East Africa
So long as Baghdad remained the primary market of the western Indian Ocean, the Red Sea functioned as a branch line for Persian Gulf shipping. Even though one could find a wealth of merchandise in Aden, much of this passed through Persian Gulf ports first. This was true even of goods from the nearby coasts of East Africa. Persian Gulf trade with East Africa was not a new endeavor, but starting no later than the eighth century there was a concerted push south of the Horn of Africa, where Islam began to exert a definite though limited influence. After their foray across the Red Sea into Yemen in the sixth century, the kings of Aksum had abandoned their maritime aspirations and Omani traders from Siraf and Suhar gradually assumed their role on the African coast north of the Horn of Africa. By the eighth century they were settled on the island of Socotra, which they used as a staging ground for trading and raiding beyond the Horn. Omanis and their Persian and Arab followers initially confined themselves to the relatively protected archipelagoes and offshore islands scattered along the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania, and even after settling on the mainland they did not penetrate the interior to any significant degree. Many of their ports were temporary in nature, or at least constructed of perishable materials, and most of the permanent towns established after the turn of the millennium were no more than a few kilometers from the sea.
Physical structures from the first three centuries of the Muslim presence in East Africa may have been impermanent, but many sites nonetheless reached impressive size—as much as twenty hectares (fifty acres) in some cases—and formed the basis for cities still thriving today: Mogadishu in Somalia; the ports of Kenya’s Lamu archipelago; the Tanzanian islands of Pemba, Zanzibar, and Kilwa; and Sofala, Mozambique, which was the coastal terminus of the gold trade from Zimbabwe and effectively the southwest limit of Indian Ocean shipping until the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. While they owed their overseas connections to Muslim merchants, these sites were originally settled and continued to be dominated by African Swahili speakers who by the eighth century had spread south along a two-thousand-kilometer stretch of the coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and who were established in the Comoros archipelago in the ninth and tenth centuries. Despite a long-standing belief that Swahili culture was indelibly marked by Arabic and Islamic influences from an early date, these were absorbed by rather than imposed upon the Swahili, who evolved a complex society that mediated between foreign and local African traditions. Part of the confusion has to do with the very word “Swahili,” which comes from the Arabic sawahil, meaning “coast.” However, Swahili is a Bantu language with a limited Arabic vocabulary—chiefly specialist religious, commercial, and nautical terms—most of which entered the language between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Omani Empire included part of coastal East Africa.
Among the earliest Swahili sites thus far excavated is at Shanga, where finds of Persian ceramics show that Muslim sailors were visiting by the end of the eighth century. The town prospered and by the eleventh century it was the site of a Friday mosque and other structures built with coral and stone rather than more perishable wood and thatch. Of slightly later date is the town of Kilwa, on an island that measures four by six kilometers in an enclosed bay on the Tanzanian coast. Kilwa reached its apogee between the late twelfth and sixteenth centuries, but excavations have revealed articles of Arabo-Persian and Chinese provenance (the latter shipped by way of Persian Gulf ports) dating from the ninth century. According to the sixteenth-century Kilwa Chronicle, the city was founded by Ali ibn al-Husayn, the son of a sultan of Shiraz. Sailing in seven ships, al-Husayn, his five brothers, and his father established themselves in seven locations in the Comoros and on the mainland opposite the Lamu archipelago, which al-Husayn is said to have bartered from a mainland ruler for some cloth. The story of al-Husayn echoes legends explaining the establishment of Mogadishu and the migration of Persians to India’s Konkan Coast in the eighth century. Whatever its veracity, the story was probably half a millennium old when it was written down: finds at Kilwa include eleventh-century coins bearing the name of al-Husayn and his successors. Nor were members of al-Husayn’s family the first people to reach the Comoros. Initially settled by Malagasy speakers from Madagascar, the archipelago grew in importance because it lay about midway between northern Mozambique and Madagascar and astride the offshore route between Sofala and Kilwa, the broad eastern arc of which was dictated by the prevailing winds and currents. In addition to the regular traffic between the Persian Gulf and Africa, there was direct trade between Srivijaya and East Africa and possibly Madagascar. Here Srivijayan merchant sailors were said to be “welcomed hospitably and conduct a lucrative trade … because each understands the other’s language,” because Malagasy derives from the Austronesian language of the island’s first settlers.
Exports from East Africa were varied but consisted chiefly of natural resources, principally gold, mangrove wood, tortoiseshell, iron for Indian metalsmiths, and ivory. Imports are harder to determine until the ninth century, when Chinese ceramics and glass were added to the manifest of Muslim and Indian merchants. Because these are less perishable than organic materials, it is easier to trace their distribution through time and space, which is one reason the history of East Africa comes into comparatively clear focus at this time. Yet there was another less heralded mainstay of Indian Ocean commerce: the trade in enslaved Africans. There were already enough slaves in Iraq to mount a rebellion in the seventh century, but the traffic in slaves shot up in the ninth century. Between 850 and 1000 ce, slavers shipped an estimated 2.5 million black Africans from south of the Horn of Africa, which in time was called the Cape of Slaves. Another 10 million followed before 1900. The Indian Ocean slave trade has received less scrutiny than its later Atlantic counterpart, partly for want of written records, and partly because of differing attitudes toward slaves and the slave trade in Asia. Unlike in European societies, slaves in the Muslim world had broad legal rights and could hold high office, earn money, and own property, even while being the property of someone else. They could purchase their freedom and marry other slaves or free persons. Initially, at least, the degree of racial prejudice associated with slavery was less in the Islamic world than elsewhere, and Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims and dhimmis—“protected people,” as Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and other recipients of divine scripture were called. Nevertheless, black Muslims were routinely enslaved, a fact about which African rulers and Muslims jurists complained, just as African Christians would later complain about their treatment at the hands of European Christians.
Hardly any documentation about the medieval East African slave trade exists, but we do know of a few individuals who rose to high rank—one ruled Egypt, first as regent and then in his own right—and writers did record unintended consequences of the trade like the Zanj rebellions. A unique source for the trade per se is the story of an unnamed African ruler and an Omani merchant named Ismail ibn Ibrahim ibn Mirdas. In 922, Ismail was en route to Pemba Island when he was forced south of his destination. Landing near Sofala, he and his crew began bartering with the locals—“a trade that was excellent for us, without any hindrances or customs duties,” so common in the rest of the Indian Ocean world. When the trading was completed, the local king boarded the ship to see off the merchants. “When I saw them there,” recalled Ismail, “I said to myself: In the market in Oman this young king would certainly fetch thirty dinars, and his seven companions sixty each. Their clothes alone are worth not less than twenty dinars. One way and another this would give us a profit of at least 3,000 dirhams, and without any trouble.”b So he bundled the king and his retainers in with the two hundred slaves already aboard his ship and sailed for home. The king was sold at Oman, which would be the end of the story were it not for the fact that several years later Ismail fetched up again near Sofala only to find himself before his erstwhile prisoner.
Recounting his adventures to the justifiably nervous Omani, the un
named king told how after being sold he lived in Basra and Baghdad, where he converted to Islam. He escaped his owner by joining pilgrims bound for Mecca, from where he continued to Cairo. Determined to return home, he sailed up the Nile and struck out for the coast, where he boarded a vessel that brought him home. Without definite news of his fate, his people had not chosen a successor, so he resumed the throne. “My people listened to the account of my story, and it surprised them, and filled them with joy.” More important, he told Ismail, “Like myself, they embraced the religion of Islam.… And, if I have forgiven you, it is because you were the first cause of the purity of my religion.” Bidding Ismail farewell, the king asked him to “let Muslims know that they may come here to us as to brothers, Muslims like themselves. As for accompanying you to your ship,” he observed, “I have reasons for not doing so.” The king’s refusal to avenge his kidnapping on Ismail testifies to his reverence for his new faith, but as his penultimate remarks reveal, his people’s adoption of Islam had a practical side and they could promote their new faith in the same way a business might post a sign saying “Arabic spoken here.”
The story of Ismail and the king comes from the Book of the Wonders of India, a remarkable collection of 136 stories gathered from friends and acquaintances by a Persian merchant named Buzurg ibn Shahriyar. Buzurg names twentyfive of his informants, who are collectively responsible for half the stories, Ismail being the source of six. Twenty-six of the datable stories take place between 908 and 953, and the oldest dates from the reign of Harun al-Rashid at the turn of the ninth century. Some of them relate fantastic or highly embellished events or miracles similar to those associated with Sinbad the Sailor in The Arabian Nights, but many reflect the ordinary interests of merchants everywhere. Most of Buzurg’s informants hail from Suhar, Siraf, or Basra, and although they relate adventures and mishaps from East Africa, Jeddah, and Aden to China, the destinations mentioned most often are in India and Sri Lanka. For this reason the compilation is an invaluable mirror of medieval Arab and Persian commerce on the Monsoon Seas. Merchants lucky and hapless, navigators with a sixth sense for the weather, and survivors of shipwreck account for the bulk of the more sober narratives. A brief tale told by Ismail, for instance, recounts how he sailed from the Malay Peninsula to Shihr, on the coast of central Yemen, and after beating off sixty-six pirate boats completed the three-thousand-mile passage in forty-one days. His cargo was worth six hundred thousand dirhams, not including the goods the sultan of Oman exempted from duty or those that “escaped the customs and were not discovered”—in a word, smuggled. Buzurg never moralizes, which imparts a chilling quality to his stories: about a shipwrecked girl raped by a sailor as she clings to flotsam while the narrator looks on; Indian suicides who hire people to drown them; and slaves, who except for Ismail’s unnamed king are enumerated with complete indifference, a hundred in this ship, two hundred in that. But it is this matter-of-fact quality that anchors these stories in the experience of their intended audience, deep-sea mariners with little use for nostalgia.
The Way East
Sasanian mariners began making the six-thousand-mile passage to China beginning in the second century, and before the start of the Islamic era Ubulla, at the head of the Persian Gulf, was renowned as “the port to al-Bahrain, Uman, al-Hind [India] and as-Sin [China].” Their role in this long-distance trade is noted in accounts of three Buddhists who traveled no farther west than the east coast of India. In 673, a Chinese monk named Yijing made his way to Guangzhou, where he “fixed the date of meeting with the owner of a Persian ship to embark for the south.” Four decades later, the Indian Vajrabodhi sailed for China from the Pallava kingdom in southern India. Stopping in Sri Lanka—doubtless at Mantai, the premier South Asian port of call for traffic between Persia and China—their ship joined a fleet of thirty Persian vessels, each with a complement of five to six hundred people and cargoes of precious stones, among other things. The commercial orientation of Persian seafarers is also the subject of an observation by a Korean Buddhist named Huichau, who after sailing to India in around 725 described the merchants from the Persian Gulf:
The inhabitants being by nature bent on commerce, they are in the habit of sailing in big craft on the western sea, and they enter the southern sea to the country of the Lions [Sri Lanka], where they get precious stones, for which reason it is said of the country that it produces precious stones. They also go to the Kunlun country [Southeast Asia] to fetch gold. They also sail in big craft to the country of Han, straight to [Guangzhou] for silk piece goods and the like ware.
The oldest secular account of the passage from the Persian Gulf is provided by a Sirafi merchant named Sulayman al-Tajir, who traded in China around 850. Because the largest ships could not reach the head of the Persian Gulf, on the first stage of the journey east, “the goods are carried to Siraf from al-Basra, ’Uman and other [ports], and then they are loaded on the Chinese boats at Siraf. This is because the waves are abundant in this sea and the water is at a low [level] in some places.” (“Chinese boats” refers not to ships built in or from China, but to those that traded to China, in the same way that nineteenth-century European and American square-riggers in the tea trade were referred to as China clippers.) The first port of call was at Masqat on the Musandam peninsula, where crews topped up their water before sailing direct to Kulam Malay (Quilon, India), a month away. Here ships bound for China paid duties of a thousand dirhams. After rounding India and Sri Lanka they called in the Nicobar Islands, again for water, although there was also a small-scale trade in ambergris, which the natives exchanged for iron. They next sailed to Kalah (probably Takuapa, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula below the Kra Isthmus) and then south to Sumatra. Once through the Strait of Malacca, the ships might call at the Buddhist kingdom of “Zabaj” (Srivijaya) or sail directly across the South China Sea to southern Vietnam or Guangzhou. By Sulayman’s time, Persian Gulf mariners seem to have stopped trying to make the entire six-thousand-mile passage to China in one ship. Major changes taking place along the length of the sea route made breaking the trip in South Asia more worthwhile than it had been.
One reason that Muslim expansion into India stalled after the capture of Daybul in the eighth century is that the subcontinent was undergoing a major political realignment that saw the rise of a number of powerful kingdoms, some founded on territorial expansion, others on overseas trade. The number of sixth-century Indian dynasties and kingdoms is almost incalculable; the borders of even the most enduring were mutable; and the incomplete historical record shows that many were short-lived. By the start of the seventh century, however, central and southern India were dominated by the dynasties of the Chalukyas, whose origins lay in Karnataka in the southwest, and the Pallavas in the southeast. Under Pulakeshin II, the Chalukyas conquered the Konkan Coast between the Gulf of Khambhat and modern Goa, and sent a fleet of a hundred ships against a place called Puri, possibly Elephanta Island in the harbor of modern Mumbai. Crossing the Narmada River into north India, the Chalukyas marched east to Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, and having spanned the subcontinent, Pulakeshin was known as “lord of both the eastern and the western seas.” He next attacked the Pallavas to the south, who were heavily invested in the long-distance trade of the Bay of Bengal and who clashed repeatedly with the Chalukyas. The struggle for control of southern India swung back and forth for more than a century and embroiled the smaller southern Indian kingdoms of the Pandyas and Cheras, and the kings of Sri Lanka.
A tenth-century stone carving of a boat from the Pala kingdom in northeast India. The upturned stern is an unusual feature in vessels of the Indian Ocean, but the pavilion near the center of the boat probably houses someone of political or ritual importance. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Contemporary with the start of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-eighth century, two major powers emerged in northern India, the Rashtrakuta Dynasty founded by a Chalukya general, and the Buddhist Palas of Bengal and the eastern Ganga vall
ey. Pala rule continued until the Muslim conquest in the thirteenth century, when Buddhism was virtually eliminated from the land of its origin, but in the meantime the Palas exerted a pronounced influence on Buddhist practice in Southeast Asia and China, where the religion continued to flourish. To the southwest, the Rashtrakutas forged one of India’s most extensive and wealthiest empires, which controlled the western coast of the subcontinent as far south as Kerala. Much of its wealth came from the commerce that flowed through ports in Gujarat and Konkan, which were home to communities of Persian and Arab Muslim traders as well as Jews, Nestorian Christians, Buddhists, and Jains.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 38
