The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [63]
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, some 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