Chapter 8 - Muslim Circulations and Islamic Conversion in Monsoon Asia

Summary

Abstract

The Islamization of South and Southeast Asia has often been characterized in terms of the diffusion of a “Middle Eastern” religious tradition from West to East. This chapter presents attempts to move beyond such simplistic assumptions to address the complexities of the historical dynamics of Islamization and vernacularization in this region as multi-vectored and interconnected processes of social transformation. Framing discussions of the geographic spread of Muslim merchant communities and the conversion of local populations to Islam across Southern – or “Monsoon” – Asia facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which evolving patterns of trans-regional circulation and interactions with diverse local societies have shaped the formation of a major part of the Muslim world.

Keywords: Islam; Indian Ocean; history; Maldives; Indonesia

Within the first century of Islamic history, Muslims were already active in expanding networks of maritime commerce across the Indian Ocean, establishing settlements of sojourning merchants on the western coast of India1 and opening up sea routes to southern China. By the tenth century, Chinese court chronicles present with increasing frequency reports of tribute trade missions with envoys bearing distinctly Muslim names coming to the Celestial Court from the ports of maritime Southern Asia. From their expanding itineraries in eastern waters during the same period, Muslims also spread Arabic-language accounts of exotic locales, including India, China, Angkor, and Champa, beyond the expanding borders of a new world of Islam.

By nature of the seasonal monsoon cycles, Muslims who ventured out across coasts and Islands of the Indian Ocean sojourned at points all along those coasts. Their temporary transit through the region may have initiated small communities of migrant or mixed trading populations during the earliest phase of the history of Islam, when connections between Tang China and the Abbasids supported movement across the great stretch of Monsoon Asia.6 It was, however, still to be several centuries before sources reveal any indications of a transition from these sojourner communities to any demographically significant conversion of local populations to Islam. This essay explores the long histories through which shifting patterns of Muslim circulation through this seascape came to shape the Islamization of much of the region, with particular emphasis on the notable acceleration of these social transformations over the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.