Islam, Trade and Politics Across the Indian Ocean is a research project funded by the British Academy over the period 2009-2012 and administered by the Association for South East Asian Studies UK and the British Institute at Ankara. The project is directed by Dr Andrew Peacock (BIAA) and Dr Annabel Gallop (ASEASUK and British Library).The aim of the project is to investigate links between the lands of the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey on the one hand and the Muslim peoples of South East Asia on the other over the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The project is interested in all forms of interaction between these two regions, political, religious, literary, commercial and cultural, including exchanges and mutual influences in material culture. We conduct academic research on evidence for these links, which will form the basis for an exhibition to be held in London in 2012 in association with the British Library, as well as a scholarly conference at the conclusion of the project. From time to time we offer small grants to researchers of all nationalities working on relevant themes.
Project Backgound
Research by many scholars has stressed how Southeast Asia has long been connected by trade, religion, migration and political links to the wider world across the Indian Ocean and beyond, and especially to the Middle East through the faith of Islam, first brought to the region by mediaeval Arab traders. However, little attention has been paid to the ties between Muslim South East Asia (i.e. modern Malaysia, Brunei, Southern Philippines, Indonesia) and the greatest Middle Eastern power, the Ottoman Empire. The rise of Muslim states in South East Asia coincided with the sixteenth century competition between the Portuguese and the Ottomans for control of the Indian Ocean trade routes, and the Ottomans assisted Muslim sultanates like Aceh (in modern Indonesia) with military aid against the Portuguese threat in return for some acknowledgment of Ottoman sovereignty. At the same time, Ottoman cultural influences started to appear in the region, and can be observed in manuscripts and art. The memory of contacts with the Ottomans is preserved in Malay literature. However, influences were not all one way, and South East Asian ceramics, for instance, became very popular in Ottoman territories, appearing in numerous Ottoman archaeological sites, and some from as far afield as Vietnam are preserved in the Ottoman sultans’ palace, the Topkapı in Istanbul. The pilgrimage also strengthened Ottoman-South East Asian links, and scholars from Ottoman territories often went to South East Asia to propagate Islam. Furthermore, trade often encouraged the migration of people from Ottoman territories to South East Asia, and along with religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was perhaps the most important link between the two areas. Political links were renewed in the nineteenth century as Muslim sultanates in South East Asia sought Ottoman protection from European colonialism, often seeking to become Ottoman subjects themselves. Cultural links were also strong in this period. Even after the end of the Ottoman Empire, links between Turkey and Indonesia remained strong, for Atatürk was considered a role model by South East Asian independence leaders like Sukarno, the first President of Indonesia, and Turkey and its army was admired even in Burma.
A seventeenth century Ottoman map of South East Asia. From Behram al-Dimaşki, Muhtasar Nüsret ül-İslam, MS Süleymaniye 2996, f. 325.
