The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

260 HEVIEW ARTICLES
The Sejarah Melayu bas been translated by C.C. Brown as the
Malay Annals (Oxford University Press, 1970). The translator used two
texts, Raffles MS. 18 and the Shellabear Text. I will first quote a short
paragraph from the Shellabear, page 30.
"The story of the Rajas of Pasai. Merah Silu is driven out
by his brother and goes to the country to which he gives the name
of Semudra, the Semudra of which the Prophet foretold the
conversion of Islam. The voyage of the missionaries from Mecca
to Semudra and the successive conversions of Fansuri, Lamiri
Haru and Perlak on their way. They reached Semudra where
Merah Silu is converted to Islam and made Raja of Semudra with
the title of Sultan Maliku'l-Saleh."
The similarity of the place-names in this and Marco Polo's would
indicate that Polo had two lists, one of places in North Sumatra and the
other of the Peninsula, and he either got the lists Mixed up or lost one.
This same similarity of names is a godsend to word-garners. They write
yards and yards of arguments, and even equate Polo's Samara to Malikul
Saleh's Semudra, or to Sumatra the island, or to both. But the experts are
in agreement on two points, namely Java Minor was Sumatra, and that
Polo was a nitwit who couldn't even get his islands right. In the same
way Ptolemy a thousand years before was a half-wit who didn't even
know the world was round. I myself prefer to follow Polo's geographical
evidence rather than play the word-game, equate Java Minor with Malaya,
and locate Samara as Kelantan. And, as I have said before, the combined
evidence of Marco Polo and Malikul Saleh has been used to put
forward a theory that Islam came first to Southeast Asia from the West.
It seems curious that while Arab and Persian merchants bad been trading
with the Far East a thousand years before Marco Polo, Islam should only
come to Southeast Asia five hundred years after the death of the Prophet
(May God Bless Him and Give Him Peace). Surely over this long period
some of the merchants and mariners must have been Muslims (May God
Bless Them and Give Them Peace, too). Could these Muslims not have
introduced the discipline a few centuries before Marco Polo?