The Indian Ocean and the Red Sea
M. N. Pearson
This chapter describes the role of the Indian Ocean, and more specifically the western corridor or sector of this ocean, the Arabian Sea, in the spread and continuance of Islam in eastern Africa. It will begin by sketching some salient characteristics of this vast entity, looking first at “deep structure” matters like winds and currents and topography.1 The account moves on to consider connections across these waters, looking at matters like trade and the dissemination of crops and disease. It then focuses on the circulation, via the ocean, of religion, with particular reference to the role of seaborne Muslim religious specialists and ideas. However, in what follows I will aim only to write about external matters in the wider Muslim world that affected Islam in eastern Africa. What happened when these influences arrived in our area is the concern of several other chapters in part 3 of this book.
At first glance, it may seem that one would expect few connections across and around the Indian Ocean before our modern era. We are often told that the world today is far more integrated than ever before—that we live in a global village. Yet there was, as we will see, copious interaction over long distances across the Indian Ocean for at least the last two millennia. A matter that may seem to hinder communication is the sheer extent of the Indian Ocean. This is an ocean that stretches from 28 degrees north latitude in the far north at the head of the Red Sea to around 26 degrees south latitude in the far south of Mozambique. Indonesia is in longitude 95 to 140 east, as compared with about longitude 38 east for Mozambique. By comparison, the continental United States occupies only from 50 to 30 degrees north latitude, and from longitude 125 to 75 east. The coast with which this chapter is most concerned, that is the west coast from the head of the Red Sea to southern Mozambique, stretches for more than five thousand miles. A direct passage from east Africa to Indonesia is more than four thousand miles. Again by comparison, the United States at its greatest extent is fewer than three thousand miles from east coast to west coast. Consequently, travel times in this ocean area were very large: often some months to go from one major entrepôt to another. Yet people were able to overcome these difficulties, helped in part by particular deep-structural factors.
The pattern of winds in the Arabian Sea is familiar enough. Many authorities stress the divide of the coast at Cape Delgado. As a rule of thumb, down to Cape Delgado is the region of one monsoon, from Arabia and India; south of there is the region of two. The northeast monsoon starts in November, and one can leave the Arabian coast at this time and reach at least Mogadishu. However, the eastern Arabian sea has violent tropical storms in October and November, so for a voyage from India to the coast it was best to leave in December. By March, the northeast monsoon was beginning to break up in the south, and by April the prevailing wind was from the southwest. This was the season for sailing from the coast to the north and east. At its height, in June and July, the weather was too stormy, so departures were normally either as this monsoon, the southwest monsoon, built up in May, or at its tail end in August.2 Ocean currents also affected travel by sea.
The third geographical matter that affects the influence of the ocean on travel and the land is coastal topography. Broadly speaking, no matter how favorable the winds and currents may be, no one is going to want to travel to an uninhabited desert shore. Equally unattractive would be an unproductive coastal fringe cut off from a productive interior by impenetrable mountains. But in fact, most of the shores of the Arabian Sea are not quite as inhospitable as these examples. In India, a fertile coastal fringe, especially in the south, the area of Kerala, is backed by the high mountain range called the western Ghats, but these are nowhere completely impenetrable. So also on the Swahili coast, where again behind a productive coastal zone is the nyika, a mostly barren area difficult, but not impossible, to travel through on the way to more fertile land farther inland. On the northern shores of the Arabian Sea, the coastal fringe is mostly much less productive, and leads to inland areas that often are hostile deserts. This may help to explain a long history of out-migration from such areas as the Hadhramaut and Oman.
Who are some of the people who traveled around and across the Indian Ocean? We will deal in detail with people transporting religious ideas later. For now, we can note merchant groups from very diverse areas indeed. Armenians traveled from their homeland in Iran all over the littoral of the ocean, and far inland. Everywhere they traveled they found hospitality from fellow Armenians. Jews were to be found all around the shores of the ocean, and especially on the west coast of India. Muslim merchants traveled and traded far and wide. From bases in Egypt or southern Arabia, their reach extended all around the shores of the ocean, and as far as China: indeed, Patricia Risso considers that their fortunes in faraway China influenced importantly their activities in the ocean.3 Hindu merchants were to be found in little colonies or merely as sojourners in every major port city all around the ocean’s shores, including the so-called exclusive Muslim heartland of the Red Sea. More recently, various other communities have traveled and settled very extensively. The Goan Christian population are to be found in other Portuguese colonies, especially Mozambique, and more recently in the Gulf oil states. Nor did people travel only for trade or to find employment. About fifteen hundred years ago, a vast, and as yet poorly understood, movement of people from what is now known as Indonesia resulted in the population of the huge island of Madagascar. This influence is plain to see today in many areas of life. Many questions remain unanswered: Was this a more or less individual, or even accidental, enterprise, or was there some directing hand? Was any contact maintained with their homeland far to the east?
Other people who traveled and sometimes settled are legion. One example, giving a glimpse of very diverse connections indeed, is the actual people on the ships. Merchants, or their agents, traveled far and wide in search of profit. The famous Asian peddlers, an important part of Asian sea trade for centuries, were pure itinerants, who often had no home at all. Skilled navigators seem to have been a group of their own, their skills being recognized internationally. The pilot who fatefully guided Vasco da Gama from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 is one example; da Gama was so impressed with him that he took him back to Portugal, where he was quizzed on his knowledge by, among others, Italian merchants.4
The most discussed, and the most notorious, of all human movements was trade in humans themselves. This topic is hardly germane to a discussion of the Indian Ocean and Islam in eastern Africa; just because many of the traders were Muslim, and some slaves were sold into Muslim areas, does not mean this was an “Islamic” trade. Similarly, as western Europe industrialized, the slave mode of production became outmoded and inefficient. This did not happen in the Indian Ocean world, and hence, for Arab traders and producers, the trade continued; this however was not a function of their being Muslim but of their not yet having made the transition to capitalism. There was an extensive trade to Abbasid Iraq from eastern Africa, primarily from the northern areas of Ethiopia and Somalia, from at least the eighth century. Severe oppression and backbreaking work in the marshlands of southern Iraq led to numerous revolts, the largest being the Zanj revolt of 868–83. This revolt may well have contributed to the weakening of the Abbasid empire, while in turn this weakening led to economic decline in the Middle East and hence a smaller demand for slaves. Later we find African slaves serving on board ships, and as military elites, in India; indeed, even some Indian Muslim rulers were technically slaves. From the late eighteenth century, this trade expanded enormously, with slaves from eastern Africa being destined for date plantations in Oman, plantation agriculture on the Swahili coast and in Zanzibar, and European plantations on the French islands, especially Madagascar, and in the Americas, notably in Brazil.5
Early contacts around and across the ocean were primarily for trade. We know, for example, of a quite extensive trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley civilization some five thousand years ago. Romans traded with India, and from this same time of about two thousand years ago, Indians, and possibly Arabs, were active on the east coast of Africa. By the early modern period, trade had increased, and linked together very far-flung areas.
The general point here is that eastern Africa was solidly geared into the Indian Ocean world long before the rise of Islam. Arabs certainly had come down from the Red Sea and so along the coast; in the seventh century, these traders converted to Islam, and kept on trading. Indians had been in the area for centuries before Islam. Pre-Islamic Sassanian pottery testifies to ties with the Gulf before Islam, while Chinese porcelain fragments again point to very early contacts. It is not, then, a matter of newly converted Muslims “opening up” the Swahili coast. Trade patterns continued, relatively unchanged at first.
This was a very long-distance trade, and one where a vast variety of products were traded—both humble items like cloths and food and luxuries like gold and ivory. High-cost luxuries made up a considerable, and glamorous, part of the trade. Some came from outside the ocean, such as silks and porcelains from China. Others originated in the ocean area. Spices—mace, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and pepper—came mostly from Indonesia, with some pepper from India and cinnamon from Sri Lanka, and were universally valued to flavor food. Spices thus flowed all around the ocean, and far beyond. China was a huge market for pepper, as was Europe.
Precious metals also were in demand everywhere, at first for hoarding and ornamentation, but increasingly to be used for money. The Indian Ocean area produced little here. The exception was gold from the Zimbabwe plateau, which reached a peak of production before 1500. Soon after this, precious metals flowed in from the Americas in a complicated pattern. Some came across the Pacific to Spanish Manila, and then on to China. From about 1550 to 1700, Japan produced much gold and silver, most of which ended up in China. The bulk of the supply for our area came across the Atlantic from South America to Spain. From there some came via the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean in Portuguese ships, and later with the Dutch, but much more flowed through the Mediterranean and to the ocean via the Red Sea and the Gulf. Other luxury products were legion: for example, ivory from eastern Africa was much in demand as being far superior to Indian and Southeast Asian equivalents. This product was to be found all along the shores of the ocean, and indeed far away in China.
Probably the greatest bulk of trade items were cotton cloths from India. Some of these were very fine things indeed, with gold and silver woven into the diaphanous material, but much of it was cheap stuff for poor people’s everyday wear. Huge amounts of such cloths were exported from the three main Indian production zones of Gujarat, Coromandel, and Bengal. It was only in the nineteenth century, when English machine-production undercut Indian handicrafts, that India ceased to be the region that clothed virtually the whole littoral and far inland in the Indian Ocean. Today this trade has again reverted to the control of countries around the ocean: India again, and also many countries in Southeast Asia, not to mention vast production in China. Kanga, long strips of colorfully dyed cloth very widely worn on the coast, provide a specific modern example. In the nineteenth century, these were imported from England. Later in the century, India was allowed to develop a modern textile industry, and kanga came from there. Now some are made locally, some in India, and some in China.
Most cloths must be considered to be necessities, not luxuries. Another necessity is food, and basic foodstuffs like rice and wheat were carried very long distances in the early modern Indian Ocean. Several of the great port cities—Melaka in the sixteenth century, Zanzibar in the nineteenth—imported most of their food. Another item was lumber. Mangrove poles from the Swahili coast, and teak from India, were valued for house building and ship construction.
Products were not only traded across the ocean; sometimes they were transplanted to grow in new places. One famous modern example is cloves, which in the nineteenth century were taken from their major production area in the Malukus in eastern Indonesia and grown, very successfully, in Zanzibar. They thus moved from the far east of the ocean to the far west. As one would expect in an oceanic zone so open to exchange and contact, many other plants have moved, and indeed they have become so indigenized that today we think of them as native. Hot chili peppers, for example, are often thought of as typifying Indian curries, yet they were introduced only in the sixteenth century, from the Americas by the Portuguese.
Some products and styles that today are spread all around the ocean originated in the distant past in one particular area. The best example is bananas, which came from Indonesia with the migrants to Madagascar, and subsequently were much modified and improved in Africa. The areca nut, a mild stimulant that originated in Southeast Asia, again is ubiquitous around the ocean. Ibn Battuta was offered some in Mogadishu as a gesture of respect for his learning. Newitt and Middleton provide quite long lists of products, techniques, and crops imported into, and indigenized in, East Africa: cotton, rice, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, outrigger canoes, looms, square houses, and the use of coral cement in construction.6 Many other products apart from chili peppers were introduced to the Indian Ocean from America by the Portuguese: pineapples, maize, cassava, cashew trees, cucumbers, avocados, guava, and tobacco.
Another importation from American to the Indian Ocean was apparently a much more virulent version of syphilis. It is believed that someone on Columbus’s second voyage was responsible for bringing the infection into Europe, where it spread with remarkable rapidity to Asia. There is a case reported from Canton as early as 1502, and in 1505 the Italian Varthema in Calicut claimed that the ruler had “the French disease [‘Frangi’] and had it in the throat.”7
David Arnold has written more generally about the Indian Ocean as a “disease zone.” Bubonic plague, for example, may well have spread to Europe not only by land but also by sea via the Indian Ocean, and of course this fearsome disease was to be found also around the shores of the Indian Ocean. Cholera and smallpox also spread out from India all over the ocean. In the early eighteenth century, leprosy spread in South Africa. Its origins may well lie on the other extreme of the ocean, with the Malay servants and slaves recently introduced to this Dutch colony. A century later, as communications became more frequent and intense, a series of cholera epidemics spread out from India all over the ocean. In 1821, cholera reached Java, where it killed 125,000 people, and at the other end of the ocean, in eastern Africa, there was a particularly serious outbreak in 1865. The hajj was a great transmitter of this disease, and mortality at Mecca itself was often fearsome. In 1865, fifteen thousand out of a total of ninety thousand pilgrims died. In the 1880s, rinderpest was introduced into Ethiopia, probably again from India, and in the next decade spread, with devastating effects, down the east coast of Africa.8
A recent trend in history writing has been the effort of “world historians” to transcend state boundaries. The Indian Ocean is a particularly suitable area for this sort of analysis, for states, and more generally politics, played little role for most of its history. It is in fact precisely five hundred years since politics was introduced into the ocean. Before the arrival of the Portuguese, there is very little evidence of landed states attempting to extend their power to control over the ocean. By and large, the seas were, in contemporary Western juridical terms, mare liberum, where all might travel freely.9 To be sure, the controllers of port cities levied taxes on those who called to trade, but on the other hand they made no attempt to force seafarers to call at their ports. And even if they had wanted to do this, two major limitations would have rendered their efforts nugatory. First, none of them had armadas effective enough to roam over the vast ocean and force people to call at a particular port. Second, in areas such as the eastern African coast and the western Indian coast, these port cities competed with each other. Sea traders were looking for entrepôts where the products they wanted were available; they also expected taxes to be reasonable, and they wanted no arbitrary confiscation of their goods or other abuses. If they were ill-treated in one port city, they had the option to turn to another; hence, the ocean’s long list of port cities that rose and declined.
This is not the place to describe in detail the impact of western European powers on the Indian Ocean. Suffice it here to note that it was them, and the Portuguese first of all, who introduced politics and naval power into the ocean. The Portuguese tried to monopolize trade in some products, and direct and tax other trade. From the seventeenth century, they were imitated by the Dutch and the British, and later by the Omanis, and indeed the British in the nineteenth century were able to monopolize and limit to themselves the use of force in the ocean. As we will see, this had little effect on the subject of this chapter—the role of the Indian Ocean in the spread and changing nature of Islam in east Africa. The point for now is merely that naval power and “politics” played a small role in integrating the ocean—really none before the arrival of Europeans, and even then, very little.
We can now turn to cultural connections and so lead into our main concern; that is, Islam in the ocean and its shores. The aspect of culture that most concerns us is religion, more specifically Islam, but it is best to look more generally at cultural connections first. The key concept here is littoral society. The subject is far from fully studied yet, but the general notion is that there is a certain commonalty about all societies located on the shores of the Indian Ocean. We may note here that the very term Swahili means “shore folk,” those who live on the edge of the ocean. It is argued that such societies, whether they be in eastern Africa or western or eastern India, around the shores of the Gulf and the Red Sea, on the southern Arabian shore, or in insular Southeast Asia, share certain characteristics. Heesterman stresses that it is transitional, permeable: “The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.”10 In an earlier discussion, I sketched the case for identifying such a society, which has certain links and a commonalty to do with society, religion, and economy.11
East African specialists have contributed to this discussion. Chittick argued that the monsoons made the Indian Ocean a united entity. “This has resulted in its constituting what is arguably the largest cultural continuum in the world during the first millennium and a half C.E. In the western part of the basin, at least, the coasts had a greater community of culture with each other and with the islands than they had with the land masses of which they form the littorals.”12 Or, as Pouwels has it, by 1500 Swahili culture was “a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly African nor ‘Arab,’ but distinctly ‘coastal,’ the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”13 A useful new concept here, which seems to get the essential relationships of coastal people very well, is resac. This refers to “the three-fold violent movement of the waves, turning back on themselves as they crash against the shore, [which] seeks to elucidate the way in which [like] the to-and-fro movements of the Indian Ocean, coastal and inland influences keep coming back at each other in wave-like fashion.”14
The precise elements of commonalty of littoral society have not yet been adequately worked out. We could look at food, obviously largely derived from the sea. Houses may well be different from those inland, as they often use materials, especially coral, available on the shore. The whole rhythm of life is geared to the monsoons. Ship architecture historically may have been similar, characterized by the use of lateen sails. Certainly, littoral society was much more cosmopolitan than that of inland groups, for at the great ports, traders and travelers from all over the ocean, and far beyond, were to be found. There seem also to have been certain languages that achieved wide currency, such as Arabic in the earlier centuries. Jan Knappert finds that there are some five thousand words of Arabic influence in Malay, and more than that in Swahili, and about 80 percent of these are the same (that is, in Malay and Swahili) so that we have a “corpus of traveling Arabic words.”15 Freeman-Grenville tried to find links and commonalties between Swahili and the language of the Sidis of Sind.16 Later, a sort of nautical Portuguese, and today variants of English, have achieved a similar, quasi-universal status.
Folk religion on the littoral similarly is to be distinguished from inland manifestations. On the coast, religion had to do with customs to ensure safe voyages, or a favorable monsoon. Particular gods were propitiated for these purposes. Specifically maritime ceremonies marked the beginning and end of voyages. Thus, folk religions on the littoral were functionally quite different from those found inland, precisely because the concerns of coastal people were usually quite different from those of peasants and pastoralists inland. It was the increasingly cosmopolitan aspect of the Swahili coast that contributed to its conversion to Islam.
James de Vere Allen, in one of his provocative but frustratingly erratic overviews, claimed that among the elements that contributed to an Indian Ocean world was indeed the Muslim religion. This means that he excludes from this world Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, as they were not Muslim, but he includes South India, since this region, while not Muslim, is too important to be left out of the Indian Ocean world.17 Despite these inconsistencies, Allen’s central point is valid: Islam indeed provided a crucial link around most parts of the Indian Ocean, while on the other hand, any consideration of Islam in eastern Africa must include a maritime dimension, one focused on the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea. I will now turn to this central task.
The central thesis is that the Indian Ocean tied in eastern Africa to a vast, diverse, and cosmopolitan Muslim world. We have shown how the Indian Ocean has always been a place of movement, circulation, contacts, and travel over great distances. It could be that Islam fits well into this sort of environment. The Quran itself has positive things to say about travel by sea: “It is He who subjected to you the sea that you may eat of it fresh fish, and bring forth out of it ornaments for you to wear; and thou mayest see the ships cleaving through it; and that you may seek of His bounty, and so haply you will be thankful.”18 Islam has spread over very great distances. The travels of the famous scholar-traveler Ibn Battuta illustrate this very well, for in the fourteenth century he traveled about seventy-two thousand miles in nearly thirty years, and all the time virtually was in a Muslim world, from West Africa to China. It could be that Islam is more peripatetic than the other great world religions. Famous scholars and saints attracted, and continue to attract, the faithful from very wide areas.
In particular, Islam involves travel and movement because of the central role of the hajj, where historically hundreds of thousands, and today millions, gather together in one place at one time for one purpose. No other world religion has anything exactly similar. The role of Mecca and the hajj has been much studied. It is here that Muslims for the last thirteen hundred years and more have been brought face-to-face with the numbers and diversity of their fellow Muslims. The hajj then is a remarkably efficient method of integrating the worldwide community.19
A few more or less random case studies will demonstrate these far-flung ties of Islam over the Indian Ocean, before we turn to a more chronological description of the various Muslim influences coming into the eastern coast of Africa. Here are a few from Southeast Asia. A. H. Johns has investigated the career of Abd al-Rauf of Singkel, and this gives us a clear picture of the many ties and networks and connections established in seventeenth-century Islam, as well as of the centrality of the holy places in this process. Abd al-Rauf was born in North Sumatra around 1615. In about 1640, he moved to the Hijaz and Yemen to study. In Medina, his main teacher was the Kurdish-born Ibrahim al-Kurani. Abd al-Rauf spent a total of nineteen years in Mecca and gained very considerable prestige. In particular, he taught hundreds, even thousands, of Indonesians there, and initiated many of them into the order of which he was a distinguished member, the Shattariyya. He returned to Sumatra, to Aceh, in 1661, and was a revered teacher there for nearly thirty years. He kept in touch with Ibrahim in Medina and taught what he had learned from him to the many Indonesian, especially Javanese, pilgrims who stopped for a time in Aceh on the way to the Red Sea.20
Another Asian example stresses the role of Medina; it, too, shows the extreme cosmopolitanism of Islam, in this case in the eighteenth century. Muhammad Hayya, the teacher of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabiyya movement, studied in Medina with scholars from India, Persia, Algiers, and Morocco. His students came from Turkey, India, Yemen, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Damascus, and other Muslim cities. As Voll notes, “The Medinese scholarly community in general was able to contact people from throughout the world of Islam because of the Pilgrimage.”21
Now two examples from India. Hajji Ibrahim Muhaddis Qadiri was born near Allahabad in northern India. He did the hajj and then studied in Cairo, Mecca, and Syria. He was away twenty-four years, but then returned to India, settled in Agra, and was a prestigious teacher until his death in 1593.22 The international character of Islam at this time, and the pattern of a career for a Muslim religious specialist, is well illustrated in the history of a founder of the Suhrawardiyya sufi order in India. Shaykh Bahaud-Din Zakariyya was born late in the twelfth century, near Multan. He memorized the Quran, and undertook further study in Khorasan for seven years. Then he traveled to Bukhara, did a hajj, and subsequently studied hadith for five years in Medina. Later he traveled and studied and taught in Jerusalem and Baghdad, the latter place being where he joined his order.23
The career of Sayyid Fadl, a Hadhrami sayyid very influential in the Mappilah community of Malabar in the nineteenth century, provides yet another example. Early in his career, he spent four years visiting Mecca and the Hijaz. It may have been during this time that he became an authority in Shafiʿi law and a member of the ʿAlawi tariqa, a sufi brotherhood. Later, his political activities in Kerala annoyed the British rulers, who after some time, in 1852, made him emigrate to Arabia. Subsequently he spent time in Istanbul and became one of the most important theoreticians of the Pan-Islamic movement, along with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. When he was resident in Mecca, he influenced the some two thousand hajjis from Kerala who each year made the pilgrimage.24
Finally we turn to eastern Africa for a sketch of the career and travels of Sayyid Ahmad bin Sumeyt. His father Abubakar was a Hadhrami sharif, born in Shiban, who was a trader and scholar and was made qadi (judge) of Zanzibar in the time of Majid (1856–70). Ahmad, too, grew up to be a trader and scholar. He interrupted his trading to study religion in Grand Comoro under the supervision of two scholars, one of them his father, who had retired there. Then Ahmad studied under an Iraqi scholar in Zanzibar, where he was made qadi in the 1880s. Even so, he later visited the Hadhramaut three times to study yet more under famous scholars and get their ijaza—that is, a certification, license, or permit. While away between 1883 and 1886, he spent time in Istanbul and studied with Sayyid Fadhi Basha bin Alwi bin Sahi, a famous Hadhrami scholar, and through his influence received an Ottoman order from Sultan Abdul Hamid. In 1887, he studied in Al-Azhar and Mecca, and in 1888 returned to Zanzibar. From then until his death in 1925, he was famed as a scholar and teacher; students came from all over the coast. Indeed, he had an international reputation, for he was asked by the mufti of Mecca himself to settle a quarrel between two Zanzibari ʿulamaʾ (religious specialists). Even prestigious scholars in Egypt sometimes sought his opinion, such was his reputation.25
We now turn to a more chronological analysis of Islamic influences flowing into eastern Africa. These began even during the time of the Prophet, for there were Africans in Mecca at the time of the Prophet, and some became his Companions, such as Bilal, the freed Ethiopian slave. Close ties with Ethiopia, just across the Red Sea, are also demonstrated by the way before the hijra, Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, some members of the new faith fled there. Islam spread across the Red Sea to the Dahlak Islands very early on, maybe by 700. Another important beachhead was Zayla, in the Gulf of Aden, from whence Islam was disseminated to southern Ethiopia. Moving farther south, Islam also spread to the Horn very early on. Even the interior was converted in perhaps the twelfth century C.E., or even earlier. Shaykh Barkhandle, whose religious name was Shakh Yusuf al-Kawneyn, is given much credit for this. His tomb is in the north of Somalia.26
As we would expect, Islam first spread into Somalia from the coast. By the tenth century at least, there were Arab merchants from Aden, Yemen, and the Hadhramaut in Mogadishu, Brava, and Marka, but while the local Somali population converted, it was not “Arabized,” there being no large-scale Arab settlement in the area; rather, there evolved a mixture of local and Arab influences. Later there also was extensive contact with the Gulf.
What we have just noted about a mixture of Arab and Somali elements applies even more strongly farther south, in the Swahili coast proper. It used to be claimed that Arab colonies were established, and that these colonies owed nothing to the interior; they looked out, to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, never inland to the interior. Today we know that this is far from the case. The earliest mosques so far excavated, possibly dating from the eighth century, were for the use of visiting Arab merchants, or merchants who even had already settled. Wholesale conversions of the existing Swahili indigenes came later, in the twelfth century and a few decades on either side of this. In this context, an observation by two outstanding younger African scholars, F. T. Masao and H. W. Mutoro, is apposite: “The role of outsiders in the early history of the East African coast cannot be denied, but it is one thing to be part of a process of change and completely another to claim responsibility for the process.”27
Muslims from the heartland of Islam, Hadhramaut especially, moved south for various reasons. Often they were traders, for the strong nexus between trade and the spread of Islam has been much noted all over the Indian Ocean world. Some moved as a result of push factors; in other words, they exchanged a life of poverty in the inhospitable regions of southern Arabia for the more benign region of eastern Africa. It used to be claimed that many of these migrant Hadhramis established or took over city-states on the coast. In seeing how this can square with the current rejection of any notion of Arab colonization, it is important to note two things. First, while many were no doubt from the Hadhramaut or Oman originally, they rapidly became merged into the Swahili world; that is to say, through acculturation and intermarriage they became another element, albeit a politically important one, in the Swahili world. Second, historically, and especially during the Omani period, a claim to an ancestry deriving from the heartland of Islam was a matter of prestige, and clearly many genealogies were manufactured, or at least embossed, in order to support such claims. A detailed analysis of this matter may be found in chapters 12 and 14 of this book.
To continue on the topic of Arab colonization, it used to be thought that some of the early settlers and rulers were Shirazis, from the eastern shores of the Gulf. This also is now generally discounted. We noted some settlement from the Gulf on the Benadir coast of Somalia, and it seems that some people claiming Shirazi ancestry moved on south from there. Indeed, it could be that the (perhaps mythical) place of origin of the Swahili people, called Shungwaya, probably located somewhere around the Tana River area in the north of modern Kenya, may be linked to the Shirazi origins myth. Anyway, whether these purported Shirazis came from there or somewhat further north, they certainly succeeded in establishing ruling dynasties in several of the major port cities, whose rulers then proudly proclaimed their Shirazi ancestry. These rulers shared a common myth of origin, and had lineage ties with each other. But the claim of a direct link with Shiraz, or the Gulf in general, can be discounted. There was, however, extensive trade with that region during the period that the ʿAbbasid caliphate, centered in Baghdad, was at its height, from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. This was also a time of very extensive trade with China. Baghdad was very thoroughly sacked by the Mongols in 1258 and the focus of trade on the eastern African coast then shifted to southern Arabia, and especially the Red Sea and Hadhramaut area.28
What we see here are very extensive connections across the Indian Ocean, with rulers claiming origins in very distant, but still maritime, locations. These rulers, regardless of origins, interacted closely with religious specialists, and indeed in terms of Islam in Africa it is these people who are most important for our purposes. We can, then, now turn to the role of Hadhrami religious specialists on the coast.
We must first note that while contact between these two areas is most important for our purposes, in fact this was all part of a much wider flow, by which Muslims from the heartland, in this case southern Arabia, spread far and wide across the Indian Ocean. It seems that push factors at several times led to an outflow of men from the Hadhramaut, and indeed also from Oman to the east and Yemen to the west. Thus they moved to India after about 1200, and even today the “Arab” community in Gujarat preserves stories of their Hadhrami origins. They also, unlike other Muslims of northern India, belong to the Shafiʿi madhhab. In Hyderabad in the Deccan, Hadhramis arrived in the eighteenth century to serve as soldiers for the Nizam, the ruler of this state. They also retain their Shafiʿi allegiance despite being surrounded by Hanafi Muslims.
The flow to eastern Africa began after about 1250, and to Malaysia, Indonesia, and then the Philippines after about 1300. Thus were created vast, far-flung lineages, merchants and scholars mixed together, who had connections for both piety and pelf all over the ocean. Stephen Dale’s exemplary work on the Mapillas of Malabar provides further detail. He notes that in this area, today called Kerala, Islam is of the Shafiʿi madhhab, as compared with the Hanafi school of the Turkic-Persian rulers of the great inland empires. Scholars came to Kerala from Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and Baghdad. From Kerala, Islam flowed on, to Southeast Asia, especially to the north Sumatran state of Aceh in the sixteenth century, and even to the Philippines. Indeed, in their wars against the Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Acehnese were helped by Muslims from southern Arabia and by Mapillas from Kerala. Further to demonstrate wide ties, some military support was supplied by the Ottoman Turks, whose sultan the Acehnese recognized as caliph.29 Given this, there is a question about whether the Shafiʿi madhhab is peculiarly suited to maritime locations. Certainly it is the dominant school in eastern Africa, the Comoro and Maldive Islands, the west coast of India, and Indonesia. The Shafiʿi madhhab expanded to all those lands that surround the Indian Ocean, from the port towns of southern Arabia and the Gulf, through the work of itinerant merchants, scholars as well as migrants. They crossed the ocean or made their way from one port to the other.
While contact, and migration, was more or less continuous between other Muslim areas around the Arabian Sea and the African coast, a particular area, the Hadhramaut, and two particular times, the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and the later nineteenth century, are when there seems to have been most extensive contact between the coast and southern Arabia. If we think of the whole Indian Ocean, or even just the Arabian Sea, as a cultural corridor, then we have what may be called a subcorridor linking these two areas, that is coastal towns in the Hadhramaut such as al-Shihr and al-Mukalla, and also inland towns, connected to the Swahili coast.
In the fourteenth century, the Swahili city-states were at their most flourishing, and contact with the Hadhramaut was at its height. Large numbers of prestigious Muslims came to the area. These migrants brought with them the Shafiʿi madhhab and, if they were sharifs or sayyids, very considerable baraka, or prestige, based on their claim to be direct descendants of the Prophet.
In the north, in Ethiopia and Somalia, these contacts seem to have been close throughout, given their location, so that there were continuing and extensive contacts with Hadhrami, Yemeni, and Hijazi migrants. But this northern area is also subject to other influences from the north, so that while the Shafiʿi madhhab predominates on the Swahili coast, on the west bank of the Red Sea and further inland, the situation is more diverse, no doubt a result of location, and also of the continuing Coptic Christian presence in the area. In Ethiopia and the Horn, we find the Shafiʿi school, which clearly demonstrates influences from Arabia, but also the Maliki, from the Sudan, and the Hanafi, which comes in with the Ottomans.
On the Swahili coast, as we would expect, contact was especially close in the north, in the Lamu archipelago. A Portuguese observer noted of Pate, about 1570, that it “has considerable trade with Mecca and other parts. The town is very large and has many buildings. It was here that a Moorish caciz, the greatest in the entire coast, resided.”30 Late in the sixteenth century, a new group of Arab settlers, called Hatimi, arrived in Pate from Brava, a little way to the north, but who claimed to have originated in far-distant Andalusia.
This first wave of Hadhrami influence was succeeded by a more negative presence from across the sea—that is, the Portuguese, who came up from the Cape of Good Hope after 1498. Certainly they aimed to combat Islam wherever they found it, and here again we can see very wide connections indeed. The visceral hatred of the Portuguese for Muslims derived from their own experience in conquering their homeland from Muslims. Even after this, the Portuguese experience in fighting Muslims in Morocco all through the fifteenth century continued their tradition of a curious mixture of hatred and fear toward Muslims. The impact of the Portuguese on the coast is traced in chapter 12.
If it can be said that the Portuguese presence had mixed effects on Islam in the region, what can we say of the next major political change—that is, the Omani hegemony of the nineteenth century? The connection between Oman and the Swahili coast provides yet another example of close ties and connections all across the Arabian Sea, albeit a political rather than a religious one.
The major port of Oman, Muscat, had been ruled by the Portuguese until 1650, when they were expelled by the Yaʿrubi dynasty. Soon after, Muslims in Mombasa, at this time ruled by the Portuguese, wrote to the Omanis asking for help to expel the foreign rulers. Oman responded and sacked Mombasa in 1661, raided Mozambique in 1670, and in 1689 destroyed the Portuguese settlement at Pate. In 1698, they captured Mombasa. In the second half of the seventeenth century, there was extensive Omani naval activity in the Hadhramaut area, near the Bab al-Mandab, and at Mocha and al-Shihr.
Early in the eighteenth century, Omani interest in and activity on the coast declined due to instability at home, but around the middle of the century, a new and much more mercantile dynasty, the Busaidi, gained control and increasingly focused on eastern Africa, especially as their activities in India were curtailed by the beginning of the establishment of British rule there. Zanzibar became the center of Omani power in East Africa, and in 1840 replaced Muscat as the capital of the Omani empire. Contact, both in terms of movements of people and trade, continued to be intense throughout the century, with especially large numbers of slaves being taken off to work on the date plantations of Oman.
On the face of it, one could predict quite major changes in religion on the coast. The Omani rulers, after all, belonged to the Ibadi group within Islam, and thus apparently had quite different religious practice than did the Swahili, with their adherence to the Shafiʿi madhhab. Further, the Omanis established a powerful state in Zanzibar, one that had profound political and economic effects on the coast. For the first time, and the last, most people whom we call Swahili were being ruled under one authority and by fellow Muslims. Yet in fact the Omani state neither achieved, nor wanted to achieve, deep penetration into the lives of its more or less nominal subjects on the coast. Ibadi Islam is one of the more moderate tendencies among the Khawarij schism within Islam. In theory, the leader of the Ibadis was to be the one with military and religious knowledge, rather than the more usual emphasis on tribe or family or race. This was greatly diluted under the Busaidi dynasty, who indeed even took the title of sultan. But even at its purest, Ibadi Islam differs from Sunni or Shiʿa mostly in terms of “theology,” not in, say, ritual, taxation, marriage, or inheritance.31 Hence, as other chapters show, the Omani impact on Islam in eastern Africa was again a mixed one, and appears to have been no more major, whether for better or worse, than was the Portuguese.
Wider connections were also in evidence in more social matters, and again we see the importance of the Hadhrami connection, which had a recrudescence under the Omanis in the nineteenth century. Family registers were kept to maintain linkages and the legitimacy of descent claims, especially for the dominant lineages, that is shurafaʾ, or sharifs. Hadhrami sharifs keep family registers, the central one being in the place of origin of the lineage in the Hadhramaut. Lineage members, wherever they are, must report births and deaths to this center—that is, to the munsib, the lineage head. Thus the sharif of the Jamal-al-Layl sharif lineage keeps a genealogy of the eastern African branch in Mombasa. He keeps it up-to-date by corresponding with other lineage members on the coast, the Comoros, and Madagascar, and periodically he also sends it to the head of the Jamal-al-Layl in the Hadhramaut.32
Just as these scholars and merchants, and their lineages, were cosmopolitan in the extreme, so also were the sufi tariqas, arguably the most vibrant and important part of Islam in the nineteenth century, if only because it impacted much more on common Swahili than did the learned work of the scholars. Different brotherhoods were dominant at different times and places. In the north, Ethiopia, the Horn, and Somalia, the Qadiri order had long been important. During the nineteenth century, it was challenged by the reformist Idrisi strand from the north. Later in the nineteenth century, a new brotherhood founded in Mecca found its way over the Red Sea. This was the Salihiyya brotherhood, named after its leading shaykh, Muhammad ibn Salih al-Rashidi, who died around 1919. He was from the Sudan, but settled in Mecca and acted in a way typical of sufi orders in that he initiated men into his order as khalifas (deputies) who then went home to spread his doctrine. Sayyid Muhammad, as one would expect, had spent five or six years in Mecca, Medina, and Yemen studying, undertaking the hajj, and getting initiated into the order.
The most influential brotherhood on the coast was the ʿAlawi order, a very austere one, with its main shrine at Inat. Late in the nineteenth century, a branch of the main Alawi order, the Shadhiliyya, won much support on the coast, even as far south as Mozambique. The founder of this branch, Shaykh Marʿuf, was from the Comoro Islands; a sharif, he did the hajj. Here we see another example of widespread connections: one of the areas where he was most influential was southern Somalia. Shaykh Maʿruf died in 1905 and his tomb in the Comoros is a place of pilgrimage for all the Shadhilis of eastern Africa.
The Qadiri brotherhood, followers of Abdul Qadir Gilani, were at least as far-flung across the ocean as were the ʿAlawi. The legends of the founder have been translated into Swahili as well as Malay and Javanese. During the colonial period, the Qadiri network reached from Mecca and southern Arabia along the Somali coast past Brava, Kisimaiu, and Lamu to Mombasa, and then via Voi, Nairobi, and Kampala into the Belgian Congo. Other lines went to German East Africa, others west through the Sudan to Nigeria and Mali. Their teachings spread from the Hadhramaut ports to Indonesia. Not surprisingly, then, some textbooks found in the Belgian Congo were identical to those in use in Indonesia. This was a very rich and important network.
Several other interlocking strands from outside the area have been important during the last two centuries. Among them are the reformist Wahhabi movement, Pan-Islam, the Islamic reform movement associated with Muhammad Abduh, the influence of colonialism, and the impact of the so-called Islamic revival of recent times. As to the first, the Salihiyya order in the north was a strictly observant movement not unlike the reformist Wahhabi tendency that had arisen in Arabia late in the eighteenth century. It is interesting, however, that Wahhabism, while influential in inland Arabia, and to an extent in Ethiopia, and a source of continuing problems for the rulers of Oman, never gained much support in the Hadhramaut, and hence had little impact on the Swahili coast.
Pan-Islam, promoted by Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman sultan, after 1880, had a wide impact on the Muslim world and frequently was tied in with anticolonial movements. Notions of Islamic unity and the centrality of the caliph in Istanbul were widely dispersed in our area. These ideas were given greater currency by the rulers of Zanzibar, as Pouwels notes in chapter 12.
This was a reciprocal matter, for some scholars from eastern Africa spent time in, and were influential in, Istanbul itself. So, for example, an important Zanzibar scholar, Ibn Sumayt, spent a year in Istanbul and studied with his fellow Hadhrami scholar Fadl b. Alawi, who was one of the theoreticians of the Pan-Islam movement. Yet when World War I broke out, the flimsiness of the ties to Turkey were revealed, as indeed they were also in India and in the Hijaz. In the former, the khalifat movement met with little success, while in the latter the sharifian dynasty in Mecca and Medina opted for the Arab Revolt and the Allies rather than the Ottomans and their German allies.
The broad impulse to moderate Islamic reform, associated with Muhammad Abduh in Cairo and his successors, met some response on the coast. However, this may have been tempered by the orthodoxy of the Shafiʿi school and the Qadiri brotherhood, so that many Swahili desiring to study in the heartland went not to Cairo and al Azhar but to the traditional ribat (sufi lodge) at Tarim. Nevertheless, there was some influence, such as Al-Islah (“Reform”), a Mombasa paper established in 1932 that spread Islamic antiimperialist and nationalistic messages from Cairo.
Colonial rule from the late nineteenth century interacted with these various tendencies and influences from outside. A new wave of very confrontational proselytizers—in this case, Christian missionaries—were tolerated, sometimes supported, by the European colonial states. Their activities did much to produce a reaction that favored Islam as the more indigenous, and locally older established, religion. Colonial rule also involved speedier communications, and the widespread dissemination of ideas via the printing press. Knappert notes that textbooks for prayer sessions printed in Egypt, Bombay, Singapore, and Penang have been found in Jakarta, Mombasa, and Dar es Salaam. Texts for Shafiʿi law were published in Swahili, Malay, Javanese, and Amharic.33
The end of colonialism, and the Islamic revival, have produced new trends in the Islam of eastern Africa, some positive and some negative. In Kenya, and to an extent Tanzania, the Swahili are now marginalized, considered to be collaborators with the slave-trading Omanis and then with the Western colonial rulers. In the face of this, some lineages “are now picking up on their Yamani or Umani patrilines where they can and going to Jeddah, Mecca, Muscat, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.”34 Others, no doubt the less prestigious, with no kin ties to the outside, have turned to Islam as a positive force and reaffirmation of a Swahili identity. Some have even converted to Shiʿi Islam, this being considered to be more militant. Here for perhaps the first time in history we may see an influence from Iran, especially Iran since the revolution of 1979. In Zanzibar, the anti-Arab revolution of 1964 led to a period of downplaying of any foreign influences, but more recently, in 1985, an Omani consulate was set up, significantly not in the capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, but in Zanzibar. Around the same time, discontent with what was perceived to be an anti-Islamic mainland regime led the island to join the Organization of Islamic Countries. Following a great outcry from mainland Christian politicians, this decision was reversed in 1993.
I want finally to locate all this material in a wider historiographical context. During the colonial period, Western authors presented Africa as a tabula rasa, on which European influence had a positive effect. Two tendencies have responded to these slights, but there is a tension between them. On the one hand, is a commendable effort to see Africa in its own terms—in fact, to indigenize African history. On the other hand, historians influenced by once-fashionable political-economy notions have written of African history as a long story of dispossession, and of deleterious foreign impacts.
Where, then, in a wider historiographical context, can we locate our data on religious flows and influences? We are not here dealing with the matter of the “quality” of the Islam of eastern Africa; other chapters deal with that in detail. All that need be said is that coastal Islam is a significant regional variant within the broad rubric of “Islam.” The key point is reciprocity. It is not just a matter of Arabs and other foreigners impacting on the Swahili; nor is it merely the Swahili Africanizing the Arabs. Rather, it is a matter of to and fro, with input from both. Nor is this an unusual finding, for the same could be said about most other Islamic areas in the world, where local cultures have influenced profoundly what happens, and produced many regional variants—all of them, however, Islamic.
My concern is with external influences. Was eastern Africa merely a passive recipient of religious norms and practices from overseas, especially from Arabia? More than twenty years ago, the above-cited Allen noted with some despair that the received wisdom, which he hoped was not true, was that everything came from Asia, nothing from Africa.35 We need to consider the extent to which the Islam of eastern Africa has merely drawn on, and modified, trends from the wider Islamic world around the Indian Ocean, as opposed to what it has contributed to the wider Islamic world.
The balance is heavily weighted toward the former. This is not to belittle Islam on the coast, for to an extent this applies to all Muslim areas around the ocean. Yet it seems to apply especially strongly to this area. This chapter has constantly stressed the centrality of the heartland. Local boys are sent off to study in Mecca, or Medina, or in the case of eastern Africa more likely in Tarim, and then come back with the prestige of an ijaza from these centers. Thousands, today even hundreds of thousands, of people from around the ocean go on hajj each year. This chapter has constantly noted the prestige, the baraka, of people who can trace their lineages back to the Prophet, or to some other acclaimed lineage from the Hadhramaut. Similarly, madrasas (Islamic schools) were set up in most of the major towns of the coast, but their founders, their inspiration, and their most prestigious teachers all came from outside.
In this regard, an Indian comparison may reinforce the point. The great madrasa of Deoband, in northern India, is generally considered to be second only to al Azhar in prestige for a traditional Sunni education. During its first one hundred (Islamic) years, it produced more than 7,000 graduates. Of these, 431 worked outside the subcontinent, with the greatest number in Afghanistan, Russia, Burma, China, Malaysia, and South Africa. There were even two who worked in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and one in Yemen.36 Eastern Africa can boast no such prestigious college. To be sure, Muslims from outside eastern Africa attend some of the major festivals, but significantly these are considered to be in a way poor people’s substitutes for the hajj itself.
In short, just as Swahili ships seldom left the coast, and very few Swahili traveled from the coast, so also we can say that norms and ideas came to the coast, but few went out. Possible exceptions are the occasional prestigious scholar from the coast who found a wider, Islam-wide audience (though most of these would claim to be Hadhrami, Meccan, or whatever by origin), the Mawlidi festival at Lamu, and the Ukitani Institute in Zanzibar, which have over the last century attracted people from many parts of Africa; these seem to be unique, and so atypical, examples. There never was, nor is, on the coast an Islamic center that attracts people from the wider Muslim world; obviously there is no Mecca or Medina, but also no shrine of a great sufi pir, no pilgrimage to the tomb of an imam, no influential variant, such as Shiʿi Islam in Iran since 1500, no educational institution such as Deoband or al Azhar, all of which cater to a worldwide Muslim constituency. The evidence, then—so far admittedly inconclusive—seems to be that, while the Indian Ocean network has operated to spread, and then influence, Islam on the coast, there has been little flow in the other direction, from the coast to the wider Muslim world.
Notes
1. For general accounts of the Indian Ocean, see Das Gupta and Pearson 1987, Arasaratnam 1994, Chandra 1987, McPherson 1993, Mathew 1990, 1995. For Southeast Asia, see Reid 1988–93. For a “popular” overview, see Hall 1996.
2. For details and references, see Pearson 1998, 51–54.
3. Risso 1995.
4. Subrahmanyam 1997, 121–28.
5. For a recent discussion and extensive references, see Alpers 1997.
6. Newitt 1994, 127; Middleton 1992, 202 fn. 8.
7. Varthema 1928, 63; Carmichael 1991.
8. Arnold 1991. On rinderpest, see Dahl 1979.
9. Subrahmanyam 1997, 109–12.
10. Heesterman 1980.
11. Pearson 1985.
12. Chittick 1980, 13.
13. Pouwels 1987, 31.
14. Caplan 1996. She is referring to the contribution of Jean-Claude Penrad in the book under review.
15. Knappert 1985, 125.
16. Freeman-Grenville 1988.
17. Allen 1980.
18. Arberry 1955, sura 16: verse 14; see also 2:164; 30:46.
19. Pearson 1994; Peters 1994; for the flavor of the hajj, by a participant, see Wolfe 1993, 1997.
20. Johns 1978, 471–72; Johns 1964, 8–11. The discussion here draws on Pearson 1990.
21. Voll 1975, 32–39.
22. For many other examples, see Rizvi 1978–83, 2:146–47, 294, 167, passim.
23. Rizvi 1978–83, 1:190.
24. Dale 1980, 6–7, 116–18, 128, 134–35, 167.
25. Salim 1973, 141–43; Pouwels 1987, 152–58.
26. Galaal 1980, 24.
27. Masao and Mutoro 1988, 586.
28. On the Shirazi matter, see Middleton 1992, 186–87; Spear and Nurse 1984, 74–79; Allen 1982.
29. Martin 1975. On Gujarat, see Misra 1964, esp. 78; for Malabar, Dale 1980, 26, 56–60.
30. Fr. Monclaro’s account printed in Silva Rego, 1962–89, 8:355. A caciz is a Muslim religious specialist. For details, see Pearson 1994, 71–72.
31. See Risso 1986, 5, 22–33, for a concise introduction to the doctrine.
32. Shepherd 1984, 152–77; see esp. 157, 159.
33. Knappert 1985, 129.
34. Shepherd 1984, 172.
35. Allen 1980, 149.
36. Metcalf 1982, 110–11.
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