IC No. 51, Mar 90 THE USE OF ARABIC COMMENTARIES ON THE QUR'AN IN THE EARLY ISLAMIC PERIOD IN SOUTH-EAST ASlA: REPORT ON WORK IN PROGRESS PETER RIDDELL Introduction The geographical expansion of the Islamic faith was somewhat limited during the life of the Prophet Muhammad (c. A.D.570-632) when compared to the centuries following his death. He received his first revelations around A.D.610 according to traditional accounts, and the remaining 20-odd years of his life witnessed the initial rejection of Muhammad's claims in his native city of Mecca, the migration of the Prophet and his followers to the Arabian city of Medina, their establishment and acceptance there, and the gradual fanning out of the Muslims through the surrounding areas by conquest and conversion. This process culminated during the life of the Prophet in his being acknowledged as Prophet by his native city of Mecca and the conversion to Islam of the inhabitants of this Arabian city. Muhammad did not live to see the rapid spread of Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula. After his death, an irresistible wave swept out from the Islamic heartland, initially consolidating its base in the peninsula, and then sweeping all before it in both a westerly and easterly direction. Within a few decades, the area covering present-day Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco had submitted to the new faith, and Islam had even spread throughout the Iberian peninsula and had reached central France. The march of Islam was stopped by Charles Martel and his Gallic warriors on the plains of Poitiers 100 years after the death of the Prophet, but it was to be many centuries before the entire Spanish peninsula was again under the control of Catholic rulers The eastward expansion of Islam was no less spectacular than that to the west, though it was slower. Nevertheless, the time frame is not overly important for our purposes here; it is sufficient to say that within 1,000 years, the Asian region had witnessed the permanent establishment of Islam in Persia and Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent had seen the entry of Islam via the north-western province of Sind in the eighth century and the establishment of Muslim empires after the thirteenth century, and the Islamic faith had penetrated the South-East Asian region, with the earliest evidence of the existence of Islamic states being in the form of tombstones dating from the last decade of the thirteenth century in the northernmost tip of the island of Sumatra. It subsequently spread further to the Malay Peninsula, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines. During this expansion to both the west and the east, there was of course an element of forced conversion to the faith by way of conquest. However, it would be erroneous to attribute the majority of conversions to this means; rather the more common, indeed more lasting means of conversion was via a combination of oral teaching and dissemination of written works: sermons, tracts, and commentaries based 3 Downloaded by [101.160.16.113] at 02:05 20 November 2011