Pearls Meet Corals: Birth of a New Script

The emergence of the Arabi-Malayalam script has been traced by some scholars to the early centuries of Islam. O. Abu, writing in 1970, located its origin as far back as the ninth century: according to him, early Arab-Muslim missionaries in Malabar invented the script as they were forced to write in the local language (Malayalam), as they did elsewhere.Footnote ¹³ Taking Abu's presumption to be an unquestionable historical fact, later scholars like C. A. Ahmad Moulavi overlooked the merit of examining what may have been the necessary conditions for such a transliterative script developing in multi-lingual South Asia.Footnote ¹⁴ The resulting absence of serious historiographical engagement strengthened the belief that the Arabi-Malayalam script emerged out of deliberate and persuasive attempts by Arab Muslims to overcome the problems of intimate interaction with local Muslims, leaving many questions totally unresolved.Footnote ¹⁵

Therefore, the central question asked in this first section is did early Arabic-speaking Muslims consider the invention of a transliterative script as necessary for communicating with a predominantly ‘oral-literate’ native coastal community that conducted its trade through commodity exchanges.Footnote ¹⁶ The argument that ‘it was being deliberate’ presumes that not only did a substantial number of non-settled Arab Muslims have deep knowledge of the local language but also that a significant number of local Muslims learned Arabic in the early years of Islam. An array of pre-colonial registers reflecting on the mercantile, religious and lingual sphere of coastal Malabar, however, points to problems inherent in such presumptions. While we do not have evidence to show the presence of a large native Muslim population in Malabar during the early years of Islam, new studies show that Arabic-speaking Muslims predominantly operated as peripatetic traders for centuries in the Indian Ocean region.Footnote ¹⁷ Therefore, from available information, we learn that the evolution of Arabi-Malayalam—both script and texts—has to be placed in a different location in which a range of linguistic, communicative, scriptorial and historical engagements shaped the scribal sensibilities around politics, religion and everyday life in pre-colonial Malabar.

The lengthy account of Ludovico di Varthema, an early sixteenth-century Italian traveller who maintained close relations with Arab traders in Malabar, indicates that Arabic speakers in Indian Ocean port towns seldom spoke or wrote native languages until the late sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Pre-colonial sources from other parts of the Indian Ocean and beyond suggest instead that they were no different from early Muslim missionaries from Arabia who did not make any active scriptorial innovation anywhere in the world. As a considerable fear existed amongst them about diluting the divinity of Arabic—both language and script—they took all possible precautions to avoid even minute scriptorial and lingual ‘corruption’ at least until the late-fourteenth century. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), one of the major fourteenth-century Islamic philosophers and a scholar of language, was vocal about such ulemiite (scholastic) anxieties in the Maghrib region of northwest Africa. After witnessing the ‘corruption’ of the Arabic language in urban Maghrib, he unequivocally attributed the reasons for this to the lingual desires of non-Arabic speaking people who emerged as decisive players in economic and cultural activities in many parts of the pre-colonial Islamicate world.Footnote ¹⁹ Recognising the differences in spoken and written forms of Arabic among various newly-settled communities in the Maghrib and beyond, Khaldun held their newly attained ‘state of sedentary’ responsible for scriptorial innovations and lingual ‘corruptions’. According to him, native Islamic communities in new sedentary states always tended to devise novel communicative methods through linguistic and scriptorial re-arrangements so as to survive in their new material and political locations.Footnote ²⁰

Things remained unchanged in the fifteenth century as well. According to Agius, Arabic-speaking Muslim traders, scholars and laity continued to express deep concerns about such scriptorial and lingual transgressions across the Indian Ocean regions.Footnote ²¹ Thus, taking its cues from two factors—the long history of Arab-traders’ peripatetic life, on the one hand, and slow developments in the sedentarisation of local Muslims in pre-colonial Malabar on the other—this article proposes that the Arabi-Malayalam script has a much shorter history than many scholars have previously suggested. It was only after oceanic life became more complex and Arabic language structures became more flexible due to political, social and moral reconfigurations that native Muslims evolved as a stable sedentary population in Malabar, and the script emerged.

Moreover, this raises the one question that scholars of Arab-Malayalam have never posed: if Arabi-Malayalam had evolved as a stable and fully fledged script before the sixteenth century, how could its existence have escaped the notice of a range of reconnoitering Muslim travellers who visited Malabar from across the medieval world? For instance, Ibn Battuta—who recorded in detail a number of urban Muslim settlements, educational systems, Islamic scholars and their intellectual making across Malabar in the fourteenth century—made no reference to it. Similarly, Abdur Razzaq, the mid-fifteenth-century visitor, who promised his readers that he would provide them with all relevant matters worthy of mention, was no different.Footnote ²²

Another sign of Arabi-Malayalam script's non-existence before the sixteenth century is the complete absence of manuscripts, documents, inscriptions and oral memory written or preserved in any part of South Asia, though the region was already witnessing an increase in the number of sedentary Mappilas in its interior as well as in ports towns like Kannur. However, there is no material or oral evidence of any stable scriptorial innovation emerging from these changing lifestyles until the late-sixteenth century, that is precisely the time when the Mappilas moved to land-locked remote regions like Nadapuram in North Malabar in the wake of Portuguese violence.Footnote ²³ Indeed, a recent study by Alam and Subrahmanyam indicates how the Mappilas identified migration as a natural response to Portuguese aggression in sixteenth-century Malabar's coastal regions.Footnote ²⁴

Thus, following Freeman's arguments about the literary formation of Malayalam bhasha- region's local language in pre-colonial times, it can be argued that the emergence of the Arabi-Malayalam script took place and was influenced by the specificities of the urban social field in coastal Malabar.Footnote ²⁵ Hence, Arabi-Malayalam as a stable and complete scriptorial form that only emerged in the late-sixteenth century, with a circulation that was limited to a small section of scribal elites and urban residents there before the ‘age of transition’ (corresponding the period between circa 1600 and 1750s). Emerging from the lingual basis of the polyglossic Malayalam in port town localities, Arabi-Malayalam emerged from a local scriptorial exigency in agrarianate Malabar during the age of fasad, which witnessed a surge of futhiya Islam (new Muslims) as Qadi Muhammed identified them in the Muhiyuddinmala.Footnote ²⁶ The futhiya Islam were familiar with the polyglossic urban Malayalam which arose out of a “polyglot soundscape”, as Lambourn has characterised pre-colonial Indian Ocean ports.Footnote ²⁷ The Tharisappalli Copper Plate, a mid-ninth-century inscription, is likely the earliest visual and textual evidence of the polyglossic ports in pre-colonial Kerala. This polyglossic inscription not only contains a range of languages, including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Tamil and Malayalam, but also different scriptorial systems such as Pahlavi, Kufic and Vattezhuthu, indicating the multiple lingual backgrounds of urban elites.Footnote ²⁸

The repeated movement of scholars, traders and refugees belonging to a range of lingual and scriptorial environments was the primary reason for Malabar's polyglossic development. Malabar in pre-colonial times provided such groups with space to live a peaceful life, pursuing their respective social practices, ritual observances and sexual norms.Footnote ²⁹ In Ibn Battuta's words, Malabar housed a variety of lingual-scriptorial groups that spoke a diversity of languages that included Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Malayalam and Sanskrit.Footnote ³⁰ Equally, various social and professional groups—such as interlocutors, brokers, scholars, travellers, scribes, students, soldiers, pilgrims and artisans, along with fugitives and slaves, who converged across the region's coastal roads, towns and halting places—shaped the polyglossic character of the Malabar littoral.Footnote ³¹ Lambourn, for instance, points out how this multi-lingual atmosphere led Ibn Battuta to use expressions like talam (dish/tray) in his brief descriptions about particular dietary behaviours in Indian Ocean ports.Footnote ³²Qissat Shakarwati Farmad, an Arabic text probably written by a native scholar by the mid-sixteenth century, also reflected such influences. In order to create a relatable lingual effect on his readers, the anonymous writer of this text used Shakarwati, an Arabised expression for the Sanskrit word Chakravartin, instead of any Arabic expression denoting ‘emperor’ or ‘sovereign’. This word was used to eulogise Cheraman Perumal, the ruler of Malabar who is believed to have embraced Islam in the presence of the Prophet Muhammed and performed the Hajj.Footnote ³³

Being the most important port town in the Indian Ocean mercantile grid before the age of fasad, it was not surprising that Calicut attracted the largest number of polyglossic speakers. Varthema, who visited Malabar in the first decade of the sixteenth century, provides us with substantial information regarding the linguistic pluralism present in pre-colonial Calicut.Footnote ³⁴ Supporting earlier information from Ibn Battuta, Varthema noted the presence of a variety of lingual-scriptorial communities that spoke Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Swahili, Persian and Malaya.Footnote ³⁵ The polyglossic canvas of the city was also strengthened by native traders who spoke Tamil, Konkani, Gujarati, Bengali and Telugu.Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, Barbosa details traders who spoke Persian, Gujarati and Deccani, in addition to highlighting Malabar's relations with other lingual regions such as Turkey, Cairo and Alexandria.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, multiple interactions between a number of diverse lingual/scriptorial/scribal communities had shaped Malabar as a pre-modern polyglossic super power by the early-sixteenth century, much before colonial metropolises such as Kolkata and Madras emerged as ‘polyglot cities’ in the eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Its evolution as a polyglossic centre was the result of Malabar's long history of relations with other lingual regions in the Indian Ocean and beyond, well before the advent of Islam.Footnote ³⁹

However, evidence from the region shows that the Arabic language continued to remain the lingua dominate in the oceanic ‘everyday world’ before the advent of the Portuguese presence.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its growth from being the lingua dominate to lingua dependentiam in fourteenth-century Indian Ocean maritime networks resulted in considerable enthusiasm for learning Arabic among local elites and port town rajas in Malabar, and the Samuthiri rulers were also said to have learned it.Footnote ⁴¹ Ibn Battuta referred to a couple of such local elites who learned Arabic before they embraced Islam in the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁴² As this situation continued to exist in the early-sixteenth century, Portuguese delegates were forced to hire the services of Arabic-speaking bilingual interlocutors in order to communicate with the Samuthiri ruler who employed Arabic scholars as interpreters.Footnote ⁴³ Portuguese sources show that Vasco da Gama took help from Martin Affonso and the Tunisian polyglot Moncaide who spoke Spanish and Malayalam at the Samuthiri court.Footnote ⁴⁴ Alam and Subrahmanyam likewise detail how non-Muslim local notables from intermediary caste groups and native rulers were still communicating in Arabic with Portuguese administrators in the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁵

Earlier, noticing such tendencies around Arabic language that evolved as both lingua dominate and lingua dependentiam in fourteenth-century urban settlements in the Maghrib, Ibn Khaldun pointed out that the “dialects of the urban population follow the language of the nation or race that has control of or has founded them”.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, in Malabar the native elites and people, who were economically dependent on Arab traders, seem to have followed the same pattern when it came to diplomacy, commerce and port town administration. Malayalam-speaking local people in the agrarianate Calicut were also no less curious to learn the functional part of the lingua dependentiam.Footnote ⁴⁷ A close reading of early fourteenth-century manipravala texts like Unniyachi Charitam indicate that native scribes in Kerala began to be influenced by multiple lingual expressions on the coasts and in the interior. When describing merchandise and traders in Malabar, the writer used the word Allah'r, referring to Muslims in the region as “people of Allah”.Footnote ⁴⁸ Correspondingly, the fiscal opportunities derived from oceanic trade also encouraged non-Muslim merchants from the region to acquaint themselves with Arabic, and their ability to engage with it had become important for trading with African ports as well by the turn of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁹

Apart from diplomatic and commercial interests, a large number of polyglossic futhiya Muslims made significant efforts to learn Arabic for religious purpose as early as the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their acquaintance with Arabic came through the expanding urban network of faith habitus around mosques, dars (schools) and religious authorities like qadis in Malabar. Evolved as a faith society under the aegis of urban faith-pietistic institutions where only Arabic texts were discussed, it was perhaps only to be expected that futhiya Muslims made conscious efforts to learn it. According to Ibn Battuta, memorising such texts remained the maxima pars of the pietistic selfhood of futhiya Muslims in the Indian Ocean littoral since Muslim scholars still depended on what we might be termed as ‘speak, hear, memorise’ method that had disseminated Islamic knowledge for centuries. Considering this method of learning as a major part of their newly-acquired religious selfhood, futhiya Muslims in Indian Ocean ports entered the world of Arabic, taking the first steps by memorising Quran.Footnote ⁵¹ For them, basic familiarity with Arabic—‘the language of paradise’—represented one of the fundamentals of being a virtuous believer, though polyglossic Malayalam remained the language of their non-religious everyday world.Footnote ⁵² In addition, Islamic pietistic institutions like mosques remained under the scholastic authority of Arabic-speaking ulema from places such as Oman and Baghdad until the early-sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵³

It is also plausible that Islamic pietistic institutions in Malabar provided agrarianate futhiya Muslims with the first opportunity to be trained in a scriptorial system. Most of those involved hailed from lower social groups and had scanty familiarity with the local vattezhuthu manuscript system and its derivatives like kolezhuthu and malayanma that together formed the early Malayalam script in the early-sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴ These scriptorial styles were widely used in religious institutions to write heavily Sanskritised Malayalam texts, making it prohibitive—both socially and physically—for lower social groups to engage with them. The subject matter of these texts indicate how they emerged from a brahmanical episteme that was only concerned with the moral and social concerns of upper caste communities in the region. Most dealt with puranic stories and brahmanical rituals, and were written and circulated by scribal elites belonging to dominant caste groups.Footnote ⁵⁵ Initiation to Islam and education centres like dars, where preliminary teaching of Arabic was conducted, seems to have been futhiya Islam's first encounter with a stable scriptorial system in Malabar. Perczel's work on Garshuni Malayalam (Malayalam written in Syriac alphabets, mixing with old Malayalam letters) clearly demonstrates how initiation into a new religion could excite embryonic Christians to embrace a new script for their vernacular pietistic negotiation in the late-sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, the increasing pietistic self-awareness and familiarity with Arabic script of oral-literate futhiya Muslims led to the slow spread of the Arabi-Malayalam script in the pre-colonial period. However, we also need to recognise that Islamic scholars in Malabar continued to versify their texts in a lucid fashion—replete with stories—for a deeper and broader spatial penetration; after all, the majority of local Muslims remained outside the realm of writing and reading until the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁷

These factors help us answer one of the fundamental questions—who invented the Arabi-Malayalam script? Scholars of pre-modern languages and scripts argue that tracing the invention of scripts should always go beyond the personal interests and inspirations of a single scribe since these evolve through multiple hands over a period of time.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hence, the credit for inventing the Arabi-Malayalam script must be sought in the voluntary acts of a number of polyglossic native Muslim scribes with linguistic and scriptorial creativity. Their increasing familiarity with the Arabic script, Islamic texts, hortatory practices and theological discourses over centuries is likely to have played an important role in the evolution of this transliterative system for registering polyglossic coastal Malayalam in extended Arabic alphabets. In the process, Arabi-Malayalam scribes made a number of necessary orthographical additions and useful consonants, expanding the possibilities of Arabic alphabets. Even though the lack of evidence for both literisation of and literarisation in the Arabi-Malayalam script before the Muhiyuddinmala would indicate a slow progression of the script, the structure, characteristics and the confidence of Qadi Muhammed in this particular text clearly suggests that Arabi-Malayalam as a script reached a stable stage for functional communications towards the end of the age of fasad.Footnote ⁵⁹

However, since the script was only used by native Muslims and no other port town in Malabar reported any activities involving the Arabi-Malayalam script until the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a broader demographic picture of Calicut—the city of Qadi Muhammed—can provide an indication of the demographic and geographical canvas of the script's circulation before the seventeenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were about 30,000 Muslims living within the municipal boundary of Calicut, but this was a much larger geographical area as compared to the port town that it had been in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1806, the total number of Muslims in the whole of colonial Malabar district (consisting of the present-day districts of Kannur, Kozhikode, Wayanad, Malappuram, Palakkad and parts of Thrissur) was around 170,000, averaging about 34,000 people in each of these districts.Footnote ⁶¹ British officials, however, calculated this number about two centuries after Qadi Muhammed had authored the Muhiyuddinmala. According to another British official record, the total population of Malabar reached about 140,000 by the second half of the eighteenth century and they were scattered across a vast geographical area, showing a smaller size of Muslim population about half a century ago.Footnote ⁶² According to the 1871 census, Calicut city's total population was about 48,000.Footnote ⁶³ From 1871 to 1901, the population growth rate in the city was consistently high, reaching as much as 16 per cent between 1891 and 1901. These calculations show that Subrahmanyam's assessment of Calicut city's sixteenth-century population—“not less than 50,000”— derives from a problematic calculation,Footnote ⁶⁴ which seems to have stemmed from contemporary European accounts. It overlooks the fact that European travellers from sparsely-populated countries such as Portugal tended to exaggerate populations in South Asia for literary, religious and political effects. For instance, coming from post-‘Black Death’ Portugal, which registered one of the lowest population densities in the whole of Europe by the early fifteenth-century, Barbosa seems to have been carried away by the relatively denser populated regions of South Asia.Footnote ⁶⁵

As a commercially vibrant colonial municipality with better urban facilities, transportation, educational institutions, commercial centres, piety spots, and expansive social interactive spaces but with a total population of less than 50,000 people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a much smaller Calicut could not have had the same resident population in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the city was marred by persisent violence, large-scale withdrawal and commercial decline in the age of fasad. Therefore, even if Barbosa's account, which placed the Muslim population at 20 per cent of the total population, is taken to be valid, the total number of native Muslims in the city could not have been more than a few thousands in the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁶ Their number was further decreased after a significant section of the economically better-off Mappilas and their dependents withdrew into inland in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, once the Portuguese began to trounce Arab merchants in Indian Ocean ports, including the city of Calicut in particular.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such factors point to a clear impossibility of an expansive Arabi-Malayalam scriptorial sphere in Malabar in the age of fasad or before, as a number of previous scholars would want us to believe.

Similarly, the complete archival, textual, inscriptional and folkloric absence of either literised or literarised Arabi-Malayalam in once-prosperous urban Calicut and other port towns like Kannur prior to the seventeenth century negates its expansive popularity and stability, which is an essential condition for the growth of such scripts. This absence also explains the attitude of the ulema, including Qadi Muhammed, who used Arabic for communicating with Muslims about Portuguese violence in Malabar and further afield.Footnote ⁶⁸ Had Arabi-Malayalam reached a stable scriptorial maturity along with communicable literisation in the early-sixteenth century, Muslim scribes like Qadi Muhammed would have communicated their worries in this medium.

The conclusion to draw from this is that the Arabi-Malayalam script is most likely to have reached a literised form during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, alongside the Mappilas’ evolution as a recognisable kinship-based polyglossic community in the Malabar interior. However, the major credit for shaping and circulating the script should still go to eighteenth-century vernacular scholar-scribes such as Kunjayin Musliyar, who expressed contemporary pain and delusions through his allegorical poetic expressions framed around the weakened roles of Muslims in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean trade.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the act of writing in vernacular language/script was yet to become a common habit among the Mappilas, including those who engaged in non-barter trade until the late-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bearing this in mind, several of the earlier imaginations regarding an expansive circulation of the Arabic-Malayalam script and literised materials before the last quarter of the sixteenth century would appear to be at odds with a range of historical realities.

Literarising the Literised: Qadi Muhammed and the Muhiyuddinmala

As pointed out earlier, the polyglossic social field in various port towns of the region shaped the larger economic, political, moral, literary and pietistic developments in Malabar before the sixteenth century. As Calicut city lost its status as the most attractive maritime port in South Asia in the early-sixteenth century and local Muslims withdrew into inland, Muslim scholar-scribes produced a new literary genre, symptomatic of the reconfigured social and moral space of the region from the seventeenth century onwards. As the ulema began to literise polyglossic Malayalam in the transliterative Arabi-Malayalam, Malabar witnessed a transition from Arabic-based literary engagements. However, this transition remained slow until the mid-eighteenth century, which marked the second stage of Arabi-Malayalam literary production. However, recent studies have revealed how such vernacular prescriptive poetries and texts from non-Persianate marginal regions remain overlooked in existing anglophone historiography.Footnote ⁷¹

As there is no compelling evidence to identify who started literising—converting the dialect into writing—polyglossic Malayalam in the Arabi-Malayalam script, the credit for its literarisation—converting the literised into literature—can be traced to Qadi Muhammed (d. 1616). He remains the only identifiable Arabi-Malayalam litterateur during, what can be termed ‘the age of transition’ that broadly covers the period from the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote ⁷² Qadi Muhammed composed the Muhiyuddinmala a year after he was ‘anointed’ as Calicut's qadi (1606), following the death of his father Qadi Abdul Aziz.Footnote ⁷³ Indicating the logic of a new textual format in a transliterative script, Qadi Muhammed maintained that “Oh, people, I have strung Muhiyuddinmala, by joining together mutthum (pearl) and manikyam (ruby)”.Footnote ⁷⁴ Qadi Muhammed seems to have deployed the allegory of ‘pearl’ (an expensive oceanic commodity) to designate the Arabic script that was the form of the Muhiyuddinmala, while using ‘ruby’ (an expensive terrestrial object) to denote polyglossic spoken Malayalam that formed the matter of the text.Footnote ⁷⁵ Freeman's ethno-anthropological study of south Indian languages like Manipravalam bhasha—an elite linguistic derivative in pre-colonial Kerala—points to a long history of such differentiating usages by non-Muslim writers in the region more widely.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the process of literarisation, Qadi Muhammed adopted an Arabic scriptorial register with sufficient orthographic incorporation, blending them with the existing Malayalam grammar and visibly building on the existing pattern of the Arabi-Malayalam script.Footnote ⁷⁷ The existence of such a script is not only indicated in suggestive expressions such as dushkam kootathe ithine eshudukil Footnote ⁷⁸ (which asks Muslim scribes to be cautious and perfect while copying the text), but also in his admission about the advice and direction that he received from scribal-scholars (arivalan) in the region.Footnote ⁷⁹ Similarly, he kept the grammatical and structural essentials of the Malayalam language, just as all other transliterating scribes in the Indian Ocean Islamicate network did. Living in the vast lingual repository of Malabar, Qadi Muhammed also brought together a large number of polyglossic expressions in the Muhiyuddinmala, including balath (the right side - Malayalam), pakkiyam (blessing - Malayalam), ustad (master - Persian), and keel (underneath - Tamil).Footnote ⁸⁰ He used these popular polyglossic terminologies along with a number of specific Islamic expressions like thwawaf (circumambulation) as literary units, clearly seeking to reach out to an ‘oral-literate’ Mappila audience that was different from those whom he had addressed earlier in his Arabic texts during the age of fasad. Here, Qadi Muhammed seems to have identified himself as a naturalised regional scholar through Malayalam structure and grammar, while the retention of Arabic and Persian expressions in the text definitely strengthened his authority as a qadi.Footnote ⁸¹

Qadi Muhammed, as the first known Muslim scribal alchemist in Malabar, thus performed a scribal pirouette in 1607, and the Muhiyuddinmala became the first identifiable literary text in Arabi-Malayalam. His acts—a syntactically veracious application of the polyglossic language, employment of modified Arabic alphabets, together with the use of highly sophisticated literary expressions (three determinant factors of literarisation)—can be defined an act of ‘scribal sublimation’ that shaped a prescriptive pietistic text for liturgical and performative Mappila consumption.Footnote ⁸² His literarisation act can also be termed as ‘ulemiite alchemy’ thanks to how it made long-lasting structural changes in the nature of Islamic texts and the content of pietistic discourses in the early seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸³ These interrelated concepts—'ulemiite alchemy’ and ‘scribal sublimation’—are used here to indicate a range of linguistic and literary acts that Qadi Muhammed systemised in the Muhiyuddinmala. They include deviation (from Arabic to polyglossic Malayalam), inversion (from valour-centric genre to the genre of piety), innovation (new consonants and alphabets) and co-option (use of existing grammar and syntax), which together galvanised a vernacular pietistic dynamism in the ‘age of transition’ in Malabar.Footnote ⁸⁴

Qadi Muhammed's literarisation happened at around the same time as similar scribal sublimations were taking place among other Indian Ocean communities and regions. For instance, Christian scholar-scribes with considerable ecclesiastical supports were able to shape Syriac-Malayalam (Garshuni), in which old Malayalam was written in Syriac alphabets with additional consonants. As a scriptorial-lingual tradition, Garshuni became very influential in the religious sphere of vernacular Christians in the sixteenth century itself.Footnote ⁸⁵ Perczel points out how the scriptorial absence in the life of St Thomas-Christians in Kerala paved the way for its emergence in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁶ In an another important study, Tschacher shows the ways in which such ‘alchemist’ ulema on the Coromandel coast designed their own sublimated transliteration in Arawi/Arabi-Tamil in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ In her significant research on Jewish-Malayalam, Gamliel identifies a longer history of such scribal alchemy by Jewish scribes who used Hebrew script for writing didactic texts.Footnote ⁸⁸ This article likewise argues that Qadi Muhammed designed the Muhiyuddinmala as an orally transmittable performative text for a sustainable vernacular communication among the oral-literate Mappilas.Footnote ⁸⁹ Therefore, In line with Pollock's conceptual category, namely “vernacular innovation”, we can say that Qadi Muhammed emerged as the pioneer Islamic vernacular ‘alchemist’ in the ‘Ma'bar to Malabar Complex’ of the Indian Ocean littoral.Footnote ⁹⁰ Until the Muhiyuddinmala, we have no record of such sublimated Islamic texts in this ‘complex’ that connected a variety of micro-Muslim habitus with shared belief systems and shafiite theo-legal adherence.Footnote ⁹¹ The complete absence—archival and oral—of this kind of poetic texts prior to the Muhiyuddinmala also suggests that earlier ulema did not delve into the potential of sublimated literarisation while engaging with transitional Islamic communities.

Indeed, Muhiyuddinmala's lucidly written stanzas, allegorical reflection and popular stories of Sufi miracles clearly show how Qadi Muhammed realised the potential of linguistic effervescence and the orality of the Mappilas, most of whom still remained scriptorially inept.Footnote ⁹² In the process, he admitted polyglossic coastal Malayalam into literacy, then “accommodated to literature” through the process of literarisation, as argued by Pollock in another context.Footnote ⁹³Muhiyuddinmala also reflects Qadi Muhammed's confidence regarding the oral and performative disseminability of such texts among vernacular Muslims. Subsequently, Qadi's scribal sublimation in a transformative polyglossic text through scriptorial, lingual and textual modification contributed to the growth of the Malayalam language's ‘regionalisation’, which was already in process at this time.Footnote ⁹⁴

Apart from the language and script, two other things also stand out in Qadi Muhammed's attempt to localise his own scribal self. The first was his introduction of Kollavarsham, the vernacular calendar in Malayalam, in this text in place of the Hijra calendar that was considered a mandatory element in Islamic texts. Secondly, Qadi Muhammed's insistence on Calicut as his birthplace displays the innate desire of a scholar to present his localised scribal self before a new vernacular audience through an effective self-neutralisation of his former identity as a complete Arabic litterateur.

Birth of A Text: From Valour to Piety

In the age of fasad, Qadi Muhammed and contemporary scholars like Makdhum II undertook a range of literary engagements—both hortatory and oratory—explaining the nature of violence and collapse of trade, which collectively resulted in Mappilas’ large scale withdrawal into the agrarian interiors of Malabar in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁵ Written in Arabic, these texts discussed with great enthusiasm many ideas such as valour, masculinity, manhood and martyrdom, which could be used against the Portuguese. These ideas provided urban Muslims with a sense of resistance and self-confidence in the wake of chaos that included the withdrawal of trading communities, dilapidated courts, perpetual conflicts between micro-regional kingdoms and tensions between various religious communities in the region.Footnote ⁹⁶ Muslim literati at this time saw them as a troubled phase in Indian Ocean history and were keen to place God, the Quran and the early companions of the Prophet at the forefront of their discussions in order to revitalise the masculine energy and communitarian kinship of urban Muslims. The ulema transformed these Islamic ideas from mere textual concepts into a set of social stimulants, redefining notions of resistance, piety and masculinity. In a different context, scholars like Rao have identified how non-Muslim scholars and poets composed similar texts in other parts of south India, negotiating the oral-literate possibilities of their targeted audience in pre-modern world of knowledge production.Footnote ⁹⁷

In the Muhiyuddinmala, Qadi Muhammed made use of existing polyglossic lingual registers among the Mappilas for addressing the shifting social framework in the region, like scholars argued in other contexts.Footnote ⁹⁸ The intricate lingual, scriptorial and scribal transformations that it contains were no different to other vernacular texts that were deeply connected with political, economic and moral shifts in such times of transition.Footnote ⁹⁹ Qadi found a language of analogy for effectively stating a range of issues that Muslims would encounter in their new territories. Scattered throughout his text, and on the basis of his experience as an urban literati, as well as the religious authority of agrarian Muslims in the interior, he highlighted a range of issues, such as cultural disturbances, poverty, starvation, loss of patronage, lack of protection, moral transgression, ritual absence, everyday fear, lack of learning, deception, epidemic, social status, false pride, weak harvest, conversion and natural calamities such as heavy rain and flood in the region of Malabar.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

By actualising a transitory reactivation beyond the normalcy of Arabic language and texts, the Muhiyuddinamala established Qadi Muhammed's evolution as an ‘author’ who inserted a new discourse into completely different geographical as well as material domains.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is very clear from this text that Qadi Muhammed sought to “characterise the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within” the Mappila community in the age of transition.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus, he asked Muslims in the region to follow the pietistic life of Muhiyuddin Abdul Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166), the Baghdadi Sufi who was extremely popular among Islamic communities across South Asia. In the Muhiyuddinmala, Jilani was identified as the perfect solution to these new issues thanks to his being regarded as the Gaus-e-Azam—the supreme succour—with his permanent divine authority and the ability to listen with patience and diligence to the cries of his followers.Footnote ¹⁰³ It was Jilani's eternal intimacy with God and his power to generate polymorphous karamat (miracles) that made him the most powerful helper in troubled times.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Not only did he take responsibility for strengthening the pietistic spirit of a morally intransigent Mappila community but he also saved people from wild animals, reptiles and natural calamities.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Visibly worried about the possibility of devious moralities emerging in the new Mappila settlements, Qadi Muhammed claimed that “when my [Jilani] followers transgress their piety path; I would hold their hand and protect them”.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Similarly, Mappilas were assured that Jilani had been given special powers to cure a range of diseases, enhance harvests and generate multiple forms of knowledge in troubled times. Interestingly, South Asian vernacular literati had evolved similar scribal strategies earlier, and similar acts were reflected in the writings of Brahmin scribal elites who wanted to engage with ‘Hindu’ vernacular audiences familiar with puranic stories and imaginations.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Qadi Muhammed justified the presence of a charismatic Sufi protector in the quotidian life of Mappilas, describing Jilani as the ultimate teacher of Islamic rituals and observances. He explained Jilani's perfect embodiment of Islamic virtues as something for Mappilas to emulate in their pursuit of ‘self awareness’ and power. Futhiya Islam in new Mappila settlements were specifically guaranteed Jilani's divine blessings as they sought self-knowledge and learning.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In a couple of guiding verses, Qadi Muhammed stated that Jilani attained his pietistic selfhood through proper ritual and moral adherences, consisting of daily prayers (tholuthovar), fasting (ramadan), repentance (tawba), pilgrimage (hajj), Quran recitation (khatham theerthovar) and hortatory acts like wa'ad (religious propagation).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the absence of enough religious teachers in the interior and in towns, Jilani's charisma as a divinely-ordained teacher-preacher communicated in a circulatory poetic text made a significant impact in the new inland settlements, most of which were distant from urban educational institutions and professional religious authorities such as qadis and muftis.

Furthermore, in a couple of instructive couplets, Qadi Muhammed asked Muslims to disseminate the Muhiyuddinmala through careful writing/copying (eshudukkil), singing (chonnorkku) and listening (kekkunnorkkum), all of which would ensure both God's and the Sufi's divine blessings in the material world and a place in the beautiful houses (manimadam) of paradise.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, Qadi Muhammed expressed his trepidation about potential mishandling of the text and cautioned Muslim copyists and writers against the erratic use of the script and language, as such derelictions would bring divine anger upon them.Footnote ¹¹¹ Indeed, drawing on the Foucauldian concept of “initiators of discursive practices”, we could argue that Qadi Muhammed emerged as the founder of Islamic vernacular discursivity in Malabar thanks to his insistence on ‘writings’ that would eventually lead to the making of an “endless possibility of discourse” in the region.Footnote ¹¹² Being the first vernacular Muslim scholar to speak about the relevance of ‘writing’, Qadi Muhammed also directs us back to the fact that at least a section of elite sedentary Mappilas had established an intimate relationship with the Arabi-Malayalam script by the early-seventeenth century. His text marked a significant progression in the act of ‘learning’ among oral-literate Mappilas whose cognitive and discursive structure was mostly shaped by the act of intuitive listening (sama) in which hortatory practices such as wa'ad (advises/preaching) and qutba (sermon) were pivotal constituencies.Footnote ¹¹³ Thus, the Muhiyuddinmala's emphasis on writing, singing and listening represented a major step towards the formation of vernacular piety within the local Muslim religious public sphere.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It proved instrumental in creating a vernacular performative network of collective remembrance, a continuation of what Arabic poetic texts had done during the age of fasad. For instance, Zainuddin Makhdum I's Manqus Mawlid reflects the development of such collective renditions in the religious public sphere of Muslims in the early-sixteenth century in which a range of diverse groups such as Sufis, traders, scholars, travellers and artisans participated.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Even though the emergence of Arabi-Malayalam lithographic print boosted the life of Arabic liturgical texts—for instance, the popularity of the Manqus Mawlid in Muslim discursive practices in the nineteenth century—we must remember that in the early-sixteenth century their audience remained mostly in port towns.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Thus, through the Muhiyuddinmala, Qadi Muhammed sketched out a vernacular and performative agenda for a larger communitarian liturgical consumption outside the port town regions. Not only did he use a range of relatable allegorical narratives delivered through a Sufi mouthpiece, but also he also shaped the formation of an Islamic vernacular liturgy. Jilani accordingly emerged as the Mappilas’ immediate interlocutor who was bestowed upon them by God to safeguard their interests. Qadi Muhammed's idea of the collective remembrance of God through the medium of a Sufi seems to represent an epistemic continuum of early medieval Islamic scholars like Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870–950) who highlighted the necessity of pietistic and literary endeavours for the creation of virtuous Muslim habitus and cities in the middle ages.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The literarisation of Arabi-Malayalam and composition of the Muhiyuddinmala also tell us what it meant to be a qadi (jurist) in a troubled time. It was important for Qadi Muhammed to state his authorship and designation as the ‘Qadi of Calicut’ in order to make a purposeful categorisation of the signifier,Footnote ¹¹⁸ who could legitimise his craftsmanship to initiate a new format of piety against the backdrop of cultural and material changes in the region. However, connecting the social birth of the Muhiyuddinmala with that of Qadi Muhammed's status as a belligerent religious functionary in Calicut has not previously been considered important in existing scholarship. After stating his scribal ability to literarise Arabi-Malayalam, Qadi Muhammed registered his much recognised autonomous authority—Qadi—as well:

According to Foucault, such scribal assertions—explicit mentions of name and designation—had emerged as a major literary tendency across the world by the seventeenth century since the author's anonymity and mysterious existence were no longer appreciated by readers. Not only the legitimacy, but also the “the meaning and value attributed to the text depended” on the sharing of this kind of important information.Footnote ¹²⁰ Similarly, such self-referential statements in the Muhiyuddinmala were supported by a number of verses in which Qadi Muhammed details the importance of acquiring religious knowledge from learned men who formed a crucial part of Muslims’ desires to be virtuous in troubled times.Footnote ¹²¹

It seems evident that Qadi Muhammed took prompts from the pedagogical framework of Islamic learning traditions across South Asia when it came to establishing his scholastic authority to vernacularise Islamic circulatory memories in the Indian Ocean region.Footnote ¹²² His invocations of scribal, legal and lingual authority can thus be viewed a continuation of the genealogical legitimation that he established in Fath-al-Mubeen, a text that dealt with ideas of masculinity and valour in the age of fasad. In it, Qadi Muhammed talked about his father Qadi Abdul Aziz who served as the Qadi of Calicut until his death in 1606.Footnote ¹²³ Mappila genealogists like Parappil Mammad Koya believe that Abdul Aziz's charismatic genealogy can be traced to Sheikh Muhammed D'iuddin who was the Qadi of Calicut in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. D'iuddin's own genealogical roots then go back to Muhammed Bin Malik, a prominent member of the first Muslim group to arrive in Kerala, and Qadi Muhammed is believed to be the eighth-generation descendant of D'iuddin's family.Footnote ¹²⁴ Whatever the truth may be, Qadi Muhammed connected his scribal legitimacy and scholastic authority with the memory of his charismatic father, in line with a common tendency among medieval Islamic scholars to systematically draw attention to their genealogical privileges in order to push aggressively the ‘trustworthiness of their enterprises’, intellectual and religious.Footnote ¹²⁵

The construction of this genealogical and pietistic legitimacy appears to have played a decisive role in the dissemination of the Muhiyuddinmala as an in-house performative text across Malabar. As a result, Jilani evolved into a house hold name in Malabar. Muhiyuddinmala's description of Jilani as a charismatic divine representative on earth with polymorphous existence—temporal and spatial—not only created a longue duree memory of this Sufi, but also produced a substantial number of loyal followers across the region. The remarkable lingual, tonal and thematic semblances that some of the eighteenth-century polyglossic mala texts like Noolmala share with the Muhiyiddinmala corroborate the proposition that Jilani's memory was continuously reproduced through what Nile Green has described as the “mnemonic internalisation” of the Muhiyuddinmala by the Mappilas from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹²⁶

This longue duree memory of Jilani in Malabar was also captured in a mid-nineteenth-century colonial document, entitled ‘Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar 1849–53’. Probably the first colonial recognition of the Muhiyuddinmala, this document points out the liturgical and performative continuity of the Muyiyuddinmala in the everyday life of Mappilas.Footnote ¹²⁷ According to this document, Muslims believed that the recitation and performance of Moidinmala-Pata (sic) secured them “immediate successes” in their ordinary life engagements.Footnote ¹²⁸ Similarly, numerous reprinted editions of the Muhiyuddinmala in the nineteenth century and substantial improvisations and modifications in the early twentieth century support the longue duree existence of the Sufi and the influence of this text.Footnote ¹²⁹ Most of the early twentieth century improvisations such as Shaikh Muhiyuddin Bayt (1909), Puthiya Muhiyuddinmala (1910), Muhiyuddin Manqus (1923), and Muhiyuddin Qaissappattu (1930) demonstrate how the content and structure of a range of performative texts remained “within the field of discourse” that Qadi Muhammed had initiated in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹³⁰