Introduction
The attempts to trace religious networks such as those of the Hadrami Alawi Sufis have succeeded in providing cultural contours to the Indian Ocean trade routes, which have been unfolding through a series of publications for the last three decades.Footnote 1 However, despite intense maritime interactions since centuries ago, Malabar has not been placed adequately in the debates on wider Arab Sufi networks in the Indian Ocean,Footnote 2 nor have the sociocultural formations and ritual accretions of Mappila Muslim society through transregional contacts been parsed out systematically.Footnote 3 Although the commercial interactions of Malabar as a prime entrepôt in the east–west trade of the Indian Ocean have been expatiated,Footnote 4 its role in the development of a Muslim religious community has yet to be fully deciphered.Footnote 5 Prange brilliantly analysed the historical process of shaping ‘Monsoon Islam’ up to the sixteenth century, primarily through humdrum maritime trading communities and its human historical engagements with non-Muslim societies.Footnote 6 However, transregional Arab communities such as Hadrami Sayyids, who moved out of Southern Arabia with the Alawi Sufi order in the later centuries, are often pathetically enwrapped within the local nationalist and Marxist frameworks, stripping them of their transregional legacies.Footnote 7 The explorative realms of Sufi Islam that are employed by such Sufi communities in the non-Middle Eastern regions such as the Indian Ocean, where the majority of the community inhabit, thus, remain the least represented in studies of Islam and Muslims.Footnote 8 This article, therefore, traces the historical development and religious cultural trajectories of Hadrami Sayyid immigrants in Malabar and the permeation of the Alawi Sufi litany into Mappila devotionalism. It mainly examines two early immigrant Sufi scholars, focusing on their diasporic writings and Sufi activities.
Being connected through multicentred networks of masters, disciples, texts, shared Sufi ideas, and values that expanded by cutting across geospatial and oceanic boundaries and often sought engagements with local patterns of spiritualities, Sufism can be conceived as an important form of a variety cosmopolitanism that existed in the premodern Muslim world.Footnote 9 The Sufi cosmopolis is defined not merely by the conflux of various networks of people bonded in organised or less organised Sufism, but also by a corpus of spiritual concepts, ideas, values, and moral camaraderie of brotherhoods that are elaborated on in the Sufi texts, enacted and circulated by Sufi figures individually or collectively across a vast swathe of lands in the Muslim world. This Sufi cultural expansion through wider transregional mercantile links in the Indian Ocean happened largely without exerting any political force and encompassed everything from social systems to political structures and from human values to material culture. Its universal metaphysical appeals, although they mostly sought continuity with Sharīʿa, quite often valued local religious contexts and imbibed many indigenous cultural and devotional elements, reifying its sensitivity to diversity and changes. Theoretically, they sought explorative engagements with God, but practically they produced different outcomes in which some achieved greater success while others struggled irrecoverably. The framework of a Sufi cosmopolis accommodates such abundant continuities, subtle ruptures, and intriguing outcomes that shaped a longue durée of Sufi actors, texts, and practices.
At least since the early decades of the fourteenth century, the Sufi cosmopolis has been able to connect Monsoon Asia with an increased mobility of scholars, traders, texts, rituals, and sailors,Footnote 10 retaining shared ideas and values, and incorporating volatile Sufi experiences and dispositions. Other linguistic and legal forms of cosmopolises in the Indian Ocean that have been recently explained by historians also played crucial roles in structuring the Sufi cosmopolis in the region.Footnote 11 For example, the Arabic as a lingua franca of various mercantile communities and the Shāfiʿī legal cosmopolis that regulated economic and religious interactions contributed greatly to the moulding of the Sufi cosmopolis, just like Persian. As we see below, in the competition between the local Sufi orders in Malabar, the fate of orders in the Sufi cosmopolis often was relegated sub judice, and legal parameters determined the course of Sufi cosmopolis, not vice versa. The Sufi cosmopolis in the Indian Ocean cautiously regarded the Shāfiʿī legal discourses alongside theological concerns of the Ashʿarī school.Footnote 12 Reformulations evolved in the Sufi cosmopolis by such concerns involved not only refutations, but also accommodations of local elements, acquainted with its long co-existence with non-Muslim contexts, unlike the neo-Sufism thesis argued.Footnote 13
In order to examine such thicker Sufi continuities and uneven fractures therein, this article pursues the Hadrami Sayyid immigrants whose lineage can be traced back to Prophet Muhammad, alongside a Sufi order that they preached: the Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya. It explicates how they succeeded in establishing successful networks in Malabar, eventually leading to the permeation of Alawi Sufi practices into Muslim devotionalism in the region. To explain the deep ritual pervasion of the Southern Arabian Sufism in Malabar, I investigate the litany of the Alawi Sufi order, Rātīb al-Ḥaddād—a routine religious ritual that prevails throughout the region with its conspicuous Hadrami provenance.Footnote 14 This eighteenth-century litany, composed by Hadrami Sayyid ʿAbd Allah al-Ḥaddād (1634–1720), is routinely recited after the night prayer in almost all Shafiʿī mosques and often in the houses of religious families in Malabar, regardless of whether they belong to the Hadrami lineage and its Alawi Sufi order.Footnote 15 How did this Yemeni ritual become a part of Mappila devotionalism? What were the engagements of the Alawi order with the wider Sufi cosmopolis that was prevalent in the region? How did Alawis gain supremacy in the larger historical process? These are the questions that we follow below.
I conveniently take two potent nodes of early Hadrami networks in Malabar: Shaykh al-Jifrī (d. 1808) and Sayyid ʿAlawī (d. 1844). Since the project of entrenching the Alawi order and its rituals in the region was later continued by Sayyid Faḍl (d. 1900), a descendant of Sayyid ʿAlawī, his writings and activities also will be adduced. By explicating mainly the writings of Shaykh al-Jifrī and Sufi activities of Sayyid ʿAlawī, I will demonstrate how Hadrami immigrants wove the wefts of a transregional network locally and channelled the Alawi Sufism into routine Mappila rites in the region. Jifrī's scholarly writings and Sayyid ʿAlawī's Sufi political activities not only evoked a wider appeal for the Alawi order, but also engendered popular legitimacy for Hadrami immigrants, helping them to elevate fellow Hadramis as religious leaders in the inlands of Malabar. This article argues that the successful engagement of the ʿAlawī order within the Sufi cosmopolis and the permeation of the ritual were a complex religious project that was brought forth by various aspects of the sacred genealogy, Alawi Sufi writings, Sufi activism, and the effective utilisation of Hadrami immigrant networks.
I will begin with a brief analysis of conceptions and approaches to the study of Sufism in the Indian Ocean in order to visualise a Shāfʿī–Sufi cosmopolis. The next section will engage with the current historical understanding of Hadrami connections with Malabar, giving nuanced insights into their historical formation. In what follows, I will analyse two cases of Jifrī and ʿAlawī to explicate how both contributed to the expansion of the ʿAlawiSufi networks and its rituals. Finally, I describe how the religious project of popularisation of Ḥaddād was successfully carried out by using a complex socio-religious synthesis of the sacred lineage, Sufi activism, and potent Hadrami Sufi networks in the inlands of Malabar. The hitherto less-utilised sources and writings that were produced by the diaspora and their disciples in different languages are employed as original sources for this study.Footnote 16 I render extreme critical vigour in comparing these sources with other evidence to ameliorate the potential hyperbole of ardent followers as well as the bias of colonial officials.Footnote 17
The Sufi cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean
The distinctive transoceanic ecumene that Islam provided in the Indian Ocean, especially after the shift in the long trade routes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea in the wake of the fall of the Abbasids, has already been read as an early form of world systems that existed before the European hegemony.Footnote 18 During the post-classical phase in which the massive popularisation of Sufi forms of religiosity that began in the thirteenth century, Sufi orders expanded to many far-flung regions such as the Indian Ocean through mercantile communities and mostly without being supported or coerced by political centres.Footnote 19 This placid process of emulation of Sufi ideas, values, and practices by indigenous societies in the region that paralleled mercantile activities had sometimes conveyed local religious cultural linguistic and legal elements, as is well attested in the literature.Footnote 20 Such larger networks of transregional actors of Sufis, texts, and shared values and ideas across a vast maritime region eventually shaped a cosmopolis of Sufism that demanded continuities along various bases, including conformity to legal requirements of the Shāfiʿī school, but also reflected regional diversities and internal ruptures as well.
With the expansion of organised Sufi orders to the Indian Ocean, the transregional shared space of Sufi cosmopolis did not merely transfigure with various indigenous cultural elements;Footnote 21 it also discoursed with the normative legal and theological realms that were provided by both the Shāfʿī legal and Ashʿarī theological schools. For instance, persisting debates on theo-legal issues of Wujūdiyya in seventeenth-century Aceh reshaped the Sufi realms across the region.Footnote 22 In the competition between the Alawi and Kondotty orders in Malabar,Footnote 23 as we see below, conformities with normative requirements and appropriations of explorative concepts from indigenous Shāfʿī Sufi scholars were detrimental to the success of the Alawi order and its ritual practices in the region. Such theo-legal Sufi discourses and the articulatory labour by religious authorities to connect with the Prophetic past have retrospectively been reshaping a Sufi cosmopolis that spanned wider coastal regions of the Indian Ocean.Footnote 24
Likewise, the cosmopolis that Sufism had fostered in the region, as well as elsewhere, hosts a longue durée of texts and practices that circulated across broader geographies in longer periods. Sufi texts that moved into newer cultural contexts, engaging local cultural requirements and theo-legal discourses, were often reproduced in various forms of abridgements, commentaries, super commentaries, translations, and marginalia. For instance, the abridged versions of Sufi texts of al-Ghazzālī's (d. 1111) Iḥyāʾ were reproduced in later centuries in the Indian Ocean regions, such as ʿUmda al-Aṣḥāb by Ramaḍān al-Sahāliyātī (d. 1489?) in Malabar; Sayr al-Sālikīn (1788), a free Malay adaptation by ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-Palambānī in South Sumatra; and al-Munjiyāt by Salih Darat al-Samarānī (1820–1903) in Central Java. Similarly, local Sufi texts that were produced in Malabar, such as Hidāya al-Adhkiyāʾ by Zayn al-Dīn al-Makdhūm al-Kabīr (d. 1522), gained wider acceptance in Mecca and Southeast Asia as commentaries, such as Kifāya al-Atqiyāʾ and Sulālim al-Fuḍalāʾ, which were written by Meccan Abū Bakr Shaṭṭā aka Sayyid Bakrī (d. 1892) and Nawawī al-Bantānī (1811–1898), respectively.Footnote 25
Moreover, sociopolitical transformations that were happening in one part of the transregional Sufi cosmopolis induced ripples across the region. For instance, the Portuguese invasion of Malabar in the sixteenth century and the Dutch abolition of the Sultanate of Banten in the nineteenth century made massive horizontal expansions of Sufism to inland areas of the region, offering the community an alternative source of non-political authority in Sufi leaders.Footnote 26 Similarly, in the wake of the fall of the Mysore reign in Malabar and the rise of the mighty British rule, the Sufi cosmopolis that was dominantly occupied by Qādirī-Chishtīs required rectifications. As we see below, Alawi immigrants undertook the articulatory labour of refashioning the existing Sufi cosmopolis by introducing themselves as reinvigorated embodiments of the ‘divine sovereignty’, bolstered by the sacred lineage and efficient to lead the host Mappila society in turbulent political circumstances.Footnote 27 By shedding the genealogical exclusivity of the Alawi order and preaching it in a Ḥaddādian model that was comprehensible to laymen,Footnote 28 Hadramis largely attracted massive followers. The Alawi order's capacity to engage meaningfully in the larger Sufi cosmopolis is one reason behind the persistence of Rātīb al-Ḥaddād as a part of routine Mappila religiosity despite puritan efforts that object to such novel rituals.Footnote 29
Ho's excellent ethnographic and historical study pioneered new promising windows for approaching religious immigrants and their Sufi genealogical intersections in the Indian Ocean. Recent research has examined how the linguistic barriers that often surfaced in transregional linkages of the Indian Ocean were overcome by a lingua franca such as the Sanskrit cosmopolis, which was later replaced by Arabic and coalesced by several other cosmopolises.Footnote 30 I would count on the previous studies to understand the historical transregional and socio-religious trajectories of a Southern Arabian Sufism in the Indian Ocean. However, the wider socio-historical implications of the Alawi order require more nuanced approaches that coherently consider religious intricacies of the Sufi cosmopolis, the Alawi genealogies, its ethnic, sociopolitical paraphernalia, as well as immense complexities provided by Islam. Because of the limitations of this article, the analysis admittedly focuses on the coastal region of Malabar—one of the Sufi entrepôts in the larger Sufi cosmopolis.
Before we proceed further, let me explain the ritual of al-Ḥaddād. In most of the mosques in Malabar, prayer leaders (Imāms) would also lead the ritual in congregation after the night prayer of ʿIshāʾ and the rest of the attendees would recite it simultaneously or after his recital of each chant.Footnote 31 This litany consists of chants, prayers, and Qurʾanic verses, and Prophetic traditions with special invocations for the Prophet, his family, the composer, and other Hadrami Sufis.Footnote 32 In Jami Masjid of Kannatippadi, near Vengara in the current Malappuram district of Kerala, where I resided as a participant observer,Footnote 33 Imam Fayḍī often speaks to people on the rewards of the routine recital of Ḥaddād litany explaining theological meanings of the lines, albeit not always alluding to its Hadrami origin. In my conversations with attendees there, I could observe that most of the participants were unaware of its Yemeni origin. However, they are used to reciting it, longing for the benefits that it is believed to bring in this life and the hereafter. Muhammad, in his twenties and a regular attendee, told me that whenever he missed the Rātīb gathering in the mosque, he tried to compensate by reciting alone at home. ‘Why do you care that much to regain a lost day's incantation?’ His reply was that this ritual was regarded as a highly rewarded one and he had once heard the Imam saying that people in earlier times had recited it for protection against contagious diseases such as plagues, and many notable scholars and Sayyids had encouraged people to routinise it.
Patching networks: Arab immigrants and the Alawi Sufism in Malabar
This section primarily adduces that the formation of a particular Hadrami Sayyid community in Malabar before the seventeenth century cannot be substantially traced. The historical narratives often unproblematically generalise that the Hadrami immigration to the region had existed for centuries, often evidenced by the predominance of the Shāfiʿi School as Hadrami handiwork.Footnote 34 Traditionalist scholars in the region attempt to legitimise their Sufi ritual practices by claiming an unstained and direct maritime conveyance of the religion from Arabia centuries ago,Footnote 35 especially from the sanctified geography of Hadramawt.Footnote 36 By reiterating strong religious and political linkages with Yemen, the scholars of Malabar were listed among the receivers of the Rasulid stipends of Aden in the thirteenth century, while, one century later, a request was made by the Qāḍī of Calicut to recite the Friday prayer (Khuṭba) in the name of the Yemeni sultan.Footnote 37 However, recent research has revealed that the expansion of the Shāfiʿī school into the Indian Ocean had involved many Muslim micro-communities from Khurasan, Baghdad, Damascus, India, and Southeast Asia, as well as from Yemen.Footnote 38
Other often-raised proof concerning the Hadramis in Malabar is that related to a mosque-based Islamic educational system in Tanur, where one Hadrami named Muhammad bin ʿAbd Allah al-Haḍramī worked as a scholar in the sixteenth century.Footnote 39 This writing in Persian on separate paper that is pasted on the margin gives a high possibility of its being a later additional note. Makhdūmī scholars in Malabar were often introduced as Sayyids with the Hadrami origin in several sources.Footnote 40 However, Maslak al-Atqiyāʾ, which is the earliest available text on Makhdūm al-Kabīr (d. 1522), written by his son ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz in the sixteenth century, states that al-Kabīr's family migrated to Malabar from Maʿbar,Footnote 41 which might also refer to a place in South India.Footnote 42 The absence of Hadrami Sayyids in travel accounts such as those by Ibn Battuta, who was keen to record religious notables wherever he visited, is conspicuous.Footnote 43 Likewise, the silence of sixteenth-century Hadrami chronicles on Hadramis of Malabar, notwithstanding some accounts of their presence in ports such as Cambay, remains problematic considering Malabar's maritime links with Arabia.Footnote 44 Indigenous historical accounts of the sixteenth century such as Tuḥfa al-Mujīhidīn and Fatḥ al-Mubīn also do not mention Hadrami Sayyids, although Tuḥfa mentions the Sāda among those who were held hostage and killed brutally by the Portuguese marauders in Malabar.Footnote 45 However, the seventeenth-century Hadrami genealogical text Mashraʿ mentions that one Sayyid Muhammad bin ʿUmar (d.?) had entered Cannanore in northern Malabar and became the son-in-law of its Principal (Sahib) ʿAbd al-Majīd.Footnote 46 Likewise, Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī of Aceh had Sufi relations with Hadrami Sayyids of Gujarat such as Bā Shaybān in the seventeenth century.Footnote 47 In addition to the lack of reference to pre-seventeenth-century migrations, the known tombs that were assigned to Hadrami Sayyids in Malabar trace back only to the eighteenth century, showing no tangible evidence that their Malabari lineage stretches to a period beyond three centuries ago. Likewise, the non-Sayyid Hadramis in Malabar, having kept no historical records or genealogical charts, provide very little evidence to establish any earlier immigration than that.Footnote 48 Despite Southern Arabia's centuries-old strong maritime links with Malabar, the eminence of a specific Hadrami Sayyid diaspora in pre-seventeenth-century Malabar has yet to be substantiated.
As the Alawi immigrants found many new diasporic centres in the nineteenth century—an era attested as an age of steam and print Footnote 49—the Alawi order also began to grow into an influential Sufi path in the Indian Ocean.Footnote 50 By the time Shaykh Jifrī—the Hadrami immigrant scholar in Calicut whom we discuss below—was writing his genealogical text Kawkab in 1794, his uncles, nephews, cousins, and other relatives had already migrated to various regions in South Asia and Southeast Asia.Footnote 51 In the depiction of migratory movements, Jifrī shows that the region of Malabar was merely one node in the wider Alawi networks and that the notable Alawi Sufi masters such as Sayyid Muhammad (d. 1747) of Quilandi, alongside his relatives and followers, played crucial roles in the expansion of the Alawi order and its rituals in Malabar.Footnote 52
Like the rich genealogical texts such as Kawkab, Sharaḥ Sabāʾik, and al-Shajara al-Aṣl that were kept within the familial houses of Sayyids in Malabar, the Sufi documents of the licence (Ijāza) that list members of the Alawi Sufi order also provide details of the further settlement of Hadrami families and expansion of their Sufi order into inland areas of Malabar.Footnote 53 An Ijāza document that traces an Alawi Sayyid to his masters will show the path through which the Sufi order was conveyed and the personalised preaching of its ritual.Footnote 54 These Sufi records and texts not only provide historical notes on relatives, teachers, Sufi masters and dates of their birth and demise, but also contain information regarding the ritual practice for adopting a Sufi order and taking the Bayʿa (pledge), in which the disciple's hand is placed below the master's.Footnote 55 This was locally known as Kai Kodukkal.Footnote 56 Many instances of such Sufi taking-hand ceremonies by Hadrami leaders in Malabar have been reported in official British records, including one in which a witness attests that Sayyid Faḍl had provided special incantation during the ceremony.Footnote 57 However, since the permission for reciting the litany of Ḥaddād was often conveyed to large groups of people through public licencing (Ijāza ʿĀmma), the above Ijāza documents that mostly record personal conveyances may not be very helpful for explaining its transformation into a widely recited popular litany in Malabar.Footnote 58 The following sections therefore provide in-depth accounts of two individuals who played an important role in the massive popularisation and public licencing of the Alawi ritual in Malabar: Shaykh bin Muhammad al-Jifrī (d. 1808, henceforth Jifrī) of Calicut and Sayyid ʿAlawī bin Muhammad bin Sahl Mawaladdawīla (d. 1844, henceforth Sayyid ʿAlawī) of Mamburam.
Replicating the Alawi version: Jifrī's engagements with the Sufi cosmopolis
This section will narrow down the analysis into how Alawi immigrants such as Shaykh Jifrī could successfully bring the Yemeni Sufi order into an overarching position in the Sufi cosmopolis of the region through his writings. Jifrī wrote extensively about the sublimity of Alawi Sufism and the necessity for popularising the rituals and litanies that were associated with the order, such as the Rātīb al-Ḥaddād. His texts, such as Kanz, Kawkab, and Natīja Ashkāl, intensely promoted the Alawi order and its rituals, and Jifrī directly gave Ijāza to his immediate Hadrami relatives, such as Sayyid ʿAlawī, and other disciples, such as Qāḍi Muḥyiddīn (d. 1844).Footnote 59 However, the mass proliferation of the Alawi order indeed adopted different strategies, often by appropriating contents from the Sufi cosmopolis in the region and at times negating or repudiating certain others. As we will see in the following story, Jifrī's refutation of the Kondotty order often borrowed the existing explorative and normative teachings of the Qādirī order and the Shāfiʿī school that was promoted by local scholarly families such as the Makhdūmīs and Kālikūtīs.Footnote 60 Before we discuss such dynamics within the Sufi cosmopolis, it would be useful to know how Jifrī managed to attain a key position among early Alawi immigrants through his diasporic as well as scholarly endeavours.
Hailing from Ḥāwī of Tarīm, Jifrī left for Malabar in his early twenties.Footnote 61 In the north-west of Calicut, he met the ʿAydarūsī Sufi master Sayyid Muhammad of Quilandi, who passed away in 1747 and was buried in Valiya Jāram.Footnote 62 His other Sufi master was none other than the progeny of the author of the Alawi litany, Rātīb al-Ḥaddād, Ḥasan al-Ḥaddād (d. 1768).Footnote 63 Jifrī's rise into a prominent Arab figure in the second half of eighteenth-century Malabar witnessed the advent and fall of the Mysore regimes and the eventual conquest of the region by the British. At least in the first two decades after his arrival in Calicut, Jifrī could retain cordial relations with the Hindu King Zamorin.Footnote 64 When Malabar fell into the hands of Mysore rulers, Jifrī's political affiliation also shifted clearly, as he showered praises upon Mysore sultans in their anti-British fight.Footnote 65 This political shift for him was necessary when he saw that Calicut, under Zamorin, was ailing in the face of the imminent colonial threat from the British. The policy rendered by the Mysore regime could also have instigated Jifrī, as the shrine of his Sufi master in Quilandi had been one of the recipients of the Inams that were distributed to religious shrines by Tipu.Footnote 66
With his significant religious position close to the political echelons, Jifrī could strengthen the Alawi diasporic networks in Malabar by accommodating and facilitating the settlement of new Sayyid immigrants from Hadramawt.Footnote 67 Jifrī's relatives, such as his cousin Ḥasan bin ʿAlawī bin Shaykh al-Jifrī (d. 1756), as well as Ḥasan's nephew Sayyid ʿAlawī of Mamburam, were all accommodated and recruited as religious leaders for the inland areas of Malabar.Footnote 68 Several later immigrants were also enrolled by Jifrī and raised as local religious leaders for the inland areas,Footnote 69 expanding the influence of Alawi networks in the hinterlands of Malabar. One of the crucial connections that Jifrī made in establishing the order would be that with his nephew Sayyid ʿAlawī, who became a prominent Sufi political figure in the anti-British movements in Malabar in the nineteenth century.Footnote 70 Both ʿAlawī and his son Faḍl rose to become religious stalwarts in the region, attracting many Malabari scholars and affluent as well as lay Mappilas to the Alawi order, thereby spreading the Alawi Sufi networks and its rituals into inland areas.Footnote 71 By initiating more indigenous scholars and laymen, they were transcending the Alawi genealogical exclusivity in a Ḥaddādian paradigm that argued for popularising the order into non-Sayyids.Footnote 72
In the new diasporic location of Malabar, Jifrī also wrote Sufi genealogical texts such as Kawkab al-Jalīl that helped Alawi immigrants not only to reconnect with the familial Sufi lineage of the homelandFootnote 73 Hadramawt, but also to reassert the Alawi claim over the sacred religious lineage that connected them to the Prophet. Such texts etched a prestigious place for Alawi Sufis in the Sufi cosmopolis, and induced political and material benefits for the diaspora. He wanted more clearly to compete and compromise with the ideas, practices, and contents of the existing Shāfīʿī Sufi cosmopolis, where the Qādirī order dominated with the overwhelmingly popular vernacular texts such as Muḥyiddīn Māla. At the same time, he repudiated others such as the Kondotty order for its problematic practices of prostrations before Sufi masters and use of hashish.Footnote 74 Such orders and their practices gave Jifrī a sense of urgency to preach the Alawi order and take normative restrictions of Sharīʿa into focus. For Hadrami scholars such as Jifrī, the situation resembled the period of the origin of Rātīb al-Ḥaddād in the homeland, when Sayyid ʿAbd Allah al-Ḥaddād set out to compile the litany to resist the ritual expansion of Zaydi Shiite groups to Hadramawt in 1660.Footnote 75 With the heretic Kondotty order, a similar religious threat was perceived by Hadramis in eighteenth-century Malabar, inducing them to popularise the Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya and its litany of Rātīb al-Ḥaddād. Jifrī foresaw that the best way to abjure the Kondotty order was to supersede it by introducing the Alawi Sufi order and highlighting the characters of its masters in his two texts: Natīja Ashkāl on the ʿAydarūsi Qādirī order (1784) and Kanz al-Barāhīn on the Alawi Madyanī order (1785).Footnote 76 These texts adopted larger ideas of Sufi-legal normativity that prevailed in the existing Sufi cosmopolis by referring to not merely globally renowned Shāfiʿī Sufi figures such as al-Ghazzāli, al-Yāfiʿī, and al-Ḥaddād, but also indigenous writings from Malabar such as al-Adhkiyāʾ.Footnote 77 Such appropriations gained the Alawi order a prominence in this Sufi rivalry and a continuity with what local scholars had already been standing for over centuries in terms of legal normativity.
At the same time, Jifrī wanted to replicate a Hadrami middle ground that sought a position between Shiite ritualism and Wahhabi purification claims.Footnote 78 He found colleagues and masters in Hadramawt who were trying to prevent the deviant rituals of Zaydi Shiites and never went for any extreme purification project as Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb had done in Nejd.Footnote 79 In Malabar, Jifrī also lambasted the Shīʿī Muharram rituals that prevailed among the Bohra communities in CalicutFootnote 80 and, as early as 1804, he unleashed one of the earliest criticisms of Ibn Wahhab's puritan thoughts from the Indian Ocean in his al-Irshādāt.Footnote 81 Taking the cue from the scholars of Hadramawt, Jifrī wanted to have a pre-emptive Alawi critique of Wahhabism in the region, as Malabar then apparently showed no sign of the Wahhabi influence.Footnote 82 In resistance to the nascent Wahabi thoughts or Shiite-heretic Sufi orders, Jifrī attempted to replicate the Alawi Shāfiʿī approaches in Malabar through writings that promoted the teachings, quotes, and activities of Alawi scholars and Sufis, including the eponymous ʿAbd Allah al-Ḥaddād.Footnote 83 He saw this normative middle path as a shared realm of the Sufi cosmopolis in which the Malabari scholars, such as the Makhdūms of Ponnani and the Qāḍis of Calicut, as well as Hadramis could easily intersect. In later centuries, Hadramis and Malabaris coalesced in the Sufi cosmopolis, repudiating both the Shiite rituals and the Wahhabi puritanism. By linking to the sacred lineage, hosting immigrants in Calicut, mentoring them in the Sufi order, and etching shared realms of interactions within the Sufi cosmopolis, Jifrī could successfully set up a favourable ground for massive Sufi expansion in Malabar. The following section will explain how Sayyid ʿAlawī utilised this fecund field and accelerated the permeation of the Alawi rituals into Islam in Malabar.
Sayyid ʿAlawī and the popularisation of the Alawi ritual
At the time that Sayyid ʿAlawī enhanced Sufi activities in early nineteenth-century Malabar, the writings and activities of early Hadrami immigrants, as stated above, had already been successful within the Sufi cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean. Sayyid ʿAlawī utilised this advantage to rearticulate connections with Prophetic traditions through Sufi activities and to execute various projects such as mosque building, preaching of Alawi rituals, fighting deviant orders, and mobilising people politically against the colonial powers. He not only personally conveyed the Alawi order to relatives, scholars, and laymen in the region, but also leveraged the prevailing favourable conditions of the Sufi cosmopolis in the region to promote it publicly.Footnote 84 Born in circa 1750 in Tarīm, Sayyid ʿAlawī set out to Malabar at a young age—probably 15 to 17—to join his immigrant uncles.Footnote 85 He soon grew into an unfathomably influential religious Sufi figure who was based in Tirurangādi—the former centre where his late uncle was buried.Footnote 86 As the British stretched their imperial paraphernalia, they felt insecure due to Sayyid ʿAlawī's towering charisma and eventually became suspicious of him and his progeny Faḍl after many uprisings against the colonial government in the nineteenth century.Footnote 87 ʿAlawī rejuvenated the interest in local Sufi figures who were greatly revered by locals and the Qaḍīs of Calicut, such as Shaykh ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Ḥimṣī (d. 1572) of Calicut.Footnote 88 Visits to a shrine by a Sufi Sayyid leader such as ʿAlawī were conceived of as a major sign of the sublimity of the one buried within it.Footnote 89 Simultaneously, he and his son Faḍl continued to repudiate ‘heretic’ orders. Citing the increasing fraudulence in the majority of existing Sufi orders, Faḍl criticised them as being merely hollow soulless decorations that lacked the unique values that the Sufi cosmopolis had been retaining for centuries.Footnote 90
Unlike his uncle Jifrī or son Faḍl, who published more than 20 texts, mostly on the Alawi order and its significance, ʿAlawī did not write much.Footnote 91 However, he became widely appealing to Mappila society through his reconstructions of the Prophetic past by using Sufi activities. While the sacred lineage often linked immigrants to ruling echelons in many places,Footnote 92 the Sufi stories that circulated orally around figures such as ʿAlawī attracted masses. The sacred lineage, alongside Sufi activities, garnered a unique place for the Alawi order in the Sufi cosmopolis. The popular legitimacy that Hadrami immigrants such as Sayyid ʿAlawī and his son Faḍl garnered in Mappila society was so conspicuous that sometimes the powerful machinery of the imperial state became dysfunctional against them.Footnote 93 When the British government decided to exile Sayyid Faḍl, the then-district magistrate H. V. Conolly sought mediation with him instead of proceeding with military force, mainly due to the risks involved in banishing ‘a person thoroughly venerated’ by Mappilas.Footnote 94 Conolly further described the extent of divinity that lower orders ascribed to Faḍl: ‘They swear by his foot as their most solemn oath. Earth on which he has spat or walked is treasured up. His blessing is supremely prized.’Footnote 95 Neither colonial authorities nor later scholars adequately addressed the sources of legitimacy that these influential Sufi figures amassed in Malabar. However, the oral circulations of miraculous stories were largely reported during their lifetimes. Conolly wrote in 1851: ‘Marvellous stories are told of his supernatural knowledge. His blessing is supremely prized.’Footnote 96 One report from 1852 describes the popular belief ‘that the untold secrets of the heart are open to his (Faḍl's) view’ and his blessing's ‘reputed efficacy towards their future reward’.Footnote 97 Such popular images of Sayyid leaders were so pervasive that even the authorities had to include frequent questions regarding miraculous acts that appeared in depositions by local Muslim witnesses.Footnote 98
Moreover, various texts that described miraculous activities of ʿAlawī, although mostly written after his death, were abundantly disseminated in Malabar, engendering prominence for Hadramis in the Sufi cosmopolis of the region.Footnote 99 Sayyid ʿAlawī was often described in these stories and writings as miraculously salvaging his fellows from shipwrecks, bringing economic and physical blessings, solving familial problems, and bringing down unjust land lords and British officials.Footnote 100 For Mappilas, Sayyids remained victorious in the competition between the two modes of sovereignty—the British imperial regime and the Hadrami divine authority. As later reflections of ‘local and individual devotion towards stationary and settled Shaykhs’,Footnote 101 these pieces of literature became so influential among the Muslim community that the British even considered confiscating those that perpetuated the legendary memory of anti-British martyrs.Footnote 102 The belief in the sacred lineage and miraculous activities of Hadramis led Mappilas to not only seek their blessings for everyday religious and social issues, but also execute various projects under the Alawi leadership.Footnote 103
The translation of this sacred legitimacy into many socio-religious and political projects that were carried out during the time of Sayyid ʿAlawī was a complex process. As mentioned, the Sayyids’ approval and reverence of certain figures such as al-Ḥimṣī of Calicut gained popularity for the shrine, but they also wanted to emphasise the need to adhere to the shared values that were adopted in the Sufi cosmopolis and were lacking in many orders such as the Kondotty. Signifying such values, Faḍl entitled one of his Alawi texts al-Ṭarīqa al-Hanīfa al-Samḥāʾ (The Upright and Tolerant Path), as he recommended reciting the Alawi ritual litany on a daily basis or, if that was not possible, at least on Thursdays and Mondays.Footnote 104 The main agency that propelled the Sufi cosmopolis, Faḍl writes, was always the basic value of ‘Istiqāma’ (uprightness), and not miraculous activities.Footnote 105
Politically, Hadramis utilised the egalitarian values of Sufi cosmopolis to fight against exploitative landlords who colluded closely with British officials. The Alawi Tariqa assumed a non-elite format, transfusing such values into the complex caste-driven social systems in the region,Footnote 106 as Faḍl advised his followers from the lower background not to use honorific titles for the higher caste and refrain from consuming their leftovers.Footnote 107 Thus, in the turbulent political decades after the fall of the temporal Mysore rule, the immigrant Arab descendants of the Prophet were perceived as capable of offering a religiously appealing sacred political authority for Mappila laymen and lower-caste Hindus, with the potential to thwart the Western imperial power. Their inherent Sufi conceptions of ‘life-as-other’, as Jacob illustrates, traversed the terrain of modern sovereignty that was pursued by these empires and sceptical rationalists.Footnote 108 Description of such political nuances of these sacred resources in anti-colonial struggles and the continuing significance of Hadrami Sayyids in Muslim politics in Kerala would be difficult here.Footnote 109 Given the emphasis of this article on the Alawi Sufi ritual expansion, it suffices to ask how such religious political authority of Hadramis facilitated the entrenchment of the Alawi Sufism in the larger Sufi cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean.
In religious terms, Hadramis extensively utilised this public legitimacy to build many mosques in the hinterlands, where they routinely read the litany, extending the influence and enhancing the position of the Alawi Tariqa in the Sufi cosmopolis. Sayyid ʿAlawī either instructed, laid the foundation, or directly undertook significant projects for constructing numerous mosques across the region. During the first half of the nineteenth century, approximately 35 mosques from Tazhekode in the eastern region of the current Malappuram district to Naduvannur in the north of Calicut district were known to have direct connection with Sayyid ʿAlawī.Footnote 110 The majority of these mosques are still managed by the descendants of individuals who are associated with Sayyid ʿAlawī and the presence in them of the tombs and shrines of his disciples gives further credibility to the idea that several mosque projects were carried out by Hadramis.Footnote 111 As there was a substantial increase in the Muslim population and number of mosques in nineteenth-century Malabar,Footnote 112 the mosques provide a link in explaining the intricate intrusion of the ritual into the routine practices of Mappilas.Footnote 113 The establishment of mosques on a large scale in Malabar under the aegis of Hadrami Sayyids in turn facilitated the public performance of the Alawi ritual, and they continue to be significant sites for its congregational routine performance.
How did Hadrami immigrants succeed in mobilising people, manpower, and funds for establishing religious structures in a strange diasporic land such as Malabar?Footnote 114 As mentioned earlier, alongside the success of the early Hadrami writings in fetching genealogical privilege for the Alawi order in the Sufi cosmopolis, the stories of miracles that circulated around Sayyid immigrants during their lifetime itself evoked the wider legitimacy and support that they needed for constructing mosques and preaching the Rātīb. As many written pieces of work on Sayyid ʿAlawī would explain, uncanny healing or blessings by Sayyids often generated huge endowments that were devoted to the building of mosques and religious shrines, as in the case of Kodinhi mosque near Tirurangādi.Footnote 115 Relying on the sacred resources of the Alawi Tariqa, both affluent persons and the poor alike heeded Sayyid ʿAlawī's call for funding or manpower for building mosques,Footnote 116 which greatly facilitated the public preaching of Alawi rituals.
Another strategic step that was taken by Sayyid ʿAlawī was the employment of fellow Hadrami Sayyids as religious leaders in these new mosques, developing them into centres of Muslim socio-religious and political activity. Many religious leaders were designated to these mosques by Sayyid ʿAlawī from the Hadrami network itself: he sent ʿAydarūs Tangal to Vadakkumuri of Parappur and ʿAbd Allah Bāfaqī to MambadFootnote 117 and, from his close relatives, Valiyākathodukayil Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qādir as Qāḍī to Kodinhi Masjid and the latter's brother Sayyid Ḥabīb to Ponmundam.Footnote 118 By predominantly appointing Hadramis to positions in these mosques, Sayyid ʿAlawī was not only expanding Hadrami Sufi networks to inland areas, but also manipulating the legitimacy that was invested in Hadramis as Sayyids and Sufis. Since most of these appointees were Sufi Sayyids, who were esteemed for their Sufi genealogical significance in the Sufi cosmopolis, their advocacy for the ritual of Ḥaddād in these new mosques held greater appeal for the public compared with local scholars.Footnote 119 By appointing Sufi Sayyids as religious leaders for these inland mosques, the Hadramis managed meticulous allocation and effective consumption of their network resources. The routine nature of reciting the litany, as recommended by its composer, further contributed to its prominent position within the religious Sufi cosmopolis of the region. Therefore, the Hadrami Alawization project of Islam in Malabar hinged upon such complex socio-historical political and genealogical factors in which the sacred resources of the Sayyid lineage and Sufi stories, egalitarian ethos, theo-legal Sufi realms, and optimum utilisation of such diverse resources played variegated but exigent roles in the Sufi cosmopolis.
Conclusion
The historical tracing of the ritual permeation of a Southern Arabian Sufi order into Mappila devotionalism helps to unravel how Yemeni immigrants and their Sufi-sacred and other resources were crucial in determining the trajectories of the Sufi cosmopolis in the region. As multiple forms of devotional expressions, legal thoughts, and cultural varieties strived within diverse cosmopolises of the Indian Ocean, the Alawi Sufis also made variegated engagements with such theo-legal Sufi realms. Hadrami Sayyids such as Jifrī, ʿAlawī, and Faḍl aspired to carve out a clear niche for the Alawi order within the wider spectrum of the Sufi cosmopolis by promoting writings on the significance of the Alawi Sufi path, appropriating local Sufi contents, networking new immigrants, employing egalitarian Sufi values, building mosques, and promoting its rituals. In the diasporic location of Malabar, they successfully replicated the Hadrami Sufism, projecting it as a path that occupied a middle range between Shīʿism and Wahhabi puritanism. The Alawi writings not only made appropriations of elements in the existing Sufi cosmopolis, but also competed with/rivalled others. Hadramis, in most of these regions, promoted the Ḥaddādian model of Alawi Sufism, making its narratives and rituals more accessible and legible for laymen against the labyrinthian Sufi theories and the genealogical exclusivity that was once preached. Transfusion of egalitarian values of the Sufi cosmopolis to the caste structures of the region was crucial, not merely in expanding the religion, but also in increasing its political stake. ʿAlawī and Faḍl utilised their popular legitimacy to advocate the Sufi normativity and implement various sociopolitical projects in the region. By building numerous mosques in the hinterlands and appointing fellow Sayyids and local followers to positions in these mosques, they further enhanced the massive expansion of the Ḥaddād ritual and ensured a diligent position for the Alawi order in the Sufi cosmopolis.
These Yemeni religious immigrants and their remarkable influence in various sociopolitical and religious realms of the Indian Ocean left multifarious impacts for understanding both host and immigrant communities in the region. Primarily, due attention should be given to the explorative Sufi experiences of Muslim religious societies outside the Middle East, such as those in the Indian Ocean. Tracing of the Alawi order and the Sufi explorative meanings that it carried help in dissecting the intricacies of the religious, cultural, political, and commercial impacts that Hadrami Sufis made through their networks, not only in the Indian Ocean, but also wherever they emerged as being influential. Likewise, they remind us of the pitfalls in relying exclusively on colonial sources that depict host and diasporic societies as producers and consumers of religious ‘fanaticism’. Extending our views to the rich sources that were left by Hadrami immigrants, their disciples, and followers in the region would help us to dissect the many placid socio-religious impacts of parallel ‘divine sovereignty’ and its transregional sacred resources of authority that were fostered in the Sufi cosmopolis. This transregional perspective of a Sufi cosmopolis not only reinvigorates the centuries-old maritime cultural linkages of the community that was subdued in the colonial, nationalist, Marxist iterations. It also provides opportunities to move away from a state-centric reading of Islam in India, where Sufism is mostly conceived as a parallel structure to Muslim states.Footnote 120
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the Muhammad Alagil Arabia Asia Chair at ARI, NUS, for their generous funding and to Engseng Ho, A. K. Muneer and Nisha Mathew for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. I also thank editor Daud Ali and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive insights. All remaining errors are my own.
Conflicts of interest
None.
