8 | The Study The Newsletter | No.76 | Spring 2017 ‘The Indian Ocean Muslims’ have contributed to the synthesis of Islamic history for over a millennium, but their roles have been continuously downplayed and disregarded in the historiography. Indians [ al-Hindīs ], Malays [ al-Jāwīs ] and Swahilis [ al-Zanjīs ], in South and Southeast Asia and East Africa respectively, interacted across the Indian Ocean highway and all shaped Islam in their own ways. Only a small number of people actually voyaged overseas physically, but they were all inluenced by the ideas brought in by those who did. The history of Islamic law in the Indian Ocean world tells us the story of this general pattern of mobility across communities, doctrines, texts, sources, places and periods. In this essay, I explore the Africans who worked in South and Southeast Asia as judges, jurists, scholars and preachers in premodern period. Mahmood Kooria African jurists in Asia: Premodern Afro-Asian interactions Below: Al-Maqamat, folio 105. Author: al-Qāsim ibn Alī al Harīrī al-Basrī. Illuminator: Yahya ben Mahmud al- Wasiti. Bibliothèque nationale de France. In 1021, an enslaved Ethiopian, Najah, seized power in the city of Zabit. This image represents the slave market at Zabi – at the time the capital of Yemen – in 1237. The illustration is part of “Al-Maqamat” (Assemblies), a genre of rhymed prose narrative. Both the author and the illu- minator of this work were born in Iraq. THE ARABS AND PERSIANS played an inevitable role in circulating certain basic ideas of Islam, but they did not ‘export’ Islamic law to ‘the peripheries’ as many studies of Islam in the Indian Ocean littoral have illustrated by ignoring the African and Asian contributions. 1 The making of Islam in the littoral has always been a rather complex process with active involve- ment of people with diverse ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds. Once introduced to Islam, the Indian Ocean Muslims formulated their practices in constructive and creative ways and transferred their conceptualizations to other places and people. The stories of several African and Asian scholars working in South, Southeast Asia and East Africa in premodern centuries still remain untold. This brings us to another gap in the literature: the ways in which Africans in Asia have been discussed. Most studies present them as slaves alone, especially the growing literature on slavery in the Indian Ocean world, and neglect their socio- cultural functions outside the strict contemporary conceptions of ‘slavery’. 2 A few literatures of political-military histories have analysed the military and administrative functions and struggles of many Africans, yet their intellectual contributions have yet to be acknowledged. 3 Against this background, I explore the Africans who worked in South and Southeast Asia as judges, jurists, scholars and preachers. Before moving on, a short note on the period and sources: although my larger project is to explore Islamic legal history in the premodern Indian Ocean world since its formative stages through comparative and connected histories of Arabs, Asians and Africans, this paper focuses on a period between the twelfth and ifteenth centuries. Before the twelfth century, we rarely have any references on African-Asian intellectual interactions, whereas the situation dramatically changes by the sixteenth century with an unprecedented rise of African political and military elites in Asia, such as the Abyssinian kingdoms of Bengal and Janjira. By the second half of the sixteenth century, their number and inluence increased even more through igures like Malik Ambar. In order to analyse their implications on, contributions to, and administration of legal systems, much space and time is needed and I hope to take it up elsewhere. The centuries from the twelfth to the ifteenth century thus provide a small prelude to a larger phenomenon of the African intellectual contributions to the making of Islamic law in South and Southeast Asia. My major sources are travel accounts, tārīkh literature, ṭabaqāt literature and inscriptions. In terms of geography, I focus on the South and Southeast Asian coasts of the Indian Ocean. A jurist and an agent One important but largely neglected community that contri- buted to the making of Islamic law in the Indian Ocean rim is that of scholars from the Swahili Coast in East Africa. The coast as such has been neglected in the Indian Ocean historiography, despite the ocean once being identiied as the African Ocean, the Zanj Ocean and the Abyssinian Ocean [Baḥr al-Zanj; Baḥr al-Ḥabashī]. Nearly two decades ago Chandra De Silva endeavoured to deconstruct this negligence by demonstrating how and why the African coast was side-lined by early European commentators and later by Eurocentric historians. He also pointed out the contributions of the local East African communities to the oceanic world in the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 4 This case is not presented diferently in Islamic historiography where scholars make blanket generalizations that almost all prominent traders, brokers, and scholars in East Africa were Arabs and Persians. In Islamic legal history in particular, although it is diicult to distinguish local Swahili from premodern sources, some scarce but crucial remarks about geographical or familial ailiations or skin colour do provide us with a stepping stone towards further enquiries about their juridical engagements and the implications. On that basis, it is striking to take note of some Swahilis who worked in South and Southeast Asia between the twelfth and ifteenth centuries. One early reference to a Swahili jurist in South Asia comes from the travel account of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, a North African who was appointed judge in Delhi, and who wrote in the mid-fourteenth century that he had met one Faqīh Sa ʿ īd from Mogadishu work- ing at Ezhimala (Hīlī) in northern Malabar (southwest India). 5 According to Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, this Somalian jurist had travelled from Mogadishu to both Mecca and Medina, had studied there for fourteen years, and had been in touch with many scholars of the Holy Cities as well as their rulers Muḥammad Abū Numayy in Mecca (r. 1254-1301) and Mans ˙ ūr bin Jammāz in Medina (r. 1300-1325). Based on the rulers’ regnal years, we can assume that Faqīh studied in Mecca sometime between the late-1280s and 1300, and in Medina between 1300 and 1315. After his education in Hijaz, Faqīh Sa ʿ īd travelled to India and China, but we do not know what sort of jobs he took at the places he visited. He settled down inally in Malabar in a port-town called Ezhimala, which was frequented by several Chinese ships and had a very active religious sphere. It had an important congregational mosque, a madrasa, and an imam and both Muslims and inidels respected the mosque for its blessedness (baraka); seafarers used to make plenty of oferings to it before they set out on sail. The mosque had a rich treasury, under the supervision of the khaṭīb Ḥusayn. Several students studied at the mosque, and they received stipends from its revenue. It also prepared food for travellers and the destitute in its own kitchen. Faqīh Sa ʿ īd must have arrived there from China through the Chinese ships that frequented the port. In the city, he collaborated with Ḥusayn, possibly the author of Qayd al-Jāmi‘, one of the irst known Islamic legal texts from Malabar. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa gives only a short description of this ‘other African’ who had far outshone his own journeys. This likely indicates that Faqīh Sa ʿ īd was not an exceptional case in his time and that there were many Muslim African scholars like him who found their way to Asian Islamic communities in premodern centuries. Immediately after mentioning Faqīh Sa ʿ īd, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa talks about another Malabar port-town called Jurfattan, three leagues from Ezhimala, and he makes a comparative statement on the practice of inheritance law among the Malabaris and Sudanis. The context of comparison in the text is interesting as he makes it with regard to an Arab jurist from Baghdad. He writes: There [in Jurfattan] I met a jurist from Baghdad of high stature, named al-S ˙ ar s ˙ arī after S ˙ ar s ˙ ar, a place ten miles away from Baghdad on the way to Kūfa. […] He had a brother in this town with a lot of money which he had asked to give to his young children by will. The deceased person’s property was kept in shipload to Baghdad. The custom (ʿ ādat) of the Indians is like the custom (ʿ ādat) of the Sudan that they do not interpose in the property of the deceased. Even if the person leaves thousands, his property would remain with the leader of the Muslims until the inheritor takes it according to sharʿ . 6 The motivations behind his comparison of a regional custom in Malabar with the one in Sudan (or broadly ‘black Africa’, if we follow H.A.R. Gibb’s translation) are very intriguing, especially as he says that the property of the deceased person inally reaches the legal inheritor. 7 This implies that many parts of the Islamic world, probably including his native place in North Africa, did not follow the ‘sharʿī’ mode of dividing inheritance in the absence of an inheritor. Further research is needed to make a conclusive argument, but for the moment suice to note down the striking similarity in the legal practices of Muslims in Malabar/India and Sudan/East Africa as remarked by a North African jurist who had travelled extensively in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Another important East African who worked in South Asia was Yāqūt al-Ghiyāthī from ifteenth-century Bengal. He undertook a challenging project of establishing a law college in Mecca on behalf of the Bengali king, Ghiyāth al-Dīn Aʿz ˙ am Shah (r. 1390-1411). 8 We do not have much biographical information on Yāqūt outside the details of his journey from Bengal to Mecca and his incredible activities in the city as told by the Meccan historians. But certainly he was part of a larger Abyssinian community in Bengal in the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries, similar to many more in the whole of South Asia and across the Indian Ocean rim. Yāqūt was well-versed in navigation, administration and diplomacy – a few matters that became very explicit during his Mecca mission. I have written in detail about this fascinating project of legal connections and circulations of people, ideas and money between the Swahili Coast, Bengal and Mecca. 9 Only to elaborate briely on Yāqūt, we do not know what his status was in the Bengali royal court. The lorid Arabic nouns like Luʾ luʾ [pearl], Jawhar [jewel] and Yāqūt [sapphire] were given as distinctive names to the black African slaves sold in the Middle Eastern markets, and many of them sustained those names even after their manumission. From the cognomen Yāqūt it is diicult to identify whether he was a slave, freeman, or an agent of the king. The Meccan historian al-Fāsī gives his full name as Yāqūt al-Sult ˙ ānī al-Ghiyāthī, which clearly indicates his bondage with Sultan Ghiyāth al-Dīn Aʿz ˙ am Shah. 10 Furthermore, al-Fāsī praises him by calling him ‘janāb al-ʿ ālī al-iftikhārī’ [his excellency and lord], surely for the ideas and money he brought into Mecca. Aʿz ˙ am Shah assigned him with responsibilities to purchase land, to construct appropriate building for madrasa and to take necessary formal steps in making the waqf legally valid. Yāqūt went several steps further by gathering support from many Meccan elites, many of whom he eventually appointed as professors in the madrasa, including the historian and judge al-Fāsī. After accomplishing his mission, Yāqūt commenced his return to Bengal, but died on his way at Hormuz. The larger network Yāqūt al-Ghiyāthī and Faqīh Saʿ īd are two important yet diver- gent examples of a larger low of Africans who participated in the making of Islamic law in premodern Asia. If Sa ʿ īd represents the proper jurists and itinerant scholars, Yāqūt stands for the agents who facilitated the intellectual exchanges. There are many more similar Swahilis who worked across South and Southeast Asia during these periods in diferent roles and positions. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, for example, also talks about one ʿ Abd al-ʿ Azīz al-Makdashawī who worked as the governor of the