By the beginning of the fifteenth century, gravestones and other sources show that Islamic states had been established in several areas of island and peninsular Southeast Asia. In north Sumatra there had been Islamic states since the early thirteenth century, Muslims had been found in East Java in the fourteenth century, and the Malay peninsula had seen the creation of several sultanates.

In Samudra there is the gravestone of one ʿAbd Allāḥ bin Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Qādir, who died in 809/1406. He was a descendant of the penultimate ʿAbbāsid caliph, confirm…