Imran bin Tajudeen. 2017. "Trade, Politics, and Sufi Synthesis in the Formation of Southeast Asian Islamic Architecture."

The Nusantara region, known as Bilad al‐Jawah in Arab and Persian texts and whose Muslim community was collectively called Jawi in Malay, contains the world’s largest Muslim community today. It encompasses the southern half of Southeast Asia and is home to speakers of Austronesian languages. Islam became established as a local cultural force relatively late in this maritime region; around the beginning of the Islamic era Javanese and later Sumatran Malay rulers constructed temple complexes to the Hindu and Buddhist creeds and were patrons of Buddhist centers of learning. Their maritime empires shaped the region’s shared aesthetic and linguistic bases, which were inherited by the multiethnic actors behind the pan‐Nusantara Islamic culture that flourished in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. This is reflected in the use of the Malay language in trade and in religious literature and diplomacy, and of the Javanese‐Indic (or Hindu‐ Javanese) synthesis in architecture built for Muslim communities. The legacy of the East Javanese Majapahit Empire (1294–1527) was particularly formative for the region’s early Islamic architecture.

Imran_bin_Tajudeen_2017_Trade_Politics_a.pdf