Islam, the Chinese, and Indonesian Historiography—A Review Article

Abstract

In 1984 two publications appeared that were designed to make available little known source material—archaeological and paleographic in one case, textual in the other—important for the historiography of the eastern Islamic world over the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These publications are based on relics from port cities on the northern and southern shores of this world—Quanzhou (Zaitun) on the China coast, Semarang and Cirebon on the north coast of Java. Along with many other emporia old and new, these cities were incorporated into an extensive and thriving network of maritime exchange in the fields of commerce, religion, and civilization. The continued development of this network was threatened and ultimately forestalled by the antagonism of the conservative inland states of both Java and China on the one hand and the hostility of European maritime power on the other. But its legacy is not a trivial one.