The pagan tribes of Borneo - Get a Free Blog Here

i8 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap.
on stone, and in various gold ornaments of Hindu
character.
The faith of Islam and the arrival of Europeans
have profoundly affected the manners and politics
of the East Indies, and now it is difficult to picture
the state of affairs when King Hiawang revisited
China to pay homage to the Emperor. In 152 1,
within a hundred years of that event, Pigafetta,
the chronicler of Magellan's great exploit, was
calling on the '* Moorish " king of Bruni, in the
course of the first voyage round the world. The
change had come. Of the two new influences, so
potent for good and evil, Mohammedanism made
its appearance first. The struggle for religious
supremacy ended in the complete victory of the
Prophet's followers in 1478, when Majapahit was
utterly destroyed, thirty years before the capture
of Malacca by the Portuguese.
How early the Arab doctrines were taught in
Bruni it is impossible to state with any precision.
Local tradition ascribes their introduction to the
renowned Alak ber Tata, afterwards known as
Sultan Mohammed. Like most of his subjects
this warrior was a Bisaya, and in early life he was
not a Mohammedan, not indeed a civilised potentate
at all, to judge by conventional standards ; for the
chief mark of his royal dignity was an immense
chawat, or loin-cloth, carried as he walked by eighty
men, forty in front and forty behind. He is the
earliest monarch of whom the present Brunis have
any knowledge, a fact to be accounted for partly
by the brilliance of his exploits, partly by the
introduction about that time of Arabic writing.
After much fighting he subdued the people of
Igan,^ Kalaka, Seribas, Sadong, Semarahan, and
Sarawak,^ and compelled them to pay tribute. He
^ Whose descendants are the Malanaus.
^ Cf. Low, Journal Straits Bratich Royal Asiatic Society^ voh v. p. I,
from whose article we have obtained much interesting material.