Narrating Community: the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ and Accounts of Origin in Kerala and around the Indian Ocean
In: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientThe story of an Indian king’s conversion to Islam by the prophet Muhammad and of the subsequent foundation by Arab Muslims of communities and mosques across the sovereign’s former dominion in Kerala appears in various Arabic and Malayalam literary iterations. The most remarkable among them is the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ. This legend of community origins is here translated from the Arabic in full for the first time. Historians have dealt with such origin stories by transmitting them at face value, rejecting their historicity, or sifting them for kernels of historical truth. The comparative approach adopted here instead juxtaposes the Qiṣṣa with a Malayalam folksong and other Indian Ocean narratives of conversion as related in medieval Arabic travel literature to reveal underlying archetypes of just or enlightened kings as sponsors of community. The legend emerges as a crucial primary source for the constitution and self-definition of Islam in Kerala and for the discursive claims of this community vis-à-vis others.
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1
Ronald E. Miller, Mappila Muslim Culture: How a Historic Muslim Community in India Has Blended Tradition and Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015): xi.
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2
Ronald E. Miller, Mappila Muslims of Kerala: A Study in Islamic Trends (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1976): 49.
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4
Yohanan Friedmann, “Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ: A Tradition concerning the Introduction of Islam to Malabar.” Israel Oriental Studies 5 (1975): 233-45.
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6
See André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World(Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1:70. In a seminal English-language work on the Mappilas, Stephen Dale, mentions only briefly the Qiṣṣa and has this to say on the origins of the Mappilas: “At the end of the fifteenth century, three Malayali dynasties exercised the prerogatives of royalty. . . . All three dynasties figure in the mythology of Kerala history, which depicts the supposed last Chera emperor of Kerala, Cheruman Perumal, converting to Islam and partitioning his empire among a number of subordinate officials before going on pilgrimage to Mecca in 825”; see also Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar 1498-1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980): 12.
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9
Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985): 17.
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10
Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985): 153.
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12
Barbara D. Metcalf, Islam in South Asia in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 1. Anas Hudawi Aripra, Malik Deenar and the Old Masjid of Kasaragod (Kasaragod: Malik Deenar Islamic Academy, 2011) provides a good example of how this legend is accepted as fact in this institutional history of the mosque that houses the tomb attributed to Mālik b. Dīnār, one of the legend’s primary characters. Mālik b. Dīnār was a Companion of the prophet Muhammad associated with Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, and is remembered as an early Ṣūfī; see his early biography in Paul Losensky (trans.), Farid ad-Din ʿAttār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis (Mahwah nj: Paulist Press, 2009): 82-90.
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51
A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History (Kottayam: National Book Stall, 1967): 120-1. Menon suggests that the legend of the conversion of Cheraman Perumal to Islam might refer to the earlier Chera dynasty during which a king left in exile after converting to Jainism or Buddhism. In this theory, Jainism and Buddhism were the main rivals to Brahmanical Hinduism in the early period and might easily have been conflated with Islam, a non-Brahmanical religion, in a later period.
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55
Menon, Survey of Kerala History, 43. The churches were located at Maliankara, Palayur, Kottakkuvu, Kokkamangalam, Kollam (Quilon), Niraman and Nilakkal.
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56
Francis Day, The Land of the Perumals: Cochin, Its Past and Its Present (Vepery, Madras: Adelphi Press, 1863): 213; Day was a naturalist and historian active in the Madras Presidency, which included Kerala.
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63
Engseng Ho, “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat.” Comparative Studies of Society and History 46 (2004): 223-4.
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67
Mohammad Ishaq Khan, Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of the Muslim Rishis (Delhi: Manohar, 1997) emphasizes the role of the Ṣūfīs Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī (d. 1384 of the Kubrawi Ṣūfī order from Persia) and Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn Nund Rishī (d. 1440 of the Rishī order indigenous to Kashmir) in spreading Islam throughout the region; the story of a king of Kashmir who secretly converts to Islam does not seem to have played a significant role.
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70
Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 177-9. Pointing to the material legacy of the first Muslim communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Insoll speaks of the “indigenisation of Islam and its full absorption into the local context.”
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72
Melanie A. Murray, Island Paradise: The Myth: An Examination of Contemporary Caribbean and Sri Lankan Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009): 13-20; see also Markus Aksland, The Sacred Footprint: A Cultural History of Adam’s Peak (Hong Kong: Orchid Press, 2001).
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73
Hussain Rantattani, Mappila Muslims: A Study on Society and Anti-Colonial Struggles (Calicut: Other Books, 2007): 37, lists some important Ṣūfīs mentioned by Ibn Baṭṭuṭa but asserts incorrectly that Zayn al-Dīn and his family belonged to the Qādirī order and came from Yemen. Zayn al-Din’s family actually belonged to the Chishtī order, beginning with his grandfather, Zayn al-Dīn Makhdūm the Elder who was a famous Ṣūfī in Ponnani; his family came to northern Kerala from Maʿbar or the Coromandel Coast. Rantattani seems to associate famous Ṣūfīs retrospectively with the Qādirī order and its sub-branch of the Bā ʿAlawī family, which became very influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See also V. Kunhali, Sufism in Kerala (Calicut: University of Calicut Publication Division, 2004): 64.
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76
Binu John Mailaparambil, Lords of the Sea: The Ali Rajas of Cannanore and the Political Economy of Malabar, 1663-1723 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
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80
Stephen Dale and M. Gangadhara Menon, “Nerccas: Saint-Martyr Worship among the Muslims of Kerala.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 41 (1978): 523-38.
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82
P. Radhakrishnan, Peasant Struggles, Land Reforms and Social Change: Malabar 1836-1982 (New Delhi: Sage, 1989): 14-21.
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Narrating Community: the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ and Accounts of Origin in Kerala and around the Indian Ocean
In: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientThe story of an Indian king’s conversion to Islam by the prophet Muhammad and of the subsequent foundation by Arab Muslims of communities and mosques across the sovereign’s former dominion in Kerala appears in various Arabic and Malayalam literary iterations. The most remarkable among them is the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ. This legend of community origins is here translated from the Arabic in full for the first time. Historians have dealt with such origin stories by transmitting them at face value, rejecting their historicity, or sifting them for kernels of historical truth. The comparative approach adopted here instead juxtaposes the Qiṣṣa with a Malayalam folksong and other Indian Ocean narratives of conversion as related in medieval Arabic travel literature to reveal underlying archetypes of just or enlightened kings as sponsors of community. The legend emerges as a crucial primary source for the constitution and self-definition of Islam in Kerala and for the discursive claims of this community vis-à-vis others.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 834 | 117 | 8 |
| Full Text Views | 266 | 12 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 91 | 29 | 0 |