The Indian Ocean (18 page)

Ibn Battuta opens up three related matters, which were among the most significant occurring in the Indian Ocean in our period: conversions to Islam, and then efforts to consolidate the faith, and ties back to the centre. In our period, to the end of the fifteenth century, the first is most important, for this was the time when the relatively new religion spread rapidly. It will be remembered that the Prophet died in 632 CE. The faith spread rapidly by both land and sea from its origins in the Hijaz area of western Arabia: to Persia, Egypt, North Africa, areas now known as Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and even to northwest India in its first century. It also spread by sea, carried by existing Arab trade networks, which we found going back some centuries before these traders were converted to the new faith. It is this which will occupy our attention, more than the continuing matter, even to today, of the travels of Muslim scholars whose aim is to improve the observance of an existing Muslim community all around the ocean, to root out practices seen to be un-Islamic, and to rectify back-sliding. In short, we are looking at the creation of the community, rather than its consolidation. The latter will not be totally ignored, but it will be considered more fully in later chapters.

The cosmopolitan, international, aspect of Islam has often been cited as a prime motivation for conversion. Coastal people especially find their indigenous beliefs, localised and very specific, to be inadequate as their world expands. When they are exposed to a universal faith (in the case of the East African coast Islam was represented in their foreign business partners), the attraction is obvious, and can be widely seen all over the Indian Ocean world at this time.
46

Parkin has suggested that it is more accurate to write of the

'acceptance' of Islam, which is likely to take longer and to be reciprocally inscribed in pre-existing custom and cosmology. The term conversion pre-supposes a shift from one to another unambiguously defined religion. Acceptance is less visibly dramatic and does not mean abandonment of a pre-existing cosmology. Yet it may well typify much Islamisation in the region in allowing for Islamic and non-Islamic traits to inter-mingle steadily.
47

This means that we are looking at additive change much of the time, as opposed to substitutive change. The former implies that an existing body of belief is added to, while the latter means existing notions are cast aside and replaced. Conversion then is a process rather than an event, and may extend over several generations.

There is also the matter of coercion and the use of power, whether explicit or implicit. No doubt in many inland areas Islam spread in part through coercion. It is not a matter of Islam spreading at the point of a sword, but rather that as Muslim armies conquered huge territories many of the conquered adopted the religion of their new masters. This applies in most of the Middle East. However, in India, where the northwest was ruled by Muslims from the eighth century, and the north Indian heartland from the thirteenth, Hinduism proved remarkably resilient, so that only perhaps 10 per cent of the population accepted the religion of the sultans. In sociological terms, most Hindus had a firmly entrenched higher tier of belief already, and were not inclined to change to another, Islamic, one. In our area of concern, the Indian Ocean littoral, there was no opportunity for pressure of any kind in most cases.

There is then a contrast between coastal Islam, and Islam inland, and also between areas where Islam is the majority or even only religion, as compared with areas where it is a minority. Put briefly, Islam reached the southern part of the Arabian peninsular, that is Yemen and Hadhramaut, very early, travelling to this region by land. Of the areas in the Indian Ocean that Islam reached by sea, we know that Muslims had arrived on the Swahili coast by the mid eighth century, though at first this was a matter of Muslim traders from the Red Sea and Hadhramaut visiting, and erecting a mosque for their use. Over time some of these Arabs settled, and some of their neighbours in the port cities of this coast converted to Islam. There is evidence of a similar process on the coasts of India occurring rather earlier. Insular southeast Asia came later, and here the religion was spread more by Muslims who themselves were relatively recent converts from India, rather than people from the heartland. Ross Dunn has put the contrast between coastal Islam and that of the heartland very well:

In the Middle East an individual's sense of being part of an international social order varied considerably with his education and position in life. But in the Indian Ocean lands where Islam was a minority faith, all Muslims shared acutely this feeling of participation. Simply to be a Muslim in East Africa, southern India, or Malaysia in the fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind.

This was reinforced by the coastal location and the fact that most of them were traders, and so had to be aware of distant markets and people and places.
48

We will now look at each area, that is East Africa, India, and southeast Asia, in turn. There has been considerable public interest in the date of the first conversions, and the beginnings of an Islamic presence in East Africa. The record shows very clearly that there were trading contacts from the Arab world to East Africa before
the beginnings of Islam. For the first century of the Christian era the
Periplus
mentioned quite extensive contacts between East Africa and Yemen, and also noted that there was extensive intercourse and intermarriage between these Arab traders and the locals. Pre-Islamic ceramics from the Middle East have been found in both Somalia and Mozambique. These are mostly Persian of the Sassanian period.
49
As these traders converted, they kept on trading, to East Africa among many other places. The very earliest mosques, dating back perhaps to the mid or even early eighth century, were constructed to service these itinerants, some of whom may even have settled. They were very small, and made of non-durable materials: wood or wattle and daub.

The earliest Muslim accounts of East Africa reflect very clearly that the locals had not converted. The tenth century 'Wonders of India', a collection of Arab stories, describes 'Zanj' as a strange uncouth place, with sorcerers, cannibals, strange birds and fishes.
50
Al-Biruni, in the early eleventh century, still finds East Africa a wild and largely un-Islamic place.
51
It was from the later eleventh century that the locals were converted, and we can talk for the first time of a Swahili civilisation, that is if we follow Middleton and see a defining characteristic of the Swahili being that they are Muslims.
52
In this century earlier wooden mosques at Kilwa were enlarged and constructed in stone. By around 1300 the main mosque at Kilwa was some 12 metres by 30 metres, implying a very large Muslim resident population.
53
Wright has pointed out that all the larger communities seem to have accepted Islam at roughly the same time, that is primarily in the twelfth century and a few years on either side of this.
54

Conversion, even if 'partial', served to further distinguish the shore dwellers, the Swahili, from their inland neighbours. This coastal society, because of its location, was much more open to wider influences from across the Indian Ocean than were people in the interior; their acceptance of Islam is part of this greater exposure. Yet their new religion was heavily impregnated with pre-Islamic indigenous beliefs, as we will see presently.

Arabs had long traded with the Indian coast, and Indians with the Arab world. When the Arabs became Muslims they continued to trade, and conversions in littoral India occurred very early, long before Muslims ruled large areas of the inland subcontinent. An early Portuguese account of the process of conversion stresses that rigid Hindu caste divisions in Malabar led to many conversions among the lowest groups. Correia's account describes both the mix of trade and religion which proved so successful, and the way the Islamic stress on the equality of all believers fostered conversions, producing the indigenous Muslim Mapillah community. He described the dominance of the Nairs in this area, and the degraded position of the lower castes. Muslims, presumably from the Red Sea area given that this was the major trading area for Malabar, pointed out to the (Hindu) rulers that the low caste porters were unable to move about freely in the area, because if they ran into Nairs they would be killed. But if these low caste Malabaris converted to Islam 'they would be able to go freely where they wished, because once they became Muslims they were immediately outside of the law of the Malabaris, and their customs, and
they would be able to travel on the roads and mingle with all sorts of people.' This argument, plus a few bribes, convinced the rulers, who gave their consent. The actual conversion of these much-oppressed people was easy, for they could then live where they pleased and eat what they wanted. They also received clothing from the Muslims. The result was a great success for this Muslim conversion drive, which in turn spilt over into trading success, especially in the spice trade to the Red Sea.
55

Another very early Portuguese account makes clear that the Mapillahs by no means abandoned all their previous Hindu customs:

And in this land of Malabar there are Moors in great numbers who speak the same tongue as the Heathens of the land, and go naked like the Nayres, but as a token of distinction from the Heathen they wear little round caps on their heads, and long beards. . . . These follow the Heathen custom in many ways; their sons inherit half their property, and their nephews (sisters' sons) take the other half. They belong to the sect of Mafamede, their holy day is Friday. Throughout this land they have a great number of mosques. They marry as many wives as they can support and keep as well many heathen concubines of low caste. If they have sons or daughters by these they make them Moors, and oft-times the mother as well, and thus this evil generation continues to increase in Malabar; the people of the country call them Mapuleres.
56

Islam began to make converts in southeast Asia from the late thirteenth century (pride of place is usually given to Samudra in north Sumatra). Conversions en masse happened mostly from the later fourteenth century; in the second half of this century east Java was won over. Islamic states appeared during the fourteenth century, first in north Sumatra and then in coastal Java. From the mid fifteenth century Melaka was the focus of the conversion effort. At the end of our period, in 1500, Islam was well entrenched in coastal central and east Java, the Malay peninsular, the southern Philippines, and Sumatra. Converts to Islam were beginning to be made in Maluku, but in general Indonesia east of Java was still open.
57

The important conversion of the ruler of Melaka was briefly described by a Portuguese chronicler in an account which makes clear the merger of trade and religion. 'Some ships arrived at Melaka from the ports of Arabia, and one year there came a
caciz
to preach the law of Muhammad in these parts.' He was successful in becoming influential with the king, and impressed on him the grandeur of Islam. Conversion followed, and the king was honoured by being given the name of the Prophet himself. A little later in the fifteenth century, just before the arrival of the Portuguese, another chronicle described well the evolving situation in Sumatra, and again demonstrated the close link between trade and religion. The people of the interior were described as brutal, savage, cruel and warlike, and some of them were cannibals. But in the littoral areas people were Muslim. These people had been converted by Muslims who came to the area for commerce. They recorded the size of the area, and the existence of a religious vacuum, and were able to make many
conversions because the locals wanted the goods of the foreign Muslims, and also as a result of marriages between foreign Muslims and local girls.

There have been many studies of what is denigrated as deviations from normative Islam. This is a dubious matter indeed. Scholars, often themselves not Muslims but rather western Orientalists, erect a scaffolding of 'pure' Islam, based on the Quran and such claimed fundamentals as the 'Five Pillars' of the faith. Islamic practice is then measured against this ideal yardstick, and deviations are roundly condemned as being un-Islamic or syncretic. Ironically, these rigid interpretations of Islam by westerners have been joined in the last few decades by equally rigid and dogmatic interpretations by Muslim revivalists.

Studies of Islamic practice all around the shores of the ocean provide copious examples. Pouwels claims in a general way that on the Swahili coast up to the seventeenth century Islam was practised in adapted and internalised forms, remaining fundamentally local in outlook.
58
Modern scholars of Islam in East Africa have discussed this important matter in a neutral way. They distinguish between dini, religion, and mila, custom. The former is book-based Islamic, while the latter is not.
59

Parkin took a more general view and commented that in Muslim communities all around the ocean 'the idea of prayer in the mosque connotes unambiguous Islamic piety, while that outside points towards the possibility of other kinds of worship.'
60
Yet this division has often worried exemplars of the faith, who ever since coastal communities accepted Islam have been concerned to 'purify' practice and rectify deviations. These Islamic specialists travelled widely by sea across the ocean, and their activities show unity in the ocean in two ways: first, they themselves made up connecting links, and second, their activities, which continue to today, have slowly increased adherence to a more normative Islam all around the littoral. As we reach more recent times we have more detailed information on their activities, but even for the period covered in this chapter we can see them hard at work.