The advent of Islam to West and North Borneo

Abstract

The literature of Islam's initial impact in North Borneo, Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah is not extensive. Detailed documentation of the sort familiar in the Malay peninsula or much of Indonesia is to a large extent lacking. There is, however, a certain amount of scattered information, some of it hitherto undigested, none of it yet correlated. The aim of this paper is to summarise some of the existing known data, in the hope of stimulating other studies now planned, in hand, or not yet considered. The generally acceptable dating for Islam in West and North Borneo has nearly always been based, with justification, on the Sultanate of Brunei, concerning which far too little has yet been published. The present situation in good scholarship is represented in the standard work by my colleague at Cornell, Dr. D.G.E. Hall (who has generously helped with suggestions for this paper), whose A History of Southeast Asia (London, 1964), reviews the historical material and accepts the view that the Mohammedan faith reached Brunei "c.1500" (map on p. 192). Elsewhere he writes that "the Muslim sultanate of Brunei was founded at the end of the fifteenth century" (p.491). Professor Hall shows that the faith had come to Sumatra more than two centuries before this, and did not reach Celebes until a century later ("Macassar, c. 1604"), though it had passed on far eastward into the Halmaheras before the Brunei date ("Tidura, c.1475").