Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  The aptly named Persian Gulf was the oldest open-water route of humankind, from where it was possible to sail along the coast of Sindh (southeastern Pakistan) and Hind (India) without losing sight of land—that is, if one chose not to use the open ocean route from Oman to India, aided by the monsoon during half the year. For it was southern India that served as the “hinge” uniting the two great basins of the Indian Ocean—the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.12 From South India or Ceylon it was a straight shot with the monsoon winds all the way to the Far East, close-hauled on a port tack. From the Persian Gulf to Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago it was a relatively quick seventy-day journey—twice the speed of sail travel in the Mediterranean, owing again to the monsoon.13 And in another direction, from Yemen and Oman it was a comparatively short and easy sea journey southwestward to East Africa. Indeed, East Africa’s Swahili coast was drawn intimately into the Islamic maritime sphere after A.D. 1200, and by the end of the fifteenth century at least thirty African coastal towns had been established by Muslim immigrants from southern Arabia.14 It was as if every group was present everywhere around this ocean.

  As noted, in classical times the towns of southern Arabia, to quote the late scholar George F. Hourani, were “the entrepots of all intercourse” among Africa, Egypt, and India. The ambassadors whom Ptolemy II of Egypt exchanged with the Mauryan emperors Chandragupta and Asoka of India, and “the Indian women, oxen, and marbles which he displayed in his triumphal procession” in 271 or 270 B.C., were likely transshipped at Sabaean, that is, at Yemeni ports.15 According to the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Greek for “Sailing Around the Red Sea”), a document of the mid-first century A.D. compiled by the equivalent of a master mariner, Arab merchants were reportedly active in antiquity in Somaliland, East Africa, and near the mouth of the Indus River valley (today’s Pakistan). Seemingly desolate and remote Arabia was at the heart of civilizational contact, and it was all on account of sailing.

  The coming of Islam in the seventh century encouraged this seafaring trade. Islam is an ethical faith that provides an entire framework for social and economic interaction. What’s more, as the scholar Patricia Risso explains, Islam is “portable.” It is “not identified with a certain locale where animistic spirits dwell, or with temples belonging to particular deities,” as has been the case with Hinduism. Thus, Islam was particularly “well suited to merchants who needed to conduct complex transactions and to travel.” It encouraged networking because it is a unifying culture that centers around elements such as the Koran, communal prayer, regulations on family life, and dietary restrictions against pork and alcohol. Such elements brought the faithful together in social groups. Indeed, in the early Islamic centuries the haj pilgrimage functioned in part as a trade fair, as Muslim merchants came together in Mecca to make deals. Islam’s “intermingling and coexistence” with Hinduism and Buddhism, writes the scholar Janet L. Abu-Lughod, lent a “coherence” to the Indian Ocean world that at times even the much smaller Mediterranean—divided rather than united by the winds—lacked.16 This mercantile community, which adapted particularly well to new norms and traditions, impelled Islam eastward through the Southern Seas, giving it hegemony over much of the Afro-Eurasian land mass.17

  Muslims dealt in slaves and ivory in East Africa, in pearls and gold in the Persian Gulf, in rice and cotton in India, and in silk, tea, and porcelain in China.18 Islam not only sustained far-flung Muslim merchant communities throughout the Indian Ocean, but also attracted converts in the process. This had a pragmatic side, since by converting to Islam an African or Asian merchant could raise his credit value among the Arabs. In Burma, whose western coastline the Arabs would penetrate eventually, the ethnic Arakanese of the region often would take an Arab name in the interests of commerce. Arab merchants converted Indians, too, and together, through their own peripatetic movements about the ocean, established Islamic communities from Mogadishu to Malacca—that is, from Somalia to Malaysia. (This was all in stark contrast to Christian missionary communities who would not have much to do with trade, and whose interests were at times inimical to those of European trading companies.)19

  Helping the expansion of Arab trade in the Indian Ocean was not just the rise of Islam, but of China, too. The Mohammedan state at Medina was established in 622; that of the Tang dynasty in China in 618. The Tang regime reinvigorated the bureaucracy, brought strong central government to China, and aggressively sought to develop maritime trading links to the south in the Indian Ocean. The situation was analogous to the moment in antiquity when the Roman Empire ruled in the west of the Indian Ocean and the Han dynasty in the east. Until the influx of Islam, Chinese merchants were comfortable dealing with Hindu and Buddhist Indians, but afterwards, under Tang tutelage, they came to be more comfortable with Muslim Indians, Arabs, and Persians.20 Thus began a pattern of strong commercial relations between the various medieval Muslim dynasties (the Damascus-based Omayyads and especially the Baghdad-based Abbasids) in the west, and the Tang and succeeding dynasties of the Song and Yuan in the east, a pattern lasting for hundreds of years. Only later, in the fifteenth century, when China turned inward and trading opportunities were fewer there, did Muslim merchant power begin to wane. But with the large empires at either end of the Indian Ocean commercially interdependent, peace reigned generally, along with free trade.

  Besides the desire for the ubiquitous frankincense, the search for luxury items like metals and medicinal herbs spurred trade between distant parts of Asia. In addition, India sold rice and cotton to China, and China sold tea in return. When da Gama arrived in Calicut, in India, he was dazzled by the maritime traffic that arrived from “China to the Nile.”21 The Muslim trading system was central to this medieval process of globalization, just as American-style capitalism has been to the post-modern form.

  The Muslims were truly everywhere. Within a few years of the advent of Islam in the seventh century, the explorer Sa’ad ibn Abi Waqqas, sailing from Ethiopia, built a mosque in the Chinese city of Quanzhou. In the early fifteenth century an Indian Muslim piloted Admiral Zheng He’s treasure fleet from India to Dhofar and on to Yemen, from where the admiral, a Muslim, too, became the first high Chinese official to make the pilgrimage north to Mecca.22

  However, though the Muslims—Arab, Persian, and Indian—dominated, the Indian Ocean was not only theirs. Traders from all countries and religions took advantage of the ocean’s unique environment. Even before the coming of Islam, Malays from the eastern seas, in present-day Malaysia and Indonesia, sailed as far west as Madagascar and East Africa at the opposite end of the Indian Ocean, bringing cinnamon and other spices.* Known as Waqwaqs because of the type of outrigger canoes they used, these heathens covered the distance of thirty-five hundred miles in about a month because of the winds.23 Hindus, too, were also spreading their rituals, icons, and language around these littorals. A thriving trade brought Indian traders, mainly Hindu, all over the South Seas, creating a “Sanskrit cosmopolis” in the early Middle Ages throughout South and Southeast Asia.24 Indeed, throughout medieval and early modern history, India’s southeastern Coromandel coast was in close contact with Burma and the Indonesian archipelago, as well as Persia in the opposite direction.

  The ocean constituted a web of trade routes. It vaguely resembled what our world of today increasingly looks like with its commercial and cultural interlinkages. Because the Indian Ocean is the sum of its parts, broken up as it is into subunits—the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and so forth—the “natural condition” was for “several locally hegemonic powers to coexist,” writes Abu-Lughod.25 The ocean was neutral, in other words. No one state power dominated, certainly not any kingdom in Europe.

  In the medieval centuries, Western hegemony still lay in the future; just as today, American naval hegemony, to the degree that it exists—the last phase of the rule of the West across these seas—may, as the years and decades advance, lie increasingly in the past.

  * So dependable has been the monsoonal system t
hat its inability to arrive has constituted a historical event. To wit, in 1630 the failure of the rains in certain parts of India—Gujarat, the Deccan, and the Coromandel coast—led to a million deaths from drought. John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: Harper-Collins, 1991), pp. 115–16.

  * The smaller dhow, used for fishing, is called a mashua, a name from India; the larger kind, used for cargo and passengers is a jahazi, from a Persian word.

  † Alan Villiers, Monsoon Seas: The Story of the Indian Ocean (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), pp. 3, 6, 56–57. The wind situation was even more complex in the Bay of Bengal, whose eastern coast was partially closed by the northeast monsoon. See Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 4.

  * Treasure ships were warships carrying small-caliber guns, bombs, and rockets.

  * The very waterless barrenness of the Empty Quarter was another reason that drove the Omanis to the sea.

  † Though many scholars confirm this, there is still some confusion as to the identity of da Gama’s pilot; one expert identifies him as a Gujarati. Satish Chandra, The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), p. 18.

  * Excavations in Kenya have uncovered Iranian pottery from the Sassanid era of late antiquity, as well as Chinese Yueh pottery, attesting further to the great sailing distances covered. Charles Verlinden, “The Indian Ocean: The Ancient Period and the Middle Ages,” in Satish Chandra The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), p. 50.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CURZON’S FRONTIERS

  In 1907, soon after his return to England from India as viceroy, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon delivered the annual Romanes Lecture at Oxford. The subject he chose was “Frontiers,” of which he had a lifetime of experience, first as a younger man traveling along the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia, and later as a diplomat involved in determining the empire’s borders in Turkestan.1 Curzon spoke about every kind of natural frontier: seas, deserts, mountains, rivers, and forests; and every kind of man-made one: walls and ramparts, straight astronomical lines on a map, marchlands, buffer states, protectorates, hinterlands, and spheres of influence. He named seas and secondly deserts as the most “uncompromising” and “effective” of frontiers, noting that England lost America, Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines, Napoleon lost Egypt, and the Dutch and Portuguese lost their coastal empires in Asia all, ultimately, because of the “interposition” of seas. As for deserts, he pointed out that the Gobi Desert protected China to its northwest, Bukhara and Samarkand were “shielded by the sandhills of the Kara Kum,” the Middle East was for long periods relatively cut off from India by the “broad wastes” of Persia and Turkestan, and black Africa cut off from the rest of civilization by the Sahara to its north.2

  Of course, seas could be navigated and deserts spanned by railroad and camel caravans, and Curzon listed numerous examples of this. Indeed, the ways in which seas separate humanity are obvious. It is the ways in which they connect civilizations that are crucially revealing, particularly when assessing such a strategic and crowded arena as the Indian Ocean. The same holds true for deserts, which are much more than just impassable frontiers, even without railways, Curzon’s reasoning to the contrary. The effect of deserts on the destiny of nations is more subtle than that of oceans; after all, it was not only the existence of a desert to the east of Mesopotamia that formed a barrier between the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent, it was also a matter of different cultures and languages or dialects, which arose because of numerous factors, not all of them geographical. Moreover, we should not exaggerate this kind of barrier, for history is full of Arab and Persian migrations across deserts. The desert stretching from Syria south into peninsular Arabia may have proved to be even less of a divider of peoples, as Arabic is spoken throughout. This north-south Arabian desert has been traversed by tribes and roving bands that intimately have affected the destinies of all the areas through which they have passed.

  Hence, we have the story of Oman, a microcosm of the world of the western Indian Ocean, because, like other places on and near the Arabian Sea—Somalia, the Gulf sheikhdoms, the provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh in Pakistan, and the northwestern Indian province of Gujarat—Oman constitutes a vibrant albeit thin band of humanity existing between sea and desert, subject to the immense influences of both.

  Oman is sort of an island; albeit not literally. Reversing in this case Curzon’s neat order of interposition, the desert has been even more of a frontier in Oman’s history than the sea. Because of the predictability of the winds, thousands of miles of open ocean not only did not separate Oman from the pathways of humankind, but indeed brought it closer to its neighbors, even as more than a thousand miles of open desert to the north kept it isolated by land. From the sea has come cosmopolitanism; from the desert isolation and tribal conflict. Because seafaring communities have existed for more than two thousand years here, Oman, in the manner of Yemen, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, constitutes an age-old cluster of civilization. Oman is not a relatively recent creation of history like the Gulf sheikhdoms, which came about mainly because they lay along the Indian Ocean trade and communications route of Great Britain, the nineteenth century’s greatest maritime power: “Petty Arab chiefships” is what Curzon called the Gulf states, “established in order to prevent slave-raiding on the adjoining seas.”3 Nor is Oman the product of a family in the twentieth century like Saudi Arabia. Oman’s ruling dynasty, the Al Bu Sa‘ids, have been in power longer than the United States has been a country. Yet, despite its longevity, the animosity of the tribes in the desert have kept the Omani state weak or nonexistent for long periods, often resulting in domination by the most proximate great power, Iran. The sea, its winds, and good harbors have provided the foundation for a venerable state, whereas the desert has often come close to destroying it.

  Oman, it is said, is the land of five hundred forts. In fact, I traveled from one Arab qasr (fort) to another in the desert that lurks just behind the deepwater harbors, a landscape kneaded over the eons by the wind and seismic disruptions into excruciating and beautiful forms. Each fort boasts a clean, mathematical singularity, towering over twisted hilltops and naked precipices. But it is the repetition that is instructive. As appealing as the museum restorers try to make them—decorating the rooms with carpets, porcelain, native jewelry, old pictures, and lovely latticework—the very number of these stone and mud edifices demonstrates the lawlessness of this wasteland over the centuries. Each fort signified a separate, self-contained society, where everyone from the governor on down to the children lived: with boiling date syrup, sticky and scalding, literally at the ready to be poured down through the narrow slits onto invaders. Thus, the desert was not simply an empty, impenetrable terrain that could be conquered only by a railroad, as Curzon suggests. Rather, it was sparsely but critically populated by nomadic tribes. Yet, lacking an urban focal point where a settled civilization could take root and thus provide political stability, it was also a landscape of anarchy.

  The liberalizing influence of the ocean never truly penetrated into such a chaotic hinterland. Indeed, the deeper and broader the desert, potentially the more unstable and violent the state. The states of the African Sahel have been the starkest examples of this worldwide, and for long periods this was the story of Oman.*

  So what has allowed Oman to emerge from decades and centuries of instability—the wages of its violent, desert hinterland—to become a stable and durable pro-Western state with its own highly trained navy deployed astride the all-important Gulf of Hormuz? And what can we learn from this that is applicable to the entire Indian Ocean region?

  A number of factors feed into Oman’s present cohesion as a state. It has a population of less than three million. That, combined with significant oil and natural gas reserves, has enabled the building of roads and other infrastructure enha
ncing the role of central government. This is in stark contrast to neighboring Yemen, which has a population of twenty-two million in a similar amount of territory, and is far more riven by mountains. Yemen is a much weaker polity, its central government has difficulty accessing vast reaches of the country, and must keep peace through a fragile balance of tribal relations, since no one tribe or sect has been able to establish an identity for the Yemeni state. The unsettling aspect of Yemen is the diffusion of power rather than the concentration of it. Since antiquity, the Wadi Hadhramaut, a hundred-mile-long oasis in southeastern Yemen surrounded by great tracts of desert and stony plateau, has maintained, through caravan routes and Arabian Sea ports, closer relations with India and Indonesia than with other parts of Yemen.* Unlike Oman, Yemen has remained a vast, unruly assemblage of tribal kingdoms.

  Moreover, Oman’s happy situation owes less to Western precepts of technology and democracy than to the reinvigoration of certain feudal practices and, relatedly, the unusual personal qualities of its absolute ruler, Sultan Qabus bin Sa‘id. In and of itself, Sultan Qabus’s Oman constitutes a rebuke to Washington notions of how the Middle East and the world should evolve. Oman shows how the path to progress in the non-Western world is indeed varied and at odds with some of the ideals of the liberal West and of the Enlightenment. It demonstrates, too, how individuals, as I learned throughout my travels about the Indian Ocean, determine history to the same degree as do seas and deserts: for good and for bad. Sultan Qabus’s singular achievement has been to unite Oman’s two worlds: its Indian Ocean world and its Arabian desert one. Some historical background is in order.