The Iranian-Siamese Connection: An Iranian Community in the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya

Abstract

Those who are familiar with the history of Muslim civilization in Southeast Asia in general, and in Thailand in particular, might be conversant with traces of the Malay or Arabic cultural and religious influences in this region. Cultural interchanges between Iran and maritime Southeast Asia during the pre-Islamic period have been studied by a number of scholars including Brian Colless who wrote several works on the activities of Nestorian and Armenian Christians in the region during the Sasanid period. Much more work has been done on Iranian influences in the spread of Islam into Southeast Asia although the interpretation of the phenomenon often depends on the religious perspective of the writer. Much of the modern literature focuses on actual or alleged Persian elements in Malay language, literature, and culture. The purpose of the present paper is to review some of the literature to date on the Iranian community in the Siamese Ayutthaya kingdom in the seventeenth century and to highlight the main problems those studies have focused on.