The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [62]
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,