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Turn a map of the world upside down and the Indian Ocean can be seen as a vast, irregularly-shaped bowl, bounded by the shorelines of Africa and Asia, the islands of Indonesia, and the coast of Western Australia.
Unlike the Atlantic and Pacific, merging at their extremes into the polar seas, this is an entirely tropical ocean; to mention it calls up a vision of palm-fringed islands and lagoons where rainbow-hued fish dart amid the coral. That is the tourist-brochure image, but behind it lies the Indian Ocean of history – a centre of human progress, a great arena in which many races have mingled, fought and traded for thousands of years.
The earliest civilizations, in Egypt and the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, had direct access to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. At the hub, stretching towards the equator, lay the Indian sub-continent, itself the site of ancient cultures in the Indus valley. Since long before the time of Alexander the Great, travellers had brought back tales of the rich and voluptuous East. The emperor Trajan, arriving triumphantly at the Persian Gulf in A.D. 116, and watching mariners set sail for India, had mourned that he was too old to make the voyage and gaze upon its wonders.
For almost a thousand years after the fall of the Roman empire the western side of the Indian Ocean, the focus of this book, was as much an entity as the Mediterranean, surpassing it in wealth and power. The arts and scholarship flourished there, in cities to which merchants came from all corners of the known world. There was also much turmoil, as conquering armies spawned in the remote parts of Asia swept down to overthrow old empires and impose new dynasties.
The lives of ordinary people, however, were always ruled more by nature than by great events, by the perpetual monsoons rather than by ephemeral monarchies. The word ‘monsoon’ comes from the Arabic mawsim, ‘season’, and ever since sailors had dared to venture on voyages across the open seas these seasonal winds had borne their ships between India and its distant neighbours. For six months they blow one way, then in the reverse direction during the other half of the year. The summer monsoon, coming from East Africa and the southern seas, is pulled eastwards by the rotation of the earth after passing the equator, so that it sweeps across India and up through the Bay of Bengal. Winds are fiercest between June and August.
The sea-captains of old might not understand why the monsoons happened (how colder air was being sucked northwards over the ocean in summer towards the hot lands of Asia, then southwards from the Himalayas and the Indian plains in winter); for them it was sufficient that the winds came on time, year in and year out, to fill their sails. For the farmers of India it was likewise enough to know that the summer monsoon would bring them rain.
However, on sea and land, the monsoon was always feared in its times of fury, when no vessel dared set out, when floods swept away villages, and cyclones left devastation.
It might be argued that the inescapable rhythm of this climate induced a certain fatalism among the Indian Ocean peoples. Yet the monsoon has also long been recognized as one of nature’s most benign phenomena – ‘a subject worthy of the thoughts of the greatest philosophers’, in the words of John Ray, a seventeenth-century English scientist.
Until the ‘Age of Discovery’, there had been a thousand years of almost total ignorance in Europe about the Indian Ocean and the lands encompassing it. Once, during the heyday of the Roman empire, a flourishing trade had existed with the East, conducted mainly by Greek mariners who had learned how to use the monsoons.
They brought back jewels, cinnamon, perfumes and incense, as well as silks and diaphanous Indian cloth much sought after by the women of Rome. But with the collapse of classical civilization in Europe, all the knowledge acquired by the Greeks was lost to Europeans.
When medieval Europe started looking for a new route to India, to outflank Islam’s barrier across the Middle East, its navigators were long thwarted by the great bulk of Africa, until the Portuguese finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India and back in 1497–99 was by far the longest sea journey ever undertaken by Europeans.
This book shows how the European presence from the sixteenth century onwards changed Indian Ocean life irrevocably. Thriving kingdoms were subdued and former relationships between religions and races thrown into disarray. With the advent of western capitalism, ancient patterns of trade soon became as extinct as the dodo (which Dutch sailors had unceremoniously wiped out on the island of Mauritius). Yet although the guns of Europe could create new empires in the East, the populations there were too great to be held down permanently. What happened in the Americas was never going to be repeated in Asia. The record of European intervention and the response to it is made up of violence, depravity and courage.
Through thousands of years of change in the Indian Ocean arena, the African giant forming its long western flank was rarely anything other than a mute bystander. Its interior was terra incognita, its peoples excluded from fruitful dealings with the rest of the world. Since the eighth century, Africa’s contact with the Indian Ocean had come under the sway of scores of Arab-ruled trading ports, strung along two thousand miles of coastline from Somalia to beyond the Zambezi river delta. These settlements looked to the sea; the interior of the continent interested them only as a source of ivory, gold, leopard-skins and slaves. For three hundred years after the arrival of the Europeans, little happened to alter that pattern.
But Africa south of the equator has been twice liberated since the mid-nineteenth century: first from its isolation, then from a colonialism which, although short-lived, seemed to have forged unbreakable bonds with the North, with Europe. Now the monsoons of history are blowing afresh, as the balance of world power swings back to the East. The start of the twenty-first century is seen as ushering in a new ‘Age of Asia’, in which the natural unity of the Indian Ocean can once more assert itself. This is the arena where the full potential of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa will be put to the test.
A NOTE ON SPELLINGS (#ulink_64d25bd7-e8eb-5793-ad5b-49c1cb4c2e6f)
Where versions of names converted from non-roman scripts are widely recognized, they are adhered to: for instance, the spelling Mecca is used rather than Makkah, even though the latter is more exact. Likewise, the renowned sultan of Zanzibar in the second half of the nineteenth century should strictly be entitled al-Sayyid Sa’id, but his name was always ‘Europeanised’ as Seyyid Said. For other transliterations from Arabic the Encyclopaedia of Islam is generally followed, but without diacritical marks. With Chinese names the modern pinyin romanization has been adopted – so that the admiral formerly known in English as Cheng Ho appears as Zheng He. Most prefixes to root words in African languages are omitted for simplicity’s sake.
Portuguese monarchs and princes are, in the main, referred to by the familiar anglicized versions of their names. Lesser beings are left in the original.
Geographical terms accord as far as possible with those in use at the times being written about. Thus Ceylon describes the island which became Sri Lanka in 1972. There is often a wide divergence between early European attempts at Indian names and those employed today; an example is Calicut, the once renowned port which appears on modern maps as Kozhikode.
PART ONE (#ulink_ae7ac41a-5554-5154-9556-cead644648bd)
ONE (#ulink_b7e210e5-b89f-5bc4-bf33-d6d7d8bc626b)
Wonders of India, Treasures of China (#ulink_b7e210e5-b89f-5bc4-bf33-d6d7d8bc626b)
Unmindful of the dangers of ambition and worldly greed, I resolved to set out on another voyage. I provided myself with a great store of goods and, after taking them down the Tigris, set out from Basra, with a band of honest merchants.
—Sinbad, starting his third journey, in The Thousand and One Nights
A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, a Persian sea-captain retired to write his memoirs. They made him famous in his day, although only a single copy of the text now survives, in a mosque in Istanbul. Captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar called his book The Wonders of India, yet he did not limit himself to describing the civilization of the Hindus. Buzurg presented his readers with a kaleidoscope of life all round the shores of the tropical ocean across which he had sailed throughout his career. His spontaneity brings back to life the people of his time far better than any scholarly reconstruction could achieve: passengers terrified in a storm-tossed ship, merchants angry at being cheated, young men in love, proud monarchs staring down from bejewelled thrones.
He included, for amusement’s sake, many fantastical anecdotes about mermaids, giant snakes which swallowed elephants, two-headed snakes whose bite killed so quickly ‘there is not even time to wink’, and women of immense sexual prowess. ‘Buzurg’ was just a nickname, meaning ‘big’, and he might well have earned it through his love of tall stories, rather than by being large in physique. However, his avowed aim was to take his audience on a tour – entertaining yet instructive – through many lands. Despite similarities between The Wonders of India and The Thousand and One Nights, the distinction is that Sinbad was a fictional hero, while much that Buzurg wrote stands up to historical scrutiny.
References to known characters and recorded events show that he was working on his memoirs in about the year 950 (A.H. 341 by his own Islamic calendar). He lived in the port of Siraf, at the southern end of the Persian Gulf, from whose narrow straits the Indian Ocean opened out like a fan. Just as the Romans had called the Mediterranean mare nostrum (‘our sea’) so the Indian Ocean was for Buzurg and his contemporaries an extension of the Bilad al-Islam, the World of Islam.
Siraf had 300,000 inhabitants, but was hemmed in by mountains. The city became like a cauldron in the summer months, and one of Buzurg’s contemporaries called it the hottest place in Persia. It was also one of the richest. Fountains played constantly in the courtyards of the wealthier merchant families, and after dark the light from scented oil, burning in gilded chandeliers, shone down on divans draped with silk and velvet. Walls of the tall houses were panelled with teak from India, and mangrove poles from Africa supported the flat roofs. The biggest buildings in Siraf were the governor’s palace and the great mosque. Ships in the harbour brought cargoes from many lands, including China; smaller craft took goods further up the Gulf to Basra, where ocean-going vessels often could not unload because of the silt brought down by the Tigris river.
Even Siraf could not pretend to compete in luxury or grandeur with Basra – still less with Baghdad, capital of the caliphs. The colossal palaces beside the Tigris, their domes supported on columns of transluscent alabaster, were the wonder of the Arab world. The historian al-Muqaddasi, a contemporary of Buzurg, extolled its splendour: ‘Baghdad, in the heart of Islam, is the city of well-being; in it are the talents of which men speak, and elegance and courtesy. Its winds are balmy and its science penetrating. In it are to be found the best of everything and all that is beautiful … All hearts belong to it, and all wars are against it.’
Although the power of the caliphs, the Commanders of the Faithful, had been fractured by dynastic rivalries, Baghdad still controlled an empire stretching from India to Egypt. Three centuries after its founding, the faith of Islam embraced many more people and far greater territories than Christianity, which was already near the end of its first thousand years. Buzurg’s writings open a window on to this moment, at the ushering in of a new millennium during which the two religions were to be in almost ceaseless conflict.
The cities of Iraq, Persia and India would have astounded the impoverished peoples in the West, had they been aware of them; but Europe’s horizons still scarcely reached beyond the uncertain boundaries of its semi-literate warlords. Western Europe lay on the outer fringes of world civilization, whereas Baghdad could boast of being at its centre, with Constantinople the only rival. The unifying concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘Christendom’ had yet to take root. Half-pagan, half-Christian raiders from Scandinavia were still able to cause havoc almost everywhere.
Some remnants of classical learning had survived within the walls of European monasteries, but these could not compare with the libraries of Arab scholars, who by now had almost all the great works of ancient Greece available to them in translation. These writings would have been more readily available to Buzurg, a sea-captain in Persia, than to the most learned of Christian bishops in Europe.
Outside the boundaries of Islam, which extended along the coast of North Africa and into Spain, direct contacts between East and West were few. Almost the only European Christians who travelled further than Italy were traders going surreptitiously to Alexandria, pilgrims striving to reach Jerusalem, and young girls and boys sold into slavery. The girls were destined to serve in the Arab harems, in company with female slaves from Ethiopia and the remote African lands south of the Red Sea. The boys were eunuchs, castrated at a notorious assembly point at Verdun in France, taken over the Pyrenees into Spain, and shipped from there to the Indian Ocean countries in the charge of Jewish merchants known as the Radhaniyya (‘those who know the route’).
However, there had been a brief time, at the start of the ninth century, when a positive understanding between Christian Europe and Islam seemed possible. Despite their remoteness from one another, the caliph Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor, several times exchanged ambassadors, bearing messages about a never-fulfilled Arab plan for a concerted war to capture Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. (The exchange of envoys is mentioned only by Charlemagne’s scribes; Islamic chroniclers probably thought it unworthy of note, since Harun received ambassadors in Baghdad from so many lands and despatched his own in every direction.) In his youth Harun had besieged Constantinople, and now wanted to exploit the divisions between the Catholics and the eastern Christians. He only took this course after vainly despatching envoys to the Byzantine emperor, Constantine VI, urging him to convert to Islam.
The caliph made no such suggestion to Charlemagne, but sent him extravagant presents: jewels, ivory chessmen, embroidered silken gowns, a water clock and a tame white elephant called Abu al-Abbas. Named after the first caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, the animal had once been the property of an Indian rajah. The man who successfully led it home from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean was a Jew named Isaac, sole survivor of a three-man mission to Baghdad. After a hazardous sea crossing to Italy, the elephant was led over the Alps and finally plodded into Charlemagne’s palace in Aix-la-Chapelle on 20 July 802. The emperor soon became devoted to Abu al-Abbas, who withstood the European climate for eight years, until Charlemagne rashly took him to the bleak Luneberg Heath in northern Germany, to intimidate some marauding Danes.
These contacts between the caliph of Baghdad and the ‘philosopher-king’ of the Franks had proved to be only a brief flicker of light across the religious and cultural divide. Charlemagne had arranged, with Harun’s approval, for the founding of a Christian hostelry in Jerusalem, and this was the basis of a medieval legend that he had been the first crusader, leading a pilgrim army to the Holy Land. However, the Crusades were launched later – by Pope Urban II in 1095 – and the Arabs were then to be stunned by the uncouth ferocity of their religious foes.
Whereas Christian Europe was confined and cut off from Asia, the non-Christian Europeans – the Arabs settled in Spain and the Mediterranean islands – were free to wander across all the known world, even as far as China. It meant travelling first through Egypt and Arabia to reach some port such as Siraf, from where the ‘China ships’ set out on what was then the longest voyage known to mankind. In one of Buzurg’s stories there is a passing mention of a man originally from Cadiz who had been bold enough to stow away on a ship bound for China. This man had crossed the divide between two contrasting maritime traditions. The twisting, creaking vessel destined for China would have been totally unlike the heavy, broad-bottomed craft, held together with massive nails, which he would have remembered seeing in the harbours of Spain.
The use of coconut-fibre cording to sew the timbers of the Indian Ocean ships was often explained away by the myth of the ‘Magnetic Mountain’; that ships built with nails were doomed if they sailed near the mountain, since every scrap of metal in their hulls flew out towards it. In one of the Sinbad tales, a captain ‘hurls his turban on the deck and tears his beard’ when the Magnetic Mountain looms up in front of his ship, for he knows he is doomed: ‘The nails flew from the ship and shot off towards the mountain. The vessel fell to pieces and we were all flung into the raging sea. Most of us were drowned outright.’
The mundane truth, however, was that Arabia suffered from a shortage of iron, and its swordsmiths always had first call on metal imported from such places as Ceylon and East Africa. On the other hand, it was some consolation that if a ‘sewn’ ship had to be beached for repairs the raw materials were usually to hand, since coconut palms grew almost everywhere beside the Indian Ocean. The ocean also supplied materials for preserving ships’ hulls, which were thickly smeared with oil from the carcasses of sharks and whales (as a ship-building port, Siraf had a factory for treating blubber); the aim was to protect timbers from rotting and keep them flexible, so that ships were less likely to be holed should they strike a coral reef.
These ‘sewn boats’ of the Indian Ocean have a long history. The earliest reference to them is in a nautical guide written by a Greek voyager in about A.D.50. Known as the Periplus [Circuit] of the Erythrean Sea, this survey describes in a practical style the Indian Ocean’s trading conditions and the people to be met with round its shores. It speaks of an East African port named Rhapta (whose site is yet to be discovered) where much ivory and tortoiseshell could be bought and the ‘sewn boats’ were built.
Ships bound from Arabia to China sailed southwards along the coast of India to Ceylon (known as Sirandib, the Isle of Rubies), eastwards to Sumatra, through the Malacca straits at the southernmost tip of Asia, then north into the China Sea. The round voyage took a year and a half. The captains of such vessels often chose to travel in convoys, to be less at the mercy of pirates who were numerous off western India. Sometimes the pirates stationed themselves at intervals across a regular trading route to catch any lone vessel, then extorted goods or money before letting it pass; the overlord of a coastline where the pirates had their havens might even take a share of such proceeds.
However, the lure of China was irresistible, even though the risks of the voyage were so great. Its products were unequalled, its prowess awesome. About China, anything was believed possible.
Buzurg never claims to have sailed there, but relates without a hint of scepticism several pieces of information passed on to him by friends: one describes how a high imperial functionary had made a state entry into Khanfu (Canton) with an escort of 100,000 horsemen; another told Buzurg that a Chinese ruler, giving an audience to an Arab merchant, had been accompanied by some 500 female slaves of all colours, wearing different silks and jewels. While allowance must be made for the exaggerations of travellers’ tales, it is true that the cavalry in oriental armies was numbered in tens of thousands, and that despotic rulers always took pride in their numbers of concubines.
Arabia became entranced by the magnificence of goods from China (porcelain is called ‘Chinese’ in Arabic to this day). Even the Red Sea had been called the ‘Sea of China’, because it was from there in the earliest times that ships began their voyages with cargoes of ivory, incense and gold, to barter for luxuries in that country the Romans, following the Greeks, had called Seres, the ‘land of silk’.
The great Sassanian empire of pre-Islamic Persia had despatched missions to China. Although Persia’s ancient civilization itself had much to offer – the Chinese were happy to imitate its techniques in silverware and blown glass – the rulers of China always took it for granted that every other nation must acknowledge their superiority and come to them; no other race has maintained this trait so rigidly. Although one Chinese scholar is known to have visited Baghdad in the tenth century. Buzurg never mentions any journeys by Chinese merchants to the western side of the Indian Ocean. When monarchs of distant countries sent gifts to the emperor, who was known to Arabs as the Sahib al Sin, these were loftily accepted as tribute, signs of obeisance. In return, Chinese titles were bestowed on the donors.
Despite the perils of ocean travel – or perhaps because of them – voyaging to faraway lands was a prospect that stirred the enthusiasm of the young: expressions of that spirit endure in the outlines of sailing ships, with their crews aboard, scratched into the plaster of excavated houses in ancient Indian Ocean cities. Yet there is no doubt that disasters were frequent. A Chinese official writing in the ninth century noted that ‘white pigeons to act as signals’ were carried by ships coming from the Indian Ocean: ‘Should a ship sink, the pigeons will fly home, even for several thousand miles.’ For sailors, land birds could also be good news, because after weeks on the open sea the first sighting of them confirmed that land must be near. Before the age of charts or precise instruments, a captain had to rely on such signs: a change in the colour of the water or current, drifting debris, even the amount of phosphorescence on the waves at night.
A famous captain who had made the voyage to China seven times is portrayed by Buzurg as a hero; in the end he goes down with his ship. The Indian Ocean vessels, built to carry at most a hundred tons of cargo, and fifty or sixty people, always feared storms, but being becalmed was just as dangerous. Drinking water might run out, or diseases spread from the rat-infested holds. Sometimes the torments of heat and stench drove passengers off their heads. Those who kept their sanity spent much of their time reading holy books, searching through them for auguries of a safe arrival. Everyone yearned for the first cry from the lookout, al-fanjari, standing in the bows, that land was at last in sight.
Often the tales in The Wonders of India display an ironic humour in evoking life at sea. They can also be poignant. When Buzurg writes about how people behave in times of crisis, the intervening centuries suddenly vanish away. He tells of a shipwreck after which the survivors drift for days off the coast of India in a small boat. Among them is a boy whose father had been drowned when the ship went down. Hunger drives the survivors to think of cannibalism, and they decide to kill and eat the boy. ‘He guessed our intentions, and I saw him looking at the sky, and screwing up his eyes and lips in silent prayer. As luck had it, at that moment we saw the first signs of land.’
Not surprisingly, many wandering merchants chose to stay in whichever port most took their fancy, rather than risk a return journey. If there was business to be done, a mosque to pray in, and slaves and concubines to satisfy physical needs, there was little more to be desired. In particular, travellers who reached China safely were often loath to come back. Two centuries before Buzurg was writing, Persians and Arab merchants in the East were already numerous enough to launch a seaborne raid on Canton, presumably to avenge some mistreatment.
One traveller who in Buzurg’s manuscript does return from China is a Jew named Ishaq bin Yahuda. He had begun life in poverty in Sohar, the main port of Oman at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, but after a quarrel with a Jewish colleague decided to seek his fortune abroad. Taking with him his entire wealth, 200 gold dinars, Ishaq goes first to India and later travels on to China.
Only a few years before Ishaq arrived in China there had been upheavals during which more than 100,000 foreign traders and their families were massacred; but he stays and prospers. After thirty years the townspeople of Sohar are astounded to see him come home again, in the year 912. He is no longer travelling as a humble passenger, but in his own ship, packed with treasures such as silk, porcelain, musk, jewels and other precious stones.
Buzurg blandly tells how Ishaq reaches an understanding with the emir of Oman, one Ahmad bin Hilal. ‘To avoid customs and the tax of one-tenth’, they make an ‘arrangement’ worth a million of the silver coins called dirhams. Ishaq also cements their friendship by giving the emir a wonderful gift, a black porcelain vase with a golden lid.
‘What is inside the vase?’ asks the emir.
‘Some fish I cooked for you in China,’ replies the merchant.
‘Fish cooked in China! Two years ago! What a state it must be in!’
The emir lifts the ornate lid and peers inside. The vase contains a golden fish, surrounded by sweet-smelling musk. The fish has eyes made of rubies and the contents of the vase are judged to be worth 50,000 gold dinars.
With his immense wealth Ishaq soon becomes an object of envy. One man who had tried in vain to buy some of his merchandise resolves to seek revenge in Baghdad – a journey of more than 300 parasangs (1,000 miles) from Sohar. Eventually this jealous enemy gains an audience with the caliph al-Muqtadir, and tells him how the Jew has done a secret deal with the emir to avoid paying customs and taxes. He also excites the caliph’s greed with a description of the wonderful goods Ishaq has brought back from China, his silks, porcelains and precious stones. Moreover, the Jew is childless, so if he dies there will be no one to inherit all his property. On hearing this, the caliph calls aside one of his aides, a negro eunuch named Fulful (‘black pepper’), and tells him to go down to Oman with thirty men. Ishaq must be seized at once, and brought to Baghdad. (The subsequent behaviour of the eunuch Fulfill would have seemed entirely in character to a tenth-century Muslim audience. Eunuchs were regarded as villainous and slippery, but in the service of powerful men they often rose high.)
When the emir in Sohar hears about the caliph’s order, he has the Jew arrested, but lets him know that a substantial bribe can win his freedom. The emir then takes another step to keep his rich prisoner out of the caliph’s clutches, and to guard his own position. He spreads the news of what has happened and warns all the other merchants in town that if Ishaq is carried off to Baghdad, none of them will in future be safe from similar treatment. The merchants respond as he has expected, first shutting down the market, then signing petitions, then rioting in the streets. They warn that they will all leave, and tell other merchants to keep away from the coasts of Arabia, where a man’s property is no longer safe.
The emir writes a letter to the caliph, recounting what the merchants have said: ‘We shall be deprived of our living, when ships no longer come here, because Sohar is a town where men get everything from the sea. If small men among us are treated like this, it will be worse for the great. A sultan is like a fire, devouring everything it touches. Since we cannot resist such power, it is better to leave now.’ To drive their message home, the merchants line up their ships at the quayside and prepare them for sailing. Affairs grow so out of hand that the eunuch Fulful and his men decide to flee back to Baghdad. As a parting gesture they seize 2,000 gold dinars belonging to the imprisoned Jew.
After they have gone, Ishaq is freed, but is so possessed by rage that he decides to leave Arabia for ever and settle permanently in China. A ship fitted out, all his possessions are loaded into it, and he sails away. But he never reaches China. When his ship nears Sumatra, on the far side of the Indian Ocean, the ruler of a port there demands a huge sum in transit dues, before allowing him to sail on. When Ishaq refuses to pay, men come at night and murder him. The ruler takes the ship and everything in it.
Without offering any judgements, Buzurg allows the reader to deduce a lot from this story, which he clearly intended to be more than fiction, since historical figures occur in the narrative. Above all, it expounds the unwritten law by which trade was conducted throughout the Indian Ocean: whatever their race or faith, merchants should have the freedom of the seas and be given fair and equal treatment in every port of call. As a shipmaster, Buzurg understood exactly how the merchants shunned places where this rule might be broken. It was later claimed for the port of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Gulf, that it welcomed merchants from all the regions of the world: ‘They bring to Hormuz everything most rare and valuable. There are many people of all religions in this city, and nobody is allowed to insult their religions. That is why this city is called the citadel of security.’
Readers of The Wonders of India would also have discerned a far more personal message in this story. The caliph and his Omani emir were Arabs, but Buzurg and his immediate audience were Persians. Although the Persians had been forcibly Islamicized for more than two centuries (Buzurg wrote in Arabic and prefaced his book with all the correct Muslim sentiments), there were many of his compatriots who looked back nostalgically to the glories of their vanquished empire and even clung to its ancient Zoroastrian religion.
They recalled how their Sassanid cities had been razed, how the Arab conquerors, once the despised nomads of the desert, had set up victory platforms on mounds of Persian dead. The last Sassanid monarch had even sent emissaries to the Chinese to plead for military help, but all in vain.
However, there was no route back to that proud past. While Islam was destined to come under pressure on its western flank from militant Christianity, throughout the Indian Ocean its influence still grew – within India itself, and beyond to Indonesia. Already Islam had taken control of the eastern shores of Africa, to which it looked to meet a perpetual need for human labour.
TWO (#ulink_078fe962-ca78-54fe-b76b-417c60b1e706)
Lure of the African Shore (#ulink_078fe962-ca78-54fe-b76b-417c60b1e706)
I am being led in Damascus without honour,
as though I am a slave from Zenj.
—from a poem by the historian Abu Makhuaf (d. 774)
EAST AFRICA had been called Azania by the Greeks, but was now known as the Land of Zanj: the Land of the Negroes. The word Zanj (or Zenj) was originally Persian, but had been adopted by other languages. Once simply used to denote colour, the epithet was later applied in particular to Africans or black slaves – almost always one and the same thing if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves on foreign soil.
The prosperous island of Zanzibar took its name from the word Zanj, and was the usual destination of Arab and Persian captains sailing to Africa on the winter monsoon.
This voyage meant going beyond the equator, to latitudes where the guiding stars of the northern hemisphere were no longer visible, yet some captains ventured even further south. They went to the very limits of the monsoon, past the mouth of a great river which, it was said, joined up with the Nile in the centre of Africa. Several days sailing beyond the river they reached Sofala, the last big port on the Zanj coast.
One lure of this remote region was gold, mined somewhere inland by Africans and brought down to Sofala to be bartered for cloth and beads. The gold was taken back to Arabia, where the risks of the long journey to Sofala were well rewarded, because a constant supply of the metal was needed for the minting of dinars, the currency used throughout the Islamic world. (Temples of the conquered religions had long since been stripped of their gold, and so had all the ancient tombs which could be uncovered.)
The Land of Zanj was not for the faint-hearted. Apart from lurid stories of cannibalism, of African warriors whose greatest delight lay in collecting the testicles of unsuspecting travellers, and the tales of tribes who lived on a mixture of milk and blood – drinking blood was most strictly forbidden by the Qu’rān – it was also rumoured that anyone who went to live in Zanj might find all the skin peeling from his body.
Yet what made Zanj distinct from other centres of trade around the Indian Ocean was its principal role as an exporter of pagan (kafir) slaves. Merchants travelled to India to buy embroidered muslins and jewellery, to China for silks and ornate dishes. But anyone sailing to the Land of Zanj would always expect to buy some young and healthy blacks. These slaves earned good prices in the lands along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean: a male labourer purchased with a few lengths of cloth could be sold for thirty gold dinars. If transported as far as the Mediterranean these human chattels brought even more handsome profits; a white slave or a horse would fetch less than thirty gold dinars, but the shortage of black slaves made them worth up to 160 dinars each. Some rulers took pride in having a personal guard of black warriors.
Another prolific source of slaves was the mountainous country known as Abyssinia, reached from the western side of the Red Sea. This name derives from Habash, the Arabic word for the region. In time, anyone who was black tended to be called an ‘Abyssinian’. Al-Muqaddasi, who had been so lyrical about Baghdad, was more mundane when he listed the goods imported through Aden: ‘leather bucklers, Abyssinian slaves, eunuchs, tiger-skins and other articles.’
Aden stood at the mouth of the Red Sea, so it was well placed to receive captives from raids on the Abyssinians. The Qur’ān was emphatic that Muslims should never be enslaved (although slaves might become believers); however, the Abyssinians were fair game because they were Christians, an offshoot of Byzantium dating back to the fourth century. Legend says that a Christian philosopher from the Levant was shipwrecked in the Red Sea and drowned, but his two pupils, Frumentius and Aedesius, survived and were found by local people, sitting under a tree, studying the Bible. They sowed the seeds of Christianity in the powerful state of Aksum, which had been in contact with the Mediterranean world since classical times and had supplied the Roman empire with ivory. Whatever the truth of the tale of Frumentius and Aedesius, by the fifth century there were certainly Christian missionaries from Syria active in what became known as Abyssinia.
The Abyssinians were also closely related to the people of Aden and its hinterland. Their forebears had crossed over the Red Sea in pre-Christian times, bringing with them from South Arabia an ancient written language they called Ge’ez, meaning ‘traveller’. (With the triumph of Islam that language had been replaced in its homeland by Arabic, just as the old religion – the worship of the sun, the moon and their divine son – had been obliterated.) There was a time when the Christian Abyssinians even invaded South Arabia, to punish the persecution of their co-religionists there; now they were on the defensive, retreating higher into the mountains to avoid the slave-raiders.
In their centuries of expansion the Arabs had needed vast amounts of slave labour to build their cities, tend their plantations, work in mines and dig canals. It was not a system of their own devising, for the economies of Greece and Rome had also relied upon slavery, and the use of forced African labour has a history going back 5,000 years. The first hieroglyphic account of contact between the Egyptians and their black Nubian neighbours beside the Upper Nile was inscribed on a rock by King Zer of Egypt’s first dynasty (before 3000 B.C.). Vividly illustrated, this shows a captive Nubian chief lashed to the prow of an Egyptian ship and the corpses of his defeated followers floating in the river. Five centuries later, the fourth-dynasty king Sneferu recorded that he had raided Nubia and brought back 7,000 blacks and 200,000 head of cattle. Slaves were used to help build the Pyramids.
In his time the Prophet Muhammad had laid down precise rules about the ownership of unbelievers, but the Qur’ān does not explicitly forbid it. The most common fate for the captive Zanj and Abyssinians was transportation across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and Basra, where they were brought ashore to be sold as labourers. After their long sea journey, during which they were manacled and subdued with whips, they were led from the waterfront between tall houses, past mosques where all men were equal, through streets crowded with donkeys, pack-horses and camels, to the slave market, the suq al-raqiq.
According to the African regions from which they came, the slaves were given group names, mostly no longer identifiable: Kunbula, Land-jawiyya, Naml, Kilab. Those who managed to survive longest learned some Arabic, acquired Arab names, and acted as interpreters, passing on orders to their compatriots. More fortunate were the ones bought to become personal servants, for there was the chance that a kind master might one day make them free. Then colour ceased to matter and they became part of the great community of Islam.
Most pampered of all African slaves were the eunuchs named by al-Muqaddasi as being one of Aden’s main imports. At the time he was writing there were 11,000 eunuchs in Baghdad, 7,000 of whom were Africans. A century earlier the caliph al-Amin had a vast corps of eunuchs; some white, whom he called his ‘locusts’, and some black, whom he called his ‘ravens’. Those who especially gratified the caliphs rose to gain immense power, and the Spanish-born traveller Ibn Jubayr was disgusted when he visited Baghdad to find the army controlled by a young black eunuch named Khalis: ‘We saw him one day going forth, preceded and followed by officers of the army, Turkish, Persians and others, and surrounded by about fifty drawn swords in the hands of the men about him … He has palaces and belvederes beside the Tigris.’ In other ways liberal-minded, Ibn Jubayr despised the blacks, observing: ‘They are a breed of no regard and it is no sin to pour maledictions upon them.’
In his memoirs the Persian sea-captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar turns repeatedly to tales of adventure in the Land of Zanj (with many hints that he writes from personal experience), and slavery is the subject of the most telling of all his stories. Behind its improbabilities lies a realism which vividly evokes the world in which he lived, and he shows a remarkable sympathy towards the principal character, an African chief. The narrator is a wealthy shipowner called Ismailawayh, who has sailed to every part of the Indian Ocean, but knows Africa especially well. In the year 922 he is on a voyage to Qanbalu (the main town on Pemba island, just north of Zanzibar), but storms drive his ship far to the south, towards Sofala. It is swept on to a notorious stretch of coast where the crew fear they are going to be captured and killed or, worst of all, eaten.
On shore, the reception given to the strangers proves far better than Ismailawayh had dared to hope. The chief of the region, ‘a young negro, handsome and well made’, questions them, and says bluntly that he knows they are lying when they claim it had always been their intention to visit his country. But he promises them that they can trade freely, and will not be harmed. After doing good business the shipowner and his crew return to their vessel; the friendly chief, with several of his men, even comes on board to see them off. At this point Ismailawayh reveals his scheme: he will kidnap the unsuspecting blacks, carry them back to Oman, then sell them into slavery.
So as the ship begins to move and the puzzled chief and his men vainly try to get back into their canoes secured alongside, the Arab traders tell them what their fate is going to be. The chief replies with dignity: ‘Strangers, when you fell upon our beaches, my people wished to eat you and pillage your goods, as they had already done to others like you. But I protected you, and asked nothing from you. As a token of my goodwill I even came down to bid you farewell in your own ship. Treat me as justice demands, and let me return to my own land.’
His pleas are ignored and he is pushed down into the hold of the ship with other prisoners: ‘Then night enfolded us in its shrouds and we reached the open sea.’ During the journey northwards, across the equator and into the Arabian Sea, the kidnapped chief never speaks a word, and behaves as if his captors are totally unknown to him. When the ship reaches port he is led away into a slave market and sold, together with his companions.
That seems like the end of a profitable piece of business for Ismailawayh. But some years later he is once again sailing down the Zanj coast with his regular crew and another storm drives them on to the same stretch of shoreline. The ship is quickly surrounded and the crew are marched away to be paraded before the local chief. To their horrified astonishment, the very man they had sold into slavery long ago is seated there once more on the chief’s chair.
‘Ah!’ he says, ‘here are my old friends.’
Ismailawayh and his sailors throw themselves on the floor, and are afraid to look up. ‘But he showed himself gentle and gracious until we had all lifted up our heads, but without daring to look him in the face, so much were we moved by remorse and fear.’ The chief tells them a remarkable story, of how he had been taken as a slave to Basra, then to Baghdad. From there he had escaped from his Arab master, had gone to Mecca, and finally arrived in Cairo. Seeing the Nile, the chief had asked where it flowed from, and was told: the Land of Zanj. He decides to follow its course, in the hope of reaching his homeland. After many adventures in the interior of Africa he succeeds. The first person he meets is an old woman, who does not recognize him but says the witch-doctors have divined that the country’s lost chief is still alive and in the land of the Arabs. At that the wanderer goes joyfully back and reclaims his throne.
The chief tells his former captors that during his years as a slave he became converted to Islam. That is why he has decided to show magnanimity towards them; indeed, thanking them for being the cause of his conversion. But when they start preparing for their voyage back to Arabia, he lets them know that he cannot trust them too far, even though he is now a fellow-Muslim.
‘As for accompanying you to your ship,’ he says, ‘I have my reasons for not doing that.’
With its pointed ironies, the tale of the black king and his white captives would have amused an Islamic audience. The closing message of brotherly reconciliation fitted well with a popular defence of slavery: that Africans so respected their masters that they bore them no grudges. In reality, however, slaves did not always submit quietly to being dragged from their tribes, their villages and the sheltering African forest. There was an Arabic saying: ‘If you starve a Zanj he steals, if you feed him he becomes violent.’ It reflected the fear that slaves would always seek a chance for revenge.
History reveals that they often did. As early as A.D. 689, less than sixty years after the death of Muhammad, there was an uprising by slaves working in the swamps near Basra, at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It did not last long, and the bodies of the rebels were left hanging from their gallows as a warning. Five years later the slaves rose up again, led by an African called Riyah, ‘The Lion of the Zanj’. This time the defiance was better organized and was not put down until 4,000 troops, also black, were let loose in a campaign of extermination. Ten thousand slaves, including women and children, were massacred.
In the middle of the ninth century a still more ferocious event took place: the third ‘Revolt of the Zanj’. This happened during a period of widespread disorder, when there was a host of military and religious challenges to Islam.
A constant threat came from the radical Shi’ite movement, one of the two great contending forces of Islam. The Abbasid dynasty had chosen the other, the Sunni orthodoxy. The Shi’ites, who had helped to put the Abbasids in power, now felt rejected. They were also hostile to the luxurious habits of the caliphs. Power was fragmented, with the law in the hands of the Arabs and the Persians controlling the administration. The army was run by Turks, who were always prone to mutiny.
In the confusion leading up to the third ‘Revolt of the Zanj’ it was a Shi’ite who took advantage of the revolutionary possibilities.
He was a visionary zealot named Ali bin Muhammad – a Persian, but partly of Indian extraction. As a young man he had led an uncertain life, writing poetry and wandering through the deserts with nomadic tribes. Clearly, he had messianic instincts, probably stimulated by his fanatical father, who is reputed to have had a dream, when Ali was still a child, that his son would grow up to destroy Basra, their home-town. As an adult, Ali made it known that he could see writing done by an invisible hand, and could read the thoughts of his enemies. These claims, similar to those being made by ‘holy men’ elsewhere during this time of fanaticism, brought round him a clique of dedicated followers; they included some petty businessmen, including a miller and a lemonade seller.
His verses, of which more than a hundred survive, express his contempt for the self-indulgent rulers of Islam.
How my soul grieves over our palaces in Baghdad and who they contain – every kind of sinner -
And for wines openly drunk there, and for men lusting after sins.
He did not conceal the way his thoughts were moving:
