Polyglossic Malabar: Arabi-Malayalam and the Muhiyuddinmala in the age of transition (s–s) P. K. YASSER ARAFATH Abstract This article examines the relations between trade, faith, and textual traditions in early modern Indian Ocean region and the birth of Arabi-Malayalam, a new system of writing which has facilitated the growth of a vernacular Islamic textual tradition in Malabar since the seventeenth century. As a transliterated scriptorial-literary tradition, Arabi-Malayalam emerged out of the polyglossic lingual sphere of the Malabar Coast, and remains as one of the important legacies of social and religious interactions in pre- colonial south Asia. The first part of this article examines the social, epistemic and normative reasons that led to the scriptorial birth of Arabi-Malayalam, moving beyond a handful of Malayalam writings that locate its origin in the social and economic necessities of Arab traders in the early centuries of Islam. The second part looks at the complex relationship between Muslim scribes and their vernacular audience in the aftermath of Portuguese violence and destruction of Calicut—one of the largest Indian Ocean ports before the sixteenth century. This part focuses on Qadi Muhammed bin Abdul Aziz and his Muhiyuddinmala, the first identifiable text in Arabi-Malayalam, examining how the Muhiyuddin- mala represents a transition from classical Arabic theological episteme to the vernacular-popular poetic discourse which changed the pietistic behaviour of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar. This article proposes that the transregional and trans-local mobility of Malabar trading communities in the Indian Ocean region facilitated a complex range of translingual recipro- cities that finally resulted in the emergence of what is generally known as Arabi-Malayalam literature. 1 Arabi-Malayalam evolved as a major lingual-scriptorial form of Islamic pietistic 1 There are a few Malayalam works on Arabi-Malayalam but these mostly focus on its etymological and lex- icological aspects, overlooking the complex ideational and historical processes that led to its growth as a lingual- scriptorial variant: see O. Abu, Arabi-Malayala Sahitya Charitram (Kottayam, ); C. N. Ahmad Moulavi and K. K. Mohammad Abdul Kareem, Mahattaya Mappila Sahitya Paramparyam (Calicut, ); and P. K. Muhammad Kunhi, Muslimkalum Kerala Samskaravum (Thrissur, ). In a recent work, M. H. Ilias and Shamsad Hussain have attempted to analyse the morphological and phonological characteristics of Arabi-Malayalam script. However, larger questions about the historical origin of this script and important narrative shifts that happened in the Muhiyud- dinmala remained outside the purview of their study, see Arabi-Malayalam: Linguistic and Cultural Traditions of Mappila Muslims of Kerala (New Delhi, ). JRAS, Series , ,  (), pp. – © The Royal Asiatic Society  doi:./S https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186320000085 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 106.200.58.90, on 12 Aug 2020 at 13:39:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at