Samudera Pasai

Where the chain starts

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)formation

Islam had been in these waters for five hundred years before Pasai existed. Arab and Persian shipping used this route from the eighth century, and there were Muslim merchant communities in the northern Sumatran ports long before any of them had a Muslim ruler.

What changed around 1267 is that a state adopted it.

Merah Silu, who took the name Malik al-Salih, is placed at Samudera at about that date. His gravestone is dated 1297 and is the earliest dated Muslim royal gravestone in Southeast Asia — a slab of imported Gujarati marble on the north Sumatran coast with a sultan's name on it in Arabic. When Marco Polo passed along this coast in 1292 he noted that the towns had converted and the interior had not.

Why a throne matters more than a quarter

The distinction between merchants and a court is the whole of why this small port is where the story starts.

What a merchant community does is trade. It can be large, rich and permanent without changing the religion of anybody outside it, and on this coast it had been exactly that for centuries. What a court can do is different: it can endow scholars, build mosques, adjudicate in the name of a law, receive envoys as a Muslim ruler receiving other Muslim rulers — and it can marry its daughters into other courts.

That last is not a metaphor. In 1414 the ruler of Melaka married a princess of Pasai, converted, and took the name Iskandar Shah. Melaka went on to become the dominant port of the archipelago and carried Islam to the eastern islands through its own merchants and its own marriages. Everything downstream of that — Java, Sulawesi, Maluku, Borneo, the southern Philippines, over the next three centuries — runs back through a wedding on this coast.

What Pasai was not

It was not the first Muslim place in the region, and it is worth being exact about that, because "the first Muslim state in Southeast Asia" is a phrase that invites the wrong picture.

Perlak, a little way down the same coast, had converted earlier — Marco Polo says in 1292 that of the six north Sumatran kingdoms he listed, Perlak was the one that had gone over to Islam, and only in the town at that. There were Muslim rulers and Muslim ports before Pasai.

What Pasai had was reach. It was the port at the mouth of the strait, on the route everything from India and the Arab world had to take, at the moment when Srivijaya's old command of that passage had broken up and no single power replaced it. A small sultanate in the right place, with a court that behaved like a court, at a moment when the sea lanes were open.

The name of the island

Drafted from Hill, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1960) · sourceexpansion

Samudera is the older of the two names in Samudera Pasai, and it did something no other port on this coast managed. It got attached to the whole island.

Sumatra is Samudera, worn down by four centuries of foreign pronunciation. The kingdom grew prominent enough during the fourteenth century that outsiders began using its name for the landmass it sat on, displacing the older designations altogether — and by the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese arrived, the town itself had faded so far that Barros no longer heard the name at all. Only Aceh.

An island is still called after a port that was already forgotten when the name stuck.

How a small port became visible

The Chinese records are the clearest measure of it, because they show a place going from unmentioned to routinely dealt with inside a decade.

In 1282 a Chinese mission returning from the Coromandel coast put in at Sa-mu-tu-la. The ruler received it and sent two of his own ministers back with it to China; their names were Husain and Sulaiman, so they were Muslims, and this is fifteen years before the gravestone that is usually treated as the first hard evidence of a Muslim court here. In 1285 Samudera sent an envoy of its own. In 1286 it was one of ten reigning families represented in a major mission to the Chinese court — the other eight were Indian.

That is a very small state on a very long list. The point is that it was on the list at all: a port at the mouth of the strait had become one of the places a Chinese court expected to hear from.

Reach across the water

How far the claim eventually ran is recorded on a grave.

At Minye Tujoh, between the Pasai and the Jambu Ayer rivers, two inscriptions mark the death of a woman in 1389 — one in Arabic, naming her as a queen and the daughter of the late Sultan Malik al-Zahir, and one in an Indic script that defied reading for twenty years until Stutterheim worked through it in 1936. The second calls her a raja iman, a queen of the Faith, and describes her house as one that holds Kedah and Pasai.

Kedah is on the other side of the strait, on the Malay peninsula. Whatever the exact force of the claim, a royal family at this port was asserting rights on both shores a century after it had converted.

The two stones are worth a moment on their own account. A Muslim queen of a Muslim sultanate was commemorated in Arabic on one side and, on the other, in an Old Sumatran alphabet related to the script of Adityavarman of Malayu, in the metre of a sha'ir. The court had been Muslim for a century and was still burying its dead in two traditions at once.

A fortnight in 1345

Drafted from Beckingham, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series (1994)peak

Ibn Battuta stopped at Pasai on the way to China and spent about a fortnight there, and what he wrote down is the only view of this court from the inside that anyone has.

What he describes is a sultan, al-Malik al-Zahir, who held disputations with jurists after Friday prayers, kept scholars from Persia and India at his court, followed the Shafi'i school, campaigned against unbelievers in the interior, and observed the forms of Muslim rulership in a manner the traveller found unremarkable.

The unremarkableness is the point. Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan jurist who had by then seen Cairo, Damascus, Mecca, the Delhi of Muhammad ibn Tughluq and the Kilwa of the Swahili coast, and he was not easy to impress and complained about most places. Seventy-eight years after its founding, a sultanate at the far edge of the Muslim world was a normal part of it: connected enough that a jurist could arrive from the Atlantic end and find people to argue law with in a language of scholarship they shared.

What a source like this is

He is an eyewitness who wrote it down years afterwards, from memory and with the help of a court secretary and other people's books, and parts of the Rihla are demonstrably borrowed or embellished.

He is worth trusting here for one thing: what the court of Pasai looked like from the inside to a visiting jurist in the 1340s. That is exactly the kind of claim an eyewitness is good for and no inscription can supply. He is not worth trusting for dates, distances, or anything he was told rather than saw.

Nothing happened in 1345. No battle, no succession, no reform — a traveller arrived, stayed a fortnight, and left. It is on the list of the polity's turning points anyway, because a kingdom known otherwise from gravestones and other people's tribute registers becomes, for two weeks, a place with named scholars in it and arguments going on after Friday prayers.

The gravestones

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)aside?What aside means

The hardest evidence for any of this is a slab of imported marble with a date on it.

Malik al-Salih's gravestone at Pasai is dated 696 AH, which is 1297, and it is the earliest dated Muslim royal gravestone in Southeast Asia. The stone is Gujarati work, of a type produced at Cambay and shipped, and there are others like it along this coast and later at Gresik on Java.

What a stone like that establishes is narrow and unusually firm: on this date, at this place, a ruler was buried by people who wanted an Arabic inscription in the international idiom of Muslim monarchy and were willing to import the marble to get one.

Why the hard evidence is a burial

Almost everything else known about Pasai is softer than that.

The founding date of 1267 is traditional. The conversion narrative is a hikayat. The marriage of 1414 that converted Melaka comes from a chronicle written a century later at a court in exile. And nobody can put a name and a reign to the sultan who was in place when the Portuguese arrived.

The gravestones are the exception, and this is a general condition rather than a peculiarity of Pasai. A polity whose records were on palm leaf in a tropical climate leaves its firmest traces in stone and in other people's archives, and what people put in stone is who died and when.

And what they say about the trade

There is a second thing the marble establishes, and it has nothing to do with religion.

Cambay is in Gujarat. A carved and inscribed slab is heavy, fragile, and worth shipping only if there is regular traffic in both directions and someone at this end with the standing and the money to order one and wait.

The stone is therefore evidence for the trade network as well as for the throne, and it is dated. Nothing anybody wrote describes Pasai's finances directly. What establishes that this was a port living off the traffic through it is the plain fact that a thirteenth-century ruler on this coast could commission monumental stonework from western India and have it delivered.

The succession that was not recorded

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)contraction

Nobody knows who the last sultan of Pasai was.

Pasai's fifteenth century was violent. The sultanate changed hands repeatedly, factions of the port aristocracy backed rival claimants, and by the time the Portuguese arrived in 1509 they found a place that had been through several disputed accessions and that gave them conflicting reports about who was in charge.

That is the ordinary condition of a Malay port sultanate, and Melaka and Aceh both describe their own last decades in much the same terms. The merchant aristocracy is the thing that persists; the dynasty is the thing that is contested.

What the Portuguese did with it

They took Pasai in 1521 by intervening in one of those disputes on one side, which is how European powers took most of what they took in the archipelago for the next century.

That is not an argument that the outcome was anybody's fault but the people who delivered it. It is an argument about what a chronology organised around European arrival gets wrong at Pasai specifically. The Portuguese did not arrive to a stable throne and break it; they arrived to a throne several factions were already fighting over, and backed the side that let them keep the harbour. The quarrel was the event. The arrival was what one side did about it.

The name nobody wrote down

It is worth being plain about why the last sultan's name is missing. It is not that Pasai was obscure in 1521. Portuguese officials were standing in the harbour writing reports.

It is that the people who wrote about Pasai in 1521 were far more interested in the harbour than in the man who was supposed to be ruling it — and a name entered now, from inference, would look on the page exactly like a name somebody had actually recorded.

1524

Drafted from Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (2005)end

The Portuguese took Pasai in 1521, ten years after they took Melaka. Ali Mughayat Syah took it from them in 1524 and absorbed its territory into the sultanate he was assembling forty miles up the same coast.

The oldest Muslim throne in Southeast Asia became a district of a state that was not yet three decades old.

What Aceh was made of

Aceh was assembled out of two things, and Pasai is one of them.

The first arrived in 1511, when Albuquerque took Melaka and the merchants, shipping and Malay court culture that would not trade under a Portuguese flag went north. That gave the new sultanate a commercial position and a class of people who knew how to work it.

The second was this coast: the harbours, the pepper hinterland behind them, and the two and a half centuries of standing that Pasai had accumulated as the place where Islam had first held a throne. Aceh took the lot in a single campaign against a European garrison that had been there three years.

Within a century Aceh was calling itself the veranda of Mecca and keeping a court full of scholars. A good deal of what made that credible had been built at Pasai before Aceh existed.

What it did not take

It never claimed to be Pasai.

Aceh's sultans traced their own line and built their own legitimacy out of their own court — the scholars, the pilgrimage traffic, the embassy to Istanbul. They had Pasai's coast, Pasai's harbours and Pasai's prestige, and they never once said they were its continuation.

That is worth noticing because it was available to them and it is what most dynasties in that position do. Melaka's kings had routed their genealogy back through Palembang to Srivijaya on far thinner grounds. Aceh had a real inheritance to claim and did not bother, which tells you something about how confident the new sultanate was: it did not need a predecessor. It had pepper, a fleet, and the strait.

One manuscript

Drafted from Hill, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1960) · sourceafterlife

Pasai wrote its own history, and the book very nearly did not survive.

The Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai is the chronicle of this kingdom, composed in Malay, with parts of it demonstrably written after 1360. It tells the story from Merah Silu's wanderings to the flight of a sultan named Ahmad, who abandoned Pasai and set up his court at a place called Menduga, about fifteen days' journey away. Then it stops. Nothing is said about what happened next, and the reason, as Hill puts it, is obvious: the author knew nothing.

How it got here

One manuscript exists.

It was copied for Stamford Raffles at Batavia by a scribe who recorded, in the last paragraph after the fashion of Malay copyists, that he finished the work on 2 January 1814. He did not give his name, and the handwriting is not that of Ibrahim, the senior scribe who did most of Raffles's copying.

Below the final line of the text there is a single sentence in old Javanese script. It says the book came from Kiai Suradimanggala, senior regent of the province of Demak, in the year 1742 of the Saka era — which is 1814. So the original had been sitting in a Javanese official's library on the north coast of Java, a thousand miles from Pasai, and was lent to Batavia to be copied and taken home again.

Of that original, nothing further is known. It has never been seen since.

The copy went to England with Raffles in 1816 and passed to his widow when he died. A panel on page three of it reads "Presented by Lady Raffles to the Royal Asiatic Society January 16th 1830", and a pencil note inside the cover, in van der Tuuk's hand, gives it its catalogue name: Hikayat Raja Pasei — Raffles No. 67.

So the entire textual survival of the first Muslim kingdom in Southeast Asia runs through one borrowed volume in a Javanese regent's house, one anonymous scribe working in Batavia over the turn of a year, and the widow of a British lieutenant-governor making a donation in London.

What kind of book it is

Not annals. Hill is careful about this and the distinction matters.

The Malay word usually rendered as chronicle is sejarah, from the Arabic for genealogy, and the Sejarah Melayu of Melaka has some claim to be called annals. The Pasai text is a hikayat — a semi-historical romance, in which a hard core of fact appears here and there inside stories drawn from the old myth-complexes of the region. Snouck Hurgronje dismissed the whole thing in 1907 as "a children's fairy tale."

Hill's response, across two hundred pages, is that the aspersion is undeserved, while conceding the real point: the events in it were, to the people who compiled it, subjectively rather than objectively true.

That is roughly the position a reader should hold about the founding of Pasai generally. The date of 1267, the conversion story, the name Merah Silu — all of it comes through this text or others like it, and none of it has the standing of the gravestone.

What outlived the kingdom

Aceh took the coast in 1524, and what it could not take by conquest it inherited anyway.

Pasai had been a centre of Muslim learning on this shore for two and a half centuries, and its scholarship did not stop when its throne did. The greatest of the scholars at the Acehnese court in its golden age is remembered by an epithet that gives the whole thing away: Shams al-Din of Pasai.

The kingdom became a district. The learning moved forty miles up the coast and was still being written about three hundred years later.