The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [58]
We described in the previous chapter many Buddhist and Hindu people travelling to service or convert kings and others in southeast Asia, and a reverse flow of Buddhist pilgrims, especially from East Asia, going to India to see the holy places. However, the first of these declined as Buddhism declined in India. It was replaced by a circulation of students and pilgrims to the new centres of the faith, especially Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand. The fact that Buddhism in India was slowly sucked back into a new Hinduism similarly meant that fewer from outside now wanted to visit the homeland of the faith, though some pilgrims continued to come, and indeed still do, to see the holy places associated with the life of the Buddha. Nevertheless, by this time the dominant religious circulation in the Indian Ocean was being done by Muslims, and Ibn Battuta gives us numerous accounts of such people.
In 1331 he was in Mogadishu. As a man of learning Ibn Battuta was very well treated, and lodged with the qadi. The Sultan spoke Arabic, but his first language was Maqdishi. Ibn Battuta was taken by the qadi, who had originated in Egypt, to the sultan. As a man who had come from al-Hijaz he was treated with respect. He was given robes, including a tunic of Egyptian linen, a furred mantle of Jerusalem stuff, and an Egyptian turban. There were many jurists, sharifs, sheikhs and people who had done a hajj in Mogadishu. Ibn Battuta then went on to Kilwa, then at its height of power and riches. He found the sultan to be very generous, and commented on the large number of sharifs from Iraq and the Hijaz and other countries who had flocked in to benefit from his pious patronage.44
Once he got to Malabar, Ibn Battuta found a similarly diverse assemblage of Muslims in positions of secular and religious authority. At one place the qadi and preacher was a man from Oman. The amir (leader) of the merchants in Calicut was from Bahrain. On one of the junks that he travelled on the factor was from Syria, while in Quilon the chief Muslim merchant was from Iraq, and the qadi from Qazwin.45
What our traveller is describing is a vast network of Muslims all around the periphery of the Indian Ocean. He was welcomed everywhere as a prestigious scholar, an exemplar of the faith. Yet our hero was not really a very prestigious person in the Muslim heartland. He would have been unlikely to flourish in Mecca or Damascus or Cairo, but he was a big fish in Delhi and other newer Islamic places such as the Swahili coast where rulers were keen to implant and strengthen Islam. His perhaps surprisingly cordial reception in so many places was probably helped by his own very strong sense of his own worth. He was rather self-important, and judgemental to a fault of other Muslims. He took it on himself to correct people who got things wrong, even merely in matters of pronunciation.
Ibn Battuta opens up three related matters, which were among the most significant occurring in the Indian Ocean in our period: conversions to Islam, and then efforts to consolidate the faith, and ties back to the centre. In our period, to the end of the fifteenth century, the first is most important, for this was the time when the relatively new religion spread rapidly. It will be remembered that the Prophet died in 632 CE. The faith spread rapidly by both land and sea from its origins in the Hijaz area of western Arabia: to Persia, Egypt, North Africa, areas now known as Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and even to northwest India in its first century. It also spread by sea, carried by existing Arab trade networks, which we found going back some centuries before these traders were converted to the new faith. It is this which will occupy our attention, more than the continuing matter, even to today, of the travels of Muslim scholars whose aim is to improve the observance of an existing Muslim community all around the ocean, to root out practices seen to be un-Islamic, and to rectify back-sliding. In short, we are looking at