The image is gorgeous, but doomed. The caliph, court and capital that it celebrates are doomed by the approaching hordes; but so too is a wider Arab world that still, just, looks to the caliph’s standards as its rallying-point. And the image itself is fated to be the captive of its own success. Time and again, it has been reproduced on the covers and jackets of books on Arab history and culture (one of mine included). That, of course, shows just how brilliant it is; but it is a brilliance that highlights the long eclipse to come. It is as if every Arabic book on Western history and culture (not that there are many) had, say, the Mona Lisa on its cover. There would, of course, be plenty of brilliant ‘Islamic’ miniature painting to come; but it is Persian, Ottoman, Mughal. Painting in Arab lands never again quite attains the power and the splendour – indeed, the standard – of those standard-bearers; quite soon it fades to nothing. The horsemen are fated to march on, flying the flag, getting nowhere.
In the spheres of political power, prose, poetry and, now, painting, Arabs seemed stuck in a recurring present, following the path of pilgrimage, never leaving the frame. Admittedly, it didn’t help to have Mongols and Mamluks, Berbers and Franks forming that inescapable border, blocking their access to the broad Eurasian stage of events; not to mention Timur and the Ottomans looming, just as that same Eurasia was convalescing after the first onslaught of the Black Death. But there would be an escape route, a back door via the fertile fringe of Arabia’s coastline. For if continental prospects were blocked, there was still an ocean opening out from the far south of the Arabs’ island: a whole monsoon world, from Mozambique to the Malacca Strait and beyond.
The hero of al-Hariri’s Maqamat, Abu Zayd, was to venture through the back door. An illustration in the famous manuscript shows him as one of a row of queasy faces aboard a leaky-looking dhow. Another shows the dhow beside an island inhabited by apes and parrots, but also by fantastic creatures with human faces. That island belongs to fiction, but there were plenty of solid islands and coastlands explored by real-life adventurers, traders, scholars, Sufis, chancers, beachcombers: individuals who were following through, belatedly, from the great Arab diaspora of the seventh and eighth centuries. Together they would propel a second, slow, eirenic wave of conquests, a trans-oceanic swell of Arab culture. These conquests have few heroes, because the adventurers tended to go off and never come back; one of the rare ones who did, and wrote about it, was Ibn Battutah. Most of the rest are lost, but now and again other, extraordinary journeys can be pieced together.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MASTERS OF THE
MONSOON
ARABS AROUND THE INDIAN OCEAN
THE LAMP IN THE NICHE
Ibn Battutah, born in Morocco at the beginning of the fourteenth century, who made his way to Mecca but went on to criss-cross the Old World from the Niger to the Grand Canal of China and from the Volga to the south of Tanzania, may well be the most widely travelled human before the age of steam. His real-life Odyssey, with himself as its accident-prone but ever optimistic hero, is the epic of Arabic travel literature. It does not matter that he was a ‘genetic’ Berber; culturally, he was Arab through and through, steeped in the Arabic of the Qur’an and of Islamic jurisprudence, looking to Cairo and Mecca as the intellectual and spiritual poles of his world.
Ibn Battutah, however, was no hero to his children. Married at least ten times and owner of countless concubines, he fathered and abandoned offspring from Damascus to the Maldives. Leaving Delhi in 1341, for example, he entrusted a son named Ahmad to a friend, and later admitted, ‘I do not know what God has done with either of them’. The lax father was a tireless social climber, and of all the expatriate Arabs in India this friend, Ghiyath al-Din, was the grandest possible ‘godparent’: he was the great-great-grandson of the penultimate Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, and thus a distant – in both senses – cousin of the Mamluks’ shadow-puppet caliph in Egypt. Like Ibn Battutah himself, Ghiyath al-Din had been attracted to Delhi by its sultan’s campaign to draw Arabs and thereby, as we shall see, to bolster his legitimacy. The far-flung Abbasid’s credentials as a guardian are less obvious: Ibn Battutah devoted two pages of his book to anecdotes about the man’s avarice.
We still don’t know what God did with Ghiyath al-Din or the abandoned young Ahmad. But, because of a chance survival, we do know what happened to Ghiyath al-Din’s own son, Abd Allah: his tombstone was found in an old royal cemetery in northern Sumatra, near the sea on the bank of the Pasai River. Here was the capital of Samudra-Pasai, the first Islamic state in what is now the country with the biggest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia, and here the rootless Abd Allah died. The Arabic inscription on his stone gives the date as 809/1406–7, and five generations of ancestry back to Caliph al-Mustansir and Baghdad. It is a monument that joins the pomp of pedigree with the pathos of exile; Abd Allah was a prototype of those wandering White Russian princes of the twentieth century, exiled from their homeland but still trading on their noble origins. In Abd Allah’s case, the trade seems to have paid: the neighbouring grave, probably that of his wife, is that of the sultan’s daughter.
If Abd Allah ibn Ghiyath al-Din ended up marrying a princess, the fate of a half-brother back home in Baghdad was very different. On his way back from the East, Ibn Battutah was moved by the scene of a mosque imam in the city, now a ghost-metropolis, having to plead for arrears of his pay – a paltry dirham a day. It turned out that the young man was an elder son of the traveller’s Abbasid friend from Delhi. ‘By God,’ Ibn Battutah wrote,
if [his father] had sent him a single pearl of all those pearls which adorned the robes of honour that he received from the Sultan [in Delhi], the boy would have been well-off. May God protect us from such a state of things!
Given Ibn Battutah’s own shortcomings as a father, motes and beams come to mind.
The contrast between the two half-brothers illustrates what was happening to Arabs in these post-Mongol centuries: stagnation in the old homeland, but opportunities for those who moved abroad. And the Indies were only part of a bigger picture. Abd Allah the footloose Abbasid in Sumatra may seem like a one-off. But he was part of a 12,000-kilometre arc of oceanic wanderers, and one of the things that joins them all together is his monument – that Arabic gravestone. The memorial came, as he almost certainly did, from India, and in particular from the port of Cambay up in the nook at the north of India’s west coast. Here were the workshops of the most successful monumental masons in history. Working with a fine local marble (sometimes robbed from ancient buildings, as the undersides of some monuments reveal), the craftsmen of Cambay produced Arabic-inscribed headstones, table-tombs and other memorials that were exported around the Indian Ocean rim from East Africa to South-East Asia. Cambay memorials have been found in Kilwa Kisiwani off the southern Tanzanian coast, Mogadishu, Aden, Dhofar in southern Oman, Lar in Iran, Cambay itself, Goa, Kollam in Kerala, Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, Kinolhas Island in the Maldives (where I discovered one, half buried in a patch of jungly scrub), Sumatra, Gresik in Java.
It is not immediately obvious why a family in, say, Tanzania should order their late relative’s Arabic tombstone from India, 5,000 kilometres across the ocean, at enormous cost in money and time; or not until we realize that all those who were thus commemorated could well afford it (the family on Kilwa controlled the export of gold from southern Africa), and that the annual alternation of the monsoon meant that ocean communications were in fact as regular as clockwork – albeit a slow-running clock, timed to the solar year. You sent the text of the epitaph off on the south-west monsoon; back came the stone on the north-east monsoon. And there was your dear departed, commemorated indelibly in Arabic script, that vigorous growth that had already spread across Central Asia and over the passes into northern India, and was now putting down roots all around the Indian Ocean’s tropical shoreline. Ordering such a monument was a way of declaring membership of a wealthy and cosmopolitan culture. Today, Chinese plutocrats order Aston Martins; then, oceanic sultans a
nd merchant princes ordered Cambay tombstones. And it was all less bothersome than being sent to Arabia for reburial, as Saladin had done with his father and uncle: with a Cambay stone, Arabia came to you in Qur’anic verses of your choice, executed by the most painstaking Indian craftsmen.
The Cambay stones bear more than Arabic words. Most noticeably, the ogival tops of the headstones often contain the image of a bulbous, vase-like glass lamp hanging in a niche. This is almost certainly meant to recall a striking image from the Qur’an:
Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth.
The parable of His Light is a niche wherein is a lamp –
the lamp is in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star –
lit from a blessed tree, an olive,
neither eastern nor western.
. . .
Allah guides to His Light whomever He wishes.
The script on the stones also sometimes transmits unexpected messages, such as a quotation from a Persian poem by Sa’di; other decorative elements include motifs borrowed from the wider artistic environment of Cambay, particularly from Jain temples. Together, the stones commemorate a diversity of dead: Arabs like Abd Allah ibn Ghiyath Din, but also the newly islamized – Swahili, Somali, North Indian, Tamil, Indonesian.
Arab wheels of fire might have long burnt out. But from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth century the oceanic arc was itself a niche, with Arabia at its centre, radiating the light of Islam, dispersing Arabs and their words east and west. The Arab eclipse was edged with brightness.
IDOLS, ELEPHANTS AND ARABIC
Arabs in the heartlands of their former empire may have been hemmed in by the hordes from further Asia and Europe. But at the edges, as Ibn Battutah’s Travels shows, there was still motion, expansion: in the aftermath of the first great Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, Arabs and the arabized were pushing out ever further, not this time as military conquerors but as merchants, missionaries and adventurers. They were driven by acquisitiveness. As Muhammad said, ‘Two hungers are never satisfied: the hunger for knowledge, and the hunger for worldly things’. Together, the new frontiersmen founded an informal mercantile and cultural empire around the oceanic arc, in which the dominant culture was Arabic and Islamic. The oldest and longest-lasting Arab polity, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, had fallen in 1258, and with it the last pretence of Arab unity. But, in its own unobtrusive way, the Arab-Islamic diaspora of the following 250 years or so, until the coming of the Europeans into the Indian Ocean, was as important and as far-reaching as the military explosion of the seventh and eighth centuries: it shaped the map of today’s Islamic world. It was the old story of dynamic disunity, breaking the egg to make the omelette.
The new expansion also shaped the ways in which a good fraction of the world population would speak, write and think, for the conquering Arabic language spread too, and not only on tombstones for Muslims. Even Ibn Battutah, the great explorer of the diaspora, could be surprised by how far Arabic had reached. A strange instance came when, probably in 1346, after leaving Samudra-Pasai on his way to visit the Arab and Persian expatriate communities in southern China, he landed at a place he calls Kaylukari. The people there worshipped idols, kept elephants and were governed by a princess named Urduja who had a guard of female warriors. She herself was a warrior, and had sworn only to marry a man who could defeat her in single combat; so far she had remained undefeated (no one had dared to challenge her) and resolutely virgin. Urduja has defeated all commentators too. Some have concluded that Kaylukari existed only in Ibn Battutah’s heated fantasies; others that it mixes fact and fiction, like that island in al-Hariri’s tales where parrots and apes cohabit with a harpy and a sphinx. Clearly, yarning sailors are partly to blame: the most sensational information about the princess was provided by the captain of Ibn Battutah’s ship. Ibn Battutah, however, provides another couple of details that stand out because they are unsensational, but still unexpected: ‘Dawah wa-batak katur,’ the princess said to an attendant, wishing to impress the traveller, meaning, ‘Bring an inkwell and paper’. They were brought, and she wrote: Bismi ’llah al-rahman al-rahim, ‘In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate’. The first unexpected detail – that she spoke with Ibn Battutah in a kind of Turkish – is hard to explain. The second, that ‘she wrote Arabic well’, is less inexplicable.
If the meeting is real, we don’t yet know where it took place. The Philippines have claimed Urduja as theirs; other locations, in southern Vietnam or Borneo, may be nearer the mark. But wherever it was, Kaylukari is most likely to have been a colony of the widespread seaboard empire of Majapahit, whose capital was in eastern Java. And if that is the case, for the princess to have known a bit of Arabic script is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Arabic had begun to be used as the script of Old Malay, the language of some of Majapahit’s possessions. Suggestively, too, there exist Majapahit coins – perhaps, rather, tokens or amulets – that show on one face the Javanese tutelary spirit Semar together with Krishna and an elephant, all depicted in shadow-puppet style; on the other, in Arabic script, is the Islamic declaration of faith,
There is no god but Allah: Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
It is gloriously syncretic. And it proves, if nothing else, that solid archaeological evidence can be as surprising as sailors’ yarns and travellers’ tales.
THE BLESSED SEA
The travels of Arabs and Arabic were helped by those regular monsoons, and encouraged by the wealth of the ocean and its surrounding lands. In contrast to the spiteful Mediterranean, cursed by God, the Indian Ocean was blessed with precious products. It is, according to the oldest Arabic travel book,
the Sea of India and China, in whose depths are pearls and ambergris, in whose rocky isles are gems and mines of gold, in the mouths of whose beasts is ivory, in whose forests grow ebony, sapan wood, rattans, and trees that bear aloeswood, camphor, nutmeg, cloves, sandalwood, and all manner of fragrant and aromatic spices, whose birds are fafagha (parrots, that is) and peacocks, and the creeping things of whose earth are civet cats and musk gazelles, and all the rest that no one could enumerate, so many are its blessings.
Moreover, the ocean meshed with a wider network, as the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’di realized. His own verses would travel the network and appear in unexpected places: not only on a Cambay tombstone found in Sumatra, but also in a song heard by Ibn Battutah on a boat in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. And Sa’di himself wrote of meeting, on the Gulf island of Kish, a merchant who day-dreamed about the ultimate trading journey:
I shall take Persian sulphur to China . . . China-ware to Greece, and Grecian brocade to India, and Indian steel to Aleppo, and mirrors of Aleppo to Yaman, and striped cloth of Yaman to Persia, and after that I shall give up trading.
The merchant, in fact, was no longer in the best position in Kish: the Mongol depradations had shifted the western terminus of trade from the Gulf, Persia and Iraq to the Red Sea and Egypt. Otherwise, however, the later thirteenth century was a propitious time for international commerce. First, the Mongol ravages on land had ‘energized’ ocean trade. Then, when the heirs of Chingiz Khan chilled out and settled down, the resulting peace gave a burst of energy to land trade too. Under the Mongols that whole broad swathe of Asia was loosely united, from the northern Fertile Crescent to the Yellow Sea. Individuals took advantage of the new hemiglobal currents; so did trading corporations, most lucratively that of the Karim, based in Egypt and the Levant. The meaning of their name is unclear: they were Muslim, but their origins may have been eclectic; they are often glossed as ‘spice merchants’, but their interests were much wider. They had already existed for several centuries; now they too were revived by the Pax Mongolica, and they set about realizing Sa’di’s merchant’s dream and more, operating a hemispheric trade network that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific the long way round.
Sometimes, as in the early history of the Arab empire and in the coming history of
European empires, the flag followed trade. In one far corner of the arc, the family who commissioned the south-westernmost Cambay monument were rulers of a tiny island sultanate – Kilwa Kisiwani. Ensconced there since the last quarter of the thirteenth century, they were expatriate Arabs from Yemen, and perhaps originally from Muhammad’s Hashimi clan. In Kilwa, however, they joined the borderless culture of the ocean rim: their gravestones came from India, their tableware – the finest qingbai porcelain, as well as the standard celadon – came from China, and the source of their wealth, gold, came from the southern African interior. By cornering its export, they were forerunners of Cecil Rhodes. But their sultanate was no Rhodesia: far from being racially or culturally segregated, it rapidly creolized, adding to the already diverse Afro-Arab mix of the sawahil, the ‘coasts’. Kilwa was only a few kilometres long, but it belonged to both the ‘Swahili’ sphere of East Africa and to the whole great oceanic arc, just as it belonged to a future that would give birth to Zanzibar, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Kilwa’s near-monopoly of gold was, however, untypical; ocean trade was open and organic. But the riches that flowed into the island meant that its sultans could build to last, including what was for many centuries the biggest stone mosque in sub-Saharan Africa, and a sprawling warehouse-cum-palace. The palace incorporates the perfect rich man’s touch, still intact: an infinity pool, overlooking the blessed sea.
THE PHANTOM EMPIRE
As with the actual empire of the seventh and eighth centuries, not only Arabs but also Persians, Berbers, Turks and others contributed to the virtual, cultural empire of post-Mongol times. And as with the earlier, military expansion, the cultural empire gained its own momentum. Muslim merchants and others spread knowledge of the sophisticated civilization of the Islamic zone; in ever more distant lands, rulers – particularly newly established ones with no credentials other than brute force – adopted Islam; they then encouraged Arabs and others, especially Muslim scholars, to attach themselves to their courts, legitimizing themselves with the glamour of learning and the whiff of holy places. Mercantile and missionary traffic increased, and Islam spread horizontally across the hemisphere and, more slowly, downwards through society.
Arabs Page 49