o - Aceh Books website

474 MALAYO-POLYNESIAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES
are somewhat less orthodox and thorough in their practice of Islam than the
Acehnese, Malays and Minangkabau. Their patterns of subsistence and their
general life-styles are similar to those of Malays and Acehnese, who were largely
responsible for the spread of Islam into southern Sumatra in particular and
throughout Southeast Asia in general. Although the people of the Rejang-Lampung
complex are less orthodox than the Malays, Acehnese and Minangkabau,
they, in turn, are generally more orthodox than Muslims of the eastern islands
of Indonesia, such as the Butinese, Gorontalese, Laki, West Toraja and Bolaang-
Mongondo of Sulawesi (Celebes) or the Tidorese and Ternatans of Halmahera.
These more eastern groups were near the most distant edges of the trading empire
of the Melaka Malays. Islam arrived later there than in the center of the empire,
and it was not so intensively proselytized.
Islam spread into Southeast Asia within a century or two of the Prophet's
lifetime, but it was not immediately successful. Marco Polo noted that it was
the religion of Pasai, in northern Sumatra, at the end of the thirteenth century,
but Hindu-Buddhism was elsewhere the major religion. Probably, native chiefs
came to view Islam as an ideology that might focus support for overthrowing
traditional empires, such as Javanese Majapahit, that were overbearing and that
interfered with chiefly interests in local and long-distance sea trade. Moreover,
Islam provided a means for claiming special trading privileges with Gujarati,
Arab, Persian and Turkish traders who controlled so much of Western commerce
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Melaka was not the first city-state in
the area to become Islamic, but it was the most successful and was most responsible
for the further spread of Islam throughout Southeast Asia. The Acehnese
were probably converted earlier to Islam, and they developed an important trading
empire that existed along with that of Johore and Portugal after the fall of Melaka
to the Portuguese in 1511. The Acehnese did not succeed in assimilating many
other ethnic groups to their culture, not even those whom they conquered, such
as the Gayo (who still maintain much of their Batak culture) or the northern
Minangkabau, but their capital city, Kota Raja, did become a center of Islamic
learning that was important not only to Southeast Asia but to the Islamic world
generally.
Ronald Provencher
MALAYO-POLYNESIAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES (EASTERN INDO­
NESIA) The Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) is one
of two in this "Muslim" country in which Muslims are a minority (the
other is Bali). According to the 1980 census, NTT had a population of 2.7
million people, only 8.5 percent of whom were Muslim, or 230,000. Despite
their numbers, the diverse Muslim peoples of NTT are of interest because of
their long historical association with Islam dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
More than 80 percent of the Muslim population of NTT is concentrated in