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. 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).
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 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 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 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).