From Srivijaya, the discussion moves on to Malacca. Gardam writes:
…I came to study the subject of Sriviyaja/Singapura/Malacca because of a research I did a few years back on Bintan and the Riau archipelago and found it indeed a fascinating subject.
There is in my opinion no doubt that Srivijaya was a far greater civilisation than Malacca. It lasted many centuries as opposed to barely one, it laid the basis of an economic and trade pattern that still defines the region to this day and which Malacca only tried to re-enact. It made the Malay language the lingua franca of South East Asia. Much less known, the Hindu-Buddhist spiritual legacy of Srivijaya is still alive today in Thibetan Buddhism (on that subject you should research the life of the Bengali Buddhist monk Atisha who brought the Srivijayan spiritual knowledge to the Land of Snow in the early 11th century).
And there is no doubt that the consensus in modern Malaysia to take Malacca as the starting point of Malay history exist only for purely religious reasons, to bind it to a Muslim identity which is largely a fabrication. This can be explained if one looks a little more closely at how the transition from Srivijayan heritage to Muslim Malay world took place in Malacca.
To carry on with this subject I am afraid to have first of all to correct you on something you said in the other blog that carries the answer to Menj. Your mistake can easily be explained because you simply repeat what keeps on being said everywhere, that the first “sultan” of Malacca was Parameswara/Iskandar Shah. For a long time this was indeed the version that prevailed, largely based on Wolters’History of Malacca. However more recent researchs, summarised in “the Malay Sultanate of Malacca” by Muhammad Yussoff Hashim (1992), have established that the first Malacca king to convert was the son of Parameswara who had taken the name Iskandar Shah by the time he went to the Ming Court to announce the death of his father in 1414.
The third ruler still had a Srivijayan name and was enthroned as Sri Maharaja. He eventually converted to Islam to become Muhammad Shah in 1436, a conversion told in the Sejarah Melayu as a miraculous event of the boat from Juddah. He is credited with initiating the rise to greatness of Malacca, but according to Ming sources was not yet a “Sultan”.
After two muslim kings ( and again according to foreign sources not yet sultans, this is an important point because they are much more neutral on this subject than the Sejarah Melayu) Raja Ibrahim, son of Muhammad Shah, again reverts to a Srivijayan name and is enthroned as Sri Parameswara Dewa Shah. This probably marks a Hindu/Buddhist reaction in the aristocracy living in the palace of Bertram, further up the Malacca river. He is the son of a princess form Sumatra and of pure Malais aristocratic descent. His half brother, Raja Kassim, is the son of a Tamil common woman, but he has the support of a Tamil faction that enjoys a growing influence in the port.
In 1445 Sri Parameswara II was killed in a coup d’etat by his half-brother who is the first Malacca king to take on the Arabic title of sultan to become Sultan Muzaffar Shah. And it is only under Raja Kassim’s rule that Islam became the state religion of Malacca.So we see that in fact Malacca was truly a Muslim state for barely more than half a century. Of course, later literature such as the many versions of the Sejarah Melayu (and remenber that they were in fact written in the 16-17th century in Riau when the descendants of the Malacca line were trying to boost their prestige) started calling kings of the Malacca line “sultan” all the way back to Temasek (first Iskandar Shah in the supposed grave of Fort Caning), as a way to give a Muslim identity to Malacca as early as possible, a fabrication now so well entrenched that it can hardly ever be corrected.
So why is Malay history today trying so hard to erase the memory of Srivija? Because the full transition from the Srivijayan heritage to an Islamic state in Malacca rests on a coup d’etat, a regicide and a fratricide, and because the first real sultan of Malacca was not a pure Malay aristocrat. Not quite the clean start that many people would like it to be, in particular in regards to the adat of utter respect and obedience to the king on which part of the Malay identity is supposed to rest in the Bumiputra concept. In my opinion this is precisely the reason behind the problem which Mahatir came to define as “the Malay dilema”. There is indeed an untold dilema because most of what defines the Malay identity rest on a lie that Malays can not help but subconciously perceive…
I have yet to read The Malay Sultanate of Malacca by Muhammad Yusoff Hashim. So, I am unable to go back to the source. However, for something less rigorous, do crosscheck with the excellent Sejarah Melayu by Sabri Zain on the internet. In particular, pages entitled Parameswara and The Melaka Empire. Apart from that, I do not think that site requires introduction.
