws a parallel between the Malay story of the ascetic who leaves his kingdom to preach in Sumatra and the Cranganagore tradition of the immortal Perumal recorded in Zainuddin’s Tohfat-ul-Mujahidin.

The primary sources informing the argument are the two key Malay manuscripts in the Raffles collection at the Royal Asiatic Society (the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu), read alongside the travel accounts of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, Moquette’s archaeological publications, and the administrative history of the Delhi Sultanate’s southern campaigns. Marrison treats the discrepancies between the two Malay chronicles not as evidence of unreliability but as a later compiler’s attempt to contest Pasai’s claim to primacy, thereby recovering a coherent historical kernel from what had been dismissed as myth.

Key Findings

  • The earliest known Muslim monument in the Archipelago is a grave at Leran (Gresik), eastern Java, dated 1082 A.D., commemorating a Muslim woman presumed to be a merchant’s wife (p. 28).
  • Gujarat did not become a Muslim province until 1297, when Alauddin Khilji defeated the Hindu kings and installed a Muslim governor; Marco Polo’s 1293 account of Cambay describes it as ruled by a Hindu king whose people were “idolators” (pp. 32–33).
  • The Shafi school of Sunni jurisprudence is the common denominator between Malay and southern Indian Islam, whereas the Muslims of Gujarat are characteristically Hanafi or Shia, making a Gujarati origin for the madhab of the Archipelago implausible (p. 36).
  • The Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, which covers history down to the Majapahit conquest of 1377, contains no reference to Gujaratis; the greatest Gujarati writers in Malay, Shaikh Nuruddin ibn Raniri, did not appear until 1628 and 1638 (p. 36).
  • The name “Ma’abri” in the Sejarah Melayu is confirmed as an Arabic term (meaning “fording place”) applied to the Coromandel Coast opposite Ceylon, a usage attested in Ibn Battuta and in the older Latin edition of Marco Polo (p. 31).
  • The Dravidian title “Perumudal Perumal” borne by Sultan Malik al-Zahir (known to Ibn Battuta in 1345) and the etymological link between the Malayalam “samuri” (sea-king) and the Sanskrit “Samudra” provide further corroboration of a South Indian cultural substrate (p. 36).

Conclusion

Marrison concludes that the Gujarat theory is untenable on chronological, institutional, and literary grounds, and that the provenance of Malaysian Islam is southern India. He argues that this finding carries two important consequences: it redirects the study of Muslim custom in Malaysia toward the comparatively neglected field of South Indian Islam, and it vindicates the historic value of Malay literary tradition, which had been frequently dismissed for lacking a sense of history. He closes with an explicit call for Islamic scholars to reconsider the entire question using materials from Gujarati, South Indian, and Malayan sources in concert.

Context

  • The article draws on the Raffles manuscripts (nos. 67 and 18) in the Royal Asiatic Society library, Moquette’s archaeological publications in the Tijdschrift van het Bataviaasch Genootschap (1912) and the Rapport van den Oudheidkundigen Dienst (1913), and the travel literature of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.
  • Historiographically, the piece is a direct challenge to the Dutch scholarly consensus represented by Kern and Bousquet, and it anticipates the later shift in Southeast Asian studies toward taking Malay literary sources seriously as historical evidence.

References