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Formation of the Malay Sultanates

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Bichara

Part of the book series: Islam in Southeast Asia ((ISLSA))

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Abstract

The first chapter is an introduction of Islam in Southeast Asia and the consolidation of the Malay cultural model. The Islamic Empire—Umayyad and Abbasid—was one of the biggest in history, from the Iberian Peninsula to the borders of India. However, only commercial factories were established from India to China. The entrepôt was a meeting point of goods and products as it was of cultures and fashions. Although the Indian Ocean entrepôt was not part of the Islamic Empire, eventually Islam was a decisive tool to claim legitimacy. Hence, a major part of Southeast Asia became part of the Islamic world without a military conquest or a political expansion. The title of Sultan overshadowed the Raja and communities from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula started to implant a new legal system beyond the tribe. Finally, the Islamic Sultanate emerged as a political model for important territories of insular and continental Southeast Asia, which became from the fifteenth century onwards an important domain of the Dār al-Islām.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The decision of the leaders, whose choice fell on Abū Bakr, was communicated to the people who confirmed it by giving allegiance. The importance of this election in Islamic history cannot be over-emphasized. It provided the later jurists with a precedent on which they could base their theories of succession, not only to the caliphate, but also to kingship” (Majumdar 1960: 439).

  2. 2.

    “An attempt to limit the true caliphate to the Rāshidūn, on the basis of a tradition attributed to the prophet which states: ‘the caliphate after me will be thirty years, then it will become kingship’ did not become accepted doctrine. Later Sunnī jurists, however, drew a distinction between the caliphate of the Rāshidūn, the Khilaˉfat al-nubuwwa (the vicariate of prophecy) and the later caliphate which they held to have had the character of worldly kingship (mulk)” (Lambton 1990: 948).

  3. 3.

    “The imamate conferred by force, and this Ibn Jamā‘a makes clear, was the only imamate which existed in his time, was conferred upon the holder by virtue of his exercise of coercive power. Al-Ghazālī had prepared the way for the recognition of this type of imamate by including the sultanate in the caliphate as a necessary element. Ibn Jamā‘a, forced by the circumstances of the time, goes further and accepts the possibility of the absorption of the caliphate itself into the sultanate” (Lambton 1981: 141).

  4. 4.

    “The Deputy thus transferred his religious and jurisdictional functions to the sultan. One aim was to boost the Mamluks’ claim as pan-Islamic rulers. Above all, the sultan now came to be the seen as the guarantor in his own territory of contracts, marriages and Sharia’s Penalties—critical legal acts whose religious legitimacy formerly depended on the Deputy. The Sultan-Caliph had arrived” (Black: 143).

  5. 5.

    “By the literature of the thirteenth century Sulṭān had become a title indicating the most absolute political independence […] Sultans, having thus become potentates whose absolute independence was generally recognized, jurist and historians set themselves to construct theories to find a justification in law for the existence of such potentates for whom there had been no place in the old conception of the Muslim caliphate” (J.H. Kramers [C.E. Bosworth] Kramers 1990: 850).

  6. 6.

    “If al-Ghazali referred to the ‘high status’ of kings, the Saljuks themselves went a stage further; for them ‘there was one Sultan just as there was one Caliph, and the Sultan was the supreme military and political head of Islam’. This had tremendous implications, which became clear in the Ottoman state, when the Sultan claimed to be, and was widely recognised as, the military leader of Sunni Islam; and then—the final twist—claimed to be Deputy as well” (Black: 94–95).

  7. 7.

    “The Mongols destroyed the Caliphate of Baghdād, and when they themselves were converted to Islām they favoured the theory that every independent Muslim empire constituted a Caliphate by itself” (Majumdar: 440).

  8. 8.

    “Ainsi, perdus dans l’espace, les enfants lointains de l’Islam ne sont pas, tant s’en faut, perdus de cœur. Sans doute ne relèvent-ils pas, au propre, du monde arabo-musulmane, de cette mamlaka que nous allons maintenant installer sur la carte, et dans la description de laquelle on ne les comprend pas. Ils sont pourtant, dans les faits, comme un trait d’union entre la mamlaka et cet autre immense, qui est, à la fois, l’etranger et le païen” (Miquel 1975: 524).

  9. 9.

    All Qurʼānic translations from Taqī-ud-Din al-Hilālī, Muhammad and Muhammad Muhsin Khān, Translation of the meaning of the Noble Qurʼaˉn in the English Language (Medina: King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qurʼān, 1417 H.).

  10. 10.

    Our translation from the original, Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, edidit M. J. de Goeje. Pars octava. Kitaˉb at-Tanbı‐h wa’l-Ischraˉf, auctore al-Masu‐dı‐ (Brill: Leiden, 1894):

    وأقصى العمران في المشرق أقصى حدود بلاد الصين والسيلي إلى أن ينتهي ذلك إلى ردم يأجوج ومأجوج الذي بناه الإسكندر دافعاً ليأجوج ومأجوج عن الفساد في الأرض.

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  1. Área de Estudios Árabes e Islámicos, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Isaac Donoso

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Donoso, I. (2023). Formation of the Malay Sultanates. In: Bichara. Islam in Southeast Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0821-7_2

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