The Indian Ocean (39 page)

It is difficult to quantify the relative successes of these two protagonists, or antagonists. On the Muslim side, leaving aside the totally Muslim Middle East, we can remember a strong Islamic presence on the East African coast – indeed one way to define the Swahili is to note that they are Muslims, unlike most of their fellow Africans. In South Asia as a whole, including Pakistan and Bangladesh with India, the total Muslim population today is something under 400 million. The Malay world is solidly Muslim, excluding Chinese migrants brought in by Europeans in the nineteenth century. On the Christian side, their share of the populations of the first and third of these areas is minuscule. We have some indications of how they fared in India in this period. It has been estimated that by the end of the sixteenth century there may have been 175,000 Christian converts in all of India, most of them poor fisher folk. Descendants of these converts are to be found all over India, and Asia, today. No doubt this is a substantial achievement, yet there are some hesitations to be expressed also. First, India had a population in this century of about 140 million, so from this perspective the missionary success was rather limited. The greatest success was obviously in the city of Goa itself, where at this time about two-thirds of the population were Christian. However, in the whole territory of Goa, the Old Conquests, Christians at most made up one-quarter of the total. In contrast, a
very rough estimate of the Muslim population of South Asia in around 1600 would find perhaps 15,000,000 people.

Once people converted they often undertook pilgrimages to religiously significant places. From the Christian side, a visit to the two most obvious sites of the Holy Land and Rome was hardly possible, except for a handful of priests to Rome. Certainly there were minor pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men. St Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the East, is the best known of these, and even today his birthday is celebrated in Old Goa with great eclat. The regular expositions of his miraculously preserved body also encouraged this cult. Parts of it were even abstracted, either openly or surreptitiously, so that a lucky few had their own personal relics of the saint. Yet surely it is significant that the crowd at his birthday celebrations includes many Hindus, and indeed some of no particular religion at all. He has become in effect a generic holy man. In many other areas also Indian Ocean Christianity, despite the intolerance of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as seen especially in the work of the Inquisition, in many areas continued to include pre-Christian customs and beliefs. Conversion was a two-way process, with much retained from previous religious practice. In many social areas Hindus who had converted to Christianity retained their old customs. Various food prohibitions and notions of pollution continued to be influential. Sometimes Indian Christians seem almost to merge in with Hindus, in an eminently tolerant way. The best example, and the most studied, is the continuance of caste notions in families who have been Christian for centuries. Christianity in India, then, owed as much to its local environment as it did to the norms of Rome.

Hindu pilgrimage certainly occurred, but exclusively by land, so that we will pass this by except to point out that their places of pilgrimage are usually aquatic, being located on the sea shore or rivers. Buddhist pilgrims from East Asia mostly travelled by sea to visit the holy sites in north India associated with the Buddha. We have no hard evidence of Japanese Buddhists reaching India in this period, and indeed the journey would have been an arduous one. One pious Japanese Buddhist worked out, presumably to explain why he never went, that to travel from Japan to India would take 1,000 days at eight miles a day, or 1,600 at five miles a day. He had to make do with a stone that he found on the coast of Japan: 'Thinking that the water poured upon the sacred remains of Buddha flows into the ocean, I feel especially familiar with this stone found on the seashore.'
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We can assume that some followers of the path in Burma and Sri Lanka made visits to north India. Certainly there was travel for religious reasons between these two Buddhist countries. It has been claimed that when Buddhism in Sri Lanka was under attack from the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Arakan played a vital role in preserving Theravada Buddhism until tolerance returned to Sri Lanka.
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By default, then, the greatest pilgrimage in our period was that of Muslims to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina; indeed to do this is to fulfil one of the central requirement of Islam. In the early modern period some 15,000 from India undertook this pious obligation each year, out of a total of up to 200,000.
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The hajj had a multitude of significances. First of all, it was a pious obligation.
However, small-scale economic activity was generated by the peddling of the pilgrims as they made their way to the Red Sea. Most of them supported themselves by trading, using their goods as needed to buy passage, food and accommodation, in a way analogous to the modern travellers' cheque. At the actual time of the hajj, a period of a few days in Mecca, the town was host to a massive market in a great variety of goods. Many were secular, but some were infused with religious significance. Burial shrouds soaked in water from the sacred well of Zamzam, bits from the brooms used to sweep out the Kaba, pieces of the ornate cloth covering of the Kaba, these and many other items found a ready market.

There was also a political dimension to the hajj. Control of the Holy Cities passed in the sixteenth century from the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt, which had only a vestigial control over the hereditary sheikhs of the cities, to the Ottoman Empire. The sultans took very seriously their role as Guardians of the Holy Places, did public works in the two cities, provided food to the inhabitants, and financed the vast pilgrim caravans from Cairo and Damascus to the Hijaz. Muslim Indian rulers similarly patronised those wanting to go on hajj.

We have no good data on numbers of pilgrims from East Africa, nor from southeast Asia. But we do have evidence of quite extensive contact with Mecca in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and indeed with other centres of Islamic power. The sultanate of Banten maintained important links with Mecca. These were for religious guidance and patronage. In 1638 the Meccan authorities bestowed the title of sultan on the ruler of Banten, and his son twice made the hajj.
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In 1581 the Portuguese saw a ship, which apart from a very rich cargo had on board 150 women, these being among the most noble of the kingdom of Pegu, who were going with very rich presents to offer them to, as they put it, 'their false prophet and legislator Muhammad'.

The effects of a visit to Mecca could be various indeed. Regrettably, it sometimes led to an increase in intolerance. In the 1630s Lobo travelled by sea from Suakin, on the west coast of the Red Sea, to Diu:

The ship carried many people, most of them pilgrims to their accursed, detestable house, by which I mean that of Meca, where Mafoma [Muhammad] is buried [
sic
]. Once these people have visited it, they receive from the Xarifes there an indisputable pass to Heaven; and when they leave Meca in this sanctified state, nothing is more loathsome to them than to meet with Christians, for they believe themselves contaminated if they see or have any dealings with us, so pure in body and soul do they consider themselves when they leave that place. For this reason they very much begrudged our being on that ship, imagining that their purity would be spoiled by our presence there, for they avoided all communication or conversation with us, so that when they arose in the morning and their eyes were unavoidably struck by the sight of us . . . they would immediately spit in the other direction as if they had seen the vilest thing in the world....
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Those who returned home from the pilgrimage had acquired very considerable prestige. In part they were considered to be daring people indeed for having undertaken the long and dangerous sea voyage across the Arabian Sea. They also were now able to stand forth in their home communities as exemplars of Islam: here is how they do it in Mecca; people in Mecca say this and that, and do this. In the Maldive Islands in the early seventeenth century those who had been on hajj were allowed to wear their beards in a distinctive style.

Those who have been to Arabia, and have visited the sepulchre of Mahomet at Mecca [
sic
], are held in high respect by all the world, whatever be their rank, and whether they be poor or rich; and, indeed, a great number of the poor have been there. These have peculiar privileges: they are called
Agy
[hajji, one who has done the hajj]; and in order to be recognised and remarked among the others, they all wear very white cotton frocks, and on their heads little round bonnets, also white, and carry beads in their hands without crosses; and when they have not the means to maintain themselves in this attire, the king or the nobles supply them, and fail not to do so.
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These people were engaged, in a modest way, in trying to 'purify' the religion, to root out customs and behaviour which they claimed had no place in 'pure' Islam. In this they had a Christian parallel in the activities of the Inquisitors in Goa, and priests sent out from Rome to rid Indian Catholicism of its deviations and errors. The much-feared Holy Office of the Inquisition was the supreme example of intolerant Counter Reformation Catholicism. Xavier was scandalised by what he saw in Goa, considering many local converts and also Portuguese to have strayed far from the faith. He recommended that an Inquisition be established, though this was achieved only eight years after his death, in 1560. However, even before this heresy did not go unpunished. In 1543 a New Christian physician, that is a Jew converted to Christianity, was convicted by the ecclesiastical court of relapsing to Judaism. He was sentenced to be burnt, but this sentence was reduced after he confessed and apologised. He was strangled before he was burnt.

The Inquisition was concerned to root out vestiges of Hindu practice amongst those recently converted. This was a very harsh regime, for many conversions had been hasty and superficial. Consequently many new converts could offend out of ignorance and yet still be subject to the rigours of the Holy Office. What seem to be social practices deriving from past religious practice were condemned, such as refusing to eat pork, wearing such Indian clothes as a
dhoti
or
choli
, cooking rice without salt, 'as the Hindus are accustomed to do'. Those who, probably in all innocence, offended were hauled off to be interrogated – a total of 3,800 between 1561 and 1623.

There was no such tribunal in Muslim lands. What sorts of things were the Muslim purifiers concerned about? We have ample evidence of rather unorthodox practice in many areas of the ocean littoral, though we are making no value
judgements at all. Unlike previous western writers on Islam, we do not seek to condemn local people who failed to follow the letter of the Law, the Shariah.

We quoted earlier some derogatory comments on the quality of Islam as seen by people from the centre (see pages 161–2). In 1542 in Malindi Francis Xavier met his alter ego, a chief 'caciz', who complained that the local Muslims were extremely slack in their observance. Once there had been sixteen mosques in the town, but now there were only three, and even these were poorly patronised. An account of Sofala, in the far south, from 1588 claimed that

The Mahometans that at this present doe inhabite those Countries, are not naturally borne there, but before the Portugals came into those quarters, they Trafficked thither in small Barkes, from the Coast of Arabia Felix. And when the Portugals had conquered that Realme, the Mahometans stayed there still, and now they are become neither utter Pagans, nor holding the Sect of Mahomet.

Members of various Muslim Sufi orders, and of schools of law, travelled widely in a quite organised way to achieve greater observance. They were much more conscious of what they were doing than were the generality of returning hajjis, whose role was much less directive. A typical rectifier would study in Mecca and Medina and other centres, and then go to the periphery of the Muslim world, where they had very great prestige. As an example, we know something of the career of 'Abd al-Ra'uf of Singkel, and this gives us a clear picture of the many ties, networks and connections established in seventeenth-century Islam, and of the centrality of the Holy Places in this process. He was born in North Sumatra around 1615, and in about 1640 moved to the Hijaz and Yemen to study. In Medina his main teacher was the Kurdish-born Ibrahim al-Kurani. He spent a total of nineteen years in Mecca, and gained very considerable prestige. In particular, he taught hundreds, even thousands, of Indonesians there, and initiated many of them into the Order of which he was a distinguished member, the Shattariyya. He returned to Sumatra, to Aceh, in 1661 and was a revered teacher there for nearly thirty years. He kept in touch with Ibrahim in Medina, and taught what he had learnt from him to the many Indonesian, especially Javanese, pilgrims who stopped for a time in Aceh on the way to the Red Sea.

So also in India. Hajji Ibrahim Muhaddis Qadiri was born near Allahabad in northern India. He did the hajj, and then studied in Cairo, Mecca and Syria. He was away for twenty-four years, but then returned to India, settled in Agra, and was a prestigious teacher until his death in 1593. A final illustration of the wide ties and influence of these scholars again comes from Indonesia. Shaykh Yusuf was born in Makassar (on Sulawesi) in 1626, and was related to the ruling dynasty. He converted to Islam, and did a hajj at age eighteen. In typical fashion, he then studied in Mecca for several years before he went to Banten where, with his Meccan prestige, he was a very influential religious leader to the sultan and court. In 1682 the VOC conquered Banten, and Yusuf led guerilla resistance to them. Finally he surrendered and
was imprisoned in Jakarta. Then he was exiled to other parts of the VOC's dispersed maritime empire: first to Sri Lanka, and in 1694 to the Cape Colony along with two wives, other family, and twelve disciples, a total in all of forty-nine Muslims. The Company tried to isolate him, but even so he was able to make a few converts before he died in 1699.
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