The Sultanate of Samudra Pasai

Samudra Pasai, on the northern coast of the great island of Sumatra, at the western gateway of the East Indies, was the first Muslim sultanate of the Malay archipelago, founded in the later thirteenth century when its ruler embraced Islam, and it became the beachhead from which the faith, carried for centuries by the Muslim merchants of the Indian Ocean trade, began to take root and spread through the islands of what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. It owed its rise to its position and its pepper: it stood upon the Strait of Malacca, through which the whole sea-trade between India and China had to pass, and it grew rich exporting the pepper of its forest gardens to the ships of all nations. When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta broke his long voyage there about 1345, on his way toward China, he found a flourishing and devout Muslim kingdom; he describes the sultan, al-Malik al-Zahir, as a pious and humble ruler of the Shafi'i school, much given to war against the unbelievers of the island in the way of God, who gathered scholars, jurists and Qur'an-readers about him, sat in learned discussion of the law after the Friday prayer, and walked to the mosque on foot; and the traveller was lodged and honoured as a distinguished guest. That so new and so distant an outpost should keep the prayer, the law and the learning of Islam so faithfully struck him, and it marks the beginning of the great history of Islam in Southeast Asia, the most populous Muslim region of the later world, won not by conquest from the heartlands but by the slow work of traders and preachers and the conversion of kings. This scene depicts the port of Samudra Pasai and its pepper-coast. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.