1492: The Year Our World Began (31 page)

Aggression, however, probably contributed less to the spread of Islam than peaceful proselytization: acculturation by trade, and the slow, sometimes unrewarding work of missionaries. In what would become Malaysia and Indonesia, as in Africa, the other great arena of Islamic expansion at the time, the means of propagation was the “jihad of words.”
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Trade shunted living examples of Muslim devotion between cities and installed Muslims as port supervisors, customs officials, and agents to despotic monopolists. Trading states speckled the Swahili coast, but the conventional notion that they housed oceangoing peoples is false. For generations, the Swahili responded to the racism of Western masters by cultivating a non-African image, emphasizing their links of culture and commerce with Arabia and India. After independence, some of their hinterland neighbors took revenge, treating them as colonists, rather as the inland communities of Liberia and Sierra Leone treated the descendants of resettled slaves in Monrovia and Freetown as an alien and justly resented elite. In Kenya, political demagogues threatened to expel the Swahili, as if they were foreign intruders. Yet the Swahili language, though peppered with Arabic loanwords, is closely akin to other Bantu languages. The Swahili came to the coast from the interior, perhaps thousands of years ago, and retained links with the hinterland that their trade with visitors from the Indian Ocean never displaced.

The coastal location of Swahili cities conveys a misleading impression of why the sea was important to them: they were sited for proximity to fresh water, landward routes, and sources of widely traded coral as much as for ocean access. The elite usually married their daughters to business partners inland rather than to foreign sojourners. Few cities had good anchorages. More than half had poor harbors, or none at all. The town of Gedi, which covered eighteen acres inside ten-foot-high walls and had a palace over a hundred feet wide, was four miles from the sea. Swahili traders plied their own coasts and frequented their own hinterlands, acquiring gold, timber, honey, civet, rhinoceros horn, and ivory to sell to the Arabs, Indians, and Gujaratis who carried them over the ocean. They were classic middlemen who seem to have calculated that the risks of transoceanic trading were not worthwhile as long as customers came to their coasts.

Visiting Portuguese in the early sixteenth century noticed the love-hate relationship that bound the Swahili to the hinterland. On the one hand, the two zones needed each other for trade; on the other, religious enmity between the Muslims and their pagan neighbors committed them to war. This, thought Duarte Barbosa, was why the coastal dwellers had “cities well walled with stone and mortar, inasmuch as they are often at war with the Heathen of the mainland.”
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There were material causes of conflict, too. The Swahili needed plantations, acquired at hinterland communities’ expense, to grow food, and slaves to serve them. Coastal and interior peoples exchanged raids and demands for tribute as well as regular trade. When Portuguese observers arrived in the early sixteenth century, they got the impression that Mombasa, the greatest of the Swahili port cities, lived in awe of its neighbors, the “savage,” poison-arrow-toting Mozungullos, who had “neither law nor king nor any other interest in life except theft, robbery, and murder.”
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But Islam provided the standard excuse for hostilities, if not their real cause. The religion was well established among the urban Swahili, after nearly half a millennium of proselytization by visiting merchants and the Sufis and sheikhs they sometimes carried in their ships. By the early fourteenth
century, visiting Muslims commonly praised their orthodoxy. It was probably not until the sixteenth century, when Portuguese piracy disrupted the Indian Ocean trade of the Swahili coast, that local Islam began to diverge from the mainstream.

For some cities, the ocean was all-important. Kilwa was one of the greatest of Swahili emporia because the monsoon made it accessible to transoceanic traders in a single season. Ports farther south, like Sofala, though rich in gold, were accessible only after a laborious wait, usually in Kilwa, for the wind to turn. Merchants from Gujarat seem rarely to have bothered to go farther south than Mombasa or Malindi, where merchants congregated with products from all along the coast as far as Sofala. The Gujaratis paid for their purchases with fine Indian textiles of silk and cotton.

On the opposite shore of the ocean, in Southeast Asia, it was harder for Islam to penetrate agrarian states with only limited interest in long-range trade. In what came to be called Indochina, the Khmer kingdom was a self-contained unit, which produced enough rice to feed its people. The rulers never showed any interest in going into business in their own right, though around the turn of the century they shifted their capital to what is now Phnom Penh in an apparent effort to increase their control over the revenue from maritime trade. Vietnam—which was culturally and physically close to China—adopted policies actively hostile to overseas commerce. Le Thanh Ton, who ruled from 1460 to 1497, forbade the waste of land, broke up great estates, colonized frontier zones with prisoners and demobilized soldiers, and gave fiscal exemptions to diggers of ditches and planters of mulberries. He almost doubled the size of his kingdom by southward conquests that took the frontier beyond Qui Nonh. He issued regulations that seem too perfect ever to have been put into practice, in which all his subjects were arrayed in order of rank under the rule of royally appointed bureaucrats. He scattered temples of literature around the country, where aspiring mandarins could study the works of Confucius and prepare for civil-service examinations on the Chinese pattern. While empowering
Confucian bureaucrats and imposing a strict law code inspired by Confucius, Le held on to popular sensibilities by representing himself as the reincarnation of a heroic ancestor.

Native kings in the region had a lot to lose if they committed to Islam: the awe inspired by reincarnation, the role of preceding the Buddhist millennium or incarnating a Hindu deity, the custodianship of relics sacred to Hindus and Buddhists. Ramathibodi II, for instance, who came to the throne of Ayutthaya—the kingdom that became Siam—in 1491, engaged in trials of magic power with neighboring kings. Khmer kingship relied on the notion that kings were Buddhas or incarnations of Shiva. In a region of divine kingship and agrarian states, it was hard for Islam to get a toehold: neither merchants nor missionaries could exert much influence.

The Malay world that flanked Indochina and lay offshore was more permeable, full of trading states and seafaring traditions. As the sultan of Melaka observed in 1468, “to master the blue oceans people must engage in trade, even if their countries are barren.”
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Camõens, who ranged the East and celebrated it in verse in the late sixteenth century, described the Malay world:

Malacca see before, where ye shall pitch

Your great Emporium, and your Magazins:

The Rendezvous of all that Ocean round

For Merchandizes rich that there abound.

From this (’tis said) the Waves impetuous course,

Breaking a passage through from Main to main,

Samatra’s noble Isle of old did force,

Which then a Neck of Land therewith did chain:

That this was Chersonese till that divorce,

And from the wealthy mines, that there remain,

The Epithite of “Golden” had annext:

Some think, it was the Ophyr in the Text.
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Muslim merchants frequented the region for centuries before any natives accepted Islam. Some of them formed communities in port cities. Missionaries followed: scholars in search of patronage, discharging the Muslim’s obligation to proselytize on the way; spiritual athletes in search of exercise, anxious to challenge native shamans in contests of ascetic ostentation and supernatural power. In some areas Sufis made crucial contributions. They could empathize with the sort of popular animism and pantheism that “finds Him closer than the veins of one’s neck.”
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As missionaries, Sufis were the most effective agents. As always with conversion stories, it is hard to distinguish miracle tales, invented in retrospect to hallow events, from real evidence. The legends of conversions engineered by Sufis are untrustworthy, partly because they are often warped by the writers’ wider agendas, and partly because they tend to be shaped by traditional topoi.

Sacred autobiography is predictably full of stories of childish orchard raiding and youthful peccadilloes, suddenly visited darkness, suddenly glimpsed light. The crucial questions relate to the self-reprofiling of whole societies. This is a process, still little understood, by which the term “Islam” becomes part of the collective self-designation of whole communities, embracing numbers of people who have never had a conversion experience or anything like it. Underlying collective realignments of this sort are further, remoter processes, by which Islam captures elites or becomes part of the landscape of life in a particular society or—if I may be permitted another metaphor—a thread in the fabric of social identity. For most people in the society that plays host to the new religion, it commonly involves passive reception of new doctrines and devotions, without any active commitment.

According to tradition, the first ruler to embrace Islam in Southeast Asia, in Pasai, on Sumatra, in the late thirteenth century, received the message of the faith in a dream. He then invited a holy man over to
complete his conversion. In the following century, other Sumatran states followed suit, and there were Muslim-led states on the Malayan mainland. Early in the fifteenth century, Melaka’s ruler adopted Islam. From the end of the century conversions multiplied, spread by dynastic marriages or by a radiationlike process in which Sufis fanned outward from each successive center to which they came. Melaka seems to have provided manpower for the conversion of states in Java, which in turn, around the beginning of the new century, did the same job for Ternate in the Moluccas, from where missionaries continued to neighboring islands. Provincial rulers guaranteed the flow of revenue to the sultans’ courts in exchange for the unmolested exercise of power. “As for us who administer territory,” said a nobleman in a Malay chronicle, “what concern is that of yours?…What we think should be done we do, for the ruler is not concerned with the difficulties we administrators encounter. He only takes account of the good results we achieve.”
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Shortly before his death in 1478, the Sufi proselytizer Abu-al-Mewahib al-Shadili summarized what he called the “maxims of illumination”—
Qawanin Hikam al-Ishraq.
Sufis, he thought, were an elite: others were “people of deviation and innovation.”
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Every one of his maxims began with a text from the Quran. Mystical experience was like memory. To be “immersed in the sea of unity” with God, the mystic had to efface all thoughts of his attributes, concentrate on his essence, and “then the distance that is between him and you is effaced.”
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Abandon intelligence, reason, experiment, and authority, al-Shadili urged.
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Lose consciousness of the universe. Practice permanent penance, for “the repentance of ordinary men is a passing mood.” Sufis could approach enlightenment because they had come to acknowledge the power of evil over them and the need to repent of it. The author quoted the Gospels as well as the Quran.
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Al-Shadili recommended watchfulness as a means to identification with God. “The thought of Truth’s sentinel came to the heart of a servant who was lonely among men.” “There passed through the heart and thought of a longing person a glimpse of the splendour and beauty of
the loved one which turned him like unto a person bewitched by the sorcery of the Babylonians: all this took place when his longings and nightingales of joy were loosed.” The author was glib with images from the mystical repertoire common to many cultures and dangerous in Islam—likening experience of God to physical love, pagan magic, even drunkenness. A mystical experience overcame him in a garden, when the trees rustled:

The winds of union with them blew at daybreak,

With gusts of yearning in the heart.

The branch of love merrily shook in me,

When fruits of love fell here and there.

Suns of union with penetrating rays

Pierced the awnings of the veils.

Clear joy shone over us and thus sparkled

The face of compassion which dispelled all blame.
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While Columbus was beginning preparations for his first transoceanic voyage, one of the greatest mystics of the age died in what is now Afghanistan. Nur ad-Din Abd ar-Rahman Jami was a consummate poet—the last great Persian poet, some say, and the biographer of a long line of Sufis. He was one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the age, whose fame in Asia was wider and deeper than any mere hero of the Renaissance could have achieved, at the time, within the narrow limits of Christendom. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire and the heirs of the Mongol khans competed unsuccessfully for his services as a political adviser: he preferred a life of art and meditation. Some of his works were translated into Chinese and sustained considerable influence over the next two hundred years in Buddhist as well as Muslim mysticism. Besides accounts of his mystical experiences, he wrote an explanation of mystical principles, called
Gleams
(
Lawa’ih
). Sense veiled reality. The self was a distraction: “[T]ry to conceal yourself,” he recommended, “from your own gaze.”
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Learning was a snare—a judgment many Fran
ciscan mystics in Europe would have endorsed. “How can love,” he demanded, “appear from the folds of your books?”
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He would have agreed with most Western mystics on another point: mystics had to beware of self-indulgence and make love practical. Jami advised, “Don’t count the Real as apart from the world, for the world is in the Real, and in the world the Real is none but the world.”
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For himself, however, his goals were otherworldly. The world was hardly worth contemplation. He dismissed it with a shrug—almost a smirk—of ennui: “I’ve had my fill of every loveliness not eternal.”
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Jami was aware that annihilation meant the eclipse of consciousness: “Annihilation of annihilation is included in annihilation…. If you are conscious of the tip of a hair and speak of annihilation’s road, you’ve left the road.”
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Even religion was irrelevant to the mystic, whose “custom is annihilation and whose rule poverty.” When you achieve union with God, why consort with mullahs? The same sort of thought occurred to Christian mystics.