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Monsoon Islam
Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian Prange argues that this “Monsoon Islam” was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India’s Malabar Coast, the muchfabled “land of pepper”, Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges.
Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.
Sebastian R. Prange is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia.
Introduction
The First Indian Muslim I am the space where I am. – Noël Arnaud, L’état d’ébauche (1950) At the turn of the seventh century, a powerful South Indian king beheld an extraordinary astronomical event. Gazing at the stars sparkling above the Arabian Sea one night, he saw the moon divide into two halves, before it once again merged back into its customary shape. The awestruck king was Cheraman Perumal, the Hindu sovereign of the Chera dynasty, one of the three ancient Tamil royal houses that ruled over southern India. His realm was the westernmost portion of the Tamilakam, a region known to foreigners as Malabar or simply “the land of pepper”; its limits correspond more or less to those of the present-day Indian state of Kerala (which takes it names from the Chera dynasty).
Upon witnessing this unwonted celestial occurrence, Cheraman Perumal summoned his Hindu astronomers, who although competent enough to accurately forecast eclipses, could not account for this unprecedented phenomenon. Later that night, however, it was revealed to the king in a dream that what he had seen in the night sky had been a miracle, performed by a man called Muhammad from a land across the sea. Some years later, a group of Jewish and Christian traders disembarked on the Malabar Coast. They had come for the same reason that drew most travellers to this part of India: to purchase black pepper, the most important ingredient in the Indian Ocean spice trade, on which Malabar enjoyed a near-monopoly. Granted a royal audience, these traders told the king about an agitator back in Arabia, a man called Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd-Allāh who claimed to be a prophet and was said to have employed magic to split the moon. A few years later still, a group of Muslim pilgrims arrived at the Chera court on their way to Sri Lanka, where they intended to visit the venerated site of Adam’s Peak. The king quizzed these Muslims about their pilgrimage, but above all about their faith and its prophet.
They related to him the miracle of the splitting of the moon, as recorded in sūrah al-Qamar (“The Moon”) of the Quran. The king requested that the pilgrims return to his court on their homeward journey. When they did so, he divided his realm among his ministers before joining the Muslims on their voyage back to Arabia. There, Cheraman Perumal was converted to Islam at the hands of the Prophet himself, becoming the first Indian Muslim. After a few years in Arabia, the convert king decided to return to his native land, but died on the Omani coast before he could set sail for India. Just before his death, however, he instructed a group of Arab Muslims in whose company he was travelling to proceed to Malabar regardless, and to propagate his new faith there. It was this group of Arabs who first introduced Islam to the Indian subcontinent.
Monsoon Islam This apocryphal account of the South Indian ruler Cheraman Perumal epitomizes a particular trajectory of Islamic history as it intersects with the history of the Indian Ocean. The story-world of the legend – made up of rulers, traders, holy men, and pilgrims who are part of the transoceanic exchange of people, ideas, and patronage – is not invented of whole cloth but consistent with the way in which historians have come to understand the trading world of maritime Asia. In recent years, a growing number of studies has shifted our focus onto the languages, cultural content, political projects, and personal ambitions that traversed the ocean alongside trade. During the medieval period, the most momentous of these non-material transfers was the spread of Islam along the shores of monsoon Asia.1
As Muslim merchants established communities in all the flourishing port cities of the Indian Ocean, Islamic beliefs and practices were carried across vast distances and came into contact with diverse societies on a scale comparable only to the initial expansion of the caliphate during the seventh century. This movement along the maritime trade routes, however, was not predicated on military conquest, political hegemony, or imperial design: the expansion of Muslim communities across monsoon Asia between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries took place haphazardly, incidental to the development of Muslim trade networks.
The principal agents in this extension of the medieval Muslim world were not sultans, soldiers, or scholars but ordinary, humdrum traders whose main objective was not to spread their faith but to turn a profit. It is the central contention of this book that this process was fundamentally shaped by the interaction of these ordinary Muslims – ordinary in the sense in that they were neither representatives of state power nor recognized religious authorities – with non-Muslim societies.2 This dynamic informed the development of Islamic norms and practices even in those regions of the Indian Ocean that eventually came under Muslim rule and that over time developed into majority Muslim societies, such as the Swahili Coast, the Maldives, or Aceh. Islam was never a stable, monolithic entity, and in places across monsoon Asia, far from Arabia, local receptions, understandings, and practices were crucial to its historical development.
The communities that grew out of the settlement of Muslim traders in port cities across maritime Asia have proved long-lasting: every major historic port-of-trade in the Indian Ocean has a Muslim community that in some way traces its history back to these premodern exchanges. The effects of the interaction between local societies and Islam, however, have differed widely. Some regions, such as East Africa or peninsular Southeast Asia, have been profoundly shaped by their interaction with Islamic beliefs, law, and institutions, while others such as southern India or southern China to a much lesser degree.
This book is a study of both these dynamics: the spread of Islam through the agency of Muslim merchants on the one hand, and the effects on Islam of their interaction with non-Muslim societies across the medieval Indian Ocean world on the other. In other words, it seeks to both look outwards, towards the movements of Muslim communities in space and time, as well as inwards, to ask how these communities understood and responded to changes in their social and political environments. The core argument is that during this period, a particular form of Islamic thought and practice emerged from these twin processes. This Monsoon Islam of the Indian Ocean was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies.
Muslims in the trading ports of monsoon Asia observed the principal acts of their faith, the so-called pillars of Islam (arkān al-dīn), in the same manner as Muslims everywhere: they professed their belief in the one god with Muhammad as his messenger, performed the obligatory prayers, gave alms, fasted during the holy month, and strove to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. In other ways, however, they diverged. For example, they produced new interpretations of Islamic law designed to meet the specific needs of their heterogeneous communities; many prayed in buildings that looked like Hindu temples, and some worshipped saints outside of the Islamic tradition; some practised matrilineality contrary to the otherwise staunchly agnatic Islamic tradition; they professed new understandings of religiously sanctioned warfare (jihād), and to that end even re-defined what constitutes the “Muslim world” (dār al-Islām).
This apparent tension between orthopraxy and innovation reflects the broader challenge of reconciling Islam as an analytical category with Islam as a historical phenomenon. As Shahab Ahmed points out, any meaningful conceptualization “must come to terms with – indeed, be coherent with – the capaciousness, complexity, and, often, outright contradiction that obtains within the historical phenomenon that has proceeded from the human engagement with the idea and reality” of the Islamic faith.3 It is this human, historical engagement – in the form of religious thought, social practice, commercial connection, and political allegiance – that this book connotes as Monsoon Islam.
To be sure, Monsoon Islam is by no means a discrete school of Islamic philosophy: it is an etic category that does not represent a deliberate or coherent set of doctrines. Instead, it describes how Islam was realized by Muslims in the context of the trading world of the premodern Indian Ocean; not as abstract principles but in specific acts, attitudes, and ideas that responded to concrete historical situations and challenges. Importantly, these acts, attitudes, and ideas, however contradictory they may appear at times, were made sense of and articulated in terms of Islamic precept, history, and law – in other words, they were understood by these Muslims as Islam. 4 Monsoon Islam developed outside of the traditional Islamic heartlands and independent of the caliphate and its successor states, on the coastlines and in the trade emporia of the Indian Ocean. The term is emphatically not meant to suggest that this trajectory of Islamic history was defined by the monsoon as a climatic phenomenon, that somehow the weather patterns in regions affected by the Asian monsoon account for the prevalence of certain religious beliefs and attitudes there.
Nor is it intended as a rebuttal to the kind of nineteenth-century orientalism that identified Islam as the natural religion of the desert: “Le désert est monothéiste”, in the words of Ernest Renan, “[s]ublime dans son immense uniformité”.5 Instead, the term summons the “deep structure element” underlying Indian Ocean trade during the age of sail: the system of seasonally opposing trade winds known as the monsoons.6 In his survey of global maritime history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto posits ebulliently that compared to the diktat of fixed wind systems, other motors of history, be they culture, politics, or economics, pale in significance: “In most of our explanations of what happened in history, there is too much hot air and not enough wind”.7
On account of the persistent maritime corridors created by its wind system, Monsoon Asia formed “a natural space that favoured the longdistance movement of people, commodities, languages and ideas”.8 The monsoons determined when ships could travel eastwards or westwards, where merchants settled, and how far their commercial networks extended. In the words of Michael Pearson, the doyen of Indian Ocean studies: “The implications of the monsoons are endless”.9 In the evolution of Islam across maritime Asia, the monsoons enabled and structured the exchanges and interactions that shaped how Islam came to be understood, communicated, and applied by Muslims living on the different coasts it connected. It is in this sense, as a link that fostered interaction, exchange, and relationships across the vast distances of the ocean, that the term monsoon is used in this book.
The world of Monsoon Islam was first and foremost a commercial realm, and many of its chief characteristics were defined by the imperatives of doing business in settings that were unfamiliar (in the sense of kinship ties), foreign (in the sense of political boundaries), and alien (in the sense of cultural difference). Embedded within these complex trade relations across the ocean were many other forms of exchange: of texts, for instance, but most importantly of people with their beliefs, customs, connections, and rivalries. At its core, Monsoon Islam was the product of the tension between the distant and the local, between these Muslims’ role in far-flung trading networks and an Islamic cosmopolis on the one hand and, on the other, their need to negotiate the specific social, economic, and political conditions of particular trading locations. Muslim trading communities were interlinked not only by mutual commerce but also by the need for religious and political institutions that could address the particular needs of these far-flung diasporic settlements.
Many of these institutions continue to define the character and structures of Islam across monsoon Asia. One example of this is Islamic law, which is usually seen as the defining hallmark of the influence that Arabic high culture had on the religion. But Muslims in maritime Asia found themselves confronted by issues that were not addressed in the classical legal texts of Islam; so Muslim judges and legists in India and elsewhere began to issue their own legal opinions (Ar., fatāwā) to address the specific problems faced by Muslims living in non-Muslim societies, a context that was simply not envisaged by the standard treatises. That there was a real need for such legal commentaries that addressed the everyday matters of social life within a non-Islamic society – that is, in a diaspora setting – is evident from the fact that these texts were almost immediately taken up by other Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean which faced the same situation. For example, a commentary on Islamic law composed in South India was quickly adopted in Java; in fact, in a legacy of these trans-oceanic, inter-diasporic exchanges, this same legal text continues to be used by Muslim judges in Indonesia even today.10
This example highlights that the spread of Islam across the Indian Ocean was not a unilateral transfer of a stable, fully formed prototype into new settings. To translate is to create anew: Monsoon Islam is the product of the creative, cumulative effort to translate Islam (as a set of religious beliefs, legal norms, and social practices) into new settings. This effort was rooted in the precepts of a universalist faith and its cosmopolitan idiom, but needed to be adapted and justified in ways that were intelligible and acceptable locally. The legend of Cheraman Perumal, the convert king, is another example of this creative effort to bridge the divide between the global and the local, to designate a place for Islam within the social and political landscape of medieval South India. Monsoon Islam, then, offers a framework for conceptualizing a particular trajectory of Islamic history, one which evolved in the context of trade, accommodation, and the blending of practices and traditions. Arguably, it is this trajectory that has defined the lived reality of the majority of Muslims worldwide, even though it rarely figures in popular images of, or discourses about, Islam today. The history and legacy of this Monsoon Islam is the subject of this book.
Historiography This study is not the first to explore this history but part of an ongoing effort to decouple Islamic history from Middle Eastern studies. The primary aim of Marshall Hodgson’s monumental The Venture of Islam is to historicize Islam, for example by focusing on culture rather than the traditional mainstay of Islamic studies, law.11 Hodgson coined the term Islamicate to describe cultural elements that were not directly religious in nature but influenced by (and influential on) the historical development of Islam.
This led him to pay much greater attention to the development of Islamic civilization outside of its Arab heartland, in places such as India which he regarded as primary sites of religious innovation in the post-caliphate era.12 By tracing the development of Islamicate civilization outside of legal texts and beyond the boundaries of the old caliphate, The Venture of Islam offers a history of Islam that is not a narrative of the dissemination (or dilution) of an authentic (but increasingly corrupted) Islam steeped in Arabic high culture but rather the story of Muslims’ interaction with a much wider, and much more heterogeneous, world. A central strand of Hodgson’s work is the interactive nature of commerce, politics, and cultural change in the expansion of Islam across the Afro-Eurasian oecumene. Hodgson draws particular attention to the special role played by what he calls the commercial community in the expansion of Islam along the Indian Ocean littoral.
As a result of this mercantile influence on the spread and development of the religion there, “Islamdom in the westerly coasts of the Indian Ocean formed a political and intellectual world of its own”, a world in which “the focus of power lay in the Muslim communities of the many coastal towns”.13 From India, the “interregional citied commercial nexus” carried this strand of Islam from the western Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, which came to be tied into oecumene. Across these regions, Islamic law developed in relative independence from the traditional centres of Islamic scholarship of the period.14 It is in this cultural and commercial oecumene that Shahab Ahmed seeks the answer to the question posed in the title of his provocative book What is Islam? Like Hodgson, Ahmed looks east, to a vast swath of territory spanning from south-eastern Europe to South Asia, what he terms the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex” that is home to the majority of Muslims today: The Balkans-to-Bengal complex represents the most geographically, demographically and temporally extensive instance of a highly-articulated shared paradigm of life and thought in the history of Muslims – it is demographically, spatially, and temporally, an (if not the) historically major paradigm of Islam.15
In focusing on the historical development of Islam in this region, Ahmed counters a scholarly tradition that has deemed it insufficiently central or authentic to be at the heart of normative discussions about Islam. Acknowledging and studying Islam as a historical and human phenomenon, rather than as divine revelation or as a closed system of theological prescription, means having to grapple with the peoples and societies that have embraced it, claimed it, and shaped it. This approach is shared by Falloum Ngom, whose Muslims beyond the Arab World explores the development of Islam through West African literary traditions to show that the faith must be seen as “a set of processes and practices, texts and interpretations” that were adapted to the culturally specific ways of people around the globe.16 If the study of Islam is ultimately the study of Muslims, then both the Balkans-to-Bengal region and sub-Saharan Africa form essential parts of what Islam is; this book argues that the same holds true for the world of Monsoon Islam.
It is no coincidence that Hodgson’s notion of Islamicate culture was taken up most eagerly, and most productively, by historians of India, who were seeking to describe the merger of Islamic, Persianate, and Indic culture that characterized the sultanates of North India and the Deccan.17 Studies of paintings, architecture, poetry, courtly culture, political thought, military organization, medicine, and many other facets of South Asian history have been analysed through the lens of an IndoIslamic pattern of society and culture.18 The focal point of these studies tends to fall on North India, and especially the Mughal dynasty, as the centre of gravity of a Persianate realm of Indo-Islam. André Wink, in his magisterial study of the long-term evolution of this Indo-Islamic world, deviates from this pattern by firmly situating Indo-Islam against the history of the Indian Ocean, a sphere that otherwise tends to be regarded as peripheral to its development: In an overview of the entire period of Islamic expansion and hegemony in the East one fact stands out: the growth and development of a world-economy in and around the Indian Ocean – with India at its centre and the Middle East and China as its two dynamic poles – was effected by continued economic, social and cultural integration into ever wider and more complex patterns under the aegis of Islam. In a word, Islamization here stands for integration.19 Wink’s emphasis on the Indian Ocean, and especially on the economic connections it embodied, has been an impetus to study South Asian Islam from the perspective of seaborne connections rather than territorial empires.
Patricia Risso’s seminal effort to trace these connections has shown that tracing the intersection of Islamic and Indian Ocean history can offer a more accurate perspective on both.20 The general agenda laid out by Risso has been taken up in a series of detailed studies that probe different trajectories of Islam in the trading world of maritime Asia. Two themes have received particular attention: the organization of mercantile networks and the transmission of language and texts.21 Both strands of research emphasize circulation as the defining hallmark of oceanic networks. This interest in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas, rather than their mere transmission, has produced innovative new frameworks of enquiry that have rejected the conventional parameters of national and regional histories and have upended received chronologies. For example, Engseng Ho recovers the 500-year history of an “ecumenical Islam in an oceanic world” by tracing the material, genealogical, and imaginary exchanges of a trade diaspora that spanned between Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia.22 Ronit Ricci uses the lens of translation to reveal interconnected processes of Islamization in South and Southeast Asia, arguing for the existence of an “Arabic cosmopolis” that over centuries bound together Muslims from different parts of the Indian Ocean.23
Nile Green takes his readers to the intersection of Islam, imperialism, and industrialization to reveal colonial Bombay as a “primary city of Islam” that complicates notions of a uniform, global form of Islam centred on the Middle East.24 And Seema Alavi draws on the “easy mingling” of seafaring cultures with the religious, economic, and political networks in Indian port cities as an expression of the cosmopolitanism of South Asian Islam in the nineteenth century.25 What all these studies share is an understanding of Islam that is not predicated on an Arabian identity and that emphasizes the role of maritime networks in the formation of a variegated but interconnected Islamic world across monsoon Asia. The concept of Monsoon Islam is, of course, only as useful as the explanatory work it helps to do. It is presented here not as a dichotomy of essentialized geographies – the harsh and forbidding desert versus the fluid and encompassing ocean – nor as a simple binary between orthodoxy and diversity. Instead, it is intended to capture the institutional and practical consequences of the interaction of Islamic beliefs and norms with other beliefs and norms in the absence of a dominant Islamic political or social order. Out of this type of interaction emerged over time a different and distinct historical trajectory of Islam, one that contrasts with the historical experiences of Arabia, Persia, and North India but that was commonplace all across the medieval trading world of the Indian Ocean: an Islam that was shaped by the priorities and preferences of ordinary Muslim merchants as they traded and settled along the coastlines of monsoon Asia. Placing trans-cultural interaction at the core of Monsoon Islam is not to say that this interaction was always perforce peaceful.
The notion of the medieval Indian Ocean as a peaceful, cosmopolitan trading world unaffected by the kind of systematic violence that is a hallmark of Europe’s maritime history has come under increasing scrutiny, and rightly so.26 Just like the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean too was marked by piracy, privateering, and military contests over ports, routes, and maritime sovereignty. At some moments, as Chapter 2 will show, actors explicitly conceived of such violence in terms of Islam, by imbuing it with religious meaning and authority; in many other instances, though, violence was simply part of the general milieu of maritime trade, an inescapable constituent of the commercial and political milieu in which Muslim merchants operated.27 Monsoon Islam was not at odds with but a part of this interwoven history of rivalry, exploitation, and conflict. The phenomenon that the concept of Monsoon Islam seeks to describe is well enough documented to allow for confidence in its fidelity: recent studies on specific aspects of trans-oceanic exchanges, such as pilgrimage for example, have created the impression of an interwoven network of commercial, familial, religious, and political ties among Muslim trading diasporas across maritime Asia.28
On the foundation of its own comprehensive case study of the Malabar Coast, this book argues that understanding these various exchanges through the conceptual lens of Monsoon Islam makes these distinct network relationships legible as part of a broader, interrelated historical development. In doing so, this book responds to a call to move beyond static taxonomies by tracing alternative geographies demarcated by the mobilities of historical actors.29 Akin to Sheldon Pollock’s notion of a “Sanskrit cosmopolis” as a world of Indic literary and political culture that linked together South and Southeast Asia during the first millennium of the Common Era, the concept of Monsoon Islam can integrate different aspects of medieval Indian Ocean history into a broader narrative.30 Be it the invocation of a Persian sultan in Friday prayers on the Indian coast, East African scholars giving lessons in Islamic law to South Asian students in Mecca, or mosques in Sumatra that look like South Indian temples, Monsoon Islam is the bigger picture that emerges from these finer brushstrokes.
Setting: The Land of Pepper This book exemplifies the world of Monsoon Islam primarily through a case study of India’s Malabar Coast, a historic region that largely coincides with the modern Indian state of Kerala. Much of the history of this region revolves around its role as the primary producer of black pepper (Piper nigrum, Linn.). Between the months of June and September, the southwest monsoon (Malayal., Edavapathi) discharges a seemingly inexhaustible amount of rainfall over Kerala’s coastal plain and the slopes of the Western Ghats, which in the northern parts can easily exceed two metres in the span of just a few weeks. As a result, Kerala’s landscape is luxuriantly lush, providing, especially in the uplands, ideal conditions for the cultivation not only of the “king of spices”, pepper, but also of cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and other spices. In this book, the Malabar Coast is defined in its original sense, as the narrow sliver of land between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats where pepper is grown. Geographically, this approximately encompasses the area between the ports of Barkur in the north and Kollam in the south.31 This usage recommends itself for three reasons.
First, and most importantly, it largely conforms to how the term Malabar is used in the sources.32 Second, delineating the region by pepper cultivation reflects its defining characteristic in the eyes of the Muslim merchants who are the main protagonists of this book. And lastly, even though the word Malabar does not correspond to local Malayali usage it serves to encompass the region’s different polities. From the early twelfth century, if not earlier, the Coast was politically divided among a number of small principalities. These states were tied to one another in shifting political configurations as well as through shared religious and economic bonds. This nexus has been somewhat obscured in the historiography, which is characterized by studies of individual port cities or kingdoms at the expense of a broader, regional perspective. These interconnections are vital, however, to understanding the shifting economic activities and political alliances of Muslim trading groups on the Coast. Located at the southwesternmost limit of the Indian subcontinent and sheltered behind the towering mountain range of the Western Ghats, Malabar was peripheral to the rise and fall of India’s great empires. The region’s relative isolation from territorial India contrasts vividly with its orientation towards the sea.
Due to its central location within the Indian Ocean, it was a natural transhipment point for long-range monsoon navigation. Crucially, Malabar was also the primary supplier of black pepper, the single most important commodity of the Indian Ocean spice trade. The Malabar Coast was absolutely pivotal to the maritime trading world of monsoon Asia since ancient times. Situating Malabar firmly within an Indian Ocean context is not to detract from the region’s role within Indian history: it was indisputably part of the nexus of South Indian history as is evident from its culture, religion, and political structure. Notwithstanding, during the period considered in this study, the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the region developed idiosyncratically in a number of important aspects. From the twelfth century onwards, Malabar was no longer ruled by any of the ancient Tamil dynasties of South India. It was neither conquered by the expansionist Muslim dynasties that established themselves in North India and the Deccan, nor was it incorporated into the South Indian Hindu empires with which they stood in competition.33
Rather, from the twelfth century onwards, Malabar was characterized by its political fragmentation into a number of competing states. In a direct reflection of the region’s orientation towards the sea, the most powerful of these polities were not primarily based on agrarian holdings but centred on port cities. Partly as a result of this political context, the region’s dominant religion, Hinduism developed along an idiosyncratic path that diverged from other parts of India, for example in terms of the role of temple establishments, notions of sacred kingship, or social practices of caste. Islam, too, developed differently on the Malabar Coast than elsewhere on the subcontinent. In all likelihood, Islam in India began on the Malabar Coast.34 The Muslim faith arrived there not in the course of conquest but as a consequence of trade. And it did not reach the region after a centuries-long process of mediation and acculturation that defines the IndoPersian tradition, but in the form of beliefs, norms, and practices carried by Muslim merchants hailing from all different parts of the Indian Ocean trading world. Although maritime commerce was closely incorporated into the political structures of Malabar’s coastal states, it was overwhelmingly dominated by expatriate mercantile groups; in the period under study, Muslims came to dominate the region’s all-important spice trade. In addition to the difference in agency in the introduction of Islam, Malabar also differs from the main strand of Indo-Islamic history in terms of both language (with Arabic, rather than Persian, as the lingua franca of Muslim elites) and religious affiliation (with the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law most prominent, as opposed to the Ḥanafī orientation of India’s Turkic dynasties). While the Malabar Coast was an outlier from the vantage point of IndoIslam, it was very much representative of the wider world of Monsoon Islam. Malabar was a central hub for Muslim maritime networks, and Malabari Muslims set important impulses for Muslim communities in port cities right across the Indian Ocean. The focus of studies of Malabar’s Muslims, however, has been less on these trans-oceanic networks than on their conflict with the Portuguese.
The arrival of Vasco da Gama on the Malabar Coast in 1498 marked the beginning of a century of confrontation between Europeans and Muslims in this region. A seminal study by Stephen Dale describes how this resulted in the development of an idiosyncratic Islamic community “whose most prominent cultural characteristic was religious militancy”.35 Studies by scholars such as Geneviève Bouchon, K.K.N. Kurup, Pius Malekandathil, or Binu John Mailaparambil have probed the European records to reconstruct Muslims’ often conflictual, though at times also cooperative, relationship with Europeans on the Malabar Coast across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.36 This book offers a new context to that history by, first, offering an understanding of how Muslim networks were constituted, both on the Coast and within the wider Indian Ocean world, and, second, by tracing their continuities through the sixteenth century.
This serves to qualify the impact of the Portuguese on Muslim networks and to highlight the continued, and in many cases even strengthened, bonds between Malabar and Muslim settlements in other parts of monsoon Asia. Muslims found themselves confronted by hostile European powers not only in South India but also in many other parts of the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Southeast Asia.37 Without question, the world of Monsoon Islam underwent profound shifts over the course of the sixteenth century; these shifts, however, played out in an interconnected way across the different regions. In other words, while the character and spatial configuration of Monsoon Islam changed, it did so as part of a recognizably interrelated, trans-oceanic process. In spite of Portuguese efforts to isolate and disperse Malabar’s Muslim communities, even in the sixteenth century the history of Islam on the Malabar Coast remains part of a broader history of Islam in the Indian Ocean.
book focuses primarily on the port city of Calicut (Kozhikode). From the fourteenth century onwards, Calicut was the most important entrepôt in the region. By the time of Vasco da Gama’s arrival, its rulers were on course towards achieving hegemony over all the rival pepper ports on the Coast. Over the following century, Calicut became the focal point of resistance against the Portuguese and a fulcrum of Muslim commercial, political, military, and religious activity. Despite this key role that Calicut played not only in South Indian but also wider Indian Ocean history, there is no general monograph on this port.38 On the basis of European sources, the other two major ports on the Coast, Cochin and Cannanore, are both subject of book-length studies; because Calicut did not become a node of European rule, its history is less accessible.39 By making Calicut its central focus, this book seeks to help redress this lacuna.
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