Sultanate of Demak Founded in Java

1466

On the northern coast of Java, Muslim merchants and local converts established the Sultanate of Demak, the first Islamic state on an island that had been Hindu-Buddhist for well over a millennium. Demak's rise marked the beginning of Islam's gradual but irreversible displacement of Hindu-Javanese civilization from the coastal lowlands, a cultural transformation that would take two centuries to complete and would ultimately produce the world's largest Muslim-majority country.