islamic-jihad-legacy-of-forced-conversion-imperialism-slavery

Islamic Jihadcompletely disappeared as a result of their incorporation, through enslavement, into the Muslim populace ofMalaya, Sumatra and Borneo ‘by a mixture of raiding, tribute and purchase, especially of children.’ 325‘Certain small sultanates, notably Sulu, Buton and Tidore, began to make profitable business of raiding forslaves in eastern Indonesia or the Philippines and marketing the human victims to the wealthy cities—or tothe expanding seventeenth-century pepper estates of southern Borneo,’ adds Reid. 326 In Muslim wars inSoutheast Asia, the enslavement was often complete: the entire population were enslaved and carried away.For example, Thomas Ivye reported in 1634 that an English Party went about looking in vain for two days forthe once-flourishing Sumatran town of Inderagiri to buy pepper. No trace of the town was found. They laterlearned that its whole population were carried away in an Acehnese Muslim invasion six years earlier to alocation three days’ journey up the river. 327 These enslaved people—belonging to the polytheistic Hindu,Buddhist and Animist creeds—were unlikely allowed to keep their faiths by their Muslim captors of Shafi’ipersuasion.Although the Spaniards occupied the Philippines and kept pressure on the Muslim-controlled regionsin the south, the Moro Muslim raiders kept their Jihad alive by making continued incursions into Spanishoccupiedterritories for capturing slaves. They enslaved, claimed Archbishop of Manila in 1637, on anaverage 10,000 Catholic Filipinos annually over the previous thirty years. It is estimated that the Moro holywarriors had enslaved some two million non-Muslims during the first two centuries of the Spanish rule in thePhilippines beginning in 1665. 328 Thereafter, the Spanish and Portuguese naval patrols became increasinglyeffective in stopping the Moro Jihad raids. Still, the Southern Filipino Muslims, according to a conservativeestimate, brought 200,000–300,000 people to the Sulu Sultanate through enslavement between 1770 and1870. 329 In the late nineteenth century, enslavement was extensive in the Malay Peninsula and IndonesianArchipelago: some 6 percent of the population in the Perak Sultanate were slaves in 1879, about one-third inthe eastern regions of West Sumatra in the 1860s, 30 percent in the Muslim-ruled region of North Sulawesiand as high as two-thirds or more in parts of North Borneo in the 1880s. 330 Here, one must take the fact intoconsideration that Europe banned slavery in 1815, pressured Muslim rulers to follow suit and intervened inslave-trade by force whenever possible.These examples of large-scale slavery would give readers a clear idea of how the conversion hadtaken place in Southeast Asia. Muslim rulers also waged wars for the express purpose of converting thevanquished populace under compulsion. Moreover, continuous Muslim incursions, sufferance of horriblesocial degradation accorded to infidel subjects by Muslim rulers as per Islamic laws and the burden ofonerous discriminatory taxes—kharaj, jizyah and others—had also undoubtedly imparted a coercivecompulsion upon them to convert to Islam. An understanding of the terror Islamic rulers of Southeast Asiahad stricken among the infidel populace can be surmised from a testimony of Dutch general Cohen (1615).People told him that ‘‘the Pangeran of Banten fears no Portuguese, Spanish, Hollanders or Englishmen, butonly the (Muslim King of) Mataram. From the latter, he says, no one can flee, but for the others the wholemountains are sufficient for us, they cannot follow us there with their ships.’’ 331 In the midst of this desperatesituation, Muslim preachers, Sufis and the Ulema might have made some contribution in converting thosepersecuted, humiliated, pauperized and terrified infidels. But such conversions likely had a very nominal325. Reid (1988), p. 133326. Ibid327. Ibid, p. 122–23328. Reid A (1983) Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History, in Slavery Bondage andDependency in Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid ed., University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, p. 32329. Warren JF (1981) The Sulu Jone, 1768-1898: The Dynamics of the External Slave Trade, Slavery and Ethnicityin the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, Singapore University Press, Singapore, p. 208.330. Clarence-Smith WG (2006) Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 15–16331. Reid (1988), p. 122107