Talk:Sunan Gunungjati

Ancestry
''Moved from article. This need substantial cleanup (for clarity and citations) beforer being considered to restore to the article.'' RJFJR (talk) 16:35, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

As for his ancestry, another source from the Hadhramaut ulamas' (religious scholars) has it that Sunan Gunung Jati, who is also identified as Syarif Hidayatullah, was born around 1450.

His lineage is traced through a descendant of Hadhrami sayyids who had started to migrate to India possibly at about the 12th and/or 13th century. References can be obtained from the Arabic genealogy books Shams Al-Zahirah, Mushajjar al-Ansab and Khidmat al-Ashirah among others.

Syarif Hidayatullah @ Sunan Gunung Jati bin Abdullah (Cambodia) bin Ali Nur al-Alam (Siam) bin Jamaludin Akbar @ Syaikh Jamaluddin Akbar (Gujerat, India) bin Ahmad Jalaludin Khan bin Abdullah Khan bin Abdul Malik bin Alawi Ammil Faqih bin Muhammad Sohib Mirbath.

Muhammad Sohib Mirbath is a descendant from Ahmad Al-Muhajir bin Isa, who is in turn a descendant of Ali Zainal Abidin bin Al-Hussain the son of Ali bin Abu Talib and Fatimah binte Muhammad the Messenger of Islam. Ahmad bin Isa migrated from Baghdad, Iraq to Medina/Mecca first before proceeding to Hadhramaut, Yemen around 898.

This seems to be more plausible lineage compared to the proposal that he is a descendant of a Hashemite clan from Palestine. One reason is that the Islamisation of Indonesia, in fact of the whole South East Asian region, is often accompanied by traders mainly from the Indian continent. Indian influence on South-East Asia especially Indonesia prior to the spread of Islam is also a well-known fact.

As is most Indonesian adopts the Shafii sect just like the Hadhramis. Traditions like visiting tombs of saints, known as ziarah wali, is also one that is practised in large scales in India and Hadhramaut especially.

Genealogical record keeping has also been a strict discipline among the sayyids of Hadhramis, even if they have migrated to India as in the past, or to Indonesia.