Islam comes to Borneo
The Arab traders came from India and began commerce in various ports. Settling in the trade ceners, they intermarried with the people of the land, and these heathen wives and the slaves of their households thus formed the nucleus of a Muslim community. The traders and their new wives increased the population of Moselm believers.
“The better to introduce their religion into the country, the Islamic people adopted the language and many of the customs of the natives, married their women, purchased slaves in order to increase their personal importance, and succeeded finally in incorporating themselves among the chiefs who held the foremost rank. Since they worked together with greater ability and harmony than the natives, they gradually increased their power more and more, as having numbers of slaves in their possession, they formed a kind of confederacy among themselves and established a sort of monarchy, which they made hereditary.
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 a tributary to the Hindu kingdom of Majapahit, until its overthrow in 1478.
They owed their conversion to one of the Islamic states that rose on the ruins of Majapahit. The story is 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 of Islam. Whereupon a number of Islamic people came over from Java, suppressed the revolt and effected the work of conversion.
Santubong was a trading and revitalizing center for journeys of ships carrying trade goods back to China. In ~977 an Indianized kingdom was established from the royal family of Tanjungpura. The family ruled until 1512 when Santubong fell to Brunei forces. The Santubong royal family maintained good relations with the Kingdom of Johore. Sometime in the early 1400’s they intermarried with the Johore royal family and converted to Islam.
In Brunei, the conversion to Islam by the royal family occurred in ~1368. Brunei had by then became a series of localized trading post unable to accommodate larger ocean going ships because of the large boulders blocking the entrance to the harbour. It was also a major slave trading center. Arab traders who had established themselves along the coast in small villages spread the religion through marriage.
On the north-west coast, the Spaniards found an Islamic king at Brunai, when they reached this place in 1521. A little later, 1550, it was introduced into the kingdom of Sukadana, in the western part of the island, by Arabs coming from Palembang in Sumatra. 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 Muslim and married the daughter of a prince of a neighbouring island, in which apparently Islam had been long established; during his reign, a traveller, who visited the island in 1600, speaks of Islam as being a common religion along the coast.
The progress of Islam in the kingdom of Sukadana seems now to have drawn the attention of the centre of the Islamic world to this distant spot. 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.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century one of the inland tribes, called the Idaans, dwelling in the interior of north Borneo, is said to have looked upon the Islamic people along the coast as having a religion which they themselves had not yet received.
Dalrymple, who obtained his information on the Idaans of Borneo during his visit to Sulu from 1761 to 1764, tells us that they regret their own ignorance and when they come into the houses, or vessels, of the people of Islam, they pay them the utmost veneration, as superior intelligences, who know their Creator. They will not sit down where the Islamic people sleep, nor will they put their fingers into the same chunam, or betel box.
These people appear to have embraced the Islamic faith, one of the numerous instances of the powerful impression that Islam produces upon the inner tribes of Borneo.
From time to time, other persons of the numerous colonists, Arabs, Bugis and Malays, as well as Chinese (who have had settlements here since the seventh century), and of the slaves introduced into the island from different countries came to Borneo.
At the present day the Islam converts of Borneo are a very mixed race. Many of these foreigners were still heathen when they first came to Borneo, but of a higher civilisation than the Dyaks whom they conquered or drove into the interior, where they mostly still remain heathen, except in the western part of the island, in which from time to time small tribes of Dyaks embrace Islam.
When the pagan Dyaks change their faith, it is more commonly the case that they yield to the persuasions of the Islamic rather than to those of the Christian missionary, or, having first embraced Christianity they then pass over to Islam. The Islamic missionaries are making zealous efforts to win converts both from among the heathen and the Christian Dyaks.
Mostly From:
Arnold, Thomas Walker The Preaching of Islam: The History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company 1896 pp. 316-318 about Borneo
Tom McLaughlin for BorneoHistory.net