In practice, however, the capital was as far from the sea as you could get, and outlying provinces were hard to control. By 1485, the power of Vijayanagar’s neighbors seemed not only to have arrested the expansion of the state but to threaten its very existence. Taxation from coastal emporia dried up as the frontiers withdrew inland. Muslim warlords usurped frontier areas. So a frustrated general, Saluva Narasimha, mounted a putsch and organized the state for war. The relief was temporary. After his death in 1491 renewed struggle for the throne almost extinguished the kingdom, until in 1492 another ambitious general, Narasa Nayaka, took effective power without proclaiming himself king. Thanks to these strong men, the state survived precariously to resume expansion a generation later.
Jihad was one means of spreading and consolidating Islamic appeal, or, at least, Muslim power. Aggressive sultanates justified their wars by invoking religion. In 1470, the Russian merchant Afanasyi Nikitin reported on them, describing their military might in awestruck terms and recounting some of their raids against Hindu lands. His account of what he called his “sinful wanderings” is skewed by his renunciation of his merchant’s vocation—he insists that the pepper and textiles of India are valueless—and by terrible guilt that overcame him at the compromises and evasions of faith he was forced to make in order to trade and even to survive in the realms of rulers who prided themselves on Muslim fanaticism. He frequently protests—too much—that he remained faithful to Christianity, but his own evidence makes it plain that he had to renounce his religion, at least outwardly. The main purpose of his book seems to be solemnly to warn fellow Christians not to trade in India, in peril of their souls. After many months in the Bahmanid kingdom in the Deccan, India, he was unable to compute the date of Easter.
I have nothing with me; no books whatever; those that I had taken from Russia were lost when I was robbed. And I forgot the Christian faith and the Christian festivals and knew not Easter nor Christmas…for I am between the two faiths.19
Nikitin reported that the Bahmanids commanded an army a million strong, armed with firearms, including heavy cannon. The sultan’s armor was of gold inlaid with sapphires and diamonds. His counselors were borne through the streets on couches of gold. Hundreds of armor-clad elephants accompanied him, each bearing an armored howdah bristling with gunmen. The state was indeed near the height of its power. Under the enterprising favorite Mahmud Gawan, in the 1460s and 1470s the sultan’s authority grew at the expense of the nobles, and the frontiers at the expense of neighbors. But the campaigns both inside and outside the kingdom provoked resentment and overtaxed the strength of the state. In 1482 the sultan had the minister murdered, allegedly because he “dared to come in our way and he tried to join forces with our enemies.” 20 His master soon followed him to the grave, leaving the throne to a twelve-year-old, Shihabu’d-din Mahmud. The power struggles that followed among the ministers and generals unleashed massacres, provoked a popular rebellion, and made it easy for provincial power brokers to usurp authority and, in effect, secede from the realm. By 1492 the Bahmanid kingdom was in a state of fission. Over the next couple of years, Shihabu’d-din reasserted his authority in a series of victories against recalcitrant subordinates—but only temporarily arrested the dissolution.
The strength of the Muslim sultanate of Gujarat peaked at roughly the same time. Mahmud Shah Begarha (1469–1511) conquered Champaner from its Hindu masters in 1484 and began rebuilding the city on the grand scale still visible in the sumptuous ruins of palaces, bazaars, squares, gardens, mosques, irrigation tanks, and ornamental ponds. There were workshops producing fine silk, textiles, and arms, and Hindu temples were allowed outside the walls. The sultan’s mightiest subject, Malik Ayaz, came to Gujarat in the 1480s as a Russian slave famous for valor and archery in the entourage of a master who presented him to the sultan. Freed for gallantry in battle—or, in another version of the story, for killing a hawk that had besmirched the sultan’s head with its droppings—he received the captaincy of an area that included the ancient site of a harborside settlement, just reemerging, thanks to Malik’s immediate predecessors, from centuries of accumulated jungle. He turned Diu into an impressively fortified emporium and induced shippers from the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, Melaka, China, and Arabia to use it as their gateway to northern India. His style of life reflected the value of the trade. When he visited the sultan, he had nine hundred horses in his train. He employed a thousand water carriers and served Indian, Persian, and Turkish cuisine to his guests off china plates.
No state in India at the time could compare with the sultanate of Delhi, which began in the tradition of the many hegemonies that invading dynasts had founded in India; it was more of a racket than a state, a supremacy shared among predatory clan members and ethnic cronies. When Bahlul, the founding father, arrived from Afghanistan, he wrote home advertising the wealth of India and enticing his kinsmen to abjure their native poverty and follow him. They swarmed in—it seemed to locals—“like ants or locusts.” But the size and diversity of his domains and opportunities soon had Bahlul recruiting help more widely. He had twenty thousand Mongols in his service. As the frontiers widened, it became increasingly prudent and increasingly necessary to employ natives—as long as they were or would be Muslims.
Bahlul’s successor, Sikandar Lodi, who was on the throne in 1492, adopted indigenous court rituals and “favoured nobles and shaikhs from Arabia, Persia, and various parts of Hind.” 21 Sikandar Lodi’s maternal grandfather was a commoner—a goldsmith—a taint that almost cost him the throne. In matters of manners and morals he had high standards and tough practices. Like all Muslim rulers of the time, he commissioned annalists who celebrated him so lavishly as to undermine all credibility—excusing, for instance, as “for the sake of his health” the toping of this supposedly uncompromising enforcer of the sharia. He certainly exempted himself from his own rules, including the prohibition of shaving. He performed miracles, commanded jinns, and had a magic lamp that illuminated for him news of far-off events.22 He flogged nobles who besmirched a polo match by brawling. He deflected the erotic attentions of an overadmiring sheikh by singeing his beard.
His fanaticism disgusted even his own chroniclers. He destroyed Hindu temples, smashed images, proscribed rites. When a sheikh disputed the justice of prohibiting Hindus’ sacred baths, the sultan raised his sword against the man in anger. His vocation was as a conqueror: that is why he called himself Sikandar—the local form of the name of Alexander the Great. He got as far as annexing Bihar and Dholpur. But he left the state overextended and impoverished. He chopped up Hindu idols and gave the pieces to Muslim butchers to use for weighing meat. He turned temples into mosques and madrassas. He burned a Hindu holy man alive for saying, “Islam and Hindu Dharma are both equally acceptable to God if followed with a sincere heart.” He frequently razed temples and erected mosques in their place, as evidenced by his behavior at Mandrail, Utgir, and Narwar. He issued orders, backed by threats of punishment by death, against the Hindu custom of bathing and shaving to mark the midsummer festival.23
Aggression, however, probably contributed less to the spread of Islam than peaceful proselytization: acculturation by trade, and the slow, sometimes unrewarding work of missionaries. In what would become Malaysia and Indonesia, as in Africa, the other great arena of Islamic expansion at the time, the means of propagation was the “jihad of words.” 24
Trade shunted living examples of Muslim devotion between cities and installed Muslims as port supervisors, customs officials, and agents to despotic monopolists. Trading states speckled the Swahili coast, but the conventional notion that they housed oceangoing peoples is false. For generations, the Swahili responded to the racism of Western masters by cultivating a non-African image, emphasizing their links of culture and commerce with Arabia and India. After independence, some of their hinterland neighbors took revenge, treating them as colonists, rather as the inland communities of Liberia and Sierra Leone treated the descendants of resettled slaves in Mon
rovia and Freetown as an alien and justly resented elite. In Kenya, political demagogues threatened to expel the Swahili, as if they were foreign intruders. Yet the Swahili language, though peppered with Arabic loanwords, is closely akin to other Bantu languages. The Swahili came to the coast from the interior, perhaps thousands of years ago, and retained links with the hinterland that their trade with visitors from the Indian Ocean never displaced.
The coastal location of Swahili cities conveys a misleading impression of why the sea was important to them: they were sited for proximity to fresh water, landward routes, and sources of widely traded coral as much as for ocean access. The elite usually married their daughters to business partners inland rather than to foreign sojourners. Few cities had good anchorages. More than half had poor harbors, or none at all. The town of Gedi, which covered eighteen acres inside ten-foot-high walls and had a palace over a hundred feet wide, was four miles from the sea. Swahili traders plied their own coasts and frequented their own hinterlands, acquiring gold, timber, honey, civet, rhinoceros horn, and ivory to sell to the Arabs, Indians, and Gujaratis who carried them over the ocean. They were classic middlemen who seem to have calculated that the risks of transoceanic trading were not worthwhile as long as customers came to their coasts.
Visiting Portuguese in the early sixteenth century noticed the love-hate relationship that bound the Swahili to the hinterland. On the one hand, the two zones needed each other for trade; on the other, religious enmity between the Muslims and their pagan neighbors committed them to war. This, thought Duarte Barbosa, was why the coastal dwellers had “cities well walled with stone and mortar, inasmuch as they are often at war with the Heathen of the mainland.” 25 There were material causes of conflict, too. The Swahili needed plantations, acquired at hinterland communities’ expense, to grow food, and slaves to serve them. Coastal and interior peoples exchanged raids and demands for tribute as well as regular trade. When Portuguese observers arrived in the early sixteenth century, they got the impression that Mombasa, the greatest of the Swahili port cities, lived in awe of its neighbors, the “savage,” poison-arrow-toting Mozungullos, who had “neither law nor king nor any other interest in life except theft, robbery, and murder.” 26 But Islam provided the standard excuse for hostilities, if not their real cause. The religion was well established among the urban Swahili, after nearly half a millennium of proselytization by visiting merchants and the Sufis and sheikhs they sometimes carried in their ships. By the early fourteenth century, visiting Muslims commonly praised their orthodoxy. It was probably not until the sixteenth century, when Portuguese piracy disrupted the Indian Ocean trade of the Swahili coast, that local Islam began to diverge from the mainstream.
For some cities, the ocean was all-important. Kilwa was one of the greatest of Swahili emporia because the monsoon made it accessible to transoceanic traders in a single season. Ports farther south, like Sofala, though rich in gold, were accessible only after a laborious wait, usually in Kilwa, for the wind to turn. Merchants from Gujarat seem rarely to have bothered to go farther south than Mombasa or Malindi, where merchants congregated with products from all along the coast as far as Sofala. The Gujaratis paid for their purchases with fine Indian textiles of silk and cotton.
On the opposite shore of the ocean, in Southeast Asia, it was harder for Islam to penetrate agrarian states with only limited interest in long-range trade. In what came to be called Indochina, the Khmer kingdom was a self-contained unit, which produced enough rice to feed its people. The rulers never showed any interest in going into business in their own right, though around the turn of the century they shifted their capital to what is now Phnom Penh in an apparent effort to increase their control over the revenue from maritime trade. Vietnam—which was culturally and physically close to China—adopted policies actively hostile to overseas commerce. Le Thanh Ton, who ruled from 1460 to 1497, forbade the waste of land, broke up great estates, colonized frontier zones with prisoners and demobilized soldiers, and gave fiscal exemptions to diggers of ditches and planters of mulberries. He almost doubled the size of his kingdom by southward conquests that took the frontier beyond Qui Nonh. He issued regulations that seem too perfect ever to have been put into practice, in which all his subjects were arrayed in order of rank under the rule of royally appointed bureaucrats. He scattered temples of literature around the country, where aspiring mandarins could study the works of Confucius and prepare for civil-service examinations on the Chinese pattern. While empowering Confucian bureaucrats and imposing a strict law code inspired by Confucius, Le held on to popular sensibilities by representing himself as the reincarnation of a heroic ancestor.
Native kings in the region had a lot to lose if they committed to Islam: the awe inspired by reincarnation, the role of preceding the Buddhist millennium or incarnating a Hindu deity, the custodianship of relics sacred to Hindus and Buddhists. Ramathibodi II, for instance, who came to the throne of Ayutthaya—the kingdom that became Siam—in 1491, engaged in trials of magic power with neighboring kings. Khmer kingship relied on the notion that kings were Buddhas or incarnations of Shiva. In a region of divine kingship and agrarian states, it was hard for Islam to get a toehold: neither merchants nor missionaries could exert much influence.
The Malay world that flanked Indochina and lay offshore was more permeable, full of trading states and seafaring traditions. As the sultan of Melaka observed in 1468, “to master the blue oceans people must engage in trade, even if their countries are barren.” 27 Camõens, who ranged the East and celebrated it in verse in the late sixteenth century, described the Malay world:
Malacca see before, where ye shall pitch
Your great Emporium, and your Magazins:
The Rendezvous of all that Ocean round
For Merchandizes rich that there abound.
From this (’tis said) the Waves impetuous course,
Breaking a passage through from Main to main,
Samatra’s noble Isle of old did force,
Which then a Neck of Land therewith did chain:
That this was Chersonese till that divorce,
And from the wealthy mines, that there remain,
The Epithite of “Golden” had annext:
Some think, it was the Ophyr in the Text.28
Muslim merchants frequented the region for centuries before any natives accepted Islam. Some of them formed communities in port cities. Missionaries followed: scholars in search of patronage, discharging the Muslim’s obligation to proselytize on the way; spiritual athletes in search of exercise, anxious to challenge native shamans in contests of ascetic ostentation and supernatural power. In some areas Sufis made crucial contributions. They could empathize with the sort of popular animism and pantheism that “finds Him closer than the veins of one’s neck.” 29 As missionaries, Sufis were the most effective agents. As always with conversion stories, it is hard to distinguish miracle tales, invented in retrospect to hallow events, from real evidence. The legends of conversions engineered by Sufis are untrustworthy, partly because they are often warped by the writers’ wider agendas, and partly because they tend to be shaped by traditional topoi.
Sacred autobiography is predictably full of stories of childish orchard raiding and youthful peccadilloes, suddenly visited darkness, suddenly glimpsed light. The crucial questions relate to the self-reprofiling of whole societies. This is a process, still little understood, by which the term “Islam” becomes part of the collective self-designation of whole communities, embracing numbers of people who have never had a conversion experience or anything like it. Underlying collective realignments of this sort are further, remoter processes, by which Islam captures elites or becomes part of the landscape of life in a particular society or—if I may be permitted another metaphor—a thread in the fabric of social identity. For most people in the society that plays host to the new religion, it commonly involves passive reception of new doctrines and devotions, without any active commitment.
According to tradition,
the first ruler to embrace Islam in Southeast Asia, in Pasai, on Sumatra, in the late thirteenth century, received the message of the faith in a dream. He then invited a holy man over to complete his conversion. In the following century, other Sumatran states followed suit, and there were Muslim-led states on the Malayan mainland. Early in the fifteenth century, Melaka’s ruler adopted Islam. From the end of the century conversions multiplied, spread by dynastic marriages or by a radiationlike process in which Sufis fanned outward from each successive center to which they came. Melaka seems to have provided manpower for the conversion of states in Java, which in turn, around the beginning of the new century, did the same job for Ternate in the Moluccas, from where missionaries continued to neighboring islands. Provincial rulers guaranteed the flow of revenue to the sultans’ courts in exchange for the unmolested exercise of power. “As for us who administer territory,” said a nobleman in a Malay chronicle, “what concern is that of yours?…What we think should be done we do, for the ruler is not concerned with the difficulties we administrators encounter. He only takes account of the good results we achieve.” 30
Shortly before his death in 1478, the Sufi proselytizer Abu-al-Mewahib al-Shadili summarized what he called the “maxims of illumination”—Qawanin Hikam al-Ishraq. Sufis, he thought, were an elite: others were “people of deviation and innovation.” 31 Every one of his maxims began with a text from the Quran. Mystical experience was like memory. To be “immersed in the sea of unity” with God, the mystic had to efface all thoughts of his attributes, concentrate on his essence, and “then the distance that is between him and you is effaced.” 32 Abandon intelligence, reason, experiment, and authority, al-Shadili urged.33 Lose consciousness of the universe. Practice permanent penance, for “the repentance of ordinary men is a passing mood.” Sufis could approach enlightenment because they had come to acknowledge the power of evil over them and the need to repent of it. The author quoted the Gospels as well as the Quran.34
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