ABSTRACT
The role of Muslim residents of the southern Chinese port cities in the process of Islamization in Southeast Asia has not yet been fully explored. This chapter addresses this lacuna and suggests that, while there had long been links between the early Islamic communities in northern Sumatra, Champa, and the ports of Southern China, it was only in the late fourteenth century that a major process of Islamization began occurring in Java and other parts of Southeast Asia. The impetus for this process, it is suggested, was the massive outflow of Muslims from the southern Chinese ports as a result of civil war and purges in Fujian from the 1350s. By the 1370s, not much more than a decade after the massacres in Fujian, Muslim tombs began to appear in Java and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. It is suggested that the late fourteenth century was a period of wide expansion of Islam within Southeast Asia, as well as of hybridity and synthesis, and that the Ming voyages of the early fifteenth century further promoted the spread of Islam in the region.
