ABSTRACT
The earliest evidence of Muslim states in Southeast Asia dates from the late seventh/thirteenth century, in the form of tombstones of Muslim kings who lived at the northernmost tip of the island of Sumatra. Islam soon spread to the Malay Peninsula and the island of Java, but arguably the earliest ‘golden age’ of Islam coincided with the rise and regional hegemony of the north Sumatran Sultanate of Aceh, which dominated the Sumatran-Malay Peninsula region during the tenth and eleventh/sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was from Aceh that substantial evidence of the first flourishing of the Islamic sciences originates, and it is to this Sultanate that we should look in assessing the role of Qurʾanic exegesis in the area up until the end of the eleventh/seventeenth century. Southeast Asian records of theological reflection for the period 700 to 1100/1300 to 1700 are relatively limited compared with those in the Middle East and India. There are no manuscripts surviving from the earliest period of Islam in this area; the oldest manuscripts in Malay date from around 1008/1600, and most of these survived because they were acquired by European collectors. There are several reasons for the absence of a rich storehouse of theological writings from the earliest Islamic centuries. First, religious polemics led to the destruction of some of the earliest writings. Second, there was no longestablished tradition of preserving written records as there was in the Arab world. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, paper quickly deteriorates in the very humid tropical climate of Southeast Asia if it is not stored in specially cooled locations.
