The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  And in this land of Malabar there are Moors in great numbers who speak the same tongue as the Heathens of the land, and go naked like the Nayres, but as a token of distinction from the Heathen they wear little round caps on their heads, and long beards. . . . These follow the Heathen custom in many ways; their sons inherit half their property, and their nephews (sisters' sons) take the other half. They belong to the sect of Mafamede, their holy day is Friday. Throughout this land they have a great number of mosques. They marry as many wives as they can support and keep as well many heathen concubines of low caste. If they have sons or daughters by these they make them Moors, and oft-times the mother as well, and thus this evil generation continues to increase in Malabar; the people of the country call them Mapuleres.56

  Islam began to make converts in southeast Asia from the late thirteenth century (pride of place is usually given to Samudra in north Sumatra). Conversions en masse happened mostly from the later fourteenth century; in the second half of this century east Java was won over. Islamic states appeared during the fourteenth century, first in north Sumatra and then in coastal Java. From the mid fifteenth century Melaka was the focus of the conversion effort. At the end of our period, in 1500, Islam was well entrenched in coastal central and east Java, the Malay peninsular, the southern Philippines, and Sumatra. Converts to Islam were beginning to be made in Maluku, but in general Indonesia east of Java was still open.57

  The important conversion of the ruler of Melaka was briefly described by a Portuguese chronicler in an account which makes clear the merger of trade and religion. 'Some ships arrived at Melaka from the ports of Arabia, and one year there came a caciz to preach the law of Muhammad in these parts.' He was successful in becoming influential with the king, and impressed on him the grandeur of Islam. Conversion followed, and the king was honoured by being given the name of the Prophet himself. A little later in the fifteenth century, just before the arrival of the Portuguese, another chronicle described well the evolving situation in Sumatra, and again demonstrated the close link between trade and religion. The people of the interior were described as brutal, savage, cruel and warlike, and some of them were cannibals. But in the littoral areas people were Muslim. These people had been converted by Muslims who came to the area for commerce. They recorded the size of the area, and the existence of a religious vacuum, and were able to make many conversions because the locals wanted the goods of the foreign Muslims, and also as a result of marriages between foreign Muslims and local girls.

  There have been many studies of what is denigrated as deviations from normative Islam. This is a dubious matter indeed. Scholars, often themselves not Muslims but rather western Orientalists, erect a scaffolding of 'pure' Islam, based on the Quran and such claimed fundamentals as the 'Five Pillars' of the faith. Islamic practice is then measured against this ideal yardstick, and deviations are roundly condemned as being un-Islamic or syncretic. Ironically, these rigid interpretations of Islam by westerners have been joined in the last few decades by equally rigid and dogmatic interpretations by Muslim revivalists.

  Studies of Islamic practice all around the shores of the ocean provide copious examples. Pouwels claims in a general way that on the Swahili coast up to the seventeenth century Islam was practised in adapted and internalised forms, remaining fundamentally local in outlook.58 Modern scholars of Islam in East Africa have discussed this important matter in a neutral way. They distinguish between dini, religion, and mila, custom. The former is book-based Islamic, while the latter is not.59

  Parkin took a more general view and commented that in Muslim communities all around the ocean 'the idea of prayer in the mosque connotes unambiguous Islamic piety, while that outside points towards the possibility of other kinds of worship.'60 Yet this division has often worried exemplars of the faith, who ever since coastal communities accepted Islam have been concerned to 'purify' practice and rectify deviations. These Islamic specialists travelled widely by sea across the ocean, and their activities show unity in the ocean in two ways: first, they themselves made up connecting links, and second, their activities, which continue to today, have slowly increased adherence to a more normative Islam all around the littoral. As we reach more recent times we have more detailed information on their activities, but even for the period covered in this chapter we can see them hard at work.

  In our period there was a very wide circulation of religious specialists from the heartland to the littoral peripheries. Push factors several times led to an outflow of men from the Hadhramaut, and also from Oman to the east and Yemen to the west. Sharifs and sayyids, and other knowledgable people, were in great demand all around the shores of the ocean. They had knowledge of the shariah, or especially of the Shafi'i school which was dominant in the Indian Ocean: 'the law was the seal of oceanic unity on which the towns thrived'. They also had baraka, the aura of divine blessing. These sharifian families all traded, but also acted as judges, officials, sufis, and teachers.61 They moved to India after about 1200, and even today the 'Arab' community in Gujarat preserves stories of their Hadhrami origins. The flow to East Africa began after about 1250, and to Malaysia, Indonesia and then the Philippines from 1300. Thus were created far-flung lineages, merchants and scholars mixed together, who had connections for both piety and pelf all over the ocean.

  Stephen Dale's exemplary work on the Mapillahs of Malabar provides further detail. He points out that in this area, today called Kerala, Islam is of the Shafi'i madhhab, as compared with the Hanafi school of the Turkic–Persian rulers of the great inland empires. Scholars came to Kerala from Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and Baghdad.62 Barbosa wrote about how many and how diverse they were:

  There are many other foreign Moors as well in the town of Calecut, who are called Pardesis, natives of divers lands, Arabs, Persians, Guzarates, Curasanes and Daquanis, who are settled here. As the trade of this country is very large, they gathered here in great numbers with their wives and sons, and seem to have increased.63

  From Kerala Islam flowed on, to southeast Asia, especially to the north Sumatran state of Aceh in the sixteenth century, and even to the Philippines. This contact was mediated through the port cities. 'The city in Southeast Asia furnished the crucial link between international Islam and the local Muslim community whose bonds stretched far into the rural interior.'64

  These were powerful links indeed. However, we must be careful not to exaggerate the extent to which there was, in this time of still primitive communications, a really dense coming and going. Hadhramis certainly spread widely, but it is unclear how close were the ties they retained with their homeland in southern Arabia. Today they are close, but we cannot assume that this applied in an earlier period. So also we must not exaggerate the degree of commonality achieved at this time. We have copious data on divisions based on ethnicity, political power, and perceived adherence to Islam, from the early modern period, and no doubt these were important earlier also. Ibn Battuta is merely one example of a self-proclaimed expert from the heartland, or near enough, who had a pronounced air of superiority as he mingled with the indigenous Muslims around the ocean. His praise is reserved for those who like himself were Arabs from the heartland, and indeed he always commented on their presence, and praised them, while either ignoring or belittling the locals. Typical was his experience in the Kerala backwaters when he was travelling from Calicut to Quilon. The trip took ten days, and they anchored at night and stayed in villages. It was not a pleasant trip. 'There was no Muslim on board the boat except the man I had hired, and he used to drink wine with the infidels when we went ashore and annoy me with his brawling.' So also with Ibn Jubayr, who left us a long passage of invective against the black Muslims of the west shore of the Red Sea.65

  There was another maritime connection which also served to solidify Islam, and create communitas amongst the very diverse community. This is the pilgrimage to Mecca. This was an absolutely central obligation for all Muslims who could afford the voyage. True, Muslims visited many other shrines also, so
me local and some widely known. As they travelled, Ibn Battuta, Sidi Ali Reis, and Ibn Jubayr all did lots of detours to drop in on holy places: tombs, mosques, madrasas and so on. But the hajj was overwhelmingly important.

  When Muslims went to Mecca they were immediately impressed with the power and majesty of Islam. Thousands of pilgrims of very diverse ethnicities, social standing, wealth and age, spent some days engaging in common rituals. Returning hajjis stood out in their local communities as exemplars of the faith, and served to reinforce the work of the religious specialists whom we have just described in that they also strove, back home in their villages, to bring their kin folk closer to the normative Islam they had seen in the Holy Cities. Our data for all this is much more detailed for the early modern period, so we will reserve a full discussion for the next chapter. We do however have accounts of their hajjs from Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Jubayr, though interestingly both of these are more or less normative accounts of how they did the prescribed rituals, and give us very little impression of what it meant for them in a spiritual sense. Ibn Jubayr had a bad time even getting to the Hijaz from the west coast port of 'Aydhab in 1183:

  The people of 'Aydhab use the pilgrims most wrongfully. They load the jilab with them until they sit one on top of the other so that they are like chickens crammed in a coop. To this they are prompted by avarice, wanting the hire. The owner of the craft will exact its full cost from the pilgrims for a single journey, caring not what the sea may do with it after that, saying, 'Ours to produce the ships; the pilgrims' to protect their lives.' This is a common saying amongst them.66

  We have described several times the close connection between Muslim merchants and religion, trade and the faith, piety and pelf as an English observer once put it. Islam encouraged specific social and commercial attitudes and customs, some parts of Islamic law fitted well with trade, and with travel. We can now turn to mundane and material matters, and investigate the trade of the Indian Ocean in this period. Certainly we will find many Muslims involved, but this is not to be seen as an 'Islamic period', not even in the Arabian Sea, let alone in the eastern ocean and beyond to China.

  There is a very extensive literature on the glamorous spice trade. More ink has been spilt on this than it objectively deserves, for it was a small part of the total. Yet it serves well to open a discussion of trade in the Indian Ocean in our period, for it was the prime example of a very long-distance trade. Where did the spices come from? In our period the main production area for pepper was Malabar, which produced perhaps some two-thirds of the Asian total, while other areas were in Siam (now Thailand), the great island of Sumatra and the Sunda Islands. Cinnamon came only from Sri Lanka, growing in a strip 20–50 miles wide and 200 miles long from Chilaw to Walawe on the west coast of the island. Nutmeg and its derivative mace came only from the six small Banda islands. Cloves grew on several small islands along the west coast of the larger Maluku island of Halmahera.67

  There were several major nodal points for the spice trade before 1500. Increasingly in the fifteenth century the production of the Maluku islands was taken by local traders to the rising entrepot of Melaka. This was described by the Portuguese Governor Afonso do Albuquerque (1509–15): 'if there were another world, and another navigable route, yet all would resort to the city [of Melaka], for in her they would find every different sort of drugs and spices which can be mentioned in the world. . .'.68

  Merchants from all over the Indian Ocean area and even further afield came to Melaka to buy spices and other products. The extensive trade to China was handled by Chinese merchants, and that to the west by a host of traders, many of them Muslims from a wide range of homelands. The dominant group may well have been those from Gujarat. A famous contemporary description, by the apothecary Tomé Pires, claimed that 'Malacca cannot live without Cambay, nor Cambay without Malacca, if they are to be very rich and prosperous.' He also pointed to the route the spices took after Melaka, for he pointed out that 'Cambay [sc. Gujarat] chiefly stretches out two arms, with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden and with the other toward Malacca, as the most important places to sail to'.69 The usual route was for the spices and other products to travel to Calicut, from where they were taken either north to Gujarat and the great markets of northern India, or across the Arabian Sea to the Gulf and the Red Sea, from where they were distributed all over the Middle East and ottoman Turkey. Some of these spices in turn went through Egypt to Alexandria, where Italian merchants, especially Venetians, bought them for sale in Europe.

  In the fifteenth century, and later, most Asian spices were consumed by Asians. India alone consumed twice as many fine spices as Europe. Of the total Asian spice production in 1500, Europe took at most one-quarter. China was a huge consumer of pepper, taking around 75 per cent of total southeast Asian production. Marco Polo wrote of Zayton [Quanzhou], which is

  frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares.... And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.

  Later, a little more soberly, he claimed that for one ship that took spices to the west, to Aden and on to Alexandria, ten went north to China.70 Roderich Ptak has done some intriguing estimates for the (admittedly rather minor) clove trade. Around 1500, total production may have been 6,000 bahars, (a bahar is about 210 kg) of which 5,000 went to Melaka, and of this 60–70 per cent was taken to the west by Gujaratis. Europe took about 300 bahars, or a mere 5 per cent of the total.71

  Asian trade in spices was a well-integrated one. For example, the great trade centre of Melaka and the great production centres in the Malukus both lived on imported food. Many other products, notably cloths from India, were woven in to the woof and warp of this trade. The profits could be very high, despite taxes in some trans-shipment areas and frequent losses from storm and shipwreck. In the fifteenth century a kilo of pepper cost 1–2 grammes of silver at the production point, 10–14 in Alexandria, 14–18 in Venice, and 20–30 for the European consumer. But costs and taxes were high, so the Venetians, the main European traders, made a profit of only about 40 per cent. There were indeed huge margins: early in the sixteenth century traders made 400 per cent profit taking pepper from Melaka to China. In Calicut mace cost twelve or fifteen times the cost of production in the Banda Islands, and nutmeg thirty times.

  There was a range of other high-value products traded over long distances. One example is ambergris, a concretion in the intestine of the sperm whale which is grey at first, and develops a fine smell rather like musk after it changes colour. This rarity was used by the elite in perfumes and incense. Precious stones are another example. In the fifteenth century it was considered that rubies from Ava were better than those from Sri Lanka. Diamonds came from Vijayanagar and Berar. The important production centre of Sri Lanka sent sapphires and emeralds to Calicut. Fine porcelain came from China. Pearls were another luxury trade item. It was considered that pearls from the Gulfs of Mannar and Persia were best. Marco Polo wrote about the former. He reported that the water was only some ten or twelve fathoms deep (about 20 metres), and men dived from small boats to a depth of between 4 and 12 fathoms, and stayed down as long as they could. This diving was done only in the months between the monsoons, that is in March and April. The king took a tax of one-tenth of all finds.72 A century later, in 1330, Ibn Battuta at Bahrain left a description from which it seems that techniques then and in more recent times have changed very little.73

  Most of the port cities were more or less monetised by this time, and we have occasional hints of an extensive trade in gold and silver, both coin and silver. This trade changed dramatically once American gold and silver appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century. It has been estimated that around 1500 at least 1,750 kg of gold, equivalent to 20,500 kg of silver, flowed from Europe to the East, this being
about one-quarter of total European production.

  The major gold producing area around the Indian Ocean was located in Zimbabwe. Production began slowly at the start of the tenth century, or perhaps earlier, and was at its height in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries; it then declined drastically. At first placer mining, that is washing from alluvium, was most common, but later quite sophisticated reef mining techniques were also employed. This gold was exported through Sofala but marketed at Kilwa, up to 10 tons a year before a decline late in the fifteenth century. A well-informed Portuguese claimed in 1506 that when the land was at peace at least one million, and up to 1.3 million maticals of gold were exported each year from Sofala, and maybe 50,000 from Angoche, this then totalling a little under 6,000 kg.74

  It may be that another form of currency was equally as important, namely cowry shells. These are a species of marine snail, and while there are several different types the one used as currency in the Indian Ocean and over much of coastal Africa was the 'money cowrie', a 2.5 centimetre yellow species. The best came from the Maldives, as these were smaller than most and so easier to transport. Their value was not affected by their size. At first sight an eccentric choice for a unit of currency, they had several important advantages. They were very durable, and they could not be counterfeited or melted down. They also had an aesthetic appeal which may be lacking in precious metals. They can be beautifully striped, and their Latin name, Cypraea moneta, reveals another aspect of their appeal. The first part of the name comes from 'Cyprus', thought to be the home of Aphrodite, or Venus, the goddess of fertility, and the long, slender orifice of the shell's underside is very like a vagina. Ibn Battuta described how they were produced. The shell fish were harvested from the ocean, and then put in pits until the flesh had dissolved leaving only the shell.