Peureulak Sultanate

Sultanate in Sumatra
Peureulak Sultanate or Perlak Sultanate is the earliest sultanate in Southeast Asia, believed to have converted to Islam as early as the 9th century. The location of Peureulak is in what is now the East Aceh Regency, Indonesia. Perlak or Peureulak is well known as a perlak wood producing area, a type of wood that is very good for ship building and house building. Its natural products and strategic position made Perlak develop as a commercial port that advanced in the 8th century, visited by ships which included Arab and Persian origin. This led to the development of Islamic societies in this area, mainly as a result of mixed marriages between Muslim merchants and local women.

The Hikayat Aceh text reveals that the spread of Islam in northern Sumatra was carried out by an Arab scholar named Sheikh Abdullah Arif in 1112. The book Zhufan Zhi (諸蕃 志), written by Zhao Rugua in 1225, cited the record of a geographer, Chou Ku fei, in 1178 that there is a Muslim country with only five days of voyage from Java. Perhaps the intended land is Peureulak because Chu fan chi declared a voyage from Java to Brunei took 15 days. The existence of the Peureulak state was reinforced by the famous Venetian traveller Marco Polo a century later. When Marco Polo returned from China by the sea in 1291, he stopped in the state of Ferlec who had embraced Islam.

Perlak was the center of early Islamic learning in the Malay Archipelago. The Perlak sultans patronized foreign scholars and missionaries who were mainly Persian Shi'ites. The Islamic scholars from Perlak also worked as missionaries further afield to convert the Malays living across the Strait of Malacca. Sunni Islam became popular by the reign of Sultan Alaiddin Syed Maulana Abbas Shah and both sects flourished and at times influenced each other. Despite the division of Perlak into two kingdoms, both continued to dispatch missionaries to nearby Malay kingdoms.