| Before the advent of Islam the Indian Ocean was part of an overlapping and interconnected local, regional, and transcontinental network of trade routes stretching between China, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Mediterranean. |
The Periplus (Circuit) of the Erythrean Sea, a Greek-language merchant-mariner’s guide of the first century, describes two maritime trade routes commencing from ports on the Red Sea (i.e., Myus Hormus, Leuke Kome, and Berenike). These connected merchants of the classical Greco-Roman world engaged in the trade of items such as textiles, copper, spices, and slaves to their partners on the western Indian Ocean littoral. One route went down through the Red Sea to southern Arabia by Muza (Mocha) and Dioscurides (Socotra), to northeast Africa (Adulis and Opone in Axum/Ethiopia), and down the coast of East Africa by way of Menouthias near Pemba as far as Rhapta (whose site is yet to be discovered, but may be Bagamoyo on the coast of modern Tanzania). The other route veered toward India’s northwestern shores by Barygaza (Broach) and then south to Muziris Cranganore and Komar (Cape Comorin).
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| The movements of people and goods were regulated by the Indian Ocean’s predictable monsoon cycle. The benign northeast or winter monsoon lasts approximately half the year (from November to March). Before the days of powered navigation, the northeast monsoon allowed the large lateen-rigged sails of the Arabian, Persian, and Indian dhows to sail such routes as Aden to Cochin with the sails trimmed to keep the ship pointing as closely as possible into the direction of the wind. They traded up the Malabar coast of India on the opposite tack before returning with their sails full and their yard arms swinging free before the wind. The southwest monsoon, which brings rain to western India and generates more turbulent weather, was best avoided. |
| By the seventh century, the trading worlds described in The Periplus had long disappeared. Western Indian Ocean ports and trade routes were caught up in increasing rivalry between the Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) Empires. The Byzantines supported Ethiopian raids on South Arabia from ports on the Red Sea, while the Persians secured their control over the Persian Gulf (Bahrain) and southern Arabia at Aden, Suhar, and Daba. In between the two empires were the Quraish, who would become the first Muslims engaged in land-based trade at their sanctuary at Mecca. |
Saljuq ruler on his throne. Their position at the western end of the Silk Road enabled the Saljuq sultans to indulge their taste for luxuries, such as the finest Chinese silks and jewels, from Central Asia. Manuscript, 13th century. |
| The early trajectory of Muslim conquest and expansion was away from the Indian Ocean and toward the Mediterranean. But successive Muslim dynasties made efforts to gain political and economic control over the Indian Ocean. The Umayyad conquest and occupation of Daybul in Sind in 712 was a first step in this direction. Subsequently, the Abbasids’ founding of their capital Baghdad in 762 near the Tigris, with its access via Basra to the Persian Gulf, provided further impetus to Muslim maritime trade and settlement from the shores of East Africa to southern China. Mariners’ reports collected in the Akhbar al-Sin Wal-Hind (c. 850) provide a glimpse into what a typical round-trip mercantile sea voyage from Siraf (south of Shiraz) to Canton would have been like in Abbasid times. Contemporary maritime activity in the southwestern Indian Ocean, from Arabia to East Africa (Bilad al-Zanj), is attested to in the Muruj al-Dhahab of al-Masudi (d. 928). |
| In 969, the Fatimids conquered Egpyt and founded Cairo, posing a serious political and commercial challenge to the Abbasids. The Fatimids succeeded in diverting trade in the western Indian Ocean from Baghdad and the Persian Gulf to Fustat and the Red Sea. The commercial importance of Egypt and the Red Sea trade route to the western Indian Ocean was maintained by the Fatimids’ successors, the Ayyubids and Mamluks. Documents from the Cairo Geniza collection offer evidence of the complex network of Fustat-based traders, stretching between North Africa and India via the western Indian Ocean, operating between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. |
| Political and economic control over Indian Ocean trade routes by Muslim dynasties based in the Middle East was complemented by the growth of Muslim communities, mercantile centers, and independent states around the littoral, many of which have complex and multistranded histories that have yet to be studied. The eastern African coast, and its Swahili speaking peoples, had multiple connections to the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and India. Muslim settlements (mosques and burial sites) at Shanga date to the latter half of the eighth century and there is evidence to support the presence of local Muslim dynasties and their control of island settlements on Pemba, Zanzibar, Mafia, and Kilwa between c. 1000 and 1150. Many of these communities were thriving when Ibn Battuta visited the region by way of Mogadishu in 1331. |
| Ibn Battuta is also a source of information for the presence of Muslims along China’s southern coastline up to Quanzhou (Zaitun), which he reached in 1347. At Quanzhou, burials and a mosque (c. 1009) mark the presence of a Muslim community at the trading port. The histories of Muslim communities in Southeast Asia are also informed by transoceanic trade. By the fifteenth century, it was the entrepot of Malacca on the Malay coast that emerged as a major maritime center in the larger Muslim Indian Ocean trading network, eclipsing centers on Java and Sumatra. Malacca had a sizeable Muslim population that had strong connections to western Indian merchants and ports such as Cambay (Gujarat). Ironically, Ibn Majid, the mariner credited with piloting Vasco da Gama through the Indian Ocean in 1498, provides an unfavorable description of Malacca. The port fell to the Portuguese in 1511, marking the firm establishment of the first European maritime power in the Indian Ocean. |
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