Chapter 7 - Cheng Ho and the Islamization of Southeast Asia

Summary

By the end of the fourteenth century, Southeast Asia was at a crossroad. Two emerging trends eventually changed the political and religious landscapes drastically in Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century. Cheng Ho's fleet, a symbol of the mighty Ming China, made its maiden voyage in the Pacific and Indian Oceans in 1405 and the fleet continued to make its presence felt intermittently until 1433. The Cheng Ho factor propelled an up-and-coming young Malay state, Malacca to a central role in shaping the political and religious developments of insular Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century. Thus, the Cheng Ho factor helped set a new order in the Southeast Asian geopolitics and Islamization in the region.

As early as the tenth century to the fourteenth century, pockets of Islamic towns were established in the coastal trading ports in Southeast Asia such as Champa, Trengganu, Sumatra's Samudra-Pasai, Perlak, Aru, Deli, Lambri and Aceh as a result of the joint efforts of the Arab, Indian, Chinese and the native Muslim traders. Thus, by the late fourteenth century, the region gradually began to form an Islamic sphere from Champa to the Malay Archipelago. Cheng Ho's missions helped to accelerate the pace of the Islamization process in insular Southeast Asia and ushered in an Islamic era in the Nusantara world. Therefore, Cheng Ho's role in the Islamization of the region should be viewed in a wider historical context as it was closely linked to the regional and international trading network centring around the spice and ceramic trade, and the geopolitics in Europe, Asia as well as in the Malay Peninsula in the early fifteenth century.

This chapter attemps to provide answers to the following questions: What role did the Arab traders play in the spread of Islam through the interlocking Arabia-India-Southeast Asia-China trade networks? Why did the Arab traders meet with great resistance in the spread of Islam in insular Southeast Asia in contrast to the smoother venture in China? What was the situation of the Southeast Asian geopolitics in the fifteenth century? Why did the early Ming emperors show increased interest in Southeast Asia? What were the explicit and implicit objectives of Cheng Ho's seven historic expeditions to the Western oceans? Was Cheng Ho and Ming China a protocolonialist as Geoff Wade claimed?