How maritime Islam connects the Indian Ocean: From East Africa to India and Malaysia

Recognising the remarkable scholarly contributions made by Kooria, he was awarded the prestigious Infosys prize for Humanities and Social Sciences this year. In an interview with Indianexpress.com, Kooria discussed his work on the Shafi’i school of law that is predominantly followed in the Indian Ocean world, how the Islamic legal framework has contributed to maritime trade, cultural ethos as well as matriliny in this region, as well and the surprising commonalities between modern nation-states that are far apart geographically but are unified only by an ocean. He also explains what the study of maritime Islam tells us about the shared heritage that connects India to the world.

Excerpts:

The Infosys Prize recognised, among other things, your innovative study on the history of Islam in the Indian Ocean world. Can you explain how the Islamic world in the Indian Ocean region is different from anywhere else in the subcontinent?

What is interesting is that the Indian Ocean by itself is a unifying factor across vast regions. From East Africa to Southeast Asia, including different parts of India, there exists a shared history. We see that from the ninth century onwards, Islam begins to become popular across these areas and there are a lot of interesting commonalities between people in, lets say, Tanzania with people in the Philippines.

One of these similarities is the Shafi’i school of law that I study. In the rest of the Indian subcontinent, the majority of Muslims follow the Hanafi school of law. But in the South Indian coastal area, you see the Shafi’i school of law being followed historically. And this is the same in Indonesia, Malaysia, as well as in East Africa. This is one of the features in which the Indian Ocean Islam has a unique character, separating it from the rest of the country.

Can you give me a historical overview of the origin of the Shafi’i school of law?

After Prophet Mohammad’s death, Islamic teachings were codified into the Quran and the Hadith. But then scholars came to the realisation that there were many issues which were neither addressed by the Quran nor the Hadith, especially as the community was expanding. So, a lot of scholars tried to infer new solutions out of the scriptures. Hence, among Sunni Muslims, four major schools were established by four different jurists, although they were not the only ones.

The Hanafi school, for instance, is named after Abu Hanifa who interpreted the Quran and Hadith by laying more emphasis on rationality. Malik Ibn Anas, who founded the Maliki school of law, suggested that one must give more importance to the examples set by the Prophet. These are two early divisions. Then came the Shafi’i school of thought based on the teachings of Idris al-Shafi’i who said that the ideal legal structure would be a combination of Hanafi and Maliki. Then came the Hanbali school of law by Ahmad ibn Hanbal.

All these four scholars emerged between the eighth and ninth centuries. And the four schools of thought expanded beyond the Middle Eastern regions to places like Central Asia and India within a couple of centuries. Interestingly, the Hanafi school of law became popular across the Silk Road, while the Shafi’i school became popular across the Indian Ocean.

So, how does the Shafi’i school of law shape society in these places?

There are two ways, one is internally and the other externally. To start with the external reason first, people traveling across the Indian Ocean were following different schools of Islamic law. But from the 16th century onwards, we see that the Shafi’i school of law is being predominant. This is mainly because many people who followed this school began to travel widely and, several jurists among them began writing new texts in Islamic law, addressed specific concerns of the community that were not addressed in other schools of law. This was a network of scholars that contributed to the change in society and led to people following the Shafi’i school of law.

Internally, I believe that the Shafi’i school of law addressed more oceanic components. For example carrying out maritime trade or eating certain seafood. The Shafi’i school of law is way more lenient about these aspects than the Hanafi school.

There is an interesting incident that happened in Cape Town, South Africa in the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire which was following the Hanafi school of law, sent a Hanafi Qazi to Cape Town to lead the Muslim community there. The Muslims in Cape Town were Shafi’is on account of being part of the Indian Ocean region. The Qazi was horrified to see the people consuming crabs, which he believed was haraam or prohibited and asked the community to quit eating it immediately. The community was very offended by this and argued that they had been consuming crabs for generations. Eventually they wrote to the Ottoman Sultan, asking him to call back the Qazi, lest they do some harm to him.

Among Shafi’i Muslims, what were some of the socio-cultural similarities between people in, say, an African country and South or Southeast Asian country in this region?

While there are many similarities, I study mainly the circulation of texts and ideas, particularly legal texts. So one interesting figure I studied is a 16th-century Malabari scholar: Zainuddin al-Malibari. From his name itself we can identify that he is from the Malabar coast in Kerala. Sometime back I was in this remote region up in the highlands of Comoros, an island country in East Africa with less than 1 million population. The people there were surprised to see an Indian and when I told them I was from Kerala they could not recognise. But when I said I am from Malabar, they immediately said, ‘Oh you are from the land of Zainuddin al-Malibari’.

An old man among them hugged me saying that his book is very important to them. Everyone in that island has to study that text in order to be trained in Islam or Islamic law. The country is predominantly Muslim and they follow the Shafi’i school. So in order to study their law they need to study an Indian scholar’s work.

I have come across similar examples all the way up to Indonesia and Malaysia. People immediately identified this text. So much of the Indian Ocean region, from Asia to Africa, is unified by a single text. And there are several other similar texts in the region. This text itself attracted about 35 commentaries and translations. In Indonesia alone, it has been translated by at least three different people. Then there are mystical texts written by Indian scholars that continue to be studied and taught across this vast oceanic region.

Even though these scholars are not well known in the Indian subcontinent, they are popular in the Indian Ocean. Mentioning their names is almost like a passport, people immediately recognise you. In Indonesia for example, I remember people expressing their lifelong desire to visit the grave of Zainuddin al-Malibari at least once before they die.

These texts may not be well known in the Indian subcontinent mainly because they were not written in Urdu or Persian, but rather in Arabic. This is yet again a common feature of the Indian Ocean world. In the rest of the Indian subcontinent, Persian stood as the lingua franca. Whereas in places like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, coastal Karnataka, it was mainly Arabic. Not just the language but also the script that was employed to write Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, etc. Similarly, Indonesians or Swahili people would use the Arabic script to write their language.

You have also done a lot of work on the matrilineal societies of this region. How does your study of the law tie up with matriliny?

Both Islamic law and the Indian Ocean region would appear to be a very masculine space. Very rarely is the contribution of women in Islamic law and the Indian Ocean taken into account. So I wanted to look at the role of women within both these spaces. And what I understood immediately was that a lot of literature posed a contradiction between Islamic law and customary law.

Matrilineal communities have a different way of dividing inheritance. It appears to go through feminine line, in contradiction to patrilineal Islamic law. But the community members do not see this as a contradiction. In the existing literature, the perspective of the community is not taken into account, especially that of the women members. So I wanted to explore how women engage with Islamic law as well as the Indian Ocean region.

What I found was how important the Indian Ocean is to the survival of the matrilineal system. Since the men could come and go as traders and sailors, women stayed looked after the property and home. That meant that men had no control over the property which would pass on from woman to woman. Whether men came back to their family or not, did not have any implication.

How is your study of Islamic law relevant in the current socio-political situation?

It is a difficult question because much of historical inquiry emerges out of sheer scholarly interest. That is the case with most Humanities research, I believe. We can suggest one or two reasons, but ultimately it is our academic interests that drive us. Even so, I can say that it helps understand the diversity of communities and the cosmopolitan heritage that all nation-states had, which are now sidelined. Our own heritage is celebrated far away in a place like Comoros or Indonesia, while our long connections and interactions with these places are forgotten. Similarly, works and scholars born and produced in India in the medieval and early modern centuries are not taken into account while one writes histories of laws or religions, or global history. I want to foreground works produced in India, as well as in Asia and Africa, as part of global connections before the European epistemes dominated.