ARI Working Paper Series

This article shows how Arab geographical conceptualizations of insular Southeast Asia came to be placed under the rubric of ‘Jâwa’ in the 13th century. It does so after examining echoes of another toponym of far greater longevity in greater depth, namely Zâbaj. It outlines how this earlier term served from the mid-9th century to mark much of the Malay-speaking region of the Straits of Malacca – even if that region was often confused by distant compilers with the East African littoral – arguing that such understandings were built both on the acknowledgement and then memories of the hegemonic claims of the Sumatra-based kingdom of Śrîvijaya, though initially through regional understandings of a regional identification of still greater antiquity, known to Arabs and Chinese alike as Jaba.

Having linked Jaba to Zâbaj as Śrîvijaya, the essay explores the impact of the Côla conquests of the 11th century in reshaping notions of an Afro-Asiatic Zâbaj, finally supplanting it with a much more Java-centric (and Chinese influenced) Jâwa. It is argued that in this process the region began to be imagined less as a distant zone of spices and fantastic creatures and more as a constituent part of the wider civilized, and thus Islamizing, ecumene, with Muslim trade from southern China now meeting Muslim counterparts from Aden and southern India.

Finally, given that Southeast Asians themselves became increasingly visible as agents in that world, reasons are proposed for the external appropriation of Malay notions of Southeast Asia constituting a series of lands ‘below the winds’, leading Persian visitors to the region to see peoples they called Zîrbâdîs (those of below the winds) much as Arabic speakers saw Jâwîs (those of Jâwa) well into the twentieth century.