Islam in South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral, 1500-1800: Expansion, polarisation, synthesis

Over the past half-century historians have endeavoured to moderate the exaggerated importance long attached to 1498 and the arrival in the Indian Ocean of a small band of Portuguese. The carriage of goods between the various key centres of production in maritime Asia grew in sophistication as southern Chinese, Javanese, Tamils and Arabs became more active in it. The origins of the Aceh sultanate at the mouth of the Aceh river in northwestern Sumatra appear no older than the late fifteenth century, although Muslims were well placed since the thirteenth century in the older port of Lamri. Islamic influence in Siam also peaked in the mid-seventeenth century, both in Sunni and Shia forms. In South-East Asia, the carriers of the Islamic literary and philosophical tradition were primarily Sufi masters, who accepted to a lineage of esoteric and literary learning to their particular teacher and beyond that to a chain of other masters of the tradition.