Islamic influences on urban form in Sumatra in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries CE

This article focuses on the evolution of three urban centres: Palembang, Padang and Tanjung Pinang. Where appropriate, brief information about other towns is added which shows that the three towns are typical for towns on the east coast, the west coast and the islands in the Straits of Malacca respectively. Unfortunately, there is no place in the Minangkabau highlands for which historical sources exist that can help to reconstruct the townscape in a comparably detailed way. The descriptions of Palembang, Padang and Tanjung Pinang give details of Islamic buildings and provide information about the development of the settlements as a whole. These morphological histories have a value in their own right. They form a baseline to assess fully the specific Islamic influence on urban form in the disruption of some Islamic transformations. The Dutch changes bring out the previous Islamic influences more sharply. In the last section the emic (indigenous) conceptions of 'urban' will be analysed, by exploring the contrast between town and village and the role of Islamic buildings to accentuate the difference. The conclusion will list the most important empirical generalisations drawn from the descriptions. © 2004 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World