Islam and Politics in Indonesia

Front matter

ix

ISLAM and POLITICS in INDONESIA

THE MASYUMI PARTY BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND INTEGRALISM

Index

‘The Party’s Infancy: Its Political Genesis and Historical Lineage

The Early Signs of Political Schizophrenia: Caught between Stability and Revolution

Confronting Reality: Masyumi and the Exercise of Power

The Fall Governing in the Name of Islam The Ideal of an Islamic Society Conclusion

Archetypal Contradictions within Muslim Reformism in Indonesia: Masyumi as Inheritors and Perpetuators

202 285 348 409

453 464 477

Maps Map 0.1

Map 1.1 Map 2.1

Map 3.1

Map 4.1 Map 4.2

Map 4.3

Plates Plate 2.1 Plate 3.1

List of Illustrations

The 10 provinces of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia, August 1950.

The spread of Islam across the Indonesian archipelago.

The disintegration of the United States of Indonesia, January 1950.

Movements linked to Darul Islam between

1949 and 1960.

Masyumi’s results in the 1955 elections.

The combined results of Indonesias Muslim parties in the 1955 elections.

Masyumi’s results compared with the other main y p parties in the 1955 elections.

“Remember Madiun” (Hikmah, 17 September 1955).

The “oriental” transferring the contents of the “problem container” into a “synthesising machine” turned to “Western speed”, which transforms them into laws, ordinances and motions.

The Government Parties in Indonesia 1950—56 (by percentage of ministerial positions).

xii

212 213

106 120 viii List of Illustrations

Plate 3.5 Plate 4.1

Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo torn between his two wives, the PKI and Nahdlatul Ulama.

The PKI separating the principle of a unique God from the rest of Pancasila.

Homage given to Malenkov and Mao.

“Masyumi is implanted throughout Indonesia.

Its influence demonstrates its victory”.

President Sukarno unveils his plan to dismantle the parties.

“The cabinet” does not know whether to give its

“report” to “the Parliament” or “the National Council”.

While Sukarno gesticulates before a few New Life Movement troops, his objectives are already being accomplished in the regions thanks to the collaboration between the army, the people and the regional administrations.

An example of the secularisation of campaign themes: The 1955 electoral programme.

An advertisement for Lifebuoy soap made by Unilever which appeared regularly in Suara Partai Masjumi, Hikmah and Abadi in 1951 and 1952.

Acknowledgements he author and translator are deeply indebted to Dr. Kevin Fogg

for his very valuable advice on specific terms and references in English. We would also like to extend our warm thanks to all those who helped with both the comprehension of the French text and the proofreading of the English version, namely Bénédicte Desmond, Jessica Lichy, Eoin Campbell, Neil Carmody, Alan Geary, David Lewis and Kieran Woods. Their help is greatly appreciated.

The translation of this book was made possible thanks to the support of the Centre National du Livre, the Institut d’Etudes de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (EHESS) and the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CNRS-EHESS).

Author’s Note

Sn the 1970s, the term “Islamist” has taken on a pejorative connotation, as it has come to encompass all radicals, including those who are ready to use violence to impose their vision of Islam’s role in society. This was not, however, the original acceptation of this term, which merely referred to Muslims who wished to see their religion play a role in public life, thus meaning that it could quite readily be applied in relation to Masyumi’s leaders.

I have used, for convenience’ sake, the term “modernist” and “reformist” interchangeably with relation to Islam, except in cases where it might lead to confusion. The two movements are very similar, although reformism, unlike its modernist counterpart, includes the proponents of Wahhabi fundamentalism.

I have often referred to the secular nationalists simply as “nationalists”, in contrast to the representatives of political Islam. It should not be forgotten however that the latter were also nationalists insofar as they also supported the struggle for national independence.

Since independence, Indonesian spelling has undergone two reforms. The first one, in 1947, replaced “oe” by “u”, while the second, in 1972, changed “dj” into “j”, “tj” into “c”, “sj” into “sy” and “ch” into “kh”. I have respected these new rules when using terms in Indonesian, except for quotations. For proper nouns, I have used the most common spelling; there is no general rule concerning peoples names: certain Indonesians have adapted their names, others have not (Sukarno, for example, is still often written Soekarno). Arabic terms are written here according to their Indonesian transcription, which is sometimes slightly different to that used in English.

All quotations from the Koran come from the Saheeh International version published in 1997 by Abul-Qasim Publishing House.

Rémy Madinier Lyon, 2015 xi

Th EOE spur|s]

meN L ; 2 abe oe oo ee ymos R A a eng i : KS

4 a P A

S oN Me: grung

Introduction t its height, the Masyumi Party, with a membership of tens of

millions, was without doubt the largest Islamic party in the world. It represented the most comprehensive attempt to reconcile Islam and democracy, for a movement of this size at least, yet its history is not without a certain number of inconsistencies and contradictions. It was founded in 1945 with the intention of rapidly establishing an Islamic state in Indonesia, but was eventually banned in 1960 for having resolutely defended a universal model of parliamentary democracy.

A Contextualised Approach to the Relation between Islam and Politics

Although the leaders of Masyumi were the champions of a humanist tradition within the Muslim reform movement which came to prominence during the first decades of the 20th century, they also contributed, from the late 1960s onwards, to the radicalisation which led to the party’s original message being lost. What is initially most striking about these party leaders is the unexpected compromises they made, but also their constant wavering between an ambitious programme of secularisation and an overcautious tendency to emphasise the importance of religion. These apparent contradictions require one to examine the movement closely through a contextualised study of the links between Islam and politics.

The history of Masyumi contradicts the short-sighted essentialist perception of the relationship between Islam and politics which is based on the premise that Islam knows no separation between the temporal and the spiritual, and which, as a result, “reduces the study of Muslim xiii xiv Introduction societies to a study of their theology.”' Indeed, it is surprising to notice to what extent the Western perspective on Islam today is willing to let itself be limited to a narrow vision of a militant and insular Islam, despite many repeated warnings from specialists in the field.* This seems to be leading to the formation of a strange “holy alliance which unites the most outspoken form of Islam to the most stereotypical form of Orientalism resulting in a version of Islam being posited that is historically inaccurate, ideologically loaded and intellectually dubious.”* Contrary to what is claimed by a whole body of work which is both imprecise and deliberately polemical, the concept of Islam as din wa dawl (religion and state) is neither a monolithic programme nor a historically incontrovertible fact. Going beyond these facile generalisations and understanding the link between Islam and politics from a genuinely historical perspective involves painstaking work. It requires original research examining a specific place and time, based on an exhaustive study of local sources. Such research must go beyond a literal and lazy interpretation of koranic norms and be founded upon a critical analysis of the concrete experience of those who invoked those norms within a political context. Various studies have already adopted this approach to show that the compromises which were reached in different parts of the Muslim world between divine commands and human realities were clearly both historically determined and transient. An eminently

"Burhan Ghalioun, Islam et politique. La modernité trahie (Paris: La Découverte, “Textes à Pappui/islam et société”, 1997), p. 9.

? Robert Hefner contends that Islamism is too often seen through the prism of the transformation it underwent in the 1970s, influenced by a new generation of activists. These activists sometimes received their religious instruction outside of traditional educational circuits, and they based their authority not on any exhaustive knowledge of sacred texts, but rather on their ability to propose simple and accessible interpretations justifying their political activity. See Robert W. Hefner and Patricia Horvatich, eds., [slam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), Introduction.

3 Ghassan Salamé, Maghreb-Machreq-Monde arabe, September 1990, quoted by Francois Burgat, Lislamisme en face, 2002 (1st ed., 1995), p. 17. A good example of this interpretation can be found in Anne-Marie Delcambre, L'Islam des interdits (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003).

í See, for example, the pamphlet written by Jean-Claude Barreau, De l’islam en général et de la modernité en particulier (Paris: Pré aux Clercs, 1991).

5 Concerning works written in French on this topic, the reader can refer in particular to those written by Olivier Carré, Francois Burgat, Marc Gaborieau, Olivier

Roy, Gilles Kepel, Jean-Louis Triaud and Malika Zeghal, cited in the bibliography.

Introduction xv useful distinction has also been established between the religion of Islam, founded by Mohammad, and Islam as it manifests itself in various societies or civilisations.°

A Complex and Little-Known History with a Disputed Heritage

The Indonesian case presents a particular interest in the greater historical scheme of things for two main reasons. The first is the speed and diversity of the changes proposed by Masyumi. These transformations were, in equal measure, contradictory and essential, and they took place over the course of almost a single generation (those who came to power after independence). They thus allow one to grasp within the space of a lifetime the important issues which have dominated the Muslim world since the middle of the 19th century. Such a historical study allows an analysis of the political, religious, cultural and social mechanisms at play in Indonesia at a time when it was faced with an essential choice between, on the one hand, a Western-inspired Muslim democracy, and on the other, a form of Islam integralism which is partially responsible for the renewed growth in fundamentalism witnessed by the country over the past 20 years. The surprising discovery that there could coexist within a single group, and sometimes even within a single leader, two apparently contradictory positions leads one to the conclusion that, as far as Indonesia is concerned at least, the idea of a clear and unambiguous border between secularism and religion needs to be revised.

The history of Masyumi reveals the scope of its secularisation project. It extended to the very heart of activist Islam, and mirrored the first of the five principles of Indonesia’s national ideology (Pancasila) which asserted the belief in a single God, thus establishing a link rather than an opposition between secularism and religion. It also suggests that if one is prepared to examine how the norms of Islam were actually implemented in public life, the simple juxtaposition between secular modernism on the one hand, and activist Islam on the other, simply disappears. In other words, contrary to what has sometimes been

6 Translator’s note: This distinction is rendered more concisely in French by using “islam” to refer to the former and “Islams” to refer to the latter. Such uses of the word are not possible in English, however.

xvi Introduction affirmed, a whole range of positions exists on the spectrum of ideas which goes from Mustapha Kemal to Rachid Rida.’

The second reason why this historical study of Masyumi is important lies in the fact that it concerns a form of Islam which is not only peripheral and Asian, but also atypical. Avoiding the Arabo-Muslim paradigm which dominates the field of Islamic studies enables us to bring to the analysis of political Islam a perspective which can no longer be avoided today, given the demographic reality of the Muslim world. More than half of the global Muslim population lives today in Asia, and the Indonesian archipelago—which has the largest Muslim population in the world—contains almost as many Muslims as the whole of the Arab world.’ The importance of this so-called peripheral Islam, far from its original homeland, offers one a broader perspective on the Muslim religion.’ In addition, links can be established here with the vast question of Westernisation dealt with by Denys Lombard, who rightly points out the extent of Islam’s role in that process.'? In short then, since the first decade of the 20th century, Indonesia has been the backdrop to a delicately balanced conjunction of two value systems with universal pretensions—Islam and European-inspired political modernism—both of which came from outside Indonesia and have so often found their legitimacy challenged in the archipelago.

7 An example of this binary opposition can be found in Martine Gozlan, Pour Comprendre lintégrisme islamiste (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). On the other hand, Shamsil A.B. should be commended for his attempt to classify political Islam into different categories, going from the “global mindset” of the Muslim Brotherhood or Mawdudi to the “rooted practice” inspired by the mode of government used in the Malay kingdoms where a ruler does not base his Islamic legitimacy on his own expertise but rather on a circle of “bhramic” ulamas. Shamsul A.B., “Islam Embedded: ‘Moderate’ Political Islam and Governance in the Malay World”, in Islam in Southeast Asia, Political, Social and Strategic Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. K.S. Nathan and Mohammad Hashim Kamali (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008), pp. 103-20.

8 Anne-Laure Dupont, Atlas de l'islam dans le monde. Lieux, pratiques et idéologie (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2005).

? As the valuable collection of texts on Islam edited by Greg Fealy and Virginia Hooker demonstrates, Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006).

10 Denys Lombard, Le carrefour javanais, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions de ?EHESS, 1990).

Introduction xvii

This sometimes complicated balance between modernism and Islam has remained at the heart of divisive moments in recent Indonesian

1 and the importance of Masyumi’s role in the debates on this history question during the 1950s and 60s means that the party has occupied an important place in the country’s historical narrative.'* The first of these divisive periods occurred at the beginning of the 1970s and centred on the figure of Nurcholish Madjid; a second one took place in the 1990s focussed on the actions of the minister for justice of the day, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, who was president of a party claiming its heritage from Masyumi.”

‘These disputes thrived on a fairly widespread ignorance within the country of the historical details of the Masyumi party. Few scholarly works have examined this topic, which no doubt partly explains why the field of Islamic studies has for so long lacked a comparative study exploring the relations between religion and politics in Indonesia. Outside the classic studies dealing with the history of Indonesia since independence—notably the three scholarly tomes written by George Kahin, Benedict Anderson and Herbert Feith'“—a good number of authors have touched on the history of Masyumi. However, only six authors have made a genuine contribution to establishing the modernist party's history. Four of those were either party members or sympathisers. Harun Nasution, in 1965, devoted his MA thesis at McGill University to examining the question of an Islamic state in Masyumi’s ideology; Muhammad Asyari in his thesis at the same university in 1976 looked at the role of the ulama within Masyumi in the period 1945-52; Deliar Noer initially wrote an MA thesis in 1960 at Cornell University

H For further analysis of these issues, see Rémy Madinier and Andrée Feillard, The End of Innocence: Indonesian Islam and the Temptations of Radicalism (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011).

12 This issue was analysed by Greg Fealy and Bernard Platzdasch, “The Masyumi Legacy: Between Islamist Idealism and Political Exigency”, Studia Islamika 12, 1 (2005): 73-99.

13 See infra. Epilogue.

14 George MacTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952); Benedict R.O’G Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961); Herbert Feith, Zhe Decline of the Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962).

xviii Introduction on the history of Masyumi up to 1957, before developing his work further in 1987 in a book entitled /slam on the National Stage; finally, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, mentioned above, attempted in his 1993 doctoral thesis to establish a comparison between Masyumi and Jamaat-i- Islami in Pakistan.’

All of this research was carried out conscientiously, in particular Deliar Noer’s, and unlike the hagiographies written about certain Masuyumi leaders, these studies were factually accurate. Nonetheless, their authors’ involvement in the historical events they were writing about made it difficult for them to possess a sufficiently critical perspective on their subject matter. There were two consequences to this, which at first sight appear to be contradictory. The first of these no doubt owes to the authors’ concern not to be accused of writing an account justifying the party and its policies. This preoccupation was exacerbated by the very dim view taken of Masyumi by the New Order authorities, which too often led the authors to focus on a minute description of the facts and thus fail entirely to develop any analysis. The embarrassing question of Darul Islam—a dissident fundamentalist movement which emerged from circles close to Masyumi—was thus only dealt with summarily, as were the internal party conflicts. The second consequence stems from the first and concerns the false impression of ideological and political coherence that one gets from the writings of Masyumi’s leaders, and which shroud, it seems to me, a major aspect of the party’s history. They lead one to believe that the party’s aspiration to found an Islamic state made perfect sense to its leaders and so does not need to be expounded upon. On the contrary, however, this aspiration corresponds to an ill-defined, multi-faceted project which abounded with contradictions.

The diversity of the various branches within Masyumi have been examined by B.J. Boland, Allan A. Samson and Luthfi Assyaukanie in their respective books on the question of political Islam in Indonesia, but as they study the entire spectrum of Islamic movements, they do not look in depth at the modernist party. Boland studies the period from 1945 to the 1970s and only devotes a few dozen pages to

15 Yusril Ihza Mahendra, “Modernisme dan Fundamentalisme dalam Politik Islam: satu Kajian Perbandingan kes Parti Masyumi di Indonesia dan Jamaat-i-Islami di Pakistan (1940-1960)”, PhD diss., Kuala Lumpur University, 1993. [Translator’s note: translations of all titles in Indonesian can be found in the bibliography.]

Introduction xix

Masyumi. Samson writes on the New Order era and proposes a useful distinction between “constitutionalist Islamists” and “Sharia-minded Islamists” within the party, though he does not detect how these two opposing points of view were in fact intertwined. Assyaukanie’s work astutely identifies Masyumi as the model of a “democratic Islamic state”, which he distinguishes both from a “democratic religious state” and a “democratic liberal state”. However, his book only contains about a dozen pages on the history of the party.'° Finally, we should mention the work of Robert Hefner, Greg Fealy, Bernard Platzdasch and Masdar Hilmy, who have undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the movements which emerged from Masyumi; their research, however is mainly focussed on the party’s contemporary legacy rather than an analysis of its doctrine and its activity in the 1950s.'”

A Religious, Political, Social and Cultural History

The history of Indonesia’s Muslim intellectuals and of the political doctrines they elaborated is a field of research which has been progressively expanded both by native scholars and by foreign academics. Masyumi, through its leading figures, contributed to the construction of an Islamic political doctrine, but it was above all a political party constantly confronted with events. It is for this reason that the chapters which follow will be founded upon the partys political history, which has up until now been poorly understood. An exhaustive analysis of the party’s main press organs (notably the daily newspaper, Abadi, and magazines such as Hikmah, Suara and Partai Masyumi), its archives and the writings of its leaders will allow us to better follow in Chapter 2 the party’s establishment in the throes of the country’s revolution. Chapter 3 will then look at its gradual identification with Indonesias fragile

16 B.J. Boland, The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Allan Arnold Samson, “Islam and Politics in Indonesia’, PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972; Luthfi Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009). '7 Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 ); Fealy and Platzdasch, “The Masyumi Legacy”; Bernard Platzdasch, Islamism in Indonesia: Politics in the Emerging Democracy (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009); Masdar Hilmy, Islamism and Democracy in Indonesia, Piety and Pragmatism (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010).

xx Introduction parliamentary democracy, which, as we shall see in Chapter 4, ultimately led to its prohibition and decline. Although our study of the party’s history accords considerable importance to this political aspect, it is essential to explore other approaches also, notably those looking at the intellectual and social backgrounds of its leaders, which will be examined in Chapter 1. These leaders were the scions of a vast reformist movement which reached Indonesia at the beginning of the last century, but also the products of a new education system set up by the Dutch colonial administration a few years later. This multi-layered approach is a necessary prerequisite to examining Masyumi’s dual goal of not only founding an Islamic state, which will be looked at in Chapter 5, but also of establishing an Islamic society, which we shall examine in Chapter 6.

Masyumi’s programme was indeed a two-pronged one, but while its political aspect was largely documented and elaborated through party programmes and the political writings of its leaders, its social facet was never comprehensively formulated and thus needs to be inferred from its political activity. By adopting an approach towards primary sources that goes beyond the mere study of official documents and looks also at Masyumi’s reaction to events, I wish to show to what extent the latter was constitutive of the partys identity and hence of its political and social programme for Indonesia. This detailed analysis has allowed me to highlight certain inconsistencies in the party’s doctrine. Some of these are an inherent part of a classical phenomenon in politics whereby a party’s programme is at a certain remove from the events which gave birth to it;'® other inconsistencies can be found in the disparity between what Masyumi actually achieved and what its programme aspired to accomplish. To go beyond these inevitable contradictions, one has to apprehend the social make-up of the “Masyumi family”; the dearth of relevant primary material in this area makes it necessary to contrive other means which will allow us to shed light on the question indirectly. Although it is far from giving us the whole picture, this approach does enable us at least to appreciate the gap between the ideal of a society based on a rigorist interpretation of Islam and a reality which was more fallible, more Indonesian and, in short, more human.

18 Cf. Serge Berstein, “Les partis”, in Pour une histoire politique, ed. René Rémond

Chapter One

The Party’s Infancy: Its Political Genesis and Historical Lineage he history of the men and organisations behind the creation of

Masyumi in November 1945 is clearly marked by a dialectical movement inherent in Indonesian Islam. This dynamic oscillated for four decades between a tendency to assert the different sensibilities which existed within it and a necessity for these different strands to unify. From the opening years of the 20th century, the desire amongst Indonesia’s Islamic modernists to establish organisational structures which would enable them to exist on the political landscape contained the seeds of their split from the country’s traditionalist Muslims. These

' in response to the initiatives undertaken

“pioneers of traditionalism”, by modernists and in an attempt to defend the values which they considered to be under threat from the reformist zeal of Muhammadiyah and Sakerat Islam, set up their own movement in 1926: Nahdlatul Ulama. The two branches of Islam also experienced periods of unity, however, between 1937 and 1943 with the Supreme Islamic Council of Indonesia (Madjelis Islam A’la Indonesia, MIAI) and later from 1945 to 1952 with Masyumi.

The extent of the Muslim community’s contribution to Indonesian politics and society cannot be reduced, however, to the polar opposites of traditionalism and modernism. In the 1920s, for example,

"To use the expression employed by Andrée Feillard in Islam et armée dans ['Indonésie contemporaine: Les pionniers de la tradition (Paris: LHarmattan, 1995).

a movement began to emerge which, while not rejecting Islam, wished to limit it to the sphere of people’s private lives. This nationalist secular current entered the political scene in 1927 with the creation of Sukarno’s Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI). The grassroots of this new party were sociologically very close to the supporters of modernism— they had often attended the same Dutch schools and knew each other from their participation in certain organisations together—and indeed the PNI provided serious competition to Muslim parties and organisations for public support. Finally, it should be noted that within the modernist movement certain cracks had begun to appear which resulted as much from the clash of ambitious personalities as from differences of opinion concerning political strategy (there was a constant debate in particular concerning the attitude to be adopted towards the Dutch colonists). These cracks led to several schisms within the movement, and this break-up of the Muslim body politic during the interwar years was the most significant political legacy inherited by Masyumi. In order to understand such a legacy, it is necessary to examine both the main stages in the formation of this Islamic political movement and the way in which its leaders, in their writings, turned their interpretation of history into a political tool.

Perspectives on the History of Indonesian Islam— References to the Founding Fathers

The advent of Islam in Indonesia remains today a very controversial historical topic. There is no clear historical evidence which allows one to point to the existence of Muslim states in the country before the emergence in the 13th century of Samudra-Pasai, a small principality in the region of North Sumatra.” Indian Muslims who used the ancient

? The first tombstone revealing the presence of a Muslim dynasty in the Malay region dates back to 1297 and belonged to Sultan Malik as-Salih from Samudera Pasai. Marco Polo signalled the existence of the trading kingdoms of Perlak and Samudera Pasai on his way to Sumatra in 1292. For a comprehensive overview of the different studies on the arrival of Islam in Indonesia, see G.W.J. Drewes, “New Light on the Coming of Islam to Indonesia’, B.K.I. 124 (1968): 433-59. Drewes contests in particular the hypothesis of an earlier Islamisation based on the discovery of the Leran Tombstone, an Islamic Tombstone in Java carrying the date 1082. The work carried out by Ludvik Kalus and Claude Guillot has confirmed Drewe’s doubts, showing that the Leran Tombstone was no doubt removed from its original cemetery somewhere in the Middle East to be used as ballast on a boat; “La stéle de Leran (Java) datée de 475/1082”, Archipel 67 (2004). On the maritime network running from the Indian Ocean to the China Seas appear to have played an important role in the spread of Islam.’ Their part in the Islamisation of the region was made easier by the influence of Indian culture in the Indianised kingdoms of Java and Sumatra, but they were not the only ones to contribute to this process. Chinese Muslims, in particular during the great Ming maritime expeditions in the first half of the 15th century, clearly had a role to play as well, though it is somewhat more difficult to know the exact nature of this influence.*

It seems certain in any case that after Islam was embedded in the north of Sumatra, there was, from the second half of the 14th century onwards, a tolerant attitude towards the Muslim religion within the Hindu-Buddhist royal court in Majapahit, in East Java. Later in the 15th century, the sultanate of Malacca on the Malay peninsula emerged as the main commercial hub in the region, and Islam spread along the trade routes leading to and from it, notably those concerning the trade of spices, to the northeast towards Brunei, to the southeast in the direction of the northern Javanese coast and further east to the Maluku Islands. When Malacca was seized in 1511 by the Portuguese, this gave a considerable boost to the sultanate of Aceh, located to the north of Pasai, which, along with other sultanates, became the new focal point for Muslim trade in the region.

On the island of Java during the 15th century, the development of sultanates on its north coast, in the area known as Pasisir, meant that it progressively removed itself from the dominion of the Indianised

Islamisation of the region, see also Ahmad Ibrahim et al., eds., Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 1985), p. 407 and Alijah Gordon, ed., The Propagation of Islam in the Malay Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Institute, 2001), p. xxv.

> Indian influences have been highlighted by several studies in Javanese literature: PJ. Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism in Javanese Suluk Literature: Islamic and Indian Mysticism in an Indonesian Setting (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995) has shown how certain Javanese texts (suluk) show Islamic influences which have come through India and Hindu-Javanese. The study of Serat Centhini led Soebardi to the same conclusion in “Santri-Religious Elements as Reflected in the Book of Tjentini’, B.K.I. 127 (1971): 331-49. On the way in which Serat Centhini is part of the process of Islamisation, see Marcel Bonneff, “Centhini, servante du Javanisme”, Archipel 56 (1998): 483-511.

“Concerning these expeditions and the other aspects of the Chinese influence on Indonesian Islam, see Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais, vol. 2 (Paris: