Sulu Series · Episode 2 — The Founding That Cannot Be Proven: The Tarsila and the Birth of the Sulu Sultanate

Sulu Series — Episode 2 of 5. ← Previous: Episode 1: The Three Kings of Sulu · Next → Episode 3: The Fort That Could Not Be Held. Full arc: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5.

The Founding Story

The conventional account of the Sulu Sultanate’s foundation goes like this. In the late 14th century, an Arab missionary named Sheikh Karim ul-Makhdum arrived in the Sulu archipelago, established a small Islamic community at Simunul in the Tawi-Tawi group, and built a mosque whose successor structure still stands. Around the turn of the 15th century, Rajah Baguinda, a prince from Minangkabau in Sumatra, arrived in Sulu and consolidated the early Muslim community under his authority. Around 1450, Sharif ul-Hashim Sayyid Abu Bakr arrived from Palembang via Mecca, married Rajah Baguinda’s daughter Paramisuli, and proclaimed himself Sultan — founding the Sulu Sultanate as a formal Islamic polity that would persist until the Carpenter Agreement of 1915.

This is the version found in nearly every general account of Philippine history. It is the version Filipino schoolchildren learn. It is the version inscribed on the historical markers of Tawi-Tawi and Sulu. It is the version that anchors the Sultanate’s claim to a continuous 465-year sovereignty.

It is also the version that rests, almost entirely, on a single source: the Tarsila of Sulu.

This story is about what the Tarsila is, what it can support, and what the cost is of building a national historical narrative on an evidentiary base that most professional historians of Sulu treat with significant caution.

What a Tarsila Is

The word tarsila comes from the Arabic silsilah, meaning “chain” — specifically, the chain of transmission by which knowledge or authority is passed from one generation to the next. In Islamic scholarly tradition, a silsilah is the documented genealogy of a teacher’s intellectual lineage, traced back through a sequence of named teachers to a foundational figure (a Companion of the Prophet, a recognized scholar, or a saint).

In the Malay world, silsilah/tarsila came to denote dynastic genealogies — the documented descent of a ruling family, traced back through named ancestors to a founding figure (usually a religiously legitimate one, often claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad through one of his daughters’ lines). The Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, the Sejarah Melayu, the Brunei Salasilah — all are tarsila in this broader sense, dynastic chronicles that establish the religious-political legitimacy of ruling houses by anchoring them in genealogies of sacred descent.

The Tarsila of Sulu is the dynastic chronicle of the Sulu royal house. It exists not as a single text but as a family of related documents in Jawi script (Arabic alphabet adapted for Malay) held in private custody by various Sulu datu families. The text known to Western scholarship is the version translated by Najeeb M. Saleeby and published in his The History of Sulu (Manila: Bureau of Science, 1908). Saleeby worked from manuscripts supplied by his Sulu informants. He provided English translation and historical commentary. His version has been the foundation of nearly all subsequent scholarship.

There is, to date, no published critical edition of the Tarsila in its original Jawi script with full philological apparatus, variant readings, and stemmatic analysis of the manuscript tradition. This is one of the most consequential gaps in Philippine historiography. The text on which the entire conventional history of the Sultanate’s founding rests has not been subjected to the kind of textual-critical analysis that would be considered standard for any comparable source in Mediterranean or European medieval studies.

The Three Waves

The Tarsila narrates the Islamization and political founding of Sulu as a sequence of three arrivals, separated by roughly two generations each.

The first wave is Sheikh Karim ul-Makhdum (often shortened to Makhdum Karim; the title Makhdum means “the served one” — a religious teacher with disciples). He is presented as an Arab Muslim missionary who reaches Sulu in approximately the 1380s, propagates Islam among the local population, and establishes the first mosque in the archipelago at Simunul in the Tawi-Tawi group. He dies in Sulu and is buried locally; tradition identifies a tomb on Sibutu island as his.

The second wave is Rajah Baguinda, a prince said to have come from Minangkabau (highland Sumatra) in approximately the 1390s or early 1400s. He arrives with a retinue, defeats local opposition, and consolidates rule over the Muslim community that Makhdum had founded. He marries into the local elite and founds a small Islamic principality. He has a daughter named Paramisuli (also rendered Paramisuri).

The third wave is Sharif ul-Hashim Sayyid Abu Bakr, who arrives in approximately the 1450s from Palembang in southern Sumatra (with a stated intermediate journey to Mecca). The Tarsila claims his descent from the Prophet Muhammad through the Hashemite line. He marries Paramisuli, succeeds Rajah Baguinda, and proclaims himself Sultan — taking the formal Islamic political title for the first time and founding what becomes the Sulu Sultanate.

Each wave is less corroborated by external sources than the last. Makhdum’s arrival is consistent with the broader pattern of Islamic missionary activity through the Malay world in the 14th century, and the Sufi-style practice of itinerant religious teachers establishing local mosques is well-documented across Southeast Asia in the period. Rajah Baguinda has potential parallels in the Sumatran-to-Borneo princely diaspora of the 15th century. Sharif Abu Bakr’s claimed Hashemite descent fits a recurring pattern of Malay-Muslim ruling houses claiming sharifian lineage as a basis for political legitimacy.

But “consistent with broader patterns” is not the same as “independently corroborated by external evidence.” For each of the three figures, no Chinese, Arab, European, or other non-Sulu source independently records their existence or their actions. They are, evidentially, Tarsila figures.

The Simunul Mosque Problem

The most visible material claim associated with the Tarsila tradition is the Sheik Karimal Makhdum Mosque on Simunul Island, Tawi-Tawi. Local tradition identifies this site as the location of the first mosque in the Philippines, built by Makhdum Karim in the 1380s. It is celebrated as such in Philippine national heritage discourse, marked with historical markers, and incorporated into the heritage tourism of the southwestern Philippines.

The current physical structure on the site is a 20th-century reinforced concrete reconstruction. There has been no published archaeological excavation of the foundations or surroundings to date material remains beneath the modern building. The site’s continuous religious significance to the local Muslim community is real and well-established — there is no doubt that this has been a sacred site within living memory and within multi-generational community tradition. What is not established is whether the founding-date claim (c. 1380s) can be supported by datable material evidence at the site.

This is a careful distinction. The site is religiously significant. The community memory is genuine. The foundation-date claim is not, presently, archaeologically supported.

This kind of claim — material veneration of a site whose attributed founding cannot be archaeologically verified — is common throughout religious heritage globally and is not in itself problematic. The problem arises only when the founding-date claim is presented in scholarly or educational contexts as established fact rather than as community tradition. Saleeby treated the date as Tarsila tradition; subsequent popular accounts have often presented it as fact.

Source-criticism card: the Tarsila of Sulu

Custody chain: Composed in Jawi script by court scribes (date uncertain; possibly 16th–18th century). Held by Sulu datu families in private custody. Translated by Najeeb M. Saleeby in 1908 from informant-supplied manuscripts. No published critical edition of the Jawi originals.

Tier: B — indigenous chronicle source; primary in the sense that it is the surviving voice of Sulu dynastic memory; secondary in the sense that its composition postdates the events it describes by an unknown but substantial period.

Reliability — general narrative framework: MEDIUM. The three-wave Islamization model and the Sultanate founding are consistent with broader regional patterns; the named figures are plausible.

Reliability — specific dates: LOW. The c. 1380s, c. 1400s, and c. 1450 dates are inferences from regnal-count calculations within the Tarsila and have no independent external corroboration.

Reliability — specific genealogical claims: LOW to MEDIUM. Variant recensions show inconsistent genealogical chains, suggesting editorial intervention by successive copyists to serve current dynastic claims at the time of each copying.

Use guidance: Treat the narrative framework as plausible. Treat specific dates as conventions rather than facts. Always note that the Tarsila is the only source for the founding figures and that no critical edition of the original Jawi has been published.

The 1417 Anchor

There is one external piece of evidence that interacts directly with the Tarsila tradition, and it is consequential. The Ming Shilu entry on the 1417 Sulu tribute mission to China — discussed at length in Story 1 of this series — records the Eastern King’s name in a transcription that some scholars read as including the element Muhammad Kamaluddin, an unmistakably Islamic personal name.

If this reading is correct, then Sulu’s ruling stratum included Islamized members by 1417 — three decades before the Tarsila dates the Sultanate’s founding under Sharif Abu Bakr. This does not contradict the Tarsila narrative; the Tarsila places the Makhdum and Rajah Baguinda waves before the Sultanate proper, so an Islamized Sulu elite in 1417 is consistent with the Makhdum (c. 1380s) and Rajah Baguinda (c. 1400s) waves having already occurred.

But the 1417 evidence does shift the analytical weight of the founding question. It establishes that Islamization preceded the Sultanate as a political institution by at least one generation — the Sulu elite was already Muslim before any “Sultan” title was claimed. The transformation from Islamizing chiefdom to formal Sultanate happened sometime between 1417 (when there were three concurrent kings, one of them Muslim) and the first European contact in the early 16th century (when there was clearly a single Sultan). The Tarsila places this transformation around 1450 with Sharif Abu Bakr. The 1417 evidence does not confirm or contradict this dating; it simply confirms that the religious transformation was already in progress.

This is the cleanest evidentiary statement that can presently be made about the founding period:

Islamization of the Sulu ruling stratum had begun by 1417 (Anchored, Ming Shilu)
A unitary Sultanate was in place by the early 16th century when European observers first describe Sulu (Anchored, Spanish sources)
The transition from plural Islamizing chiefdom to unitary Sultanate occurred sometime between these two dates (Inferred)
The Tarsila places the transition around 1450 under Sharif Abu Bakr (Tarsila tradition; not externally confirmed)

The c. 1450 date is, in this framing, a working convention rather than a proven fact. It is the date that the indigenous tradition gives, and absent contradicting evidence, it is reasonable to accept it as the conventional date for the Sultanate’s founding. But it should not be cited as if it had the same evidentiary weight as the 1417 Ming mission or the 1578 Spanish first contact.

Brunei or Palembang?

A second contested element of the founding narrative concerns Sharif Abu Bakr’s geographic origin. The Tarsila states that he came from Palembang in southern Sumatra, with a stated intermediate journey to Mecca. The historian Robert Nicholl, working from Brunei sources, has argued that the actual route of Abu Bakr’s arrival was more probably from or via Brunei rather than directly from Palembang. The Brunei Sultanate by the mid-15th century was a major Islamic political center on the northwest coast of Borneo, in close geographic proximity to Sulu, and with documented political and commercial ties to the Sulu region.

Both readings have circumstantial support. The Tarsila’s Palembang claim fits the broader Malay-world pattern of tracing royal legitimacy back to the great Islamic centers of Sumatra (Aceh, Pasai, Palembang). Nicholl’s Brunei argument fits the geographic and political logic of the period — Brunei was the proximate Islamic neighbor and the natural source of an Islamic political-administrative model for Sulu. The two readings are not necessarily incompatible: it is possible that Abu Bakr (or whoever the founding figure historically was) had connections to both centers, with the Tarsila emphasizing the more prestigious and distant Palembang origin for legitimacy reasons while the actual operational base was Brunei.

The dispute is not resolvable from currently available evidence. It is worth noting because it illustrates a broader feature of tarsila as a genre: dynastic chronicles tend to maximize the prestige of founding figures (more distant origin, more illustrious genealogy, more dramatic founding journey), and modern scholarship has to read these claims with appropriate skepticism while not dismissing them outright.

What the Tarsila Carries

If the Tarsila’s specific dates are unreliable and its genealogies are subject to editorial intervention, why does it remain the central source for Sultanate origins?

Because nothing else exists. The pre-1578 Sulu world is documented from outside (Chinese sources discussed in Story 1) and from within only through the Tarsila tradition. There are no contemporary chronicles by visiting Arab travelers (the way Ibn Battuta documents Maldives or Sumatra). There are no surviving administrative records from the Sultanate’s first century. There is no body of legal or commercial documentation from before the 17th century. The Tarsila is what survives.

What the Tarsila can credibly carry, with appropriate caution, is:

The general narrative framework of three-wave Islamization. The pattern of itinerant religious teachers followed by dynastic founders is common across Southeast Asian Islamization and the Sulu version fits the regional pattern.
The structural claim that the Sulu Sultanate emerged from the convergence of indigenous political authority with imported Islamic religious-political legitimacy. This claim is independently consistent with everything we know about how Islamic sultanates formed in maritime Southeast Asia.
The legal-political institutions that the Tarsila tradition describes — the use of Arabic-derived governance vocabulary (sultan, sharif, sayyid, imam, qadi), the hybrid sharia-and-adat legal system, the Agi-agi sa Sug customary code — are documented from the 17th century onward and provide retrospective evidence for the kind of polity the Tarsila describes the Sultanate as becoming.
The community memory of founding figures who are venerated at specific sites and remembered in specific ways. This is real cultural-historical evidence even when the specific factual claims cannot be confirmed.

What the Tarsila cannot reliably carry is the specific factual claim about which year the Sultanate was founded, which figure founded it, and what his exact genealogy was. These are the kinds of claims that require external corroboration to be treated as fact, and that corroboration does not exist.

The Distributed Sovereignty Beneath

The Tarsila’s narrative is a story of dynastic founding — the emergence of a unitary Sultanate under a single sovereign who derives legitimacy from a single line of religious-political descent. This is the story dynastic chronicles tell, and it is the story that subsequent scholarship has often reproduced.

But it is worth noticing what this story occludes. The Tausug society into which Makhdum, Rajah Baguinda, and Sharif Abu Bakr arrived — if they arrived as the Tarsila says they did — was already a structured political world. It had its own datus, its own kin-group authorities, its own customary law (adat), its own ritual specialists, its own systems for managing land and water and inter-community conflict. The 1417 evidence shows us a polity with at least three concurrent kings — distributed sovereignty as a structural feature, not as a transitional disorder.

When the Sultanate was founded, what happened was not the imposition of order on chaos. It was the placement of an Islamic-political apex over an existing distributed structure. The new institution of the Sultan added a layer; it did not replace the layers below. The datus continued to exist. The kin-groups continued to govern themselves. The customary law continued to operate. The Sultanate worked because it sat atop a functioning indigenous political structure — and it would survive the centuries it survived because that indigenous structure provided the substrate on which Sultanate power continuously regenerated.

This is the same point that becomes explicit in Stories 3 through 5 of this series, when Spanish, then American, colonial powers attack the Sultanate’s apex and discover that the structure beneath cannot be reached. The pattern was set at the founding. The Sultanate was always, from its origin, a layered sovereignty rather than a unitary one. The Tarsila tells the apex story. The substrate story is the longer and more durable one.

This matters for how we should read the founding. It is conventional to say that “the Sulu Sultanate was founded c. 1450.” It would be more accurate to say that a unitary Islamic sovereign apex was placed over the existing distributed political structure of the Sulu peoples around the mid-15th century, and that this apex (the Sultanate) became the institution through which Sulu engaged with external powers from the late 15th century onward. The peoples and their distributed sovereignty long predated the Sultanate. They would also outlast it.

What We Should Say, and How

Honest historiography of the Sulu Sultanate’s founding requires holding several things at once.

We should say that the Tarsila is the central indigenous source for the founding period and that it deserves to be treated with the respect due to a community’s own account of its origins.

We should say that the Tarsila’s narrative framework is plausible and consistent with broader regional patterns of Islamization and dynastic founding.

We should say that the Tarsila’s specific dates and genealogies are not externally corroborated and should be cited as Tarsila tradition rather than as established historical fact.

We should say that the c. 1450 date for the Sultanate’s founding is a working convention drawn from the Tarsila and that it has not been independently verified.

We should say that the 1417 Ming evidence anchors Islamization of the Sulu elite by that date and is the firmest external evidence for the religious transformation that preceded or coincided with Sultanate formation.

We should say that the Sultanate as it emerges in 16th-century European records was a real, functioning Islamic polity — whatever the precise circumstances of its founding — and that its political and religious institutions are documented from the 17th century onward.

We should say that beneath the Sultanate, the distributed political structure of the Sulu peoples — the datus, the kin-groups, the customary law, the religious life — continued to operate as the actual fabric of community sovereignty, and that this substrate is older than the Sultanate, lasted as long as the Sultanate, and continued after the Sultanate.

These statements together preserve both the precision that the documentary record permits and the honesty that the gaps in that record require. They neither dismiss the Tarsila tradition (which would be an act of colonial-style devaluation of indigenous historical memory) nor uncritically accept it as fact (which would be a different kind of intellectual failure). They locate the Sultanate’s founding in the appropriate epistemological space: a story that is most likely substantially true in its general outline, that is supported by the firmest evidence available to a community working with limited contemporary documentation, and that should be cited with the qualifiers that honesty requires.

A Founding That Cannot Be Proven

The Sulu Sultanate cannot prove the date of its founding. Few Southeast Asian sultanates can. Brunei cannot prove the date of its founding with the kind of evidentiary precision that European historiography demands. Malacca’s founding date is reconstructed from later chronicles and external references rather than from contemporary documentation. The Aceh Sultanate’s origins are similarly clouded.

This is not a deficiency of the Sulu sources alone. It is a structural feature of Southeast Asian historical evidence in the late medieval and early modern period — a region where sustained literacy was concentrated in court and religious circles, where most documents were composed on perishable materials, where institutional archives in the European sense were not maintained, and where the strongest contemporary external observations came from Chinese sources whose own categories distort what they describe.

What the Sulu Sultanate has — what it can offer — is a tradition (the Tarsila), a network of community memories, a continuous institutional history from the 16th century through 1915, a body of legal and religious institutions that survive into the present, and a 1417 Chinese state record that anchors at least one element of the founding narrative. This is, in fact, a good evidentiary base by the standards of the region. It is not the kind of evidentiary base that permits the precision a modern reader might expect, but it is enough to support the central claim: that Sulu became, in the mid-15th century, an organized Islamic sultanate that would persist for nearly five centuries.

The founding cannot be proven in the way that, say, the founding of the United States can be proven. It can be evidenced, with appropriate caveats, in the way that Southeast Asian dynastic foundings of the same period can be evidenced. The honest reader should hold the c. 1450 date as a useful convention, the Tarsila as a respected indigenous source, and the 1417 anchor as the firmest external evidence — and should resist the temptation to collapse this layered epistemic situation into a falsely confident factual claim.

The next story picks up the Sultanate at its first contact with European observers — a moment when the documentary record becomes substantially thicker, the evidentiary problems shift, and the Sulu polity, whatever the exact circumstances of its founding, demonstrates beyond doubt its capacity to defend itself against an empire.

Quarantined Claims

Applying the framework laid out in Story 1 — Anchored / Probable / Contested / Speculative / Unknown / Quarantined — the following claims are explicitly excluded from this story’s reconstruction:

QUARANTINED: That “the Sulu Sultanate was founded in 1450” is an established historical fact. It is a working convention drawn from the Tarsila; the date has no independent external corroboration. The honest formulation is “conventionally dated c. 1450.”
QUARANTINED: That the Tarsila is a contemporary chronicle of the founding events. It is a later dynastic compilation by court scribes whose composition postdates the events by an unknown but substantial period; it is the surviving voice of Sulu memory, not a contemporary record.
QUARANTINED: That the Simunul mosque is archaeologically dated to the 1380s. The current structure is a 20th-century concrete reconstruction. The site’s continuous religious significance is real; its founding-date claim is community tradition, not material-archaeological fact.
QUARANTINED: That the Sultanate replaced or extinguished the pre-existing distributed political structure of the Sulu peoples. The Sultanate was layered over an existing datu-and-kin-group substrate; the substrate continued to operate beneath the apex throughout the Sultanate’s life.
QUARANTINED: That sharifian descent claims in the Tarsila can be evaluated as biographical genealogy. They function as a Malay-world legitimation idiom and should be read in that register; treating them as biographical genealogy misreads the genre.

Primary sources: The Tarsila of Sulu, in the version translated by Najeeb M. Saleeby in The History of Sulu (Manila: Bureau of Science, 1908); Ming Shilu (Veritable Records of the Ming), Yongle reign 15th year (1417) entries on the Sulu mission; early 16th-century European references to Sulu, including Tomé Pires, Suma Oriental (c. 1515) for the broader Malay-world Islamic merchant network. Secondary: Najeeb M. Saleeby, The History of Sulu (1908) and Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905); Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973), especially chapters on the Islamization of Sulu and the founding of the Sultanate; Robert Nicholl, “Brunei Rediscovered: A Survey of Early Times,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14.1 (1983) and related articles on the Brunei-Sulu connection; Midori Kawashima (ed.), The Qur’an and Islamic Manuscripts of Mindanao (2012) for context on the Jawi manuscript tradition; Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 1: The Lands Below the Winds (1988) and vol. 2: Expansion and Crisis (1993); William Henry Scott, Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History (1984); Roderich Ptak, “From Quanzhou to the Sulu Zone and Beyond,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29.2 (1998). Internal cross-references: see “The Three Kings of Sulu” for the 1417 Ming evidence that anchors pre-Sultanate Islamization, and “The Fort That Could Not Be Held” for the Sultanate as it appears in the first European observations.