Chapter 16. Continuity and Change in the Austronesian Transition to Islam and Christianity

Chapter 16. Continuity and Change in
the Austronesian Transition to Islam
and Christianity
Anthony Reid
Commercial links and a common orientation towards maritime trade continued
to bind Southeast Asian Austronesian communities together in historical times, and
the spread of Islam is regarded as a consequence of these cultural ties. Islam required
many changes in traditional Austronesian social and religious practices, as did
Christianity, but the strength of Austronesian tradition, reinforced greatly by the
continuing use of the Austronesian languages as vernaculars, imposed a two-way
dialogue on the process.
Austronesian Boundaries
A Samoan deposited in (say) Madura might well conclude that it was Islam that
most profoundly distinguished Indonesian culture from his own. In dress, diet,
naming, social and domestic relations as well as belief and ritual, Islam has taken
the majority of today’s Austronesians in a distinctive direction. In consequence
they would probably see less reason to identify with our Samoan than with
non-Austronesian Muslims in South and West Asia. One might reasonably
conclude that the conversion by 1650 of most lowland areas of the archipelagoes
we now know as Indonesia and the Philippines to Islam or Catholicism had
created the most fundamental cleavages between Austronesians. From these
transitions, however initially qualified, there was no going back. No subsequent
influence from Holland, China, Britain, Japan or America could ever overturn
these identities as Muslim or Catholic, whatever they were held to mean in
different times and places.
This would, however, be only part of the story. The two prosyletizing
scriptural religions were by no means the only, nor even the first, of the
consequences for Southeast Asia’s Austronesians of proximity to the great
Eurasian land mass. Others have spoken eloquently of the transitions wrought
in Southeast Asia by Sanskrit terminology and Indian political and philosophical
ideas, as these were selectively adapted by Austronesians. I want to draw
attention also to the commercial and diplomatic connectedness within and beyond
Southeast Asia which predated and underlay the advance of Islam among
Austronesians.
When the ancestors of the Polynesians struck out to the east of the Indonesian
Archipelago, they sailed off the edge of the known world. For more than a
333

---

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
thousand years before the eighteenth century exploration of the Pacific, the
Austronesians who remained in Southeast Asia were significant players in a
series of interlocking trade networks which stretched from eastern Indonesia to
China and Japan in the north and to Portugal and Ireland in the west. We know
this not so much from the ambiguous geographical information of Ptolemy and
his Chinese contemporaries as from the arrival of the products of eastern
Indonesia in the markets of the world.
Only after their arrival in Southeast Asia did Europeans discover just where
the spices they had been seeking came from:
The Malay merchants say that God made Timor for sandalwood and
Banda for [nutmeg and] mace and Maluku for cloves, and that this
merchandise is not known anywhere in the world except in these places
(Pires 1515:204).
These points marked precisely where the southeastern boundary of the Eurasian
world-system lay. Cloves, nutmeg and sandalwood were sent to the north and
west in small quantities from as early as Roman and Han times. Records of
shipments reaching Europe are continuously available from only the tenth
century, and they show a trickle of nutmeg and clove rising to a steady stream
at the end of the fourteenth century. Austronesians, with intermittent stimulus
from Chinese, were the carriers of these spices around the archipelago, to entrepôts
such as Sri Vijaya, Melaka, Patani and Banten. By travelling frequently as far as
Maluku and Timor, they kept these peripheries on the known map of world
commerce.
Beyond that, to the east and south, lay darkness. In the perspective of Asian
traders the Indonesian Archipelago represented “the outer edge of the world”
(Pinto 1578:393; also Wolters 1970:23-24). Of course there was some exchange
across the Arafura and Timor seas, with a few slaves and birds of paradise from
New Guinea and the surrounding islands being traded as far as Java. In
comparison with the intense commercial interest focused on Maluku and Timor,
however, the low level of interaction beyond is extraordinary.
Austronesians were among the great sailors of Asia, and their involvement
in maritime commerce was one of the themes that maintained a sense of common
interest among seemingly culturally diverse Austronesians. As well as carrying
their own produce into world markets, Austronesians commanded all the sea
routes between east Asia and the rest of Eurasia. Whether shipping passed
through the Melaka or the Sunda or the Lombok and Makassar Straits; whether
portages were made across the Malay Peninsula from Melaka, from Kedah or
from Tennasserim; whether traffic to and from China took on water and supplies
along the Cham coast of Indochina and the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, or
in the Philippines and eastern Borneo, or along the west coast of Borneo and
334

---

Continuity and Change in the Austronesian Transition to Islam and Christianity
Java; Austronesians were directly involved. In the long and often intense
commercial and diplomatic relationship between Southeast Asia and China it
was Austronesians who took most of the initiatives, at least until the southern
Sung dynasty (1127-1279) stimulated the creation of a Chinese seagoing fleet
(Wolters 1970:19-42). The Malay culture hero, Hang Tuah, was appropriately
depicted sailing, trading and fighting for his king in China, India and the Middle
East as well as Java and Siam. While the Malayo-Muslim maritime tradition is
well known, it is worth recalling Dampier’s praise also for still-Hindu Chams,
one of whose vessels he encountered in the Gulf of Siam in 1687:
They were of the idolators, Natives of Champa, and some of the briskest,
most sociable, without Fearfulness or Shyness, and the most neat and
dexterous about their Shipping, of any such I have met with in all my
Travels (Dampier 1697:272).
How else than through this common commitment to maritime commerce does
one explain the curious ways in which Malays, Javanese, Chams and Tagalogs
were tied to each other? Champa and Majapahit exchanged royal princesses and
diplomatic missions in the fourteenth century, and a Cham king chose Java as
his refuge from Vietnamese pressure on the Cham capital in 1318 (Robson
1981:276). Both Malay and Javanese traditions make much of the Cham
connection. The Sejarah Melayu (1612:135) claims that a ruler of Champa
journeyed to Majapahit to make his homage, fathering there a child by a
Majapahit princess. This child grew up to become the penultimate ruler of
Champa before the capital, Vijaya, fell to the conquering Vietnamese.
Javanese tradition asserts that it was through a Cham princess married to the
king of Majapahit, and her brother Raden Rahmat, that Islam entered the Javanese
court. To complete the Austronesian triangle, Rahmat took as his wife a lady of
Tuban named Nyai Ageng Manila — perhaps evidence of Philippine birth (Babad
Tanah Jawi:20-21). Although there were certainly Muslims in Champa in the
fifteenth century, the Cham ruling class was still Hindu at the time of the
Vietnamese conquest of Vijaya (Qui Nhon), which Vietnamese sources date to
1471. The Malay royal chronicle claims that the Hindu aristocrats who fled the
Vietnamese took refuge not in nearby Hindu-Buddhist Cambodia but among
Muslim fellow-Austronesians in Melaka and north Sumatra (Sejarah Melayu
1612:136-137). The king of Champa, with his capital further south in Phanrang,
remained a Hindu until at least 1607, but he was nevertheless closely allied with
Malay Johor against Vietnamese, Khmer and Portuguese (Matelief 1608:120-121;
Manguin 1979:269).
The Cham diaspora of traders, warriors and refugees in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was Muslim or in process of becoming so. Muslim Chams
were among those battling the Portuguese in the South China Sea and aiding
Demak’s holy wars in Java in the sixteenth century, and helping even distant
335

---

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Makassar in the seventeenth (Pinto 1578:107, 386; Sja’ir Perang Mengkasar:
146-147). Malays and Chams were so closely aligned during the conflicts of
seventeenth-century Cambodia that their Iberian enemies thought they were
one people.
The first European reports on the Tagalogs classify them as “Luzons” (Port.
Lucoes), a nominally Muslim commercial people trading out of Manila, and
“almost one people” with the Malays of Brunei (Pires 1515:134). One of these
Luzons commanded the Brunei fleet in 1521 (Pigafetta 1524:58-59), and another
was named head (temenggong) of the Malays remaining in Melaka after the
Portuguese conquest in 1511 (Pires 1515:134, 281). As well as their substantial
trade with Melaka, the Luzons were collecting sandalwood in Timor when
Magellan’s ship reached there (Pigafetta 1524:94), no doubt to supply the Chinese
trade. Luzons were well represented in the polyglot Muslim fleets which did
battle with the Portuguese in the South China Sea during the sixteenth century,
and one of them held Aru (northeast Sumatra) for the crusading Sultan of Aceh
in 1540 (Pinto 1578:49, 107, 112). Pinto, our source for much of this, also mentions
Luzons among the anti-Muslim warriors of the Batak king, in 1538 (ibid.:26),
suggesting they could be mercenaries valued by all sides. Luzons disappear from
descriptions of the archipelago after the Spanish conquest of Manila in 1571,
presumably assimilating to the Malay diaspora.
We should also recall the intermingling of Javanese and Malays, especially
in Melaka where the Hikayat Hang Tuah admitted that the Malays were all
“half-Javanese” (Winstedt 1969:38), and where the royal chronicle was studded
with Javanese passages. The very categories Jawah and Jawi referred as
frequently to Sumatra or Malays as to Javanese until European labels began to
prevail. More surprisingly, Madagascar’s interaction with the Indonesian
Archipelago was still remembered in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese
found there “many brown and Javanised natives who say they are descended
from them [Javanese]”, which they attributed to Javanese seafarers having
traveled across the Indian Ocean (Couto 1645, IV, iii:169).
It appears, then, that commercial links and a common orientation towards
maritime trade continued to bind the Austronesians who “remained behind” on
the fringes of Eurasia to each other, in advance of and apart from Islam or
Christianity. The spread of Islam to most of the Austronesians of Southeast Asia
can be seen as a consequence as much as it was a cause of this common
involvement in maritime commerce.
Islamization as Change
The initial threshold of entry into the house of Islam was deliberately low — to
recite the shahada (“there is no god but God and Muhammad is His Prophet”);
to undergo circumcision; and to abandon the consumption of pork.
336

---

Continuity and Change in the Austronesian Transition to Islam and Christianity
Understanding of the message of Islam could come later. In urging de Houtman
to take the simple step which would save his life in Aceh, even if he could not
appreciate the body of Islamic doctrine, a Muslim scholar there used the image
of a master shipwright who had first to lay down the keel of the ship though he
could not yet see the whole pattern of the vessel (a metaphor more appropriate
to Austronesian than to Dutch shipbuilding) (de Houtman 1601:99). It was these
external symbols of adherence to the faith which were held to be the essential
requirements of entry. No internal assent to a creed or confession of past errors
was called for. Europeans who encountered peoples recently converted, like the
“Lutao” of Mindanao and northern Maluku, often thought these externals were
all there was:
Never is a Lutão found who has not been circumcised, or one who eats
pork — and it is this which constitutes their Mahometanism … for they
do not know what the Koran is (Diaz 1718:321; cf. Legazpi 1569:60-61).
A Muslim source, the Hikayat Patani (75) also made the point about the first
Patani ruler to adopt Islam: “He gave up worshipping idols and eating pork, but
apart from that he did not alter a single one of his kafir habits”.
This pattern has led many authors to see conversion as an inappropriate term
for the first steps towards Islamic faith. Merle Ricklefs (1979) depicted
Islamization not as a step but as an ongoing journey in “Six centuries of
Islamization in Java”. This should not be taken to mean, however, that change
was imperceptible, steady, or unidirectional. Rather, I would argue, it was made
up of numerous conversions to the external ideal and almost as many reversions
towards the bedrock of Austronesian habits. Changes were profound, and the
first step often the most profound. The cost of entry into Islam should not be
minimized by a modern sensibility which sees religion as a matter of personal
conviction and piety. It involved a change of identity symbolized by the
abandonment of the pig-eating which had provided Austronesians with not only
their major meat source but also the stuff of sacrifice and feasting.
Pig-eating was a major obstacle to conversion in all the cases for which there
is first-hand evidence. In South Sulawesi Bugis and Portuguese sources agree
that Islam failed to make headway in the sixteenth century because of its ban
on pork and other foods (Dias 1559:306; Noorduyn 1955:105-106). A pious legend
had one Makassarese chief threatened with jihad declare that he would not accept
Islam even if rivers flowed with blood, as long as there were pigs to eat in the
forests of Bulo-bulo. Of course that very night the pigs disappeared by divine
intervention (Matthes 1943:257-258). Even when rulers were convinced of the
need to convert, they often asked for a grace period during which they could
have a mighty feast of all their domestic pigs (Jones 1979:148; Volkman 1985:21).
337

---

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
In the period 1540-1640 the boundary of Islam became particularly clear as
a result of the military and commercial struggle with Portuguese and Spanish
Catholics. Acceptance of Islam came to be seen as a test of political loyalty;
non-Muslim ethnic groups were seen not simply as latent Muslims but as actual
or potential enemies; the state greatly increased its commitment to upholding
orthodoxy. This period of conscious competition was one of such profound
religious change that it might rightly be labelled not only conversion, but
revolution. That sharp boundary of the house of Islam softened when the Dutch
(and later English) insulated Southeast Asia from both counter-reformation
Catholicism and international Islam, and divorced the religious contest from the
economic one. The tendency grew to accept existing Austronesian society as
Islamic rather than seek to change it (Reid 1993).
The discontinuity represented by Islam in that period of rapid change was
most obvious to outsiders in matters that bore on identity — dress, speech,
deportment and diet. There were, however, two areas in which Islam (and in
different degrees Christianity) represented an even more fundamental challenge
to Austronesian values. In its attitude to both sexuality and death Islam offered
so basic an opposition to the ways of understanding the world that tensions
persist until today, even though major changes were already evident from the
sixteenth century.
Austronesian religion had understood the cosmos in terms of dualities in
which both male and female elements were essential. Women had crucial ritual
and religious roles, especially in mediating between humans and spirits. Islam
and Catholic Christianity by contrast were carried by male religious specialists
ministering to a deity identified as male. Spiritually talented and ritually
experienced women could not find a place in the new religion to match that
which they had played in the old.
It must have seemed to many women that Islam was a male ritual activity not
relevant to women. Women in the Philippines were not given the option of
ignoring Catholicism in this way, however, since the Spanish friars tended to
seek out and persecute female shamans where Muslims were more inclined to
ignore them (Schumacher 1979:72-73; Chirino 1604:302-305). Resistance to Islam
in South Sulawesi appears to have had support from a few aristocratic women.
Women of ordinary birth, however, were probably under little pressure to
abandon domestic ritual activity, and even shamanistic healing. The chief
evidence for this is less in the sources than in Southeast Asian religious practice,
where such activities survived surprisingly well until this century. There is a
curious story in the Babad Lombok (1979:17-19), however, that when all the men
of Lombok submitted to a superior Javanese force and agreed to be circumcised,
the women did not. Fearful that the women’s refusal to convert would enrage
338

---

Continuity and Change in the Austronesian Transition to Islam and Christianity
the Javanese, the ruling circle moved their capital away from the coast and back
to the ancient Hindu capital, though their commitment to Islam remained.
The struggle of Islam to impose a radically different sexual morality on
Austronesians was a long one, with rapid changes in periods of orthodox
emphasis but also inevitable compromise with the autonomous position of
Austronesian women. Women had been accustomed to initiating divorce with
little stigma attached. In the Philippines one high-born lady protested to a
Spanish missionary that “it was a hard thing if unhappy with one’s husband
one could not leave him, as was the custom among them” (Chirino 1604:313).
Unlike Catholicism, Islam of course permitted divorce, but only in terms of
repudiation (talak) of the woman by the man. This formula was incorporated
into local law codes as a legal option (Undang-undang Melaka 1976:132-133), but
since women continued to be economically self-sufficient the frequency of
divorce initiated by women was almost unparalleled. As an Arab visitor
complained, the Malays “do not treat divorce as a religious act” (Ibn Majid
1462:206).
Adultery was already punished in very varied ways before Islam, and the
harsh Islamic punishments for zina were adopted by the élite of some trading
cities in the seventeenth century. Around 1600 foreigners witnessed the death
penalty being publicly administered to élite youngsters in Patani, Aceh and
Brunei — something much less common two centuries later. For rape and adultery
the local law codes frequently added the much harsher Islamic penalties at the
end of a passage setting out the system of moderate fines preferred by local
custom (Reid 1988:156-158). In all these respects, there appears to have been a
dramatic lurch towards Islamic norms during the period of conversion, followed
by a reversion towards an accepted compromise with Austronesian reality.
Dress in public was one of the quickest things to change with Islam, as with
Christianity. Bare breasts, penis inserts, tattoos and long male hair all disappeared
very quickly in favour of what we now see as standard Indonesian/Malay dress
of sarung and kebaya (chemise). Again the initial change was particularly
dramatic. In Makassar city only fifty years after the conversion to Islam women
were sometimes “entirely covered from head to foot, in such fashion that not
even their faces can be seen” (Rhodes 1653:207). In Banten in the same period
Arab-style dress became common (Schrieke 1957:242). Such un-Austronesian
phenomena disappeared, however, along with the large Islamic merchant cities
in the late seventeenth century.
Islam was even more uncompromising in its condemnation of idolatory, and
for this reason required that the dead be buried quickly and simply, in complete
contrast to Austronesian tradition. Change in the externals of funerary practice
was achieved astonishingly quickly. Burial sites of the tenth to sixteenth centuries
have yielded valuable ceramics and gold items, buried with the dead in the
339

---

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Philippines and eastern Indonesia to ensure a comfortable passage to the afterlife.
These end abruptly with the coming of Islam and Christianity. The elaborate
feasting, designed to ensure the deceased endured this most dangerous transition
and would not return to torment the living, was modified into a relatively simple
burial.
One of the major appeals of the scriptural religions was that they loosened
the grip of spirits on every aspect of daily life. The truly pious were strengthened
against assaults by unsatisfied spirits. People continued to face illness and
misfortune, however, and for these the actions of angry spirits of the dead
appeared a more immediate and direct explanation than scriptural notions of sin
(Hoskins 1987:150-151). Ordinary Javanese Muslims in Banten told Scott
(1606:172-173) that God was good and would not hurt them, but the devil (by
which they must have meant spirits, setan in Malay) was constantly doing them
harm so they directed all their ritual activity to appeasing him.
Islam had already incorporated some helpful popular compromises by the
time its greatest Southeast Asian gains were made. The period following the fall
of Baghdad was one in which the Sufi orders (tariqa) became the major
instruments for the extension of the faith. While the founders and saints of the
Sufi orders had been learned visionaries seeking a direct path to union with
God, at the popular level Sufism by the fifteenth century represented a means
of linking the individual with the spiritual power (Ar. baraqa; Malay berkat) of
holy men, apostles, rulers and other remarkable people. The power of these dead
saints was invoked to help the living through the spiritual genealogy which
linked each Sufi teacher to the venerated founder of his order, but also through
visitations (ziyara) to the tombs of holy men, where offerings were frequently
made.
Such practices were particularly popular in Southeast Asia, where the berkat
of dead saints could be invoked for similar purposes to the spirits of the ancestors.
The newly Muslim population made pilgrimages and offerings at holy tombs —
those of the apostles thought to have introduced Islam to each area, such as the
nine walis of Java or Dato ri Bandang in Makassar; of popularizers of the Sufi
orders like Abdurrauf of Singkil, in Aceh, and Shaikh Yusuf of Makassar; and
of certain powerful kings such as Iskandar Muda in Aceh. The strength of this
saint-veneration as early as the sixteenth century is confirmed by the protest of
a strictly orthodox Javanese handbook against it: “It is unbelief to say that the
great imams are superior to the prophets, or to put the saints (wali) above the
prophets, and even above our lord Muhammad” (Drewes 1978:38-39).
There is no doubt that despite rapid acceptance of the form of Muslim
funerals, Southeast Asians continued to fear that the dead would trouble them
unless ritually satisfied. In Banda in 1599, the dead were quickly buried in a
white cloth, as prescribed, but when the Dutch asked Bandanese why they
340

---

Continuity and Change in the Austronesian Transition to Islam and Christianity
continued to pray for several days at the graveside they were told it was to
prevent the dead from “standing up”, which would otherwise surely happen
causing great misfortune to all (Tweede Schipvaart 1601:90). Austronesians
adopted with particular enthusiasm the widespread Muslim practice of returning
at the third, seventh, fortieth and hundredth days after the burial, to feast at
the grave (Martin 1604:49; Gervaise 1701:140-147; Raffles 1817 I:327; Ali Haji
1866:76).
According to the official or learned conception this is done in order to
bestow on the deceased the recompense earned by his good work;
according to the popular notion it is to let them enjoy the actual savour
of the good things of the feast (Snouck Hurgronje 1893 I:221).
Honouring the dead has continued to be a great preoccupation of Southeast
Asian Muslims. Whereas in the Arab world the seventh month of the Muslim
year is considered most appropriate for such commemoration, in Indonesia it is
the beginning and end of the fasting month (the ninth) when ancestors are
especially remembered. Feasts were (and in some places still are) held at grave
sites just before the fast commences, and at its end, and the forgiveness of elders
is asked — the dead as well as the living. Although the origins of these practices
lie in obscurity, they may initially have represented another creative Muslim
response to the need to make offerings to the spirits of the dead.
Arabic terms and prayers were adopted quickly even for purposes which
had been closely associated with the spirits. Do’a became the standard term for
an invocation or a blessing to ward off evil (Houtman 1603:107, 165). Roh (plural
arwah) was accepted as a Muslim equivalent of the Austronesian concept of
semangat (soul-substance or spirit — Endicott 1970:28-51), while potent graves
were referred to by Arabic words which reinterpreted their power in Islamic
terms — kramat (sacred [grave]), berkat (spiritual power), and ziarah (pilgrimage
— Houtman 1603:250).
The Idea of the Sacred
When we move from the externals which could be observed by outsiders to the
belief systems of individual Austronesians, it must be immediately acknowledged
that the sources are inadequate to allow us to confirm or deny any of the great
hypotheses about religious change. Yet to dodge it is in a sense to trivialize one
of the most momentous intellectual passages for an individual or a society into
a matter of outward social conformity. I have little doubt that there was a
large-scale movement towards a more modern mentalité in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries,1 but it is almost impossible to explicate this without frequent
reference to religious change at a much later period when there were
ethnographers to record it.
341

---

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
The religions of the Austronesians were characterized by a baffling diversity
of spirits and practices. When the Dutch attempted to investigate the religion
of Seram (central Maluku) in 1684, their conclusion was that “the informants
differed so widely that it was impossible to describe the system, and moreover
they are so superstitious that it would almost take a book of paper to note the
details of each negeri” (cited Knaap 1987:71). Modern ethnographers have faced
similar difficulties. Conklin discerned 1500 distinct spirits among the Ifugao
(Luzon), and Volkman (1985:34) “perhaps thousands” among Toraja. This has
not prevented either contemporary missionaries and observers or modern scholars
from identifying an underlying pattern of Austronesian or Southeast Asian
belief.
As in other pre-modern traditions, there was no distinction between a religious
and a secular dimension. The material world was suffused with spiritual forces,
and to survive and flourish in it everybody had to know how to manipulate
them. In a sense it is modern religions, notably Christianity, Judaism, and
modernist Islam, by largely abandoning their “functions of explanation,
prediction and control” of everyday events, and withdrawing to an other-worldly
personal piety where they do not compete directly with scientific understandings
of nature (Horton 1971:104), which created the category “primitive religion”.
The older religious systems of the Austronesians, on the other hand, can only
be understood as intimately involved in every significant event of daily life (for
modern explanations, see Hoskins 1987:139; Volkman 1985:33). Ritual and
shamanistic activity was usually designed for immediate practical ends. Spiritual
forces had to be manipulated to cure illness, ensure fertility, increase power,
safeguard the living particularly at dangerous life crises, and ensure that the
dead were assisted through the most traumatic of all transitions into a contented
afterlife. Feasting and animal sacrifice was made to ensure the spirits were on
side for every personal crisis, including
the recovery of a sick person, the prosperous voyage of those embarking
on the sea, a good harvest in the sowed lands, a propitious result in wars,
a successful delivery in childbirth, and a happy outcome in married life
(Plasencia 1589:191).
Even when Filipinos wanted to pick a fruit from a tree, plant or harvest rice,
cross a stream or pass any major landmark, they would ask permission from the
protective spirit and make some appropriate offering (Chirino 1604:298-299;
Ortiz 1731, cited Rafael 1988:112). European observers were struck by the feasts
and offerings to the spirits of the dead to aid the sick, and the attribution of
illness and premature death to incorrect ritual or malign manipulation of the
spirit world by some enemy.
In the African context, Horton (1971:101) has described a two-tier cosmology
in which “lesser spirits” controlled the affairs of the local community, while a
342

---