Prueba de hipótesis

The shifting long-distance trade routes of the Indian Ocean, and their creation of new Muslim polities across this space, provide the maximal framework for considering the Hadrami migration and the canonical for-mation of the ªAlawô Way. Chapter 2 showed how the foundational ele-ments of the ªAlawô Way came together in the crucible of extensive trans-regional communications, beginning in the thirteenth century. The shift in East-West trade routes, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, brought Hadramawt and Aden into greater contact with Egypt, the Hejaz, and India. This shift, and the new polities it brought forth, had a singular

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torical result: the creation of a transoceanic “new world” for Islam, sym-bolized by a common allegiance to the Sháfiªô school of Islamic law. I use the term new world because this expansion was over water, whereas else-where, Islam had expanded territorially, like the preceding empires of the Romans and others. Ultimately stretching from Cape Town on the south-ern tip of Africa to Timor at the limit of the Malay Archipelago, this new world of an enlarged Islamic ecumene became a transcultural space that numerous Muslims, among them Hadramis from Arabia, traversed and settled in with relative ease and great profit, participating in the creation of new ports, polities, and even peoples.

While historians who work strictly with trade data speak of rises and declines along these routes between periods, a progressive intensification of contacts is detectable from the thirteenth century on if one looks at the phenomenon in broader cultural, political, and religious terms.

Specifically, the route through the Red Sea brought into new prominence established cities along it, such as Cairo and Aden, and threw up new ones like Cambay and Calicut, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Far-ther east along the route, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, oFar-ther cities such as Pasai and Melaka in the Strait of Melaka rose to prominence as transregional emporia. In all these places, foreigners arrived in in-creasing numbers, and new societies formed as a result of their intercourse.

In Calicut, for example, the Hindu ruler known as the Zamorin (or samu-dri raja,“ruler of the sea”) hosted four thousand foreign Muslim traders in the fourteenth century, while Muslim Melaka in the fifteenth century hosted many Indian merchants from Cambay, Calicut, and the Coro-mandel coast, who became o‹cers of the Malay court and some of the wealthiest merchants. Elsewhere, in Egypt, Yemen, and Gujarat, foreign soldiers and slaves settled and became rulers, military o‹cers, and state o‹cials. The Mamluks in Cairo, Rasulids in Aden, and Muzaªaris in Cam-bay were among these dynastic states run by foreigners and slave o‹cials.

This newly energized trade route and the new Muslim polities along it made possible the celebrated travels of Ibn Battuta, the Maghrebian lim scholar, in the mid-fourteenth century. Like many other itinerant Mus-lim scholars and soldiers in this period, he earned his keep serving these new states, in his case as a judge. In each place, he took local women as wives and slave-concubines. The descendants of such unions between trav-eling men and local women became the mobile, creole natives of this new, Indian Ocean world of Islam.

In the sixteenth century, this process intensified, as the Ottomans over-ran first Egypt, then points down the Red Sea until they reached and

oc-cupied Aden. The governors, o‹cials, and soldiers in these places were for-eigners who came from diªerent parts of the Ottoman imperial realm. In India in the same period, the Mughals established their dominance, and their ruling institutions were manned by similar itinerants. In the same cen-tury, the Safavid dynasty established its rule in Persia and secured the coastal regions. The simultaneous rise of these three extensive territorial empires in the age of gunpowder, and the shrinking of space between them, ener-gized commercial and political relations in the western Indian Ocean. Fur-thermore, aggressive Portuguese depredations, in the first and last thirds of the sixteenth century, drew together Muslim states across the ocean. In the former period, Muslim naval forces from Diu and Calicut combined with those of the Ottomans against the Portuguese on the west coast of India. In the latter, Turkish artillery was sent to Aceh to counter the Por-tuguese there,¹while Muslim Bijapur and Golconda combined against Por-tuguese Goa. Together, Golconda and Aceh sent arms and men to push the Portuguese out of Melaka (Reid 1969, 1993). In the 1570s, the Arab ju-rist and historian of Malabar, Zayn al-Dôn al-Mulaybárô (also al-Malôbárô or al-Maªbárô), detailed the events and geography of this international conflict and formulated an explicit theory of jihád against Christians who invaded Muslim lands (al-Maªbárô 1987). In contrast to graphic acccounts of Portuguese violence, al-Mulaybárô portrayed the expansion of Islam in Malabar as the result of a peaceful history of trade and intermarriage, be-ginning with the apocryphal Cherumal Peraman. Peraman, the ancestor of Calicut’s Zamorin rulers, had established the divisions and ceremonial insignia of state, been converted to Islam by traveling Sufis, and followed them to Hadramawt, dying in its port city of al-Shiâr.

The rise of port cities from the thirteenth century on, and of large ter-ritorial states in the sixteenth, meant that new Muslim states and polities were being created out of old ones with the arrival and incorporation of foreigners in positions of rule and influence. Such a process is di‹cult to imagine in today’s postcolonial, nationalized world. The racialized priv-ileges and jealousies of late nineteenth-century colonialism have given for-eigners, European and otherwise, a bad name. They became thought of as aliens who could not be absorbed and as interlopers who threatened and exploited indigenous sovereignty and wealth—rather than as partners

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1. In the late 1990s, the Turkish scholar Cemil Aydin met persons in Aceh who claimed to be descendants of these Ottoman artillerymen; I appreciate his relating this remarkable encounter to me. Ottoman and Portuguese artillery also faced oª in Ethiopia in the same period, as auxiliaries in the Christian-Muslim wars there.

with whom new persons, polities, societies, and economies could be cre-ated. Yet precisely the constitution of new polities and persons by mo-bile Muslims was the important dynamic in the expansion of Islam across the Indian Ocean. Hadramis, especially the sayyids, were a strong cur-rent in this restless ocean.