MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE Y LOS "NOUVEAUX PYRRHONIENS"

Buried as he is in the port town of Aden, on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, the Adeni lies between two geographical media:

land and water. Buried in 1508, he also lies between two historical peri-ods: the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. This double location is significant because it marks the point in space and time at which the Hadrami diaspora ventured out into the Indian Ocean, and thus into the new currents of what many historians now call world or global history (Eaton 1990; Frank 1998; Pomeranz 2000; Wallerstein 2004). The Indian Ocean, which hosted trade routes connecting the countries surrounding the South China Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and the North Atlantic, saw in the sixteenth century the arrival of silver and gold from the Amer-icas, brought by the Portuguese and Spaniards via the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. What had been an international economy now became a global one, literally. From the sixteenth century on, too, Hadramis sojourning and settling in India became known as religious teachers, Sufis, and court and civic figures. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century on, they came into prominence farther east in the Malay Archipelago, in established re-ligious roles as well as new ones such as adventurers, sultans, merchants, diplomats, and landlords. These new developments in the Hadrami di-aspora moved roughly in parallel with and in counterpoint to the estab-lishment of European colonies in the region, as the Portuguese, Dutch, and English expanded their activities eastward to India and the Malay Archipelago. But they moved in diªerent ways.

Unlike the Europeans, whose activities combined conquest and trade and who maintained monopolies by navies, Hadramis entered into

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ranging exchanges with peoples in the Indian Ocean, especially in modes that come under the broad banner of religion. Their travels traced out pathways across the ocean marked by mosques, graves, and schools. Some have called these pathways a Sufi order—the ªAlawô ìarôqa, or ªAlawô Way (al-Attas 1963; Serjeant 1957; Trimingham 1973). The Arabic term ìarôqa is a second-order derivative of the basic noun ìarôq, which means “path.”

As a conceptual abstraction from the basic noun, the word may trans-late as “method,” “way,” or “pathway” in English. Applied to organized Sufism, it usually translates as “Sufi order,” referring to the institutional complex that commonly comprises a combination of lodge, leader, mys-tical genealogy, particular texts, litanies, chants, and ritual practices. The eponymous ªAlawô refers to an ancestor of the Hadrami sayyids, the grand-son of the Migrant, Aâmad b. ªIsá, and denotes genealogical descent from him; it connotes descent from the prophet Muâammad as well.¹I use the terms ªAlawô Way or pathway interchangeably to name an institutional complex. That this complex is characterized by a term indicating move-ment is particularly apt, as we will see. Although the diaspora is a larger phenomenon than the Sufi ªAlawô pathway, the latter has dominated its collective representations; it is di‹cult to separate the two before the late nineteenth century, since most of the written sources available for the di-aspora were generated by the ªAlawô Way.²Our interest here is the dis-tinctive ways of moving through history and geography. These pathways are discourses that mobilize places, texts, and persons in meaningful nar-ratives of travel.

A study of the Hadrami diaspora and of the ªAlawô Way provides a thread through the history of the Indian Ocean. The telling of that his-tory has been pioneered by historians of cross-cultural trade, notably K. N.

Chaudhuri, Simon Digby, Ashin Das Gupta, J. C. van Leur, Michael

Pear-1. The Muslim world is rife with communities known by variants of the name ªAlô, such as those rendered the Alawis, Alevis, and Alawites in the English-language literature. Among them, a connection to the prophet Muâammad’s family is important, be it in genealogy, theology, or history. The Prophet had no surviving sons; ªAlô b. Abô T¥álib, who was his cousin and his daughter Fáìima’s husband, is the progenitor of all the Prophet’s descen-dants. Essentially, ªAlô’s name is often taken by those claiming descent from Muâammad.

This singular exception to the usual patrilineal reckoning of Arab descent gives rise to much discussion, especially in Shia circles. The Shia, short for shô ªat ªAlô, are literally “partisans of ªAlô,” in reference to ªAlô’s position in historical disputes about the succession to Muâammad. The interweaving of genealogy, theology, and history is precisely the focus of this study.

2. The preponderance of ªAlawô writings and perspectives gives rise to controversies in the twentieth century, which I take up in chapter 6 and beyond.

son, B. Schrieke, Neel Steensgaard, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Their work has been built primarily on the documentary trail left by the Euro-pean trading companies, which operated as virtual governments in the Indian Ocean. Ashin Das Gupta, who used Dutch archival records to elicit stories of non-European merchants, lamented the dearth of sources apart from those of the European trading companies (Das Gupta 1982: 408).

An important exception to such sources has been known for a while, in the documents of medieval Jewish merchants in Cairo studied by S. D.

Goitein (Goitein 1966). Recently, these have been fictionally exploited by the anthropologist-novelist Amitav Ghosh; his In an Antique Land (1992) is a combination ethnography-history that connects Egypt and Aden in Yemen with Malabar in India through the relations between a Jewish mer-chant and his Indian trading agent/slave—and at the same time the fan-tasy alter ego of an Indian anthropologist doing fieldwork in Egypt. Oth-ers, working on pilgrimage (Pearson 1996), prayer (Parkin 2000), textiles (Barnes 2005), gravestones (Lambourn 2003), and combinations of tex-tual genres such as travelogues and poetry (Bose, forthcoming), have be-gun to retrace similar paths across the ocean but through diªerent sets of materials.

The Hadrami diaspora, especially the ªAlawô Way, provides a contin-uous set of records that enables us to imagine yet another pathway through the history and geography of the Indian Ocean. Discovering and inter-preting the narratives embedded in them pose a challenge. Although the majority of these records exist in manuscript form and are di‹cult to ac-cess, some have been in print for decades. One of the main obstacles to discovering the narratives has been the fact that they were written in diªer-ent parts of the ocean, such as Zanzibar, Mecca, Hadramawt, Surat and Malabar in India, and the Malay Archipelago. The texts were thus known as belonging to diªerent national literatures, separated from each other, rather than as parts of a unified phenomenon in dialogue with each other.

By reading these formerly separated texts together, as the literary output of one diaspora that traveled across the Indian Ocean during half a mil-lennium, one begins to hear echoes across the countries and centuries and to recognize names, families, motifs, styles of expression, and ideas that connect the texts. At the same time, the task is eased because the scattered contents in this material are in discursive modes that express the experi-ences of mobility out of which they emerged. An appreciation of the fact of mobility itself attunes us to the narratives strung across these texts and to their slender threads across the ocean. The idea of mobility becomes an interpretive key. Furthermore, understood as discourses, the narratives

G E O G R A P H Y 29

Say’un Bayt Jubayr

al-Hurayda al-Hajarayn

Shibam

al-Shihr al-Mukalla

Burum

Qabr Hud al-Suwayri

Wadi M asila Wadi Hadramawt Haynin

al-Mashhad

Sayhut

HADRAMAWT ARABIAN

SEA

A R A B I A N S E A

INDIAN OCEAN

map 2. Hadramawt

are not restricted to texts but circulate orally in numerous arenas of so-cial life as well.

While such discourses of mobility developed and were transformed in the Indian Ocean from the sixteenth century on, they had prior existence on land, in the homeland of Hadramawt. In both arenas, they charted the creation of new communities, which emerged from the interaction between transregional and local social groups. Such communities are com-posed of individuals who are creoles and local cosmopolitans. By local cosmopolitans, I mean persons who, while embedded in local relations, also maintain connections with distant places. They thus articulate a re-lation between diªerent geographical scales (Ho 2002b).

This chapter moves backward from the Adeni to the homeland Hadra-mawt before the sixteenth century. We look at how a certain kind of place is created by the movement of a diaspora through it. In the longer view, Hadramawt is not only a homeland; it is a destination of earlier migra-tions. Marks on the landscape become significant as they are embraced by the stories of mobile persons, as points on an itinerary. The ªAlawô Way of the Hadrami sayyids is such an itinerary. Landmarks became signs within the discourse of mobility, and particular places became signposts in the historical formation of the ªAlawô Way. Conversely, as the ªAlawô Way settled and developed in Hadramawt, the significance of the place changed, transforming from a destination to an origin. Through a nar-rative of geography, then, this chapter outlines the historical origins of the sayyids in Hadramawt, and the early roots and routes of the ªAlawô Way there.