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We talk about Indians Hinduising Southeast Asia. But Indians also converted region to Islam

The advent of Islam in India, and its spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But the opposite is true.

In India’s long history with Southeast Asia, there’s one half that we’re very comfortable with: the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. From Rabindranath Tagore to Narendra Modi, Indian writers, diplomats and politicians have waxed romantic about the ancient religious and commercial ties between the subcontinent and the landmasses of the Eastern Indian Ocean.

The advent of Islam in India, and its rapid spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as the end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But, if anything, the opposite is true. Indians were just as influential in spreading Islam in Southeast Asia as we ever were in spreading Hinduism. And Islam spread along the same networks that Hinduism once had, deepening and widening the oceanic web of ideas and influences. 

Gujarati and Tamil merchants, Sufi inquisitors, Malayali fakirs and mercenaries — Muslims from across the Indian subcontinent made lives and careers in Southeast Asia, directly shaping the region’s cultures for centuries until colonial rule.

The fakir from the Coromandel

One of the oldest surviving Malay texts, the 14th-century Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, minces no words about where Islam arrived from. Receiving divine portents, the legendary Sultan Muhammad of Ma’bar in the Coromandel—supposedly a descendant of Caliph Abu-Bakr—renounces his throne. He puts on a fakir’s clothes and sails to Samudra (Pasai) on Sumatra’s northern tip, on a ship coming from Mecca. There he anoints a chief named Merah Silu as Sultan Malik al-Salih. The ship returns to Mecca laden with gifts, while the fakir remains, in the chronicle’s words, to firmly “establish the religion of Islam”.

Indians, referred to as “Kling”, appear again and again in this Hikayat, as they do in many other Malay Muslim chronicles. A Kling trader arrives and locates the gold that makes the infant Pasai Sultanate rich. A Kling yogi comes to display his magic and loses to the sultan’s sanctity, converting on the spot and granting the Sultan the title of “Perumudal Perumal” (Perumal is the name by which the god Vishnu is known in the Tamil........

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