Introduction
Oceans divide continents but they also connect their shores. Over the early modern period, maritime trade increasingly integrated the regions of the western Indian Ocean. Spices were traded from Malabar in south India to Yemen on the Arabian peninsula, with the eventual terminus in Cairo further west.Footnote 1 Trade went hand in hand with political ambitions, and fostered aspirations to transoceanic empire building and maritime exploration across a sea of exchanges that were otherwise determined by the monsoon.Footnote 2 Slaves from East Africa were shipped across the ocean to serve in the armies of the subcontinent.Footnote 3 Pilgrims from around the Indian Ocean basin and beyond congregated in the Hijaz for the annual ḥajj.Footnote 4 Studies of the early modern western Indian Ocean region have highlighted these multi-layered configurations of networks, connections, and exchanges that spanned its waters.Footnote 5 They render the story of the western Indian Ocean prone to partial analysis, since its sheer scope defies an all-encompassing narrative. Instead of an histoire totale, a recently formulated ‘new thalassology’ has identified ‘the spread of ideas and cultural practices’ as one among many promising future pathways of research.Footnote 6 In a similar vein, Sujit Sivasundaram has emphasized that knowledge formation and cultural exchange have important transoceanic trajectories, which need to be integrated into the study of the Indian Ocean history.Footnote 7
Maritime connections gave rise to cosmopolitan forms of writing history. This article argues that the sixteenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of transoceanic Arabic historiography. Highly mobile scholars used Arabic to write historical texts in the subcontinent. Their biographical works and chronicles borrowed from both the model of collective biographies, prevalent across the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea region, and forms of Persian history writing in the subcontinent and beyond. These historians held affiliations with courts in Gujarat and the Deccan. However, they used Arabic to reflect on the history of events and communities within the western Indian Ocean region and thereby integrated the history of this region into a transoceanic Arabic historiography.
Recently, Engseng Ho provided a crucial starting point for the emergence of a sixteenth-century transoceanic historiography in Arabic. According to him, an ‘Islamic ecumene’ emerged during the fifteenth-century reconfiguration of the Indian Ocean.Footnote 8 Commercial activities intensified and merchants started to realign trading networks along a circuit that centred on the Hijaz and Yemen in the west, and Gujarat, the Konkan, and Malabar in the east. The rise of the Muzaffarid sultanate in Gujarat and the Bahmanī sultanate in the Deccan reinforced a transoceanic pull on mobile communities, who spotted professional opportunities through courtly patronage. Central to his work are the sayyids from the Hadramawt in Yemen, in particular the al-ʿAydarūs kinship group, who transformed their sacred lineage that went back to the Prophet Muḥammad into social capital, which served them as crucial currency among the subcontinent’s elites. Ho’s notion of ‘local cosmopolitans’ captures their ability to become rooted in different places, while at the same time forging transient networks that allowed them to remain mobile. Members of the al-ʿAydarūs kinship group served as advisers, scholars, and administrative personnel at royal courts and among learned communities.
From their individual life trajectories, these sayyids composed Arabic texts, ‘travelling texts’, which mirrored all the things that mattered for such highly exclusive, mobile communities: the tool of genealogy, which accommodated new family ties; courtly patronage in faraway places; and learned affiliations through scholarly circles.Footnote 9 Ho offers a seminal analysis of one of the Arabic ‘travelling texts’, the Nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir (The travelling light regarding the stories of the tenth century, sixteenth century CE). ʿAbd al-Qādir al-ʿAydarūs penned it in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in the early seventeenth century. In it, he combined the events and the people of the sixteenth century that he deemed worthy of remembrance. His centenary framework of selection had prominent precedents. He had learned this tradition of history writing from the scholarly communities of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and the Hijaz. They had employed this model to record, remember, and respect members of a transregional learned community. Their authors established their own criteria of selection, and thus the biographical dictionaries that emerged from such a practice are also highly personal stories reflecting their worldviews.Footnote 10 Al-ʿAydarūs’ intellectual genealogy can be traced back to two famous historians of the Red Sea region. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī and his student Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī wrote similar biographical works about the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries, respectively, while living in Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz. Thus, Ho’s observed ‘shift in East–West trade routes, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, [which] brought Hadramawt and Aden into greater contact with Egypt, the Hejaz, and India’, was paralleled by a spread in ideas and cultural practices in Arabic history writing from the Red Sea region to Gujarat.Footnote 11
The story from the perspective of the al-ʿAydarūs family and their texts is, however, only one partial way to tell it. There is a broader context of these transoceanic learned exchanges. The proliferation of Arabic historical writing followed the earlier spread of learned figures and the creation of scholarly networks. Movements between the subcontinent and the Red Sea region had gained pace during the fifteenth century. A growing community of Indians travelled to the Hijaz to study with prominent teachers, to receive teaching certificates, and to copy books.Footnote 12 At the same time, more and more learned figures ventured the other way as well. Lavish courtly patronage at a growing number of courts offered them high rewards.Footnote 13 Several scholars chose al-Hind to pursue an academic career, to compose books, and to teach. For example, the Egyptian scholar Muḥammad al-Damāmīnī (d. 828/1424) made his way from Egypt, via the Hijaz, to Yemen, and then further on to al-Hind in the fifteenth century.Footnote 14 He received patronage from several sultans in Gujarat and the Deccan. Moving from court to court, he composed three commentaries on Arabic grammars initially written in the Red Sea region and western Asia. For the fifteenth century, John Meloy has shed light on the growing corpus of ‘local histories’ by members of the Banū Fahd family in Mecca, which documented the increasing interactions between their hometown and South Asia, especially through the movement of people.Footnote 15 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have recently offered a study of one of these historical texts to understand the connected histories of the Red Sea and Gujarat, and have thereby complicated the picture of Arabic history writing in the Indian Ocean as seen from Mecca. They show that scholarly exchanges continued during the sixteenth century, as is evident from a work written by the Meccan historian Jārullāh b. Fahd. It reports the comings and goings of courtly embassies, precious cargo, and ‘savant-migrants’ between the Hijaz and Gujarat.Footnote 16
The sixteenth-century spread of Arabic history writing across the western Indian Ocean has to be studied within a broader geographical and empirical context. In the following, I will discuss the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography from three perspectives. First, I will zoom out and explore the traces of this transoceanic Arabic historiography as seen from the Persianate world, a transregional sphere of cultural influence that stretched from Anatolia via Iran, Central and South Asia, to Southeast Asia. Specific to the current purpose, I will focus on the Haft iqlīm (The seven climes), a sixteenth-century Persian work by Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, a scholar from Safavid Iran.Footnote 17 From his vantage point in the ‘Persian cosmopolis’, a transoceanic entanglement based on Arabic exchanges was observable.Footnote 18 At the same time, this text can serve as a starting point to discuss important entanglements between the Arabic and Persian circulations, the flows between them, and the limits of exchange. Transoceanic Arabic history writing emerged alongside a diverse Persian historiography that had taken shape over the medieval period and provided the form and means in history writing at Muslim courts.Footnote 19 Persian universal chronicles and histories played a central role from the Mughal north, across the Deccan, and further south to the principalities of south India.Footnote 20 The elite groups at courts in the subcontinent and the wider Persianate world constituted the main audiences of these works.Footnote 21
Secondly, a transoceanic Arabic historiography did not emerge out of thin air. Contemporary manuscript collections in India hold a diverse corpus of Arabic historical texts from the early modern and modern periods. Significantly, almost all the manuscripts that are held in the most prominent collections in Rampur (Uttar Pradesh), Patna (Bihar), Kolkata (West Bengal), and Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh/Telangana) – to be discussed below – are concerned with the history of the Red Sea region, especially Egypt, the Hijaz, and Yemen. Ownership statements, reading notes, and other traces of perusal and transmission demonstrate the wide circulation of these Arabic historical manuscripts among readers in South Asia. With these manuscripts, it becomes possible to look at the transoceanic cultural references from the reception side of historical texts, and thus the aspect of reading in a transoceanic Arabic historiography.
Thirdly, during the sixteenth century, the relative diffusion of Arabic scholarly traditions and literacy provided a conducive environment for the writing of Arabic historical texts. Other historical texts survive, some of them previously studied for their own merit, and others essentially untouched. I argue that the Arabic historical texts from the sixteenth-century subcontinent have to be read together to consider their cumulative significance: a deeper historical consciousness and reflection about the transoceanic connections that linked communities from both sides of the sea. While mobile historians certainly had an eye on the South Asian audience, it is significant that they aimed at a broader transoceanic narrative and readership. Arabic historical texts from Gujarat to the Deccan and Malabar are of importance because they transcend courtly and regional contexts to engage with the pasts of transoceanic communities. I will offer a reading of the transoceanic cultural references of the texts – in terms of both their story of composition and their contents – that reflects on the historical connections of South Asia with the Red Sea region. Thus, with this set of texts, the focus will be on the writing of Arabic historical texts and their proliferation among communities of western India during the sixteenth century. The texts are Ḥājjī al-Dabīr al-Ulughkhānī’s Ẓafar al-wālih bi-Muẓaffar wa- ālihi (The victory of the fervent concerning Muẓaffar and his family) and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-ʿAydarūs’ al-Nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir (The unveiled light concerning the news about the tenth century) for Gujarat, Ibn Shadqam al-Madanī’s Zahr al-riyāḍ wa-zulal al-ḥiyāḍ (The flower of the garden and the pure water of the cisterns) for the Deccan, and Zayn al-Dīn al-Malībārī’s Tuḥfat al-Mujāhidīn fī baʿd aḥwāl al-burtukāliyyīn (The gem of the proponents of Jihād concerning some of the news about the Portuguese) for Malabar.Footnote 22
Compared to a substantial corpus of Persian chronicles, prosopographies, and hagiographical works, the transoceanic Arabic history corpus seems rather small. Yet small does not mean insignificant. Taken together, the texts of this Arabic corpus reflect on particular confluences in the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean (see figure 1).Footnote 23 This article begins the task of exploring and delineating them.
Figure 1. The early modern western Indian Ocean region. Map based on John Meloy, Imperial power and maritime trade: Mecca and Cairo in the later Middle Ages, Chicago, IL: Middle East Documentation Center, 2010. Reproduced with the permission of the Middle East Documentation Center, the University of Chicago. Changes to the map by O. Nelson, chinooktype.com.
Excavating an Arabic transoceanic connection: Rāzī’s Seven climes
In the late sixteenth century, historians in the Persian cosmopolis of Iran and northern India were aware of the Arabic maritime network that spanned the Red Sea region and western India.Footnote 24 Scholars who inhabited the Persianate worlds imagined these cultural links in the context of geographical descriptions in narrative texts. In 1594, Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, a scholar from Safavid Iran, finished the composition Haft iqlīm (The seven climes) after a final editing period of six years.Footnote 25 In this Persian composition he combined topographical, biographical, and historical aspects of the world known to him.Footnote 26 He divided this world up into seven geographical zones or climes (aqālīm, sing. iqlīm).Footnote 27 The first clime included Yemen, Nubia, and China. The second reached from Mecca to Hormuz, and via Gujarat to the Deccan. The third extended from Iran and Iraq to northern India. The fourth focused on Iran and present-day Afghanistan. The fifth consisted of broader Transoxiana. The sixth stretched across Turkestan and the Russian steppes to Anatolia. The seventh listed the Slavs, and ended with the mythical figures Gog and Magog.
Such a sevenfold conceptual geography had its predecessor in earlier periods. Medieval Arab geographers developed different but often very persistent notions, which structured their worlds.Footnote 28 In the Abbasid period, for example, geographers and littérateurs made sense of increasing interactions with ethnicities and cultures from east to west and north to south; they would establish links between a climate zone and its inhabitants, and thereby also provide justifications for the enslavement of certain ethnic groups, and the cultural dominance of others.Footnote 29 According to medieval ethnographic works, it was the climate zone that determined the cultural characteristics of peoples living in it, and consequently structured the populated parts of the world in a hierarchical manner.Footnote 30 Geographers not only described the world in ways comprehensible to their audiences. They also provided a culturally commensurable version of it by reflecting on what they knew about it.
Naturally, this was also the case with Rāzī’s work; however, his mental map differed remarkably in comparison with previous geographical divisions of the world. His underlying conceptions cut across several seemingly naturally perceived areas, at least in comparison to geographical treatises from the medieval period.Footnote 31 Regions such as Iran and al-Hind were broken up to create new cultural zones that made more sense to him.Footnote 32 Each of his climes contained a succession of entries on the cities, regions, and personalities which made up the social fabric of that geographical zone. The fourth zone traditionally represented the central one of the seven climes,Footnote 33 usually the place of origin of the person who had penned the treatise and therefore the most elevated and prestigious of the seven zones.Footnote 34 As in earlier treatises, the location of the fourth zone, its climate, and its significance as the earliest habitation of humankind distinguished this area from the other climes.Footnote 35 Temperament, nature, knowledge, and virtue rendered its inhabitants superior to their neighbours. At the same time, this clime seemed to describe a central part of the early modern Persianate world, which Rāzī and his family of literary fame inhabited.Footnote 36 Judging from the enumeration of regions and cities, the fourth clime consisted of the core cultural centres in Persian history, such as Khurasan and Tabriz, as well as places that became prominent because of their famous learned men, such as Astarabad and Gilan. By grouping certain places and their people within one clime, Rāzī ordered the world in terms commensurable to him. Each zone represented an internal cultural affinity as its raison d’être.
Rāzī’s second clime imagined an Arabic connection between the Red Sea region and western India as a discernible cultural zone. This clime consisted of the Hijaz with Mecca and Medina on the Arabian peninsula and the port city of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.Footnote 37 It then moved across the baḥr al-hind (Indian Ocean) to link these places with the historic region of the Deccan, subdivided further into Ahmadnagar, Dawlatabad, and Telangana, and adding Ahmadabad in Gujarat.Footnote 38 In the introduction to this section, Rāzī provided the defining outer limits of this space: it stretched from China across India, and from Iran into Africa.Footnote 39 It was made up of seventy-seven cities, many of them located in the Arab lands. Owing to the religious importance of Mecca, the seat of the Hijaz (čūn kursī-yi Ḥijāz Makka ast), this city provided the starting point in the western part, and connected ultimately with the towns, forts, and people of the Deccan plateau. Therefore, I suggest a reading of his compilation of these places and people in the second geographical zone as an expression of underlying close cultural and social ties. While the reason for this geographical arrangement is not elaborated further, this second clime can still be treated as an analogous case to Rāzī’s own fourth zone, albeit on a lower rank in his hierarchical conception.
Rāzī’s observation makes it possible to excavate and set into context an Arabic transoceanic connection. This maritime Arabic connection at times rivalled, complemented, or simply paralleled the Persian cosmopolis.Footnote 40 Persian was a crucial transregional idiom of prestige during the early modern period.Footnote 41 The spread of Persian described different ‘significant geographies’ and underpinned forms of cultural conduct from Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf.Footnote 42 Connections and exchanges between the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal worlds were maintained largely through Persian.Footnote 43 For example, Muzaffar Alam’s examination of Persian akhlāq texts on ethics and statecraft in the subcontinent shows the complex and long-lasting spread of political and cultural norms from the Persian Gulf region to Central Asia and northern India.Footnote 44 Persian became the political language at Muslim courts throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Work on intra-Asian elite migration has demonstrated how Iranian groups combined the skills of trade and state-building to move between Iran and several courts in the Deccan during the seventeenth century.Footnote 45 Most significantly, Persian was quasi-omnipresent when it came to history writing, at least in ‘Islamicate’ contexts of this period.Footnote 46 Courtly elites sponsored Persian transregional history writing from Iran to Central Asia and north India.Footnote 47 Rāzī was culturally rooted in this Persian cosmopolis and probably visited India, where his cousin served in different posts under the Mughal emperor Akbar and his successor, Jahangir.Footnote 48 He worked in a social environment that was characterized by professional mobility, and he provided a commentary to such geographical proximities and notions as mobile social groups experienced them during the sixteenth century. Thus, his delineation of the second clime makes sense as an imagined Arabic connection between the Red Sea region and western India, grounded in a reflection of prevailing social mobilities and cultural exchanges across the western Indian Ocean.
Rāzī’s second clime, or western Indian Ocean connection, also paralleled an ‘Arabic cosmopolis’ of literary networks further south, which likewise stretched across core regions of the Indian Ocean world during the early modern period.Footnote 49 Ronit Ricci studied the transmission of The book of one thousand questions – essentially a conversion story structured in a list of questions that the Prophet Muhammad was asked by a Jewish leader – from Arabia, via south India, to Southeast Asia. She analysed the transregional dissemination of this Arabic text through processes of ‘translation’ and ‘conversion’, with ‘tellings’ produced in Tamil, Malay, and Javanese. Thereby, she built on Sheldon Pollock’s concept of the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, a term initially used by him to interrogate the dominant transregional discourse in Sanskrit that shaped political and cultural formations in South Asia during the first millennium.Footnote 50 Ricci employs the overarching notion of an Arabic cosmopolis to trace the emergence of a ‘shared canon of texts’ along ‘literary networks’. This Arabic cosmopolis was ‘defined by language, literature, and religion’, and thereby represented a ‘translocal Islamic sphere’ that ultimately encompassed communities from the Arabian peninsula, across south India, and into mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.Footnote 51 By looking at the ‘intricate relationship between Islamization and literary and linguistic transformation’, Ricci highlights the significance of literary networks to cultural processes and their change over time.
The variety of cosmopoles raises the issue of the relative use of Arabic and Persian across the Indian Ocean world and beyond more generally. Different strands of scholarship have offered different answers to this. Marshall Hodgson posited Arabic and Persian as two increasingly marked ‘geographical zones’ from the thirteenth century onwards, roughly congruent with the Arab Middle East and North Africa on the one hand, and Anatolia, Iran, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia on the other.Footnote 52 Shahab Ahmed’s magisterial tour de force through the ‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’, which was dominated by a widely circulated ‘Persian canon of literature’ and thus constituted ‘a common paradigm of Islamic life and thought’, sparks the question of where Arabic fits into the Indian Ocean world, what cultural role it played, and for whom.Footnote 53 Previously, it was often assumed that the uses of Arabic in South Asia were restricted to religious rituals, and that the language merely served as a tool for the purpose of studying Islam.Footnote 54 This was reinforced by juxtaposing Arabic’s religious significance with the secular and cultural importance of Persian.
Going beyond this dichotomy, Ricci’s cosmopolis included vernacularized languages that became Arabicized over time.Footnote 55 This also implied that Arabic was in use across regions from East Africa, to south India, and into Southeast Asia.Footnote 56 Similarly, Michael Pearson considered Arabic as a crucial lingua franca of communication in maritime contexts from the Swahili coast, to south India, and into Southeast Asia.Footnote 57 He also pointed out that, in the fourteenth century, the famous traveller Ibn Battuta recognized the prevalence of different Arabic idioms across these oceanic worlds, alongside the practice of a higher Arabic idiom by some social groups. Muhsin al-Musawi recently introduced the notion of a ‘Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters’ to capture the significance of Arabic as a scholarly idiom and communicative medium across learned networks from Egypt to Central Asia.Footnote 58 For the region of Malabar, Sebastian Prange provided a detailed and vivid picture of Arabic contacts with the Red Sea region, which built on the longue durée of trade, political patronage, and religious networks.Footnote 59 Meanwhile, Persian served as an important language of exchange across the Bay of Bengal and became vernacularized across different languages.Footnote 60 And Gagan Sood has shown how vernacularized forms of Persian provided the medium for epistolary communication between eighteenth-century South Asia and the Persian Gulf region.Footnote 61
As will be shown below, Arabic historical writing emerged where Arabic scholarship had made a substantial landfall. By the fifteenth century, Arabic scholarship had begun to play an integral part in Islamicate court cultures and their learned communities in Gujarat, the Deccan, and Malabar, although the extent of this role has not been researched sufficiently yet.Footnote 62 What comes up repeatedly, however, is that, when it comes to Islamicate scholarship, Arabic and Persian often went hand in hand. Prominent sources, such as the sixteenth-century historian Firishta of the Deccan, referred to the establishment of madāris (singular madrasa), ‘institutions of higher learning’, across the medieval Deccan to promote both Persian and Arabic for the teaching of a diverse set of Islamicate subjects.Footnote 63 Recent scholarship by Samira Sheikh named various Arabic scholars who contributed to the flourishing learned culture at the court of the Gujarati sultans, whose chronicles were written almost without exception in Persian.Footnote 64 As the recent meticulous research by Jyoti Gulati Balachandran has shown, learned groups beyond the courts in fifteenth-century Gujarat employed both Arabic and Persian in their textual traditions.Footnote 65 These were essentially community-building exercises intended to anchor growing Muslim communities in a spiritual geography and an erudite Islamicate tradition. Similarly, in China, Islamicate scholarship, both in Arabic and in Persian, provided the foundation for the elaboration of a Chinese Islamic canon – Han kitab – among scholarly networks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 66
This previous scholarship also implied that questions of sacredness, cultural heritage, language policies, and personal inclinations played an important role in the preference and use of Arabic and Persian. What this article explores is how such preferences changed as cultures changed over time. The subsequent study of the transoceanic reading and writing of Arabic historical texts builds on this diverse scholarship to emphasize historical contingencies over normative preconceptions. Tracing practices and texts in their changing contexts can paint an intricate picture of when and how the uses of Arabic became amplified, the connections that people could forge through it, and the meaning-making processes that it could thereby shape.
Reading Arabic histories in early modern South Asia
The exploration of a transoceanic Arabic historiography can start with those who read historical texts in the early modern period. The reception side also offers a more complex picture of the cultural importance of Arabic across the ocean. One way to approach reading habits of Arabophone audiences is to study which Arabic historical texts circulated in South Asia during this period. Scholarship on European book cultures provides meticulous studies on the history of reading, and how specific individuals perused their books.Footnote 67 Manuscript versions of Arabic historical texts can be approached in a similar vein. To begin with, it is necessary to survey Arabic manuscript collections in the subcontinent. To my knowledge, the corpus of Arabic historical texts in manuscript collections in Hyderabad, Kolkata, Patna, and Rampur has not yet been studied. Manuscript notes, such as statements of scribes (most importantly the colophon at the end of a work stating its completion), reading notes, and ownership marks, are an invaluable record to assess the nuts and bolts of reading tastes and practices.Footnote 68 However, in the cases of Arabic histories, this record is more often fragmentary than not. Ultimately, manuscript notes can only indicate a general interest of South Asian communities in Arabic histories and thereby serve as a starting point to explore individual cases of reception through reading notes and references.
The biographical dictionary Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa- anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān (The deceased of the nobles and news about the sons of time) written by the famous thirteenth-century biographer and historian from Egypt and Syria Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282) dominates the collections of Arabic historical works across India. Several manuscripts of his text survive in libraries in Hyderabad, Patna, and Rampur.Footnote 69 Since the evolution of the collections in all three cities is complex and as yetalmost unstudied, an essential aspect of the manuscripts’ circulation histories is missing. It is therefore difficult to pin down where, how, and among whom these manuscripts circulated after they had been copied. What the actual manuscript versions show, though, is that scribes continuously copied and recopied Ibn Khallikān’s famous biographical compendium over the early modern period. Copyists produced both Rampur versions during the sixteenth century.Footnote 70 Another version survives in the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, bearing the seal of the Mughal Emperor Shāh Jahān.Footnote 71
The South Asian circulation of Ibn Khallikān’s biographical work is correlated with the usage of this text as a model for Arabic history writing in South Asia. As will be discussed in the following section in more detail, Ibn Khallikān appears in different ways in the sixteenth-century transoceanic histories from Gujarat and the Deccan. In Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s text, he shows up in a historical digression, as a famous biographer from the Red Sea region. Ibn Shadqam partly continued and partly reworked Ibn Khallikān’s biographical work. He exhibited how influential Ibn Khallikān’s conception of writing a collective biography was until the sixteenth century. I suggest that Ibn Khallikān’s centrality in the transoceanic history writing projects of the sixteenth century reflects his work’s status as crucial historical reading material.
Ibn Khallikān’s Wafayāt al-aʿyān functioned as a ‘prior text’ for the pursuit of Arabic history writing.Footnote 72 Ricci employed this concept and phenomenon in her analysis of translation practices across Southeast Asia.Footnote 73 The phenomenon describes the process by which ‘familiar stories and characters [are used] to introduce new ideas and narratives’.Footnote 74 In other words, prior texts become manifest in the textual relationships between an earlier ‘text’ and its reworking in a different socio-cultural environment. Thereby, they help to establish localized histories for groups, which are simultaneously shared by translocal communities.Footnote 75 It was because Ibn Khallikān’s presentation of a favourable Muslim community made for good reading across communities of the western Indian Ocean that it was conducive to transoceanic history-writing exercises.
Other Arabic historical texts also rose to fame across the subcontinent; taken together, they read like a historical library of the Red Sea region. Most of them are concerned with the regions of the Red Sea, from Egypt to the Hijaz and Yemen.Footnote 76 Compared to other genres, not many manuscripts survive from this period. Those that do survive are almost all copies from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. For example, the history of Egypt was disseminated through the work al-Ḥusn al-muḥāḍara fī taʾrīkh al-miṣr wa-l-qāhira (The excellence in lectures regarding the history of Egypt and Cairo).Footnote 77 The famous fifteenth-century historian Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī compiled this text mainly based on biographies of people whom he considered important to the history of Egypt. At the same time, transoceanic Arabic histories reached a readership in the subcontinent. The previously mentioned fifteenth-century biographical dictionary by al-Sakhāwī, the al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ (The brilliant light regarding the people of the ninth century), survives in manuscript versions, as well as in abridgments and summaries, in collections from Gujarat to Patna.Footnote 78 The sixteenth-century transoceanic history by al-ʿAydarūs, al-Nūr al-sāfir, was copied across the early modern subcontinent.Footnote 79
To dig deeper, a case study from the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna can exemplify the extent to which South Asian readers engaged with Arabic histories of the Red Sea region. The text is one of the famous fifteenth-century histories of Medina, entitled Wafāʾ al-wafāʾ bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā (The fulfilment of compensation in the reports about the house of the Prophet (the chosen one)), by ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Samhūdī (d. 911/1506), and it consists of an abridgement of his larger work on Medina.Footnote 80 The version at hand preserves al-Samhūdī’s statement of completion at the end of the text, the initial compositional colophon. The scribe added a Persian completion note below, stating that he copied this text in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat in 1015/1606.Footnote 81 More importantly, the same scribe (according to a similar hand) seems to have perused this Arabic manuscript thoroughly, and to have added an abundance of informed comments and extracts from other works in the margins. First, there are several correction notes and lexicographical annotations, which demonstrate traces of the reader’s philological encounter with the text.Footnote 82 Secondly, he placed qif-notes (the imperative of waqafa, meaning ‘stop’, addressed to the person reading the text) in the margins of the manuscript folios.Footnote 83 They function as highlighters of sections, labelling them for future reference. In particular, his qif-notes mark references to the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, and further historical information on this highly venerated place.Footnote 84 Thirdly, the scribe was interested in other religious aspects of Medina as a holy Islamic city. For example, he marked with a qif-note a section that dealt with the superior quality of performing the fast (ṣiyām) in Medina.Footnote 85 These examples of reading notes probably only represent a partial and incomplete record of the reader’s engagement with the text, and more specifically one that was intended to help with future inquiries into the history of Medina. Nonetheless, this case study gives a sense of the profound interest that a reader had in the Islamic past and religious significance of the Hijaz. It thereby stands as an example of how deeply Arabic history writing concerned with the Red Sea region percolated across learned communities of Gujarat.
Arabic history writing in sixteenth-century South Asia
As shown above, mobile communities and literary networks have become crucial for studying social and cultural dynamics of transoceanic entanglements. What is more, the people involved left behind several Arabic historical texts, which reflect on their place in the western Indian Ocean region. Their texts help us understand how they perceived their transoceanic world, its past, and its people. In the following, I study the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography as a corpus of texts and a scholarly practice. I argue that the sixteenth century witnessed a form of Arabic history writing that linked people, places, and practices of the Red Sea region and western India. The sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean connections created a social and cultural constellation in which Arabic, as a scholarly idiom of Islamicate prestige, became conducive to the pursuit of history writing among mobile groups. They traversed an Arabic cosmopolitan world reaching from the Hijaz and Yemen in the Red Sea region, to Gujarat, the Deccan, and Malabar across the sea. In their historical texts they reflected on the shared past of this transoceanic space, its communities, and its cultural traditions.
In sixteenth-century Gujarat, Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s Ẓafar al-wālih offers a crucial case of Arabic history writing.Footnote 86 Yet, there are several problems with this text. So far, only one manuscript has been located, in the Calcutta madrasa, and this version, incomplete at the beginning and the end, serves as the commonly used edition. Since an introduction and other details about the work’s history of composition are missing, not much is known about how the author presented his relationship with his text. In addition, the date of composition is not clear, but conjecture puts it in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 87 Based on the condition in which the manuscript was found, scholars have speculated that it remained a draft throughout the author’s life, and did not circulate widely.Footnote 88
Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s biography linked his personal fortunes and background closely to the Hijaz. He was of Meccan origin (b. 1540), and his father was responsible for the religious endowments (awqāf) of the Sultan of Gujarat in Mecca.Footnote 89 The family returned to Cambay in 1554, where Ḥājjī al-Dabīr belonged to the scribal service elites in the sultanate of Gujarat, and worked for different nobles.Footnote 90 After the Mughal conquest of Gujarat in 1572/73, his father was tasked with the responsibility of administering Mughal religious endowments in Mecca and Medina. Ḥājjī al-Dabīr accompanied him to deliver the necessary funds. After his father’s death, he moved on to serve a different courtier in Khandesh, a region of the northern Deccan.
Thus, Ḥājjī al-Dabīr was well established in Arabic elite networks in Gujarat and across the sea. Apart from his Hijazī background, he seemed to have retained strong personal ties with Mecca while living in Ahmedabad. In Gujarat, he belonged to the service elites of the sultanate. However, his family looked back on a long scholarly tradition. They could boast of scholarly successes in Patan, where they had held offices as muftis, judges, and teachers in the past.Footnote 91 Patan, also al-Nahrwāla in the Arabic and Persian sources (hence the element al-Nahrwālī in Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s name), was a scholarly centre in Gujarat that was famous for a proliferation of learned figures. For example, the sixteenth-century historian, traveller, and Meccan ambassador to the Ottoman court, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Nahrwālī, hailed from an important service family in Patan, and wrote historical accounts of both Ottoman Yemen and Mecca in the Hijaz.Footnote 92 Like Ḥājjī al-Dabīr, Quṭb al-Dīn had a strong relationship with the Hijaz, where he refined his education in Islamicate subjects during his extensive stays.
It is Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s transregional connection that helps to explain why he chose Arabic to write his history. As pointed out before, in the South Asian context a Persian historiography flourished at the courts in Gujarat, the Mughal worlds, and the Deccan, but Arabic represented a medium through which Ḥājjī al-Dabīr could relate to other audiences. His historical text mixes political chronologies, biographical entries of famous personages, and personal information.Footnote 93 It is split into two sections. The first covers the history of the sultans of Gujarat in the form of a succession of sultans, interspersed with further biographical entries and other ‘digressions’. The second section contains the succession of the north Indian Muslim dynasties, ending with the Mughals. Here the similarities with frameworks of universal histories in the Indo-Persian historiography are striking. These histories differed from case to case but they generally accounted for the proliferation of selected Muslim dynasties up to the authors’ own times.Footnote 94 Although it is impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis here, the Indo-Persian historiographical tradition seems to have served Ḥājjī al-Dabīr as a blueprint for his own history.
Historical digressions, which pervade the larger narrative melange of dynastic succession and biographies of Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s text, link his story back to the Red Sea. His historical radius extended beyond South Asia: for example, he integrated sections about the history of the town Zabīd in Yemen, which by the fifteenth century was a crucial transit point for scholars moving between the Hijaz and the subcontinent.Footnote 95 In the same vein, he included a biographical entry on Ibn Khallikān.Footnote 96 Ḥājjī al-Dabīr gave a short summary of Ibn Khallikān’s professional life and enumerated his scholarly skills, especially his qualities as a historian, which are manifest in Wafayāt al-aʿyān.Footnote 97 As we have seen, in this biographical compilation, Ibn Khallikān brought together famous figures from across the Islamicate world to expound their qualities, deeds, and virtues.Footnote 98 Ḥājjī al-Dabīr dwells on the importance of this text, noting that a Persian translation of the work was produced, and offered to the Sultan of Gujarat as a gift.Footnote 99 In sum, Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’s audience is presented with hand-picked information about the history of the Red Sea region. Those elements were simultaneously highly relevant to the history of communities in his own social environment in Gujarat.
Another text underscores the profound transoceanic historical entanglements of the sixteenth century. The Arabic biographical work al-Nūr al-sāfir provides another case for the spread of Arabic history writing from the Red Sea to Gujarat in this period.Footnote 100 ʿAbd al-Qādir al-ʿAydarūs al-Ḥusaynī al-Ḥaḍramī al-Yamanī al-Hindī wrote the work while resident in Ahmedabad in Gujarat during the early seventeenth century. He was a member of the al-ʿAydarūs kinship group, born in Ahmedabad in Gujarat in 978/1570, where he grew up to serve as a courtier, and thus offered his scholarly skills to the regional sultanate. He died in the same city in 1038/1628, after a full life of scholarship. The several nisbas (‘affiliations’) of his name point to the transregional dimension of his family lineage. They showcase how he negotiated the transoceanic dispersal of the al-ʿAydarūs family and his own past as part of his persona. The Ḥaḍramī origin of the family in Yemen coexisted with his own place of personal attachment in al-Hind.
Ho’s observations, which merge into a success story of Ḥaḍramī scholarship, can serve as a starting point to probe the wider historiographical significance of the work for the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography.Footnote 101 He points out how this work ‘chronicled’ communities, events, scholarly genealogies, and the expansion of Islamicate learning, and thereby created a transregional Islamicate space that encompassed the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia.Footnote 102 Still, Ho concentrates on the particular significance of the work to the family project of the Ḥaḍramī Sayyids. Building on this, I want to elaborate on significant themes of al-ʿAydarūs’ biographical work. He incorporated into his work several clues about the more widespread rise of Arabic learned pursuits. Therefore, al-ʿAydarūs’ biographical work has to be seen in the wider context of Arabic history writing across sixteenth-century western India. At the same time, his work was embedded in a complex socio-cultural environment conducive to the composition of Arabic historical texts in seventeenth-century Gujarat. The fact that the work appeared in Gujarat signifies transoceanic connections that go beyond his family network. A larger transoceanic scholarly world spread out across the ocean and combined with a local community receptive towards Arabic scholarship.
Al-ʿAydarūs’ work has a strong intertextual relationship with al-Sakhāwī’s collective biography al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ. As Ho points out, he used the same centennial framework for his work and he furthermore stated in the foreword that his work contained ‘the great events and wonders of the tenth century hijrī’ (roughly the sixteenth century) together with the obituaries of its ‘great men’ (kings, scholars, judges, men of letters, and the righteous),Footnote 103 ‘be they Egyptian or Syrian, Hijāzī or Yamanī, Rūmī or Indian, Mashriqī or Maghribī’.Footnote 104 Thus, his idea of the Islamicate world, mapped out in the introduction, echoed al-Sakhāwī’s, and it shaped their biographical works accordingly. Whereas al-Sakhāwī had gained scholarly prestige in the Hijaz, al-ʿAydarūs experienced the increasing transregional movements of various social groups in Gujarat. He structured his whole work as a chronicle: while al-Sakhāwī compiled an enormous list of biographical entries, al-ʿAydarūs arranged events and biographies according to the sequence of years from 901 to 1000 hijrī.Footnote 105 Like al-Sakhāwī’s, al-ʿAydarūs’ historiographical treatise praised the pursuit of intellectual endeavours in the rhetoric of the prosopographical.Footnote 106 These prosopographical elements (the biographical entries) need to be studied further to explore the ways in which al-ʿAydarūs placed learned pursuits of individuals at the centre of a transoceanic cultural connection.
A deeper scholarly and cultural relationship between Gujarat and the Hijaz is also clear from the wider choice of biographical entries in the Nūr al-sāfir. This goes beyond the aforementioned intellectual link that al-ʿAydarūs established with al-Sakhāwī, his former teacher.Footnote 107 During the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the importance of the Hijaz rested not only in the haramayn (the two holy places of Mecca and Medina), but also in its role as a scholarly centre.Footnote 108 Al-ʿAydarūs offered biographies of personages who travelled from Gujarat to the Hijaz. Here, the emphasis rests on the transformation of their educational trajectory that took place while residing in the Hijaz. For example, the main entry for the year 955/1548 is the return to Gujarat of al-Khān al-Aʿẓam Aṣafkhān al-Kujarati [al-Gujaratī], a vizier of the Sultan of Gujarat (manṣab al-wizāra), from Mecca, where he had been sent by the Gujarati rulers.Footnote 109 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam recently studied a historical text by Jārullāh b. Fahd from sixteenth-century Mecca, which devotes many references to Aṣafkhān as the head of the Gujaratī embassy in Mecca, his efforts in creating an amicable relationship with the rulers of Mecca, and his extensive patronage activities among the learned communities.Footnote 110 Al-ʿAydarūs, however, puts greater emphasis on Aṣafkhān’s own learned pursuits.Footnote 111 Early on, he became well versed in several fields of knowledge. Even more crucial were his scholarly transactions, and the social networks that he forged as part of his administrative post in the Hijaz. In Mecca, he was an important benefactor for the resident scholars. The students flocked to him, and through his charitable activities in the field of knowledge (ʿilm) they excelled in their studies. Aṣafkhān thus personified the importance of the Hijaz as a magnet for scholars, and in Gujarat al-ʿAydarūs seemed to have been so well placed in the flow of transoceanic information that he could observe this en détail.
Al-ʿAydarūs was himself an itinerant scholar, who travelled widely to study and collect books. His own entry in the book puts him on the map as a central learned figure.Footnote 112 It showcases his educational upbringing, his compositional activities, and the links he forged with other scholars of repute. In Gujarat he shared the mobile transregional world of scholars, Sufis, and sultans, who came to him for advice, blessings, and learning. Al-ʿAydarūs was also an important Sufi shaykh (mystical and spiritual leader in Islam), and he was eligible to bestow the khirqa (lit. ‘garment’) of affiliation on new disciples of his Sufi path (ṭarīqa).Footnote 113 Learned men from across the western Indian Ocean approached him on scholarly and spiritual matters. The names of the listed affiliates sketch the transregional contours of the western Indian Ocean. They represent the various regions from al-ʿAllāma al-Shahīr Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Sinbāṭī al-Makkī al-Miṣrī in Egypt, to al-Sayyid al-Jalīl … al-Shāmī al-Makkī in Mecca, al-Shaykh al-Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAllāma … al- Ḥaḍramī in Yemen, and al-Shaykh al-Kabīr al-ʿAllāma al-Shahīr Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan … al-Kawkinī al-Hindī in the South Asian subcontinent. Here again, names are important for the places and connections they signify in the grand scheme of things. The people behind the names make up the social fabric of a historically and culturally linked western Indian Ocean connection.
In the sixteenth-century Deccan, sultans offered courtly patronage to mobile scholars for their transoceanic Arabic history projects. Ibn Shadqam al-Madanī’s biographical and historical work Zahr al-riyāḍ presents one such effort with regard to the court of Ahmadnagar, one of the five Deccani courts which succeeded the Bahmanīs over the course of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.Footnote 114 His peregrinations bear witness to the persistent connections between the Hijaz and the Deccan, as well as the high mobility of elite groups in this period.Footnote 115
The biographer and historian Sayyid Abū l-Makārim al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Shadqam al-Madanī was born in Medina in 1535, and died in the Deccan in 1590.Footnote 116 Following in the footsteps of his father, he became naqīb al-ashrāf (chief of the ashrāf, that is, a line of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad), and a mutawallī (‘custodian’) of the Prophet’s grave.Footnote 117 However, Ibn Shadqam resigned from his post and left Medina. He travelled widely to visit the shrines of the Shi’i imams at Najaf, Kerbala, and Mashhad, and made contact with the Safavid court in Iran, and the Niẓāmshāhī court in the Deccan. While affiliated to the court of the Niẓāmshāhī dynasty in Ahmadnagar, he composed the Zahr al-riyāḍ. After his death, his body was brought to the cemetery of Medina al-Baqiʿ, where he was buried.Footnote 118 Scholarship on him and his work is limited to general references by Werner Ende and Zubaid Ahmad.Footnote 119 Jacqueline Sublet and Muriel Rouabah placed his biographical work in a larger group of texts, whose authors used the previously mentioned prominent biographical dictionary by Ibn Khallikān when composing recensions and continuations for their own period.Footnote 120
Ibn Shadqam’s biographical work again demonstrates a deep historical connection with the Red Sea region. According to the introduction to the Zahr al-riyāḍ, he composed it during the years 1580–84, while he was affiliated to the court of Murtadā Niẓāmshāh.Footnote 121 Furthermore, he recounts his reading (muṭālaʿa) of Ibn Khallikān’s prosopography as a meaningful impetus to writing his own work.Footnote 122 He thereby places himself in an intellectual relationship with Ibn Khallikān’s Wafayāt al-aʿyān. There is also a close textual link, as many personages who feature in Ibn Shadqam’s prosopographical account are derived from Ibn Khallikān’s biographical community.Footnote 123 Transregionally famous and notorious figures appear across Ibn Shadqam’s work, such as Jingīz Khān, as well as Saljuq kings, ʿAbbāsid viziers, and poets and scholars from east to west.Footnote 124 Sultan Amīr Timur (Tamerlane) turns up as well, because of the political repercussions he caused across West and South Asia. His entry is followed by biographical entries for his successors, enshrined in a Timurid genealogy that ends in Humayun, son of Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire.Footnote 125 Deccani rulers are mentioned as well.Footnote 126 Ibn Shadqam continues his predecessor’s idea of bringing together these figures of great importance in an imagined transregional Muslim community.
Ibn Shadqam’s transoceanic Arabic history project has to be seen in the context of a Persianate cosmopolitan world that the Deccan shared in the sixteenth century. Roy Fischel recently elaborated on the Persian history-writing activities at the early modern Deccani courts.Footnote 127 The writers of major Persian chronicles, such as Firishta, Shirazi, and Tabataba’i, wrote their histories in the Deccan from the 1590s to the 1620s. They belonged to the faction of the ‘foreigners’ (gharībān) at these courts, mainly hailing from Iran, and building on Persian as both a cosmopolitan language and an established cultural idiom that was supposed to guide personal ‘comportment’ and the arts of ‘statecraft’.Footnote 128 Factional rivalries often occurred between these Persianate foreigners and the groups of the ‘Deccanis’, the majority of whom were locally rooted Muslims, who communicated in the Dakhnī language.Footnote 129 While these foreign scholarly and administrative elites were crucial to the state-building exercises of the Deccani courts, they always had one foot out of the door, keeping close ties to their homelands.Footnote 130 However, while affiliated at different times to the courts of Ahmadnagar and its neighbouring sultanate, Bijapur, these historians provided crucial ‘origin narratives’ for the local dynasties.Footnote 131 They used common tropes, and moulded familiar stories to make ‘improbable narratives’ sound reliable. They provided the Deccani courts with a diverse corpus of Persian history writing, as well as a Persian past and genealogy that linked the Deccani dynasties with famous dynastic lineages from western Asia. Thus, they integrated the Deccan into a sixteenth-century cosmopolitan world of Persian mobilities.
Ibn Shadqam’s case is similar in a way. His activities map an Arabic cosmopolitanism that coexisted side by side with the Persianate sphere. He shared a wider Arabic transregional idiom with the mobile elites of the western Indian Ocean region. While he moved between the interconnected worlds from the Red Sea region to al-Hind, Iran, and back again, Arabic opened doors at the Deccani court of Ahmadnagar, allowing him to translate his scholarly skills into successful courtly patronage. He brought with him a text and model of Arabic history writing from the Red Sea region that he reshaped socially and culturally. To a local and translocal audience he could present a transoceanic social history that linked the Red Sea region, Iran, and the Deccan in a cultural space in which Arabic functioned as a transregional idiom side by side with Persian.
Moving further to the south Indian region of Malabar, Zayn al-Dīn al-Malībārī’s Tuḥfat al-Mujāhidīn is important for the sixteenth century.Footnote 132 Al-Malībārī, on whom biographical information is scarce, composed it during the second half of that century.Footnote 133 It consists of four sections: the first is a compilation of prophetic traditions with stipulations about jihād, the second provides an account of the spread of Islam in Malabar, and the third concerns the customs of the non-Muslim inhabitants of Malabar. These three parts function as an introduction to the fourth part: the ‘account of the proceedings of the Portuguese’ from the time of their arrival in 1498 to 1579.Footnote 134 Scholarship over recent decades has repeatedly made use of this narrative source to study the military conflict of Malabarī polities with the Portuguese during the sixteenth century, and the competition over the Indian Ocean spice trade, as well as forms of conversion, and the spread of Islam across south India.Footnote 135 Most recently, Prange has edited an English translation of a text from south India which bears a strong textual relationship with al-Malībārī’s narrative, indicating a wide transcultural circulation of his text in south India.Footnote 136 But, while Malabar was closely linked with the wider Red Sea region through trade and scholarly networks, it is nonetheless difficult to locate al-Malībārī within these activities.Footnote 137
Instead, his choice of language can be explained based on the historical significance of Arabic within his wider socio-cultural setting. For the recompilation of prophetic traditions on jihād in the first part of the introduction, Arabic seemed to be the natural choice, predetermined by the genre of ḥadīth. His decision to compose the historical sections in Arabic was then probably a logical continuation. The use of Arabic for the composition of his historical work reflects on the close relationship that Malabar already had, and continued to have, with regions and societies across the sea – to Yemen and the Hijaz in one direction, and to Southeast Asia in the other.Footnote 138 Malabar was an important contributor to the Indian Ocean spice trade, a crucial crossing point for travellers and traders coming from west or east, and therefore central to the networks of the wider Indian Ocean.Footnote 139
The political history of the early modern Indian Ocean provides a necessary context to explain the emergence of this historical text.Footnote 140 The Portuguese had entered the region as competitors in the lucrative trade in spices from Malabar to Egypt. However, their combined military and commercial ventures were complemented by Ottoman expansionism into the Indian Ocean. Giancarlo Casale recently argued that Portuguese and Ottoman ‘discoveries’ of the Indian Ocean built on similar interests in access to the spice trade.Footnote 141 This was accompanied by the expression of similar notions of universal empire.Footnote 142 The Ottoman conquest of Egypt and the Hijaz was therefore part of a larger strategy to take control of these commercial activities, and to formulate claims of a global caliphate, just as the maritime blockade of Mecca’s seaport Jidda in 1517 was a move by the Portuguese intended to encroach on these economic activities.Footnote 143 This military conflict had already involved the Mamlūk empire, forged short-term alliances between their Ottoman successors and the sultanate of Gujarat, and even reverberated as far as the neighbouring realm of Bijapur.Footnote 144 The sultans of the Ottoman empire, Gujarat, and Bijapur, and the Portuguese forces, as well as a host of local power-holders in the Hijaz and Malabar, became entangled in a political power struggle over the commercial prospects of Indian Ocean trade.Footnote 145
In the context of these emerging political fault lines, al-Malībārī’s narrative made use of Arabic to reflect on the politics of Malabar’s past and present. He stated his political purpose in writing this work in the introduction.Footnote 146 He aimed to unite a hitherto allegedly inactive group of Muslim states from around the western Indian Ocean to defeat the Portuguese invaders of Malabar. The choice of Arabic made sense in the complex political setting of the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean. Al-Malībārī’s case shows that, by the sixteenth century, Arabic history writing formed part of a transoceanic dissemination that permeated deeply into courtly societies in South Asia. His choice of language was particularly important in terms of the audience he envisioned. The book had a specific addressee, being dedicated to ʿAlī ʿĀdil Shāh I (r. 965/1535–987/1558) of Bijapur, one of the Deccan sultanates.Footnote 147 He cited the sultan’s excellent track record as a just and legitimate Muslim ruler, together with his military zeal, in a panegyrical fashion, thus making a case for armed resistance against the Portuguese.Footnote 148 More specifically, the stated purpose, introduction, and structure of al-Malībārī’s work show that the objective of dedicating this work was political communication with a Muslim court, and not just the addition of an Arabic book to the royal library.Footnote 149 Within this process, Arabic represented not only the preferred medium of telling, but also an accepted language for reading a historical narrative about the region of Malabar.
Conclusion
The sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean witnessed a confluence of factors that allowed a transoceanic Arabic historiography to emerge beyond its waters. The proliferation of Arabic history writing was traceable from Gujarat, to the Deccan, and to Malabar. Mobile and transregionally connected scholars used Arabic to reflect on the pasts of regions and communities, east and west. These transoceanic historians thrived on mobility, learned pursuits, and shared networks from the Red Sea region to Iran, Gujarat, and the Deccan. Their narratives built on scholarly authorities and their texts from across the Red Sea region. Yet, their works did not emerge out of nowhere. Surviving Arabic historical manuscripts and their notes indicate a readership with a diverse interest in the history of Egypt and the Hijaz, but also the wider western Indian Ocean region as a whole. Arabophone communities of the western Indian Ocean shared their connected pasts through writing and reading. By the late sixteenth century, a mobile scholar from the Persian cosmopolis observed this transoceanic space as a distinct cultural zone, and as a transoceanic Arabic connection that linked the Red Sea with the subcontinent.
The study of writing and reading practices in this transoceanic context offers an empirically grounded trajectory to explore forms of transregional cultural integration. Within the field of global historical scholarship, the dimension and degree of ‘global integration’ is a recurring topic.Footnote 150 It often involves the question of when a historical phenomenon is truly global. In the current context, the western Indian Ocean did not witness a ‘systemic integration on a global scale’.Footnote 151 At the same time, however, the story of ‘global integration’ is not a one-way street. The above-mentioned scholarship has drawn a complex picture of ups and downs, phases of acceleration and of slowdown, and a multitude of connections and interdependencies. Since it is not the geographical extent of a historical process that determines its ‘globality’, the level and intensity of transregional integration has to be examined based on other parameters. Writing, reading, and sharing the history of communities and their practices across regions can inform inquiries into the cultural integration of human spaces along connections and mobilities.
Delineating changing transregional constellations, based on social and cultural connections in the study of a transoceanic Arabic historiography, can inform and elaborate on recent approaches to global history. Sanjay Subrahmanyam developed the concept of ‘connected histories’ as a global framework for historical inquiry.Footnote 152 By tracing change in ‘symbolic and ideological constructs’ in the context of South Asia, and the subcontinent’s wider links with the regions of early modern Eurasia, he provides a heuristic basis for the investigation of interrelated social and cultural processes across time and space. Most importantly, it is the emphasis on individuals and communities, in the way that they transcend and encompass a variety of regionally fixed histories, which offers an angle to explore the historically contingent connections. Flows of ideas and cultural constructs can be related in their global spread to regional adaptation and reformulation. This can be brought into a fecund dialogue with Arif Dirlik’s call ‘to confront the contingencies and ground-level processes of human activity with the structures that are at once the product and the conditions of that activity’.Footnote 153 The transoceanic Arabic historiography offers a manuscript- and text-based angle to study such forms of cultural dialogue as a ‘process’ and a ‘performance’.Footnote 154 The people involved traversed the western Indian Ocean, and thereby imagined, wrote, and read about its shared history in Arabic. They created their cultural space, a ‘significant geography’, by writing and reading Arabic histories in it.Footnote 155 These cultural practices offer a conceptual pathway to ‘spatialize the past’, and thus acknowledge change over time in this cultural formation itself.Footnote 156 The practice of transoceanic Arabic history writing further stresses historical contingency and change over time in the globalizing early modern Indian Ocean world.
The early modern Indian Ocean world was very much a multi-centric one.Footnote 157 Instead of seeing the Arabic and the Persian cosmopoles as exclusive spheres of influence, this research has emphasized that Arabic and Persian circulations were enmeshed with each other, and constituted often complementary cultural flows in these transoceanic connections. Each language offered a range of opportunities for mobile scholars within and across the respective cosmopoles. Still, the study of Arabic historical texts through manuscript versions provides a bottom-up approach to complicate the broad-brush effects of seeing the Indian Ocean world through the eyes of such cosmopolitan cultural formations. As an intellectual practice, it represents one form of a transregional cultural integration within the Indian Ocean world.
Thus, for the early modern period it is necessary to ask wider questions about the social and cultural interactions of Arabophone communities on both sides of the ocean. Further research in South Asian archives and manuscript collections – which offer a range of early modern Arabic (and Persian) texts that were shared with communities in Anatolia, Egypt, the Hijaz, Yemen, and Iran – is necessary to study these entanglements from the viewpoint of other textual traditions, networks, and practices, and to determine moments of cultural interaction and confluence, but also shifts and suspension of these connections.
Christopher D. Bahl is a research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut (part of the Max Weber Foundation). He received his PhD in history from SOAS, University of London, in 2018, with a thesis on ‘Histories of circulation: sharing Arabic manuscripts across the western Indian Ocean region, 1400–1700’.
