Sasak

The Sasak are the Austronesian people of Lombok in the Lesser Sunda Islands, related to the Balinese and the peoples of Sumbawa. Their name appears in an eleventh-century Balinese inscription and the fourteenth-century Negarakertagama.

The palm-leaf chronicle Babad Lombok recalls how the island's chief kingdom, with its trading capital Pamatan at the foot of Mount Samalas, was destroyed by the eruption of 1257, easing the Balinese conquest in 1284. By the fourteenth century the island was under Majapahit rule; the Balinese kingdom of Gelgel conquered it in the early sixteenth century.

Islam reached Lombok in the fifteenth century and spread among the Sasak from the late 1500s, blending with older animist and Hindu ideas into the Wetu Telu tradition of prayer three times a day. From 1692 the Balinese kingdom of Karangasem ruled many Sasak villagers until the nineteenth century.