The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [59]
The cosmopolitan, international, aspect of Islam has often been cited as a prime motivation for conversion. Coastal people especially find their indigenous beliefs, localised and very specific, to be inadequate as their world expands. When they are exposed to a universal faith (in the case of the East African coast Islam was represented in their foreign business partners), the attraction is obvious, and can be widely seen all over the Indian Ocean world at this time.46
Parkin has suggested that it is more accurate to write of the
'acceptance' of Islam, which is likely to take longer and to be reciprocally inscribed in pre-existing custom and cosmology. The term conversion pre-supposes a shift from one to another unambiguously defined religion. Acceptance is less visibly dramatic and does not mean abandonment of a pre-existing cosmology. Yet it may well typify much Islamisation in the region in allowing for Islamic and non-Islamic traits to inter-mingle steadily.47
This means that we are looking at additive change much of the time, as opposed to substitutive change. The former implies that an existing body of belief is added to, while the latter means existing notions are cast aside and replaced. Conversion then is a process rather than an event, and may extend over several generations.
There is also the matter of coercion and the use of power, whether explicit or implicit. No doubt in many inland areas Islam spread in part through coercion. It is not a matter of Islam spreading at the point of a sword, but rather that as Muslim armies conquered huge territories many of the conquered adopted the religion of their new masters. This applies in most of the Middle East. However, in India, where the northwest was ruled by Muslims from the eighth century, and the north Indian heartland from the thirteenth, Hinduism proved remarkably resilient, so that only perhaps 10 per cent of the population accepted the religion of the sultans. In sociological terms, most Hindus had a firmly entrenched higher tier of belief already, and were not inclined to change to another, Islamic, one. In our area of concern, the Indian Ocean littoral, there was no opportunity for pressure of any kind in most cases.
There is then a contrast between coastal Islam, and Islam inland, and also between areas where Islam is the majority or even only religion, as compared with areas where it is a minority. Put briefly, Islam reached the southern part of the Arabian peninsular, that is Yemen and Hadhramaut, very early, travelling to this region by land. Of the areas in the Indian Ocean that Islam reached by sea, we know that Muslims had arrived on the Swahili coast by the mid eighth century, though at first this was a matter of Muslim traders from the Red Sea and Hadhramaut visiting, and erecting a mosque for their use. Over time some of these Arabs settled, and some of their neighbours in the port cities of this coast converted to Islam. There is evidence of a similar process on the coasts of India occurring rather earlier. Insular southeast Asia came later, and here the religion was spread more by Muslims who themselves were relatively recent converts from India, rather than people from the heartland. Ross Dunn has put the contrast between coastal Islam and that of the heartland very well:
In the Middle East an individual's sense of being part of an international social order varied considerably with his education and position in life. But in the Indian Ocean lands where Islam was a minority faith, all Muslims shared acutely this feeling of participation. Simply to be a Muslim in East Africa, southern India, or Malaysia in the fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind.
This was reinforced by the coastal location and the fact that most of them were traders, and so had to be aware of distant markets and people and places.48
We will now look at each area, that is East Africa,