Is There a Middle East?
Page 19
The shared world of Sarina and Sayyid Mustafa is the subject of this chapter. They belonged to families and communities that, for their time, were literate, mobile, and cosmopolitan. Though generally excluded from high political office and seldom figuring among the ranks of the recognized cultural elites, such groups were critical in sustaining the polities within which they lived, traveled, and worked. Whether as bankers or scribes, teachers or students, their activities made possible the circulation of goods, tokens, and knowledge, as well as their exchange over many different kinds of political and cultural boundaries. These individuals, and the associations that framed their lives, thus have for us an importance for our understanding of the dynamics of the early modern world (and its differentiated transitions into modern times) that far exceeds their modest numbers. In particular, they offer us a glimpse into the society, culture, and trade of the region before its partitioning into the Middle East and South Asia, and before nation-states arose to redefine preexisting identities.
In the pages that follow, I focus on how the likes of Sayyid Mustafa and Sarina—inhabitants of a region that spanned much of what is known today as the Middle East and South Asia and that, for reasons given below, I call Islamicate Eurasia1—conceived of and articulated their mundane world. A sensitive appreciation of the images and ideas that allowed them to approach and make sense of their temporal surroundings is a prerequisite for any deep comprehension of their actions. Only then can we hope to situate them properly within their ambient polities and evaluate their contributions to their period and after. Unfortunately, little that is definitive is known about their everyday views, thoughts, and attitudes. This reflects in part the ongoing tendency in scholarship to stress, on the one hand, the concerns of the region’s conspicuous elites, who monopolized the realms of high politics, warfare, state bureaucracy, art, the belles lettres, and formal scholarship, and, on the other hand, the concerns of the Europeans in their diverse guises.2 But this also reflects the biases of the extant historical record and the challenges that one has to overcome when trying to derive meaningful insights from it.
The vernacular perspectives explored in this chapter are based on a close reading of a collection of documents in Arabic and Persian. Composed between 1745 and 1748 in the commercial, administrative, and spiritual centers of Iraq, the Malabar, and Bengal, it consists of about a hundred personal, business, and official letters; notarized statements; accounts; petitions; contracts; receipts; and certificates of appointment. Originally destined for settlements throughout India, these documents exhibit a wide range of rhetorical conventions and writing styles, combining in varying proportions the local idiom, the spoken vulgate, and the classical form of their writers’ language. Their authors and their recipients were indigenous to the region, and include men, women, fathers, sons, wives, mothers, uncles, brothers, sisters, nephews, masters, servants, employees, teachers, students, clerics, pilgrims, and officials. The backgrounds of these individuals reveal a kaleidoscope in which the most prominent were Bengali and Iraqi Shi’is, Iraqi Armenians, Mughal Indians, and Ottoman Turks.
Through this archival miscellany, I elucidate some of the cognitive patterns used by those whose livelihoods were enmeshed in the region’s arena of circulation and exchange. These patterns were appropriate and meaningful within the ambit of their daily activities, enabling them to represent, interpret, and explain to their satisfaction their perceived world, at the center of which, as described below, lay places, power, and people. But this world was not to last for much longer; it would witness partial fragmentation and major realignments from the close of the eighteenth century. The main source for these changes was the remarkable growth in Europe’s political, economic, and administrative entanglement with India, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran. These produced in time fundamentally new realities. The chapter’s final section outlines how these realities interacted with the conceptual repertoire inherited by the region’s literate and worldly though mostly inconspicuous residents. It seems that, at around this time, their Islamicate Eurasia started to unravel; it would ultimately be replaced by confessional polities whose rulers were much more conscious of their frontiers and boundaries and were increasingly anxious to police them. As many of the older connections withered away and as new ones were cultivated under the auspices of the emerging global empires, nation-states, and multilateral associations, the gazes of the region’s inhabitants shifted to other horizons, and their world in the process was refashioned.
PLACES
Hanna b. ‘Abd al-Da’im’s appreciation of his larger world was one that was widespread among southern Iraq’s population. We can gain a sense of this appreciation because it was invoked as his constant guide in an unfinished quest that was very close to his heart. “For three years,” he wrote to his son in 1747, “we have not seen from you a letter.... In these three years, I have written nearly a hundred letters. Some I have sent to Basra, some to Misr [Egypt] ..., some I wrote to places on the Malabar coast, some to Cochin. I am at a loss in the matter of where to write, my son, [because] it is not known where you are.”3 This passage gives us a visceral sense of the great physical expanse over which it was unremarkable for such individuals to travel and to maintain ties, and over which their mind’s eye could range with practiced ease. Clearly, their world encompassed territories as far apart as India, Egypt, and Iraq. The main impulses for such a broad outlook were, to be sure, trade and finance. But they were also inextricably bound to pilgrimage, study, and the desire for the most current information. For those who made their living primarily from commerce, transport, or communication, this physical domain was generally treated as a single arena for their activities, woven together by a dense web of continental and maritime routes; for students, teachers, and religious scholars, it was an ecumenism unified and rendered meaningful by their shared commitment to certain ineluctable fundamentals. And what enabled them to come to terms with so many places separated by such large distances was a combination of personal, collective, and inherited experiences, and the existence of a conceptual repertoire made up of a set of images and ideas.
Although there is plenty of evidence that individuals engaged in circulation and exchange were able to conceive of, and operate on, grand scales, and that they were driven to do so by multiple imperatives, there were at the same time frontiers beyond which they seldom ventured. It only requires a glance at the array of places mentioned in their correspondence to see that their affairs were often continental in scope. Closer examination, however, shows that the functional boundaries of their arena of activities never extended beyond mainland Eurasia and the Mediterranean basin, omitting notably those parts of the world incommensurable with Islamicate polities. Thus, there is not a single reference in the documents to a location—whether a region, state, province, district, port, city, town, or village—in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, Christian Europe, Southeast Asia, or East Asia. In other words, the polities within which their authors—and their families and communities—lived were, in a profound sense, always familiar to them. This would suggest that, in practice, their physical world was circumscribed by what was predominantly an Islamicate Eurasia (Figure 7.1).
Within this region, then, how did its inhabitants conceive of settlements? A series of letters written by Sayyid Mustafa, with whose predicament I opened this chapter, gives some useful pointers. While stranded on the Malabar Coast during the monsoon of 1748, he spent much of his time in Cochin. His family and associates at home in Bengal seemingly knew little, if anything, about the settlement. To help them crystallize it in their minds, he provided a few pertinent facts. To describe the settlement, he used several different terms that indicate a definable place.4 He often prefaced its name with the word for “port.”5 Sayyid Mustafa further noted that it was a “Dutch possession,”6 and that it was found “half-way to Basra.”7 So we see that settlements such as Cochin were not thought of in terms of their longitude and latitude or in some other technical manner that fixed their abs
olute location. Rather, they were specified in terms of their surrounding area (in this case, the Malabar region), the basic features of their ambient polity (here, a port under Dutch control), and their position relative to other places that were better known (Cochin as situated between Bengal and Basra).
Figure 7.1. Islamicate Eurasia, c. eighteenth century.
Cochin is one of more than a dozen settlements explicitly identified in the documents that adjoined or had easy access to the high seas. Alongside these were mentioned a similar number of inland settlements (see Table 7.1). In some cases, such as Aleppo,8 Diyarbıkr,9 and Isfahan,10 the standard practice was to use its bare name on its own. But this was the exception; the toponyms of settlements were usually combined with an attribute that captured something meaningful about the place. Basra, for example, though most often invoked without any elaboration whatsoever, was occasionally preceded by the word for “port” or “town,” whereas Cochin tended to be prefaced only by the word for “port.”11 More rarely, the settlement’s name was denoted not by its unique toponym but rather through a qualification of a more general term, such as the country in which it lay. Thus, bandar-i Kālī Saylān (the port of Sri Lanka) was used when referring to Colombo,12 and major settlements were talked of as bandar-i Bangālah (the port of Bengal) or, for those of political import, mahrūsat al-Hind (“the guarded city of India”).13 Although the places intended by such names may not be immediately apparent to us today, deciphering them would have posed no problems for contemporaries who were fully aware of the context in which they were being aired (Table 7.1).
Table 7.1. Places in Islamicate Eurasia
Settlements
Littoral
Inland
Basra
Azimabad (Patna)
Calcutta
Baghdad
Calicut
Diyarbıkr
Canonore
Halab (Aleppo)
Cochin
Isfahan
Hugli
Jahangirnagar (Dhaka)
Istanbul
Karbala
Jidda
Mecca
Machlipatnam (Machlibandar)
Medina
Mahe
Murshidabad
Mocha
Najaf
Pondicherry
Shahjahanabad (Delhi)
Surat
Shiraz
Suvali
Tellicherry
Countries
Continental
Maritime
Anatolia
Lakshadweep
Bengal
Sri Lanka
Hind (India)
Iran
Malabar
Misr (lower Egypt)
Sind
The attributes or epithets attached to the names of settlements often served a purpose that went beyond rhetorical adornment or the dictates of etiquette or protocol. They could convey aspects of the place’s heritage or history, such as Baghdad Dār al-salām (the house of peace),14 Basra mubārak (blessed),15 Shiraz Dār al-’ilm (the house of knowledge),16 and Hugli maftuh (open or conquered).17 Others gestured toward its spiritual function, especially if it hosted a mausoleum dedicated to a celebrated figure or a renowned place of worship, or possessed artifacts that bore witness to the central tenets of a religious tradition. Shi’is, for example, always referred to their shrine cities in Iraq as Najaf-i ashraf (noble Najaf) and Karbalā’-yi mu’allā (exalted Karbala), and Muslims generally referred to their holiest sites in the Hijaz as Makka al-mukarrama (revered Mecca) and al-Madīna al-munawwara (luminous Medina). By invoking such epithets, the individual signalled his identity and beliefs or displayed consideration for his correspondent’s background. There were also terms that flagged the settlement’s principal functions or its administrative or political status. Among the most commonplace were words that translate as “port,” “protected,” “town,” and “city.” These were useful for highlighting aspects of a place’s multifaceted character. So, local officials tended to describe Basra as a “town” or “city,”18 which was appropriate in view of its status as the provincial seat of government, whereas mariners and merchants—when, that is, they were inclined to use an attribute at all—focused on Basra’s role as a “port.”19 Lastly, the qualifiers accompanying toponyms could be invaluable for orienting those, especially couriers and intermediaries, who might not be familiar with the locality. A letter from Iraq written in the 1740s noted that its recipient was living in ‘Azimabad “in the territories of Khan Bahadur Nawwab ‘Abd al-‘Ali Khan.”20 Another letter, dispatched at roughly the same time, stated that its destination was “Jahangirnagar in Bengal.” 21
These littoral and inland settlements are to be contrasted with a group of larger entities, which I term “countries.” As with settlements, two broad types of countries may be discerned in the sources: those situated on a continental landmass and those that were islands or formed an island cluster (see Table 7.1). In contrast to settlements, the simple toponym alone normally sufficed, whether in reference to a large portion of the Indian subcontinent, such as Sind or Bengal, or to a big island, such as Sri Lanka. These names communicated a flavor of where the country lay and of its proportions, though its boundaries or frontiers were usually ill-defined and open to interpretation.22A case in point is the cluster of islands in the Arabian Sea that are known today as Lakshadweep, which, in testimony to its physical qualities, was occasionally prefaced by the word hār, meaning “string” or “necklace” in Hindvi and Persian.23 What is beyond doubt is that such entities did not coincide with any contemporary state, however it may be defined. Rather, they invoked one or a combination of the area’s historical, cultural, and topographical qualities that were known throughout the region, echoing a tradition that, in the Islamic world at least, goes back to human and classical geographers of the ninth and tenth centuries.24
Whether speaking of countries or settlements, the letters reveal that relatively few descriptive attributes were in common use, and those that were bore no immediate relation to the sovereign currently exercising formal authority over the place. Instead, they pointed to its history or function or prestige. It would seem, then, that the language deployed for specifying a place’s location and character was determined chiefly by inherited, confessional, and practical considerations and not by obeisance to the powers that be. The mental map evinced by this repertoire gives almost no quarter to the political realm. It evokes instead a constellation of brightly shining and distinct ports, towns, and cities, embedded within a country, a kind of hazy nebula, in an otherwise dark background. In the minds of those who lived, worked, and traveled within the region, these places were linked by a dense, crisscrossing network of land and sea routes, conceived in relative, rather than absolute, terms.25
POWER
Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this mental map is the tendency to shun territorial frontiers and boundaries. This runs counter to our present notions of the nation-state or even of larger regions, such as the Middle East. The most popular choices today for demarcating the limits of particular territories are topographical features and political control. In the period that I am discussing, the region’s literate, urban, mobile inhabitants certainly had the experiential, conceptual, and lexical wherewithal to imagine and verbalize basic attributes of their physical geography, say, the course of a river or the break between the foothills of a mountain range and the neighboring flood-plain.26 But we have found that, with the partial exception of coastlines, physical geography was not a primary filter through which they viewed their world. Similarly, their correspondence dispatched while on the move displays no awareness of passing between districts, crossing into a new province, or traversing the marches of a kingdom. It was as if political markers of separation were fanciful abstractions conjured up by rulers and their courtly bureaucrats with no practical significance for those actually responsible for flows and transactions over long distances.
One way in w
hich politics or, more broadly, sovereign power did impinge on their articulation of the world was in the recognition of a legitimate ruler or his personally delegated representative. The members of this most exclusive of clubs were imagined as embodying the polity over which they exercised their formal jurisdiction. This manifested itself verbally through the absence of direct references to the regimes over which they presided. Instead, the sources show the recurrent and widespread use of regnal titles, such as “sultan,” “padishah,” “nawab,” and “raja.” The titles bestowed upon—or, in the eighteenth century, more often wrested by—their representatives varied greatly from polity to polity. Take the case of the Arab territories of the eastern reaches of the Ottoman Empire in the 1740s. The documents note the presence of a governor, provincial governor, deputy, and district chief officer. Accounts of what happened to these officials following the demise in 1747 of Iraq’s governor, Ahmad Pasha, give the impression of formal sovereignty as vested in the very person of such individuals. In the midst of the confusion surrounding the succession, a Shi’i living in Basra wrote to his son in Surat that the former “master of the seal” of Diyarbıkr had become the governor of Baghdad and that Basra was now under the rule of its former provincial governor, Muhammad Basha Ilchi.27 Ahmad Pasha’s death was obviously unexpected and resulted in a power vacuum. The letters convey the speed with which the Porte strove to make new appointments to the high-level posts necessary for maintaining order and imperial rule. Moreover, our observer describes these men as “the companions of the sultan.”28 This harmonizes with the idea that a select group of leading officials were vital for the functioning of government and their authority was in direct proportion to the strength of their personal ties to the distant sultan in Istanbul. In this conception, formal sovereignty over the polity is conflated with the sultan and his ruling companions, and it is deemed to have no viable existence independently of them.