There is no right or wrong answer for this question. As in other parts of the Muslim world, Islam married with local traditions. Since the early Islamic expansions into Iraq, Iran, Central Asia and India, and later to southern Africa, Southeast Asia and the Balkans, Islam did not come as a purely political intrusion.

As in larger Central Asia, Islamization in Indonesia started from medieval times with Sufistic ways. The transition from Hindu-Buddhist regimes into Islamic ones was colored mainly with Sufi narratives, similar to that in Turkic and Persian lands.

In Sumatra, Java and elsewhere, conversion to Islam was intertwined with indigenous Southeast Asian religious values. Conversion to Islam in Southeast Asian contexts started from Pasai in Sumatra and continued rapidly until the 16th century in Java, interwoven with the popularization of Sufi fraternities in Islamic lands.

This process was followed by Islamization in other islands.

The power of the Aceh Sultanate in the island of Sumatra and Demak Sultanate in Java played a crucial role in the making of Islam in the archipelago. The Aceh sultan invited the son of Ibn Hajar Haytami, a famous Shafi’i scholar in Mecca, to teach Islamic knowledge in his court.

Such invitations continued until later centuries, especially through visits of the descendants and students of a Medinan scholar, Ahmad al-Qushashi, to various parts of the Malay Archipelago.

From this early modern time, Islam in the archipelago consisted of the Sufi tradition, which then crystalized with the Shafi’i school of law that helped formulate social and political orthodoxy in the sultanates.

The Sufi element indeed contributed to the absorption of local traditions into Islam and re-articulation of Islamic teachings through indigenous, vernacular values.

Thus, the wayang (shadow puppet) and kalimat sada (the decree of faith in Islam, recited as an amulet of heroic wayang figures) and other examples are attributed to the theological aesthetics of Sunan Kalijaga, one of the main disseminators of Islam in the archipelago.

This syncretic culture permeated all regions including Aceh. This is why the recent concept of Islam Nusantara (Islam of the Archipelago) signifies the shared geography of Islam, which has reduced the centralization of Java.

Provincializing Java is necessary to see how other islands and people outside Java articulate, perform and embrace Islam in one and many ways.

Within the spirit of syncretic culture, Muslims in the wake of nationalism can accept a secular form of sovereignty and follow the Indic, but universal aphorism Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (unity in diversity) as a national motto.

The long acceptance of a legal maxim in Islam, like al-adah muhakamah, that local values is a source of law making, tinted the process of inclusion.

The formation of names in Indonesia is another illustration. In India today, Hindu worshipers are mostly given Sanskrit names, and Muslims are given Arabic, Persian or Urdu names.

The Islamic nationhood of Sir Muhammad Iqbal and the secular imagination of Jawaharlal Nehru caused the bipartition of “two intertwined identities” of Pakistan and India in the 1940s.

The Persian power of sulh-e kul (universal peace), created at the behest of Emperor Akbar in 16th-century Mughal Empire to create religious harmony, was not really a legacy for today’s India.

But thankfully in Indonesia, the idea of universal peace was clearly present and its motto even reflects a Sanskrit legacy for a Muslim majority and plural nation.

Indra Jaya, Diah Pitaloka and Surya, for example, are known as Muslim names, in addition to Arabic names that in the past particularly belonged to santri or pious Muslims.

This has been challenged recently by the Salafi tendency to convert a “Hindu” name into an “Islamic” name, like the celebrity Teuku Wisnu who has renamed himself after Sultan Muhammad al-Fatih.

However, the name of the Sultan known as the Conqueror of Constantinople was colloquially pronounced as Fatih Sultan Mehmet, like Memet or Mamet in Java, and the Sultan was himself a polyglot, or at least aware of the linguistic richness (Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and another local languages) in the early Ottoman state.

The Ottoman Empire became a unity of multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies with Sufi and Hanafi elements that incorporated indigenous norms. The name of the cleric known as Ustadh Bakhtiyar, who helped Tengku Wisnu change his name, has its origin from Persian, not Arabic.

Such ignorance of history, in general, cohabits nowadays with the use of Salafi-Wahhabi rigidity to purify everything perceived as dangerous and evil.

We have recently seen some notorious attempts to link Indonesian heritage with everything Islamic, such as the temptation to identify the Majapahit kingdom as a Sultanate and Borobudur as the legacy of Solomon without considering scientific inquiry, as encouraged by Islam itself.

In preserving our diversity we can see that Bhinneka Tunggal Ika was the modernly sophisticated strategy of Akbar’s sulh-e kul. This motto of universal peace contains a tawhidic paradigm; it’s a radical philosophy to embrace the plurality of human beings who believe in God, the only One, but one that can be expressed with the 99 sacred names of Allah.

Thus, like in the Mughal Empire, we find many encounters between Sanskrit-Indic traditions with Perso-Arabic literary traditions.

Our predecessors read and wrote the Kitab Sri Rama legend, but were also inspired by the cosmopolitan Perso-Arabic tradition. Islamic and Hindu elements encountered each other. Many examples of such interreligious encounters are evident. Chinese and European influences also formed our textual and cultural hybridity.

During today’s religious populism or extremism, as also happening in India, we should be more aware of any attempts that are detrimental to the principle of our diversity.

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The writer is working on early modern Islamic thought for his PhD at Freie Universitaet Berlin and is a 2017 Drewes fellow at Leiden University where he will examine the Sufi heretics in the Malay world. The article is based on an earlier presentation on Islam Nusantara, convened by the Dutch chapter of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU).