The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [137]
The Inquisition was concerned to root out vestiges of Hindu practice amongst those recently converted. This was a very harsh regime, for many conversions had been hasty and superficial. Consequently many new converts could offend out of ignorance and yet still be subject to the rigours of the Holy Office. What seem to be social practices deriving from past religious practice were condemned, such as refusing to eat pork, wearing such Indian clothes as a dhoti or choli, cooking rice without salt, 'as the Hindus are accustomed to do'. Those who, probably in all innocence, offended were hauled off to be interrogated – a total of 3,800 between 1561 and 1623.
There was no such tribunal in Muslim lands. What sorts of things were the Muslim purifiers concerned about? We have ample evidence of rather unorthodox practice in many areas of the ocean littoral, though we are making no value judgements at all. Unlike previous western writers on Islam, we do not seek to condemn local people who failed to follow the letter of the Law, the Shariah.
We quoted earlier some derogatory comments on the quality of Islam as seen by people from the centre (see pages 161–2). In 1542 in Malindi Francis Xavier met his alter ego, a chief 'caciz', who complained that the local Muslims were extremely slack in their observance. Once there had been sixteen mosques in the town, but now there were only three, and even these were poorly patronised. An account of Sofala, in the far south, from 1588 claimed that
The Mahometans that at this present doe inhabite those Countries, are not naturally borne there, but before the Portugals came into those quarters, they Trafficked thither in small Barkes, from the Coast of Arabia Felix. And when the Portugals had conquered that Realme, the Mahometans stayed there still, and now they are become neither utter Pagans, nor holding the Sect of Mahomet.
Members of various Muslim Sufi orders, and of schools of law, travelled widely in a quite organised way to achieve greater observance. They were much more conscious of what they were doing than were the generality of returning hajjis, whose role was much less directive. A typical rectifier would study in Mecca and Medina and other centres, and then go to the periphery of the Muslim world, where they had very great prestige. As an example, we know something of the career of 'Abd al-Ra'uf of Singkel, and this gives us a clear picture of the many ties, networks and connections established in seventeenth-century Islam, and of the centrality of the Holy Places in this process. He was born in North Sumatra around 1615, and in about 1640 moved to the Hijaz and Yemen to study. In Medina his main teacher was the Kurdish-born Ibrahim al-Kurani. He spent a total of nineteen years in Mecca, and gained very considerable prestige. In particular, he taught hundreds, even thousands, of Indonesians there, and initiated many of them into the Order of which he was a distinguished member, the Shattariyya. He returned to Sumatra, to Aceh, in 1661 and was a revered teacher there for nearly thirty years. He kept in touch with Ibrahim in Medina, and taught what he had learnt from him to the many Indonesian, especially Javanese, pilgrims who stopped for a time in Aceh on the way to the Red Sea.
So also in India. Hajji Ibrahim Muhaddis Qadiri was born near Allahabad in northern India. He did the hajj, and then studied in Cairo, Mecca and Syria. He was away for twenty-four years, but then returned to India, settled in Agra, and was a prestigious teacher until his death in 1593. A final illustration