A Portuguese map made in 1519 depicting Indian Ocean areas. Photo: Wikimedia Commons A Portuguese map made in 1519 depicting Indian Ocean areas. Photo: Wikimedia Commons From matriarchal Muslim societies to ‘jihad’ in support of a Hindu king, Islamic life in the Indian Ocean region is multi-faceted and rich. It is this milieu that intrigued Mahmood Kooria, winner of the 2024 Infosys Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences, and set him on a path to becoming one of the foremost authorities on Islam in the Indian Ocean region. He is the author of ‘Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi‘i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean’lucky horse, and currently teaches at The University Of Edinburgh. Kooria spoke to Outlook on his research, maritime Islam, cosmopolitan Malabar of the 15th and 16th centuries and more. Excerpts:
Infosys Prize winner Mahmood Kooria Infosys Prize winner Mahmood Kooria QWhat is the personal journey that drew you to history, particularly to the Indian Ocean region and Islamic law?
AI don’t think I was a serious student of history, at least during my undergraduate years. I haven't said this on a public platform before: I failed in the first year of my Bachelor’s. I was on my own journeys and my own readings, and I scored only 32 marks in history when we were expected to get at least 35 out of 100. That was a wake-up call for me and in the second and third years, I worked very hard. However, there was more to it than that. I was definitely interested in reading and writing. Together with a senior in college, I wanted to write the biography of a local Sufi saint called Mampuram Tangal, who had migrated from Yemen to Kerala in 1767 and became a revered figure since the 19th century. For the biography, I needed to access the archives, which was not easy for an undergraduate student. But there was an archivist at the regional archives of Kozhikode, C.P. Abdul Majid, who was very generous with his time and explained how the archives functioned. Then, to get a reference letter to access the archives, I approached the well-known historian Professor M.G.S. Narayanan. He too was very generous and typed out the letter to the state archives of Kerala that got me permission to access the archives. More than what I got from the archives, this experience with the archivist and a prominent historian—how they treated a young student from a small college—left an impression on me.Getting into a Master’s programme in History at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was a dream that I never thought would come true. Once admitted, I had to struggle a lot with the ways in which they taught history; and on top of that, coming from the Malayalam medium, I had to work hard on my English. I came across the courses on Indian Ocean taught by Professor Yogesh Sharma and became intrigued by them. Many conversations at JNU along withProfessor Sharma’s lectures got me hooked. He eventually encouraged me to go to Leiden University in the Netherlands where there was a programme to train young students from Asia and Africa in the early modern Dutch language and palaeography as well as in the archives of the Dutch East India Company, which produced an enormous amount of material on different parts of Asia and Africa. From there, I moved to the Erasmus Mundus fellowship, which allowed me to pursue a PhD in the topic of my choice—the Indian Ocean.
QThe bulk of your research has been on Islamic legal systems that prevailed in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Shafi’ism. How did this legal system shape the worldview of its adherents differently from that of say, the Hanafi school, which was prevalent in north India?
ABefore the 16th century, there is evidence of Muslims in the Indian Ocean region—from the Chinese Muslim diaspora to South Asia and East Africa—following different schools of law, including the Hanafi or Maliki schools. However, by the 16th century, they predominantly begin to follow the Shafi’i school of law, mainly because of the network of Shafi’i scholars from southern Arabia, East Africa, and South Asia itself. While it is difficult to distinguish the world view of Shafi’i Muslims from that of Hanafis on the foundational approaches to religion, we can see that it better facilitated certain aspects such as maritime trade, and conducting trade in the high seas. Or more tolerance towards shellfish, which is proscribed for Hanafis. In Cape Town in South Africa in the 19th century, there's an interesting conflict between the Hanafi Qadhi sent by the Ottoman Sultan and the local Muslims who are predominantly Shafi’i about the permissibility of eating crab, which the locals have been eating for a long time. So, yes, the Shafi’i school is more favourable to the oceanic life.
QOften people associate Islamic law with patriarchal systems. However, you are now studying matriarchal customs among Muslim societies in the Indian Ocean region.
AOne of the questions during the defence of my PhD dissertation was whether there were women jurists among the Indian Ocean Muslims. I said yes, there were; but I couldn’t name any. This sparked my interest in seeing how women contributed to Islamic legal traditions, especially in the Indian Ocean context. So, when I went on to do a post-doctoral project under HERA, a European Union initiative for the Humanities, I wanted to bring together women, custom and law, especially as matriliny or matriarchy (these terms are a bit problematic; but I use matriarchy with its nuances as an umbrella term) is pitched as the classic example of how Islamic law contradicts local customs and traditions. When we say matrilineal or matriarchal Islam, it almost sound like an oxymoron because the perception of Islam has been always patrilineal/patriarchal. Interestingly, I saw that the perspectives of the matrilineal communities themselves are very rarely taken into account when this contradiction between custom and Sharia is portrayed. So that's something that I have been trying to explore. Initially, I was interested in the matrilineal customs in Kerala, but I soon realised that there are many other communities, such as Minangkabau in West Sumatra in Indonesia—which is the largest matrilineal Muslim community—Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and in Comoros and Mozambique in East Africa. The connecting point for all these communities is the Indian Ocean.
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Possibly the origin—and a reason for the survival—of the matrilineal system, were the traders, sailors and captains who sailed to different coastal areas and stayed there during the monsoon season until the wind was favourable for them to go back. During their stay, they could marry into local communities; and when they left, they could do so without the responsibility of owning anything as the children as well as the property belonged to the women. This worked very well for men who were travelling along the ocean as well. So, I see the Indian Ocean as a major common factor in the survival of these communities.
QIt's said that Islam arrived on the Malabar coast in the 7th century and was well-established in the region by around the 12th century. From what you have learned from your research? Can you paint a picture of Islam in the Malabar region in the 15th and 16th centuries?
AI think there's a huge difference between the 15th and 16th centuries from a historian’s point of view. In the 15th century, and also in the period before that, we get the impression that the Muslim community is very diverse and cosmopolitan. For example, Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller who arrives at the place in the 14th century, and Abdul Razak, a Persian diplomat who arrives at Kozhikode in the 15th century, mention the diverse backgrounds of the Muslims, who are from different parts of India, Arabia, Persia and Africa, who have come and settled in Kozhikode, some of them marrying local women. This is still prevalent in the early 16th century. During that period, Duerte Barbosa, a Portuguese clerk who had lived in Kerala for about two decades, gives a description of the diverse nature of the local Muslim community on the Malabar coast. However, this changes by the mid-16th century because the Portuguese were attacking a lot of Muslim settlements, specifically targeting them because they were the most influential traders in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, which the Portuguese wanted to monopolise. Due to this, many of them started to either go back to the places where they came from or to explore different territories. So, from the mid-16th century onward, the majority of the population become the Mappila community—local Muslims who either converted to the religion or who were born through intermarriages with foreign merchants or who had settled down in the region several centuries earlier. That is the major transition we see between the 15th and 16th centuries.
classy slots QIn your research work on the period, you have mentioned ‘jihadi’ literature written in support of the Hindu king of the Malabar region, the Zamorin, even holding the Hindu king above the neighbouring Muslim kings. Can you elaborate on the context of this?
AJihad today is a very problematic term. But in 16th-century Malabar, the understanding of jihad was completely different. It was basically conceived as a political struggle under the banner of a king. You wage jihad for the ruler irrespective of your religious identity. So, they use the term to fight for the local Hindu Zamorin against the European intruders at that time—the Portuguese. We have a series of Arabic literature from the 16th century, at least three authors who write quite elaborately on why Muslims should fight for the Zamorin because he has been protecting his subjects irrespective of religion, giving them respect and rights. Therefore, they say, it is our moral and religious responsibility to stand for him. Some of these authors also at length criticise some of the neighbouring Muslim rulers who signed treaties with the Portuguese, saying that the Hindu Zamorin was far ahead of them morally and politically.
QThere is a legal argument by which these authors consider that they are living in a safe ‘abode of Islam’, even when they are under a Hindu king. What is that legal interpretation?
AUntil the 16th century, most writers in Shafi’i law that we know came from the Middle East, where majority of the population and rulers were Muslims—the abode of Islam—whereas for the people in Malabar/Kerala that's not the case. They are a minority, and the rulers are not Muslims. There is this broad distinction in Islam between ‘abode of war’—places hostile to Muslims—and ‘abode of Islam’. The Malabar Muslims under the Zamorin have a legal interpretation by which they identify the place as an abode of Islam since their identity, rights and community life is protected here.
As the Malabar Coast or Kerala never came under the Mughal Empire during this period, and the Mughals were not very interested in resisting the Portuguese intrusions on Malabar, the Muslim authors from the region stood for themselves under the banner of the Zamorinslucky horse, who had protected them for centuries. Their conceptualisation of Malabar as an abode of Islam was, therefore, their organic way of conceptualising their harmonious political and religious lives in support of their ruler.
