PASAI AND CONSTANTINOPLE Hybrid Legitimacies and Multiple Identities in the 15th Century Muslim Societies

Abstract

This article provides an alternative historical explanation that challenges the monolithic portrayal of premodern Muslim polities. Prevailing narratives often emphasize Islam as the sole dominant identity, relegating Southeast Asia to the ‘periphery’ of the Islamic world and reducing the Ottoman governance to purely Islamic ideals. This article reconsiders how Muslim polities in the fifteenth century forged legitimacy through strategies that were neither monolithic nor exclusively Islamic. Focusing on the Sultanate of Pasai in Sumatra and the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, it demonstrates how rulers embedded themselves in multiple traditions, Islamic, Indic, indigenous, and Greco-Roman Christian, at once. Through textual analysis of primary texts, Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, Tarih-i Ebü’l Fath, Târih-i Beyân-ı Binâ-yı Ayasofya-yı Kebîr, and History of Mehmed the Conqueror, this study demonstrates that both Pasai and the Ottomans integrated hybrid traditions to construct their sovereignty. Highlighting these multilayered repertoires adopts a polycentric rather than center-periphery framework, one in which Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean emerge as dynamic, interconnected sites of Muslim statecraft.