Cambay — modern Khambhat, on the coast of Goedjarat (Gujarat) in western India — is named in Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk (1946) as the city from which the first Muslim tombstones were imported to the Atjeh region of northern Sumatra, and as the chief Moslimsch emporium (Muslim trading emporium) of the eastern Indian Ocean in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the chapter De oudste cultuurstreamen, Dr. Van Naerssen records that the first Muslim ruler of Samudra on the Pase-rivier — whose grave dates from 1297 — “lies buried there in 1297. His gravestone is preserved and proves to have been imported ready-made from Cambay, the chief city of Goedjarat, which itself had only been Islamised since around 1250 and was developing more and more into a Muslim emporium.”
Role as a tombstone-exporting centre
The ready-made import of Muslim tombstones from Cambay to northern Sumatra is, in Van Naerssen’s account, the principal material evidence for the early Islamisation of the Sumatran coast. The same Cambay-type tombstone is found in the oldest preserved Muslim grave on Java — that of Malik Ibrahim (d. 1419) at Gresik, near Surabaya — for whom “many legends have been woven.” The two tombstones — at Samudra in 1297 and at Gresik in 1419 — together bracket the early Islamisation of the archipelago, and both point back to Cambay as the source of the first Islamic funerary monument-type to reach the Indies.
Significance for Atjeh
For the Atjeh-focused reader, Cambay’s significance is foundational. The Atjeh sultanate that succeeded Samudra as the dominant Muslim power on the north Sumatran coast inherited its earliest Islamic material culture — specifically its tombstone type — from Cambay. The Gujerati mercantile network of which Cambay was the chief city was the proximate vehicle through which Islam reached the Pase region in the late thirteenth century, and through which the conversion of the Minangkabau via Atjeh was effected in the mid-sixteenth century.
Dutch terms used in this article
- Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk — What the Indies Received and Gave
- Wereldbibliotheek N.V. — World Library Ltd.
- oudste cultuurstroomen — oldest cultural streams
- Atjeh — Aceh
- Acheh — Aceh
- Java — Java
- Sumatra — Sumatra
- Goedjarat — Gujarat
- Cambay — Khambhat
- Samudra — Samudra
- Pasei — Pasai
- Pase — Pasai
- Minangkabau — Minangkabau
- Moslimsch — Muslim (adjective)
- Moslim — Muslim
- Dr. — Doctor
See Also
- Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk
- F. H. van Naerssen
- Goedjarat
- Samudra
- Pasei
- Acheh
- Malik Ibrahim
- 1297
- 1415
- 1419
- Conversion of Minangkabau via Atjeh (c. 1550)
- Marco Polo
Source
Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk, onder leiding van Dr. C. W. Wormser (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek N.V., 1946), pp. 80–81 (chapter De oudste cultuurstroomen door Dr. F. H. van Naerssen).