Note 92 — Chapter XII · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO.
Reading edition
Similarly, Islam in Borneo is mostly confined to the coast, although it had gained a footing in the island as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. About this time, it was adopted by the people of Banjarmasin, a kingdom on the southern side, which had been tributary to the Hindu kingdom of Majapahit, until its overthrow in 1478;92 they owed their conversion to one of the Muhammadan states that rose on the ruins of the latter.93 The story is that the people of Banjarmasin asked for assistance towards the suppression of a revolt, and that it was given on condition that they adopted the new religion; whereupon a number of Muhammadans came over from Java, suppressed the revolt and effected the work of conversion.94 On the north-west coast, the Spaniards found a Muhammadan king at Brunai, when they reached this place in 1521.95 A little later, 1550, it was introduced into the kingdom of Sukadana,96 in the western part of the island, by Arabs coming from Palembang in Sumatra.97 The reigning king refused to abandon the faith of his fathers, but during the forty years that elapsed before his death (in 1590), the new religion appears to have made considerable progress. His successor became a Musalman and married the daughter of a prince of a neighbouring island, in which apparently Islam had been long established;98 during his reign, a traveller,99 who visited the island in 1600, speaks of Muhammadanism as being a common religion along the coast. The inhabitants of the interior, however, he tells us, were all idolaters—as indeed they remain for the most part to the present day. The progress of Islam in the kingdom of Sukadana seems now to have drawn the attention of the centre of the Muhammadan world to this distant spot, and in the reign of the next prince, a certain Shayk͟h Shams al-Dīn came from Mecca bringing with him a present of a copy of the Qurʼān and a large hyacinth ring, together with a letter in which this defender of the faith received the honourable title of Sultan Muḥammad Ṣafī al-Dīn.100