Author: Sebastian R. Prange
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Format: Paper back
Pages: 344
Source:  cambridge.org

The commonplace black pepper was once a valued commodity much as is oil today. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, it held a central place in global geopolitics, prompting wars and alliances, new financial instruments and a class of middlemen. In the pre-steam ship era, this mercantile trade was dependent on the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean. Muslims played a prominent role as merchants, ship owners and sailors. It led to the Muslim communities along the rim of the Indian Ocean, in East Africa and the western coast of the Subcontinent.

The pepper crop grown in the South Indian hinterland was brought to Calicut, Cochin and Kollam on  the Malabar coast, in today’s India’s Kerala and Karnataka states. The northeastern monsoon that began in late October until February or March allowed the sailing ships to journey from South Asia to the Red Sea; the southwestern monsoon, that began in March on the East African coast, reached Malabar in late May. This schedule not only affected trade but also the seaborne hajj traffic – without a land route from the Subcontinent, pilgrims could find themselves disembarking in the Hejaz either too early or too late!

Sebastian Prange’s masterly study whets the appetite for a present day visit to these old port towns, for example to retrace the Ibn Battutah’s steps in the fourteenth century. In his famous travelogue he described visiting a Qur’an hifz schools for boys and girls, “a thing of which I have never seen elsewhere”.

Monsoon Islam  covers three historic themes: the  modus vivendi between Muslim trading communities and the Malabari Hindu rulers; the Shafi scholars’ ijtihahadi endeavours and the impact of the sufi shuyookh; the conduct of the Portuguese, for whom enmity with the local ‘Moors’ was a continuation of their conflicts  with Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa.

Mercantile trade for spices began in Roman times. The first Muslim merchants were from Yemen and Khurasan. Horses were traded for spices, to fulfil the cavalry needs of the kingdoms, sultanates and empires to the north of Malabar. According to Prange, the oldest mosque on the Malabar coast that can be reliably dated was founded in 1124. The Muslim settlement was made up of Arabs and Persians and the indigenous Malayalam speaking population, the Moppilas.

The high-caste Hindus eschewed seafaring for religious reasons, so there were openings for Muslim traders to establish their depots, lightering and related import-export activities: “the willingness of local elites to cooperate closely with foreign traders, allowed expatriate merchant groups to control the maritime commerce in all of Malabar’s principal ports [. . .] various coastal rulers vied to attract merchants to their ports.” The low-caste Hindus found employment in the ports and contact with Muslims opened the path to Islam for many.

The Indian Ocean merchants seem to have been adherents to the Shafi’i madhab, and so the onus was on the jurists of this school “to reconcile Islamic norms with divergent local customs”  Among the influential faqihs were Ibn Hjar al-Haytani (died 1567) and his Malabari student, Zayn al-Din, author of Fath al-Mu’in, composed about 1575 and “a key part of a Shafi’ite legacy of Malabar: Islamic scholars of the period. responded with fresh thinking on commercial law for long distance trade “characterised by sharp disparities in capital, multi-party consignments, and above all the need for brokers and agents in distant ports [. . .] Islamic jurists set out in some detail the lawful conditions for commissioning an agent, the agent’s duties, as well as his discretion in carrying out his commission”. The port towns had qadi courts to rule on disputes – an example of the modus vivendi with Hindu rulers.

A common ground bringing together Muslims and Hindus in Malabar were its dargas or sufi shrines, that were visited to make supplications and seek blessings. The ubiquitous Ibn Battutah has recorded meeting faqirs and visiting zawiyas during his Malabar sojourn. He mentions Shaikh al-Din al-Kazaruni of Calicut, “to whom are paid the offerings made in vows by people of India and China [. . .]”.

The Kazaruni order provided rest homes for travellers “lodging itinerant merchants in foreign ports [ . . .] a vivid example of the overlap between religious and commercial networks.”  

The Portuguese incursions shattered the modus vivendi of  Muslim maritime trade monopoly with Hindu political rule. It began violently, “in 1502, Vasco da Gama plundered and sank a ship belonging to a Muslim merchant , not sparing the 700 men, women, and children who were returning from Mecca. At Calicut, Gama demanded that all Muslims be expelled from the town, which the [dynastic Hindu ruling house] Zamorin refused, “for it was unthinkable that he expels 4,000 households of them, who lived in Calicut as natives, not foreigners, and who had contributed great profits to his kingdom.”

Nevertheless, Portuguese cannon fire power and their demands for a monopoly on the pepper trade transformed the situation. In displays of Christian fanaticism, mosques were demolished, with churches built in their place. While some Hindu rulers established treaties with the Portuguese, this was resisted by the Muslims. They made appeals for help, and in the early sixteenth century the Ottomans and Mamluks did join their naval forces to confront the enemy in the battles of Chaul (1508) and Diu (1509) with mixed success. It seems the Mughal rulers were indifferent. Prange’s quotation from an Arab chronicler bears much resonance with our own times,

The Portuguese aggressed against the people of the land [. . .] and they carried on for more than eighty years until the condition of the Muslims had become impoverished and weak and powerless [. . .] And the Muslim sultans and amirs and their supporters in spite of the abundance of their military and their wealth did not come forward to assist the Muslims [of Malabar].

In these unsettled times, that included a Portuguese naval blockade of rice shipments that led to a famine inland, the Arab and other expatriate traders resettled elsewhere leaving the Malabari Muslims on their own to organise resistance to the well-armed Portuguese colonialists. Prange quotes from one of his primary sources “The war between them is very cruel and merciless, for the Malabars are so courageous that they never surrender and prefer death [. . .].”

The Portuguese were also harassed by piracy. While aid from the Mughals or Ottomans was not forthcoming, there were alternatives: Mapilla merchants were at “the heart of a nexus that linked the Malabar coast to other centres of resistance such as the Maldives, Ceylon and South Asia. Military cooperation was an important part of these new bonds.” Though not mentioned by Prange, the Maldives was successful in resisting the Portuguese.

By the second half of the sixteenth century, “rather than dissolving Muslim networks, the Portuguese only managed to shift it to other ports and routes.” The eastern Indian Ocean trade to China became as important, if not more, than the western side. Muslim maritime mercantilism outlived the Portuguese incursion.

The  book considers in detail the conversion to Islam of the Hindu king Cheraman Peruhal, attributed to witnessing the miracle of shaq al-qamar. Prange later offers this brilliant insight on historiography,

By filtering indigenous knowledge through the sieve of European historicism, most orientalist scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to distil India’s past into a coherent Whiggish narrative that has British rule as its inexorable apex. This endeavour tended to dismiss traditional accounts of communal histories , such as the story of Cheraman Peruhal, as a “farrago of legendry nonsense” {. . .] legends like that of Malabar’s convert king were relegated to the realm of ahistorical, fantastical mythmaking. As colonialism and then nationalism circumscribed and reduced the hybrid plurality of the world of Monsoon Islam, its most iconic embodiment was likewise banished from the annals of history proper”.

In Prange’s assessment, the seventh century Cheraman Peruhal’s qissah “is a complex and astonishingly resonant attempt to legitimize the creation of a new Islamic religious elite within the context of an overwhelmingly non-Muslim social order and political structure”. With support of sixteenth century Muslim sources, he argues that by positing Cheraman as one of their own, it was a Mappila process for “wresting control away from the traditional Arab elites [. . .] To Mappilas of the sixteenth century and beyond, Cheraman Peruman thus helped to establish their communal filiation both locally and globally, within Malabar’s socio-political context as well as vis-a-vis the wider Islamic world.”

Allahu ‘Alam!  

JS/August 2025