The example of the lands around the Strait of Malacca illustrates how the cultural empire spread during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As we have seen, the rulers of Samudra-Pasai in northern Sumatra (to which Samudra gave its name) had adopted Islam early on – at least by the end of the thirteenth century. A century later, it seems that the sultanic family were pleased to have a blue-blooded Abbasid as a son-in-law. Later still, it is claimed that merchants from Sumatra advised the chief of Melaka (Malacca) to become a Muslim too, in order to attract trade. How the islamization of the East Indies had begun in the first place is not clear. Local histories claim that missionaries were sent direct from Mecca to Sumatra; Islam and Arabs, however, tended to arrive in South-East Asia not in one leap, but via the oceanic stepping-stone of India.
India also acted as a portal from continental Asia into the ocean arc. Delhi had been captured by Muslim Turkic adventurers in the later twelfth century. Soon after, the Mongol catastrophe had propelled a stream of mainly Central Asian Muslims into the subcontinent. The flow increased throughout the thirteenth century; news of Indian opportunities spread through the mercantile web, and via the sounding-board of the Mecca pilgrimage. By the second third of the fourteenth century, under Muhammad Shah ibn Tughluq, sultan of Delhi and host of Ibn Battutah and Ghiyath al-Din, the flow had become a flood.
Muhammad Shah came from a mixed Turco-Mongol background, and like the later rulers of India of Mongol origin – the ‘Mughals’ – he set his sights on the conquest of the entire subcontinent. Campaigns in the south made Delhi the richest Muslim state on earth, awash with gold and slaves, and there took place a migration of which the recent surge of Indians to the Gulf is a mirror image. On occasion, Muhammad Shah sent fleets of ships to the Gulf to recruit Arabs. They gathered round Muhammad Shah, a contemporary wrote, ‘like moths around a candle’. Arab courtiers adorning the royal audience chamber, the Hall of a Thousand Columns, could amass stupendous wealth: in his Delhi palazzo, Ghiyath al-Din had the ultimate plutocrat’s bauble, a gold bath; the buttons of his coat – just one of which would have got his son in Baghdad out of hock – were pearls as big as hazelnuts. Ghiyath al-Din, scion of caliphs, was specially favoured; but Muhammad Shah was besotted with Arabs of whatever background, addressed them all as ‘my lord’, and showered them with gifts.
One was always there, however, at his majesty’s pleasure. Among the prominent Arabs who turned up in Delhi in the 1330s was a youth named Ghada, a grandson of Muhanna ibn Isa, the amir of the Arabs in Syria whose loyalty had oscillated between the Mamluk and Mongol superpowers. Muhammad Shah assigned the young man the income of vast provinces – the equivalent of the modern state of Gujerat, and more – and married him to his sister in the society wedding of the season.
The sultan showed him immense honour, but [Ghada] was a raw bedouin, who did not measure up to this standard; the rudeness of the desert folk was his dominant trait, and it brought him to disaster only twenty days after his wedding.
The bedouin princeling started knocking high-born officials about and ended up in the sultan’s gaol. Eventually, however, he was given a reprieve and ‘learned good manners and refinement’.
The already refined Ghiyath al-Din the Abbasid, however, could do no wrong. The sultan would share his betel with him, which he did with no one else; the part of Delhi where Ghiyath al-Din lived was renamed ‘the Abode of the Caliphate’; and on one occasion, having unintentionally slighted him, Muhammad Shah lay on the ground and forced Ghiyath al-Din to place his caliphal foot on the sultanic neck. But the sultan’s almost manic obsession with Arabs, and above all with the Abbasid family, went even further. Before Ghiyath al-Din had arrived in Delhi, Muhammad Shah, the richest Muslim monarch on earth, had given his empire away – to that impoverished exile in Egypt, the man who was forced to sell his clothes to live, the Mamluks’ puppet caliph al-Mustakfi Sulayman.
No doubt, Sulayman was bemused. But he duly sent Muhammad Shah a document declaring the sultan of Delhi his vassal, and a set of robes in black, the Abbasid dynastic colour. Little good did it do the new nominal overlord of India: by the time Muhammad Shah finally received the diploma in 1343 and substituted Sulayman’s name for his own on the coinage, the caliph was dead. Undeterred, Muhammad Shah sent for a new diploma from his son and successor. In practical terms, it all meant rather less than Queen Elizabeth II being head of state of Australia. To Muhammad Shah, however, it meant more; perhaps everything. He was the man who had everything, materially. But as the second in a dynasty of Turco-Mongol marauders, recent converts to Islam, he had no legitimacy other than his own worldly power. While this has not bothered most rulers, it troubled Muhammad Shah, one of the most fascinating, frightening and complex monarchs in world history. As a fragment of autobiography reveals, he had fallen into a deep spiritual malaise, almost an existential crisis:
My father prevented my search for the rightful imam . . . My condition became such that no designs of mine could be actually realized . . . [and I] would have preferred (in despite of Islam) to become an idolator.
Muhammad Shah saved himself from idolatry by finding his rightful imam – in those tenuous, shadowy caliphs in Egypt. In them, in the black robes, in the Abbasid foot on the sultanic neck, the old Arab empire kept a phantom hold on the wealthiest ruler in the world.
A CENTRIFUGAL CENTURY
If the enigmatic and arabophile Muhammad Shah was a special case, his Delhi was only one destination in a hemisphere of mobile Arabs. And by no means all the globetrotters and fortune-hunters were the offspring of Abbasids or great tribal amirs. The Berber-blooded Ibn Battutah was from a respectable but modest family of Tangier; in Delhi and then again in China he bumped into a fellow Moroccan called al-Bushri, a traveller of similarly middling background from Sabtah (now the Spanish-run Ceuta), up the road from his own birthplace. Later, he stayed with al-Bushri’s brother on the north-western edge of the Sahara. ‘How far apart they were!’ he exclaimed (about 12,500 kilometres, as the crow flew). Just as the diaspora of the seventh and eighth centuries had flung Arab families apart, like the five sons of al-Abbas scattered from Tunisia to Samarqand and the brother governors in Tunisia and Sind, so too did the centrifugal century after the Mongol calamity. Now, too, new regions were opening up to the adventurous, and not only around the Indian Ocean. South of the Sahara in the Sahel – the sahil or ‘coast’ of the desert – Ibn Battutah found that the great West African empire of Mali (far more extensive than the modern state of Mali) was home to many expatriate Arabs. Most were from North Africa; some, like the distinguished Granadan scholar and architect al-Sahili and the merchant al-Kuwayk of Iraqi origin, whose tombs Ibn Battutah noted in Timbuktu, were from further afield.
Most Arabs, of course, stayed at home; unlike the mass migrations of the first Islamic centuries, this was a diaspora of the edges, of an adventurous minority. It is impossible to estimate numbers; but judging by names on the surviving Islamic gravestones from one destination in the far east – Quanzhou, the Hong Kong of its day, in China’s Fujian province – Arabs, and especially Yemenis, were a prominent component among Muslims of other origins, mostly Persians and Turks. Here, in what the Chinese called ‘the richest city under the heavens’, no fewer than twelve of the twenty-two governors under the Mongol Yuan dynasty were Muslims. Nor were the Arab and arabized wanderers all Muslim. North of the Caucasus, for example, in what is now southern Russia, Ibn Battutah met a Jew from al-Andalus who had travelled overland via Constantinople in four months; local informants regarded such a journey as unremarkable. Travellers and traders to distant parts also turn up regularly in documents from the Cairo Geniza, a repository for discarded documents attached to a synagogue. This giant waste-paper basket has turned out to be a mine of information on Egyptian and further Jewish communities from the eleventh century on. Patient paper-chasing has enabled researchers to trace the lives of people ignored by standard histories: Abraham ibn Yiju, for instance, a Tunisian Jewish businessman in the India
trade, and Abu Zikri ha-Kohen, originally from Sijilmasah in southern Morocco, who dealt from Cairo in Indian Ocean goods and had a brother-in-law acting as his agent in Sudanese Sawakin.
These far travellers may not all have shared a faith or a genetic origin; but they did share a global, or at least a hemiglobal frame of mind, and they were fluent in its major language. It was because of the spread of Islam, but also of Arabic, that people like Ibn Battutah could feel at home in places as far apart as West African Mali, Maldivian Male, and even on the margins of the known world, with Urduja the pugnacious princess.
VIRILE VOCABULARY
Like today’s travellers for whom English plus a bit of French or Spanish will cover most eventualities, fourteenth-century globetrotters could get by in Arabic, with a smattering of Persian and perhaps Turkish; speaking Arabic then, like speaking English now, made travel easier. The irony was that, back home, the old high language was decaying. In 1327, listening to the sermon at Friday prayers in al-Basrah, the Iraqi Ivy League town where the laws of the language had been laid down, Ibn Battutah was shocked to find that ‘when the preacher rose and recited his discourse he committed in it many gross errors of grammar’. Complaining to a local scholar, he was told bluntly, ‘In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the science of grammar.’ The political and social breakdown that had afflicted the old heartlands for centuries, followed by the Mongol onslaught, seemed to have undermined even the oldest and firmest base of Arab unity, the Arabic language. The qawa’id – both the ‘foundations’ and the ‘grammar’ – were decaying alarmingly.
As if in compensation, Arabic was enlarging its overseas empire. It had already colonized Persian and Turkic; more recently, Arabic loan words had made inroads into European languages. Now it was going on to conquer new lands and tongues in sub-Saharan Africa, India and South-East Asia. Arabic script, too, spread with trade and Islam, and with the material culture that they carried: it was the literal expression of that culture. Not much later than the earliest Cambay stones in Sumatra, inscribed in Arabic, comes the first extant Old Malay text written in Arabic script: found across the strait in the Malay Peninsula, it may be as early as 1326. The list of languages written in Arabic script was to lengthen and cover much of the Old World: to Arabic itself, Persian, the Turkic languages and now Malay, would be added Kurdish, Pashtu, Sindi, Kashmiri and Urdu, Uyghur in Chinese Turkestan, Swahili in East Africa, Fulani and Hausa in West Africa; even, for a time, Croat in the Balkans, ‘Cape Malay’ – really a form of Afrikaans used by nineteenth-century South African Muslims and written in Arabic script – and certain ‘secret’ languages among the clans of southern Madagascar. Often, additional letters were needed; sometimes a whole new style of script was designed, like Persian nasta’liq – supposedly inspired by a dream in which Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law and one of his scribes, told the calligrapher to look for inspiration in the anatomy of ducks. In the far east, meanwhile, the ancient transition from the chisel of angular, epigraphic Nabataean and Kufic to the cursive reed-pen of the caliphal chancery was taken even further in the Chinese Arabic scripts, written with the ink-brush and looking as if they had descended from cloud-scrolls.
How far Arabic penetrated the languages themselves can be judged from numbers of loan words. In post-Ottoman Turkish in 1931, 51 per cent of newspaper vocabulary was Arabic; even after a generation of de-arabicization, the proportion in 1965 was still 26 per cent. In Farsi, there were attempts to persianize the lexicon in the nineteenth century, but at least 30 per cent of the vocabulary remains Arabic. Arabic travelled via Persian to the Indian subcontinent, where not only Hindi and particularly Urdu but also many of the related languages are rich in Arabic words; thus, for example, a concept as indigenous as Sikh khalsa can turn out to have an Arabic name – khalisah is ‘pure’. India’s recent colonial history also meant that a minor secondary wave of Arabic words made it the long way round to Europe, and particularly with the nabobs (the nawab, Arabic ‘deputies’) to ‘Blighty’ – itself from Arabic wilayah, ‘dominion, realm’, via Persian into Indian bilayati ‘of the foreign land, especially Europe/Britain’. Arabicization is continuing in at least one part of the Indian subcontinent, as Bangladeshi Bengali replaces Sanskrit loan words with new ones of Arabic origin.
Further south and east around the ocean arc, Arabic has bequeathed modern Indonesian as many as 3,000 loan words. From the East Indies, it still had further to go – not just to Ibn Battutah’s hazy Kaylukari but also to Elcho Island, off Australia’s Arnhem Land: there, the Aboriginal name for God, ‘Walitha’walitha’, apparently came via early contacts with Makassar Muslims from the Arabic phrase Allahu ta’ala, ‘Allah, exalted is He’. In the opposite direction, in Africa, the belated Arab tribal migrations of the Banu Hilal and others from the eleventh century onwards arabicized the lowlands, but Arabic would also steal into the Berber languages, a quarter to a third of whose vocabulary is now Arabic. From the Maghrib, traders, missionaries and tribesmen also took Arabic itself as far south as Bornu in northern Nigeria, where a form of the language is still spoken by inhabitants of Arab origin. No less importantly, from the sawahil, the coasts of the western arm of the oceanic arc, Swahili spread inland through trade to become the national language of Kenya and Tanzania. Swahili is a Bantu language, but Arabic has loaned it perhaps as much as half of its vocabulary. Like Turkish and many other languages that were long written in Arabic script, Swahili has romanized itself. But, as in Bangladesh, the lexical penetration continues: Greek-origin saikolojia, for example, is giving way to Arabic-origin elimunafsi (’ilmu ‘n-nafsi, ‘the science of the soul’).
Given that language is already gendered in other ways – notably ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ – it may not be wrong, or even impertinent, to see the whole process as one of virile Arabic vocabulary (and it is always vocabulary, never grammar) penetrating a succession of grammatical matrixes, Indo-European, Turkic, Hamito-Semitic, Austronesian, Bantu. Just as seventh- and eighth-century Arab men scattered abroad and begot generations of talented muwallads, so in later times their language continued to father a rich and expanding creole world. If only in retrospect, it makes up for the political impotence.
A DISTANT VIEW OF MECCA
As Islam spread, it too penetrated and enriched one culture after another. It had long outgrown its Arabian origins. But over the centuries a web of attachments grew that kept the wider Islamic world joined to Arabia and the world-navel of Mecca. The most powerful link was the inviolable Arabic of the Qur’an and of worship. And there was another binding and physical link in pilgrimage, one of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam and therefore a duty, but only for those who were physically and financially able to undertake it. Very few were; even fewer did.
But there were other kinds of attachment. Sometimes these were corporeal and personal, like the tombs of expatriate Arab matriarchs and patriarchs: Nafisah’s in Cairo has been mentioned, as has that of Qutham, one of those five sons of al-Abbas, in Samarqand (where, for a time, the superintendent of the shrine was that real live Abbasid – Ghiyath al-Din, en route to Delhi). Sometimes the wish was father to the corpse. Thus, ‘Abu Waqqas’, supposedly Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, the Companion of Muhammad, is buried and venerated in both Tamil Nadu and Guangzhou, leading a posthumous double life like the Christian St Thomas – or indeed triple, as the real Sa’d was buried in Medina. Non-human remains could also bring Arabia close. One example is the sacred house in Kangaba, Mali. Known as the Kababolon, ‘the Vestibule of the Ka’bah’, it is said to contain relics of an unspecified and mysterious nature brought from Mecca by a mid-fourteenth-century ruler of the Mali empire.
If you could not reach Arabia by the usual means, you could always take yourself there supernaturally, compressing time and distance. Nizam al-Din, the great Sufi saint of Delhi, is an extreme case: he is said to have visited the Ka’bah every night on a flying camel. Sometimes, though, lesser mortals can share in something of the same experience. A
t a site called Daftar Jaylani, deep in the Sri Lankan jungle, there is a cave that for ten years in the twelfth century was supposedly home to the Baghdad-based saint Abd al-Qadir al-Jaylani; he, too, would go on supernatural pilgrimages. Even today, by crawling into the narrowest part of the cave and looking through a peep-hole, a sort of psychic telescope, thousands of visitants are convinced that they have seen Mecca, 5,000 kilometres away.
TRANSLATING ISLAM
Despite all these various points of attachment to Arabia, Islam ‘creolized’, rather as those Arabic-enriched languages had done. In the ninth-century Baghdad of al-Ma’mun, it had begun to develop from an Arabian religio, a set of inherited obligations, into a cosmopolitan faith that added philosophy and ethics to cult. Now, in the post-Mongol centuries, it spread around an even wider world, acclimatizing and gaining accretions as it went. Islam was going global; also, inevitably, it was going native.
At home in the old Arab empire, Islam tended to remain a unitary ideology that had long ceased to unify. Its living word, the Qur’an, was embalmed in sanctity and shrouded in layers of exegesis; so too was hadith. Except among Sufis and esoterics, public rituality tended to be more important than private spirituality; debate, such as it was, centred on textual minutiae – on individual words, syllables, letters, dots – and generated ever more texts. Writing of his own fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun entitled a chapter, ‘The great number of scholarly works available is an obstacle on the path to attaining scholarship’. He went on to brand academic overkill ‘an evil that cannot be cured, because it has become firmly ingrained through custom’. Many scholars could no longer see the wood for the trees – or hear the Word for the sounds. But for non-Arab Muslims the sacred sounds were not enough: they had to look for the larger meaning, the sense, as one inevitably does when one translates. The curious upshot of this is that some non-Arab Muslims may in fact understand the message of the Arabic Qur’an as well as, if not better than, many of their Arab co-religionists. As a recent researcher in sociolinguistics was told, the latter ‘are Arabs and already speak Arabic, [so] there is no need for translations’. But Arabs do not ‘speak Arabic’ – that is, they do not speak the high Arabic of the Qur’an; they never have done, or not as a ‘native’ language of daily life. That is the point of the Qur’an: it is elevated beyond human expression. And it does not help that the numerous exegeses try to attain the same high language as that of the text they are trying to explain. Arabophones may well respond to the mystical medium of the Qur’an like no other hearers; sometimes, however, the message may elude them.
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