Introduction
In the early centuries of Islamic history, between the seventh and the tenth, there was already a significant population of Muslims living in the Indian Ocean world, ranging from eastern Africa to eastern Asia. As traders, travellers, sailors, scholars and exiles, they travelled and settled in the maritime littoral, actively contributing to the making of Islam and its laws. Islam’s frontiers ran across trade routes, deserts, mountains and seas, and its world and message constituted “more than an area of spiritual unification”.1 Nodal points of Islamic economic and cultural developments were formed within a hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. Most of these Muslims adhered heartily to their religion, so that it became an important element in the reciprocity of legal obligations and rights when dealing with each other and other communities. The spiritual contacts between widely separated areas were “often astonishingly close” for the Islamic communities through the idea of a common geographical space.2 Even though they were living far away from contemporary discussions about Islamic law and theology in the Islamic heartlands in Arabia, they shaped their own methods and practices.
Despite the fact that a large portion of the Muslim community were already living outside the Middle East in the early centuries of Islamic history, and that Islam was a prominent socio-cultural and doctrinal praxis in these “peripheries”, not many historians have endeavoured to take into consideration the religious and juridical complexities of Islam there. Islamic (legal) historians keep a Middle-East-centric narrative and impose that framework onto “the peripheral Muslims”.3 More specification of Islamic legal traditions outside the Middle East is, therefore, long overdue, and this chapter takes a preliminary step in that direction with an investigation into the formative periods.
Once we read the evidence from or on the Muslims of the Indian Ocean littoral, the internal dynamics and trajectories of a long history of Islamic law become apparent. The sources show how the communities from the littoral contributed to innovative developments, facilitated by the spread of Islamic networks that connected a wide variety of regions, ethnicities and backgrounds. These communities were not a small rudimentary collective of believers: they were demographically as significant as many of their Middle Eastern parallels. They had their own leaders to administer law and justice, and the individual authorities, such as qāḍīs and shaykhs, and their institutions, such as mosques, were considerable. What were the characteristics of those Islamic institutions and spaces, and how did individuals function within these physical and social structures, with or without following a particular legal paradigm? Did Muslims manage their own laws in those places? How did Islamic law appear there to administer a partly mobile and partly sedentary community?
To address these questions I shall investigate sources roughly from the seventh till the tenth centuries, the timespan generally perceived as the formative and classical period of Islamic law. In Middle Eastern contexts researchers have the luxury of directly related legal materials, but the sources for the history of the oceanic Muslims are comparatively marginal. I shall utilise a variety of fragmentary materials, such as travellers’ accounts, geographical literature, futūḥāt works (narratives of Islamic expansion), along with archaeological findings and epigraphic data in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Tamil, Malayalam and Sanskrit. Most of these sources have already been edited and published more than once, although they have rarely been used in legal historiography. Almost all the Arabic and Persian travel and geographical literature in this timeframe have been translated into European languages from the late nineteenth century onwards, while most futūḥāt works and material evidence have come to light only recently. Because these sources are not necessarily concerned with law per se it is difficult to reconstruct a full picture of the legal engagements of the early Muslims in the oceanic rim, yet we can discern whatever insights they give.
I shall start with a geographical description of the Indian Ocean by dividing it into five zones in order to illustrate the presence of Muslims in each zone between the seventh and tenth centuries. Consequently, I shall analyse five major Muslim groups on the basis of their potential motivations and occupations in the context of questions of Islamic law. The next section engages with the existing claim that the Islamic legal schools, such as Shāfiʿīsm and Ḥanafīsm, played important roles in the oceanic littoral. The problems I raise here argue for a more nuanced and intermixed legal scape of early Islam. The last two sections analyse the important venues of legal formations that facilitated and impacted the early interactions, and I take a closer look at physical and social institutions, such as mosques and marriages. I argue that Islam and its different institutions functioned in the maritime zones by constantly negotiating with the various dominant non-Muslim socio-political entities, and therefore produced diverse juridical experiences.
Early maritime zones of Islam
The Indian Ocean littoral has been categorised, described and perceived in the early Muslim literature through different prisms and taxonomies.4 What is today generally seen as the “Indian” Ocean littoral was more fluid in the geographical and travel literature in the ninth and tenth centuries. It was not only an “Indian” Ocean (Baḥr al-Hind), but it was also called inter alia the Persian Ocean (Baḥr Fāris) and the African Ocean (Baḥr al-Zanj). The latter name was often used to designate its western part, along with the name Baḥr al-Ḥabashī (“Abyssinian Ocean”), as distinct from the eastern part with its boundary at the Chinese Ocean (Baḥr al-Ṣīn). The northern boundaries were given other names, such as the Yemeni Ocean (Baḥr al-Yaman). These geographical identifications changed over time, depending on the geographers, travellers and writers. Other terms occur, such as Baḥr al-Qulzum, Baḥr Lārawī, Baḥr Harkand, Baḥr Shalāhiṭ, Baḥr Kalah, Baḥr Kardānj, Baḥr Ṣanf and Baḥr Ṣankhay to denote different areas and seas which are now all considered parts of the Indian Ocean world.5
For the sake of clarifying the purpose of this chapter, I divide the ocean into five major cultural zones based on the early Muslim settlements and written records following important political, cultural and linguistic features: 1. The Arab-Persian zone, covering the northern and eastern coasts of the Red Sea and the coasts up to Makrān on the east, including many islands in the vicinity, such as Khuriya Muriya, Socotra and Maṣīra; 2. The African zone, covering the western coast of the Red Sea, from Sudan through the strait of Bab al-Mandab down to Qanbalū, Sufāla and Wāqwāq (Madagascar) and several islands in between; 3. The Indic zone, from Makrān to Kūlam Malī (Quilon) on the western and southern sides of the subcontinent, and from Bengal to Sri Lanka on the east to the south; 4. The Malay zone, from the islands of Lanḳabālūs or Lanjabālūs (the Andaman and Nicobar Islands) to Java (Jāba) in the south and Qimār (Khmer = Cambodia) and Thailand in the north and Sulu Sea in the east; 5. The Chinese zone, with Khānfū as the most important emporium and attaching some significance to Shīlā (Korea) and the Wāqwāq islands (Japan).
In the four maritime zones beyond the Arab-Persian zone, the arrival of Islam, not to speak of its law, has been very contentious in the historiography.6 But what is certainly true is that most of these places had been actively participating in the Indian Ocean trade long before the rise of Islam, and that they will all have been connected with the mercantile and mobile communities of the Arab-Persian zone. Many of these places from eastern Africa to eastern Asia had some sort of Persian or Arab settlements in the sixth and seventh centuries, if not earlier.7 Once Islam dominated the religious and political landscape of the Middle East by the mid-seventh century, these pre-existing Arab-Persian communes could well have been influenced by this new religion, but we do not know whether or not they converted to it or cared at all about its rise and spread.
We have some limited sources specifically concerning Muslims’ lives in the zones, from the seventh century. The earliest and most widely cited reference comes from East Africa with regard to the first Islamic migrants to Abyssinia, who fled there in 615 to escape the persecution of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. The first group consisted of 11 men and four women, including the would-be-third-caliph ʿUthmān and his wife Ruqayya (daughter of the Prophet Muhammad), while the second group had 83 men and 18 women.8 Most of them returned to Arabia when the situation became convivial, yet only after leaving behind some traces of early practices of Islam and its laws, such as the establishment of a place of worship at Massawa (later called Masjid al-Ṣaḥāba, in present-day Eritrea) and a burial ground. A few who had remained behind developed these structures and practices and married into local elites, but at least one of them converted to Christianity.9 Within a few years after these early migrations, an inscription from Māṭāyi in Malabar and oral tradition in Ghogha in Gujarat in the Indic zone claim that mosques were established there in the first decades of Islam.10 That inscription dates to the fifth year after Hijra (i.e. 627). However, the credibility of both these sources needs to be further substantiated.
Apart from these few instances, solid textual, epigraphic, archaeological or architectural sources are rare for this century. Some Chinese accounts mention a strong Arab presence in the Malay zone in the late seventh century, to such an extent that the writers often confused Sumatra in Southeast Asia for Arabia because so many Arabs were there, whom they denoted with the term Dashi or Tazi. According to one narrative, the Arab chieftain (of Sumatra, possibly) interacted with the kingdom of Java after Queen Si-ma became its ruler in 674. The Queen was known for her valour, honesty and ensuring safety and protection in her kingdom. This made “the prince of Tazi” afraid of her and he “dared not attack her”.11 Yijing (635–713), a Chinese monk who visited Sumatra in 671, wrote about the island’s connections with the Middle East.12 We do not know if the Arabs mentioned in these instances were Muslims. If they were indeed Muslims, they may have embraced Islam in the Middle East and travelled to the Malay zone, or they may have been residents of the existing settlements who converted to the new religion. In his Dong xi yang kao (Research on the Eastern and Western Ocean), Zhang Xie (1574–1640), a later Chinese author, narrates the whole history of Muhammad as something that had happened in western Sumatra. This indicates a historical consciousness among the Chinese people about this island as being predominantly Islamic.13
There are related oral histories and written narratives of kings converting to Islam at the hand of the Prophet or in front of his companions, who visited distant places, such as India and China. Textual and epigraphic narratives on the early arrivals of Islam in these regions were written or copied in later periods. There are inscriptions in the Ding Zhou Mosque (dated to 1348), in Qing Jing Si Mosque of Quanzhou (1350), and in Huai Sheng Si of Guangzhou (1350). There are also texts, such as the Ming official history Da Ming yi tong zhi, the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ, the Kēraḷōtpatti narratives of Malabar, Futūḥāt al-jazāʾir of the Lakshadweep Islands, the manuscript of Said Husayni of the Comoros.14 All these sources talk about events happening during the rise of Islam in the seventh century or immediately afterwards, but they were written and/or copied many centuries later. Authenticating their claims is hard without corroborating evidence from the period itself. However, one important series of interactions between these regions and the central Islamic world in the seventh century were the diplomatic missions, especially to China. These initiatives are fascinating in their own right as they contain fragmentary information on Islamic (and Islamic legal) interactions with these regions, as I shall infer below from some Chinese episodes.
By the eighth century there is solid historical proof of the existence of active Islamic communities in all five zones of the Indian Ocean region, as settlers, soldiers, migrants, exiles and converts, along with references to infrequent itinerants, such as traders, diplomats and missionaries. The expeditions of Muḥammad bin Qāsim (d. 715) to Sind and the consequent Muslim settlements there is the most interesting episode of this century. Obeying the command of the Iraqi governor of the Umayyad dynasty Ḥajjāj bin Yūsuf (d. 714), Ibn Qāsim conquered several regions of the Indic zone, from Makrān to Daybul. According to the narrative a few Muslims coming from Sri Lanka, who were attacked by pirates off the coast of the western Indian subcontinent, the conquest of Ibn Qāsim was motivated by a maritime skirmish in the Arabian Sea. In that account, Ḥajjāj asked the local ruler to help the captives against the pirates, but the ruler said that he could not meddle with Midi pirates. Angry with this response, Ḥajjāj sent two commanders to Sind, who both were defeated and killed. Eventually a strong army under the command of Ibn Qāsim conquered the land, rescued the Muslim detainees, and adva...
