2 - SOUTH-EAST ASIAN ISLAM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Summary

Centuries, calendrically precise, are seldom as meaningful historiographically as historians are apt to make them seem. The nineteenth century in Islamic South-East Asia is no exception, and yet, with the need to see a pattern in a period of years, patterns do emerge. The Java and Acheh Wars stand like tombstones at either end of a series of violent and often bloody conflicts fought to renovate or defend Islam and the ummat (Arabic, umma) against the vitiating syncretism of local tradition and increasing colonial encroachment. The early years of the century saw the beginnings of a redefinition of the relationship of the West with the Archipelago which was to culminate before the beginning of the next in the complete subjection of Indonesian and Malay political and administrative authority to alien rule. And finally, the opening of island and peninsular South-East Asian societies to the west meant, in the literal sense, not merely the consolidation of European power and influence, but a considerable increase in the flow of communications with the heartland of Islam which did much to determine the nature and intensity of the conflicts which characterize these years.

The Java War of 1825-30, though from one point of view the first in a series of manifestations of social unrest in Java in which protest at socio-economic change brought about by the West played a determining role, must also be seen as yet another in the succession of conflicts which had punctuated the previous hundred years, arising in large part out of social tensions present within Javanese society itself.