Islamization of Gajo and Alaslanden (1300–1600) is the periodisation given in Prof. Dr. Kernkamp’s chapter De invloed van den Islam in Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk (1946) for the gradual, three-century conversion to Islam of the inland Gajo and Alas lands of northern Sumatra, lying immediately to the south-east of Atjeh proper. Kernkamp’s wording: “the Gajo- and Alas-lands were gradually wholly Islamised from 1300 to 1600.” The dates bracket a period that begins with the foundation of the Muslim polity of Samudra on the Pase-rivier in the late thirteenth century (founder buried 1297) and ends in the period when the Minangkabau conversion via Atjeh was being completed.
Context: Islamisation of Sumatra
Kernkamp’s account places the Gajo–Alas conversion within the wider Islamisation of Sumatra as a whole. He notes that “the Minangkabauers, who around 1500 were still heathens, were converted from Atjeh, after the realm of that name had arisen there. About 1550 they took up Islam in rapid tempo and in their entirety, and have remained fervent Muslims since.” The southern Bataks, he adds, “were in turn converted from Minangkabau, but long continued to resist. The action was accompanied by violence and plunder and this ‘holy’ war therefore failed. Only far into the 19th century does the Islamisation there succeed, because the government created orderly conditions, and only after a request of the Bataks to send Christian missionaries was refused.” The northern and eastern Batak lands, he notes, remained only partially Islamised even by 1946.
The Gajo and Alas lands, lying between the Muslim Atjeh sultanate to the north and the still-animist Batak lands to the south-east, were thus the first interior region of northern Sumatra to be brought into the Islamic fold — and they were brought in, on Kernkamp’s account, by the slow spread of the Atjeh sultanate’s religious influence over the three centuries from 1300 to 1600.
Significance
For the Atjeh-focused reader, the Islamization of Gajo and Alaslanden matters for two reasons. First, it places the Atjeh sultanate at the head of a long, three-century process of interior conversion that brought the Gajo and Alas peoples — the same peoples who, in the late nineteenth century, would be the object of Van Daalen’s 1904 expedition — into the Islamic community long before the Dutch colonial conquest. Second, it establishes the religious-cultural continuity between Atjeh proper and the Gajo–Alas interior that was to make the late-nineteenth-century Dutch military conquest of those interior lands (under Van Heutsz and Van Daalen) a continuation of the same Atjeh War that had begun on the coast in 1873.
The same chapter notes that the Gajos retain, even in 1946, a specifically Muslim calendar — “the Gajos have exclusively a Muslim calendar and know by experience how much time must elapse each time before the fields can be worked again” — placing them at the extreme end of the spectrum of Atjeh-derived Islamisation in northern Sumatra.
Dutch terms used in this article
- Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk — What the Indies Received and Gave
- Wereldbibliotheek N.V. — World Library Ltd.
- invloed van den Islam — influence of Islam
- Atjeh — Aceh
- Atjehsch — Acehnese (adjective)
- Acheh — Aceh
- Sumatra — Sumatra
- Batak — Batak
- Gajoland — Gayo country
- Gajo — Gayo
- Gajos — Gayo people
- Alaslanden — Alas lands
- Alasland — Alas land
- Alas — Alas
- Samudra — Samudra
- Pasei — Pasai
- Pase — Pasai
- Minangkabau — Minangkabau
- Prof. Dr. — Professor Doctor
- Dr. — Doctor
See Also
- Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk
- W. J. A. Kernkamp
- F. H. van Naerssen
- Acheh
- Gajoland
- Alaslanden
- Conversion of Minangkabau via Atjeh (c. 1550)
- Samudra
- De tocht van overste Van Daalen door de Gajo, Alas en Bataklanden (Geusau 1939)
- Atjehsche oppermacht in de Gajo en Alaslanden
- 1297
- 1550
- 1873
- 1904
Source
Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk, onder leiding van Dr. C. W. Wormser (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek N.V., 1946), p. 81 (chapter De invloed van den Islam door Prof. Dr. W. J. A. Kernkamp).