The Arabic Language

17.7 Arabic in South-east Asia
The earliest direct contacts between the Islamic world and East Asia go back to 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Before that time Persian and Arab trade 
had mostly taken place between South Arabia and South India; South Indian 
merchants then took over the second leg of the route to the Malaysian archi
-
pelago. From the fourteenth century onwards, some traders may have settled on 
the coast of Sumatra and later on Java. No precise numbers are known, but at the 
beginning of the twentieth century the presence of more than 30,000 Ḥaḍramawtī 
immigrants is reported (Lombard 1990: 65–6). Since the Malay language was 
firmly established in the Malayan peninsula and as a 
lingua franca
in the Indone
-
sian islands, Arabic was unable to gain the same position that it had obtained in 
the lands of the Middle East and North Africa, but there can be no doubt that as 
the language of the 
Qurʾān
and Islam it exercised an enormous influence. This 
influence manifests itself in the use of Arabic loanwords in Malay and its modern 
offshoot Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia; furthermore, in 
the use of Arabic script for the Malay language; and, finally, in the use of Arabic 
as the religious language of most people.
The first signs of Arabic presence in the Indonesian archipelago date from the 
period of the thirteenth century in the form of tombstones. The first preserved 
inscription in Arabic script dates from the fourteenth century, a legal edict that 
was found in Trengganu in the Malay peninsula, written in the variety of Arabic 
script that became known as Jawi. It is an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet with 
special additional signs for 
c
, 
g
, 
ng
, 
ny
, 
p
and 
v
, which was used in manuscripts 
from the sixteenth century onwards. In Indonesia, this script remained in use 
until the twentieth century, when it was replaced by a Latin orthography during 
the period of the Dutch administration in Indonesia.
The Indonesian Muslim community is the largest community of Muslims 
outside the Arab world. The vast majority of the population of about 240 million 
people are Muslims and regard Arabic as the holy language of their religion. It 
is, therefore, not surprising that the position of Arabic as a religious language is 
unshaken. Most Indonesians have a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic because of 
their Qurʾānic training. The secular curriculum, however, does not do very much 
to improve this knowledge and, in spite of periodic attempts by the authorities 
to improve the level of Arabic, it is largely left to the so-called 
pesantren
schools 
to train those who wish to learn in Arabic. The 
pesantren
system has been very 
successful in setting up a religious curriculum on the pattern of the so-called 
‘Meccan’ model, that is, traditional transmission of texts by 
ʾijāza
‘licence to 
transmit’ and on the whole passive knowledge of the written language.
The number of words from Arabic in modern Indonesian is considerable; 
according to some estimates, at least 3,000 words may be traced back to an Arabic 
original. Naturally, many of these words are connected to religion, but there are 
Arabic loans all over the lexicon in such domains as politics, philosophy, zoology 

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The Arabic Language
and botany, medicine, education and science. Many, or most, of the loans have 
probably come through the medium of Persian, as in the case of Urdu. In some 
cases, the exact provenance is still visible in the form of the word. Thus, the word 
for ‘digestion’ exists in two variants,