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Transoceanic Arabic historiography: sharing the past of the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2020

Christopher D. Bahl
Christopher D. Bahl*
Affiliation:
Orient-Institut Beirut, Rue Hussein Beyhoum 44, Zokak el-Blat, Beirut, Lebanon
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: bahl@orient-institut.org
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Abstract

The early modern western Indian Ocean constituted a dynamic space of human interaction. While scholarship has mostly concentrated on trade and commerce, recent studies have shifted the focus to social and cultural mobilities. This article argues for the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography during the sixteenth century, which reflected on the cultural integration of regions from Egypt, the Hijaz, and Yemen in the Red Sea region, to Gujarat, the Deccan, and Malabar in the subcontinent. Historians from the Persian cosmopolis further north observed a strong cultural connection between Arabophone communities of the western Indian Ocean region. Manuscript collections in India show that Arabic historical texts from the Red Sea region had a readership in the subcontinent. Most importantly, mobile scholars began to compose Arabic histories while receiving patronage at the western Indian courts. Scholarly mobilities fostered cultural exchanges, which increasingly built on a shared history, written, read, and circulated in Arabic during the sixteenth century

Keywords

Arabic mobilitieshistory writingmanuscriptsPersian cosmopolistransoceanic
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 203 - 223
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© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

†

Most of the research for this article was conducted while I was a PhD student at SOAS, University of London. I am grateful to SOAS for awarding me a doctoral scholarship and to the Institute of Historical Research for granting me a Thornley Fellowship, which allowed me to complete this project. A previous version of this article was awarded the Doctoral Presentation Prize of the ‘Comparative histories of Asia’ seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, 2018. I also presented it at the 25th European Conference on South Asian Studies in Paris in 2018. I thank the audiences for their critical questions and comments. I am grateful to Prof. Konrad Hirschler and Dr Roy Fischel for their critiques and comments on earlier drafts of this article. Tom Tölle and Alice Williams provided helpful suggestions for revisions of previous versions of the article. I also thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their inspiration, comments, and corrections. I thank John Meloy and Marlis Saleh for allowing me to reproduce a map of the western Indian Ocean, and Olaf Nelson for carrying out amendments. All mistakes remain mine alone.

References

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2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Iranians abroad: intra-Asian elite migration and early modern state formation’, Journal of Asian Studies, 51, 2, 1992, pp. 340–63; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman age of exploration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 4–8, 23–6; Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: trade and faith on the medieval Malabar coast, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

3 Richard Eaton, ‘Malik Ambar (1548–1626): the rise and fall of military slavery’, in Meena Bhargava, ed., Exploring medieval India, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries I: politics, economy, religion, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010, pp. 121–47.

4 Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and sultans: the hajj under the Ottomans, 1517–1683, London: I. B. Tauris, 1994; Michael Pearson, Pilgrimage to Mecca: the Indian experience, 1500–1800, Princeton, NJ: Wiener, 1996.

5 Prange, Monsoon Islam; Markus Vink, ‘Indian Ocean studies and the “new thalassology”’, Journal of Global History, 2, 2007, pp. 41–62.

6 Vink, ‘Indian Ocean studies’, p. 61.

7 Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘The Indian Ocean’, in David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic histories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 31–61.

8 Here, and in what follows, see Engseng Ho, The graves of Tarim: genealogy and mobility across the Indian Ocean, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006, pp. 99–105.

9 For this paragraph, see ibid., pp. 116–25.

10 Konrad Hirschler, ‘Studying Mamluk historiography: from source-criticism to the cultural turn’, in Stephan Conermann, ed., Ubi sumus? Quo vademus? Mamluk studies, state of the art, Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2013, pp. 159–86.

11 Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 99.

12 Christopher Bahl, ‘Reading tarājim with Bourdieu: prosopographical traces of historical change in the South Asian migration to the late medieval Hijaz’, Der Islam, Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East, 94, 1, 2017, pp. 234-275.

13 Christopher Bahl, ‘Histories of circulation: sharing Arabic manuscripts across the western Indian Ocean, 1400–1700’, PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2018, pp. 46–53.

14 Ibid., pp. 76–153.

15 John Meloy, Imperial power and maritime trade: Mecca and Cairo in the later Middle Ages, Chicago, IL: Middle East Documentation Center, 2010.

16 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘A view from Mecca: notes on Gujarat, the Red Sea, and the Ottomans, 1517–39/923–946 AH’, Modern Asian Studies, 51, 2, 2017, pp. 286–90. See also Nile Green, Making space: Sufis and settlers in early modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 12.

17 Ahmed Rāzī, Tazkere-ye haft eqlim (Chronicles of the seven climes), 3 vols., ed. S. Taheri (Hazrat), Tehran: Soroush Press, 1999.

18 Derived from Pollock’s and Ricci’s works, discussed below, the term ‘Persian cosmopolis’ has proliferated in South Asian scholarship. See, for example, Richard Eaton, ‘The Persian cosmopolis (900–1900) and the Sanskrit cosmopolis (400–1400)’, in Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, eds., The Persianate world: rethinking a shared sphere, Leiden: Brill 2018, pp. 63–83.

19 Peter Hardy, Historians of medieval India: studies in Indo-Muslim historical writing, London: Luzac, 1960.

20 Stephan Conermann, Historiographie als Sinnstiftung: Indo-persische Geschichtsschreibung während der Mogulzeit (932–1118/1516–1707), Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002; David Shulman, Vēlcēru Nārāyanạrāvu, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of time: writing history in South India, 1600–1800, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.

21 Roy Fischel, ‘Origin narratives, legitimacy, and the practice of cosmopolitan language in the early modern Deccan, India’, Purushartha, 33, 2015, pp. 71–95.

22 ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar Ulughkhānī, An Arabic history of Gujarat: Zafar ul-wálih bi Muzaffar wa ālih, 3 vols., edited from the unique and autograph copy in the Library of the Calcutta Madrasah and with a preface by E. Denison Ross, London: John Murray, 1910–28; ʿAbd al-Qādir b. Shaykh al-ʿAydarūs, in Ahmad Hālū, Mahmūd Arnā’ūt and Akram Būshī, eds., al-Nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir, Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2001. Ibn Shadqam al-Madanī, three volumes: vol. 1: National Library, Kolkata, MS 269; vol. 2: Rampur Raza Library, Rampur (henceforth RRL), MS 4428; vol. 3: British Library, London, MS Delhi Arabic 1329. Al-Malībārī: British Library, MS IO Islamic 2807e.

23 For a different approach to writing history across the globe, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘On world historians in the sixteenth century’, Representations, 91, 1, 2005, pp. 26–57.

24 For a recent summary, see Jos Gommans, ‘Continuity and change in the Indian Ocean basin’, in Jeremy Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., The Cambridge world history, volume 6: the construction of a global world, 1400–1800 CE, part 1: foundations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 182–209.

25 Evgenli Berthels, ‘Rāzī’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, Brill Online, 2012, http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_6269 (consulted 28 May 2018).

26 Rāzī, Tazkere-ye haft eqlim. I thank Francesca Orsini for providing me with her unpublished paper on ‘“Significant geographies”: in lieu of “world” literature’, Paris, 5 February 2016, and for making me aware of this geographical treatise, which she mentioned in her elaboration of conceptual and imaginative geographies.

27 For the following summary, see Berthels, ‘Rāzī’.

28 Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, The myth of continents: a critique of metageography, Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1997.

29 Susanne Enderwitz, Gesellschaftlicher Rang und ethnische Legitimation: arabische Schriftsteller Abū ʿUṯmān al-Ğāḥiẓ (gest. 868) über die Afrikaner, Perser und Araber in der islamischen Gesellschaft, Freiburg: Schwarz, 1979; Andre Miquel, ‘Iḳlīm’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3519 (consulted 18 May 2017).

30 Bernard Lewis, Race and slavery in the Middle East, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

31 Miquel, ‘Iḳlīm’.

32 Rāzī, Tazkere-ye haft eqlim, vol. 1, pp. 29–82, 83–515.

33 Miquel ‘Iḳlīm’.

34 Rāzī, Tazkere-ye haft eqlim, vol. 2, pp. 518–1441.

35 Ibid., p. 517.

36 Berthels, ‘Rāzī’; Rāzī, Tazkere-ye haft eqlim, vol. 2, pp. 518–1441.

37 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 29–82.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., p. 29.

40 Gommans, ‘Continuity and change’.

41 The field of early modern Persianate studies is vast. See, for example, Muzaffar Alam, The languages of political Islam, India, 1200–1800, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly encounters: translating courtliness and violence in early modern Eurasia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

42 See Orsini, ‘Significant geographies’. For a recent assessment of studies on the Persianate world, see Mana Kia and Afshin Marashi, ‘Introduction: after the Persianate’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 36, 3, 2016, pp. 379–83.

43 Ali Anooshahr, ‘Shirazi scholars and the political culture of the sixteenth-century Indo-Persian World’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 51, 3, 2014, pp. 331–52; Subrahmanyam, Courtly encounters; Francis Robinson, ‘Ottomans–Safavids–Mughals: shared knowledge and connective systems’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 8, 2, 1997, pp. 151–84.

44 For this and the following, see Alam, Languages of political Islam.

45 Subrahmanyam, ‘Iranians abroad’, pp. 340–63.

46 The term ‘Islamicate’ was originally coined by Marshall Hodgson and principally denotes a ‘culture centred on a lettered tradition … shared by both Muslims and non-Muslims’, which distinguishes it from ‘Islamic’ as pertaining to the sphere of religious belief: Marshall Hodgson, The venture of Islam, volume 1: the classical age of Islam, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974, pp. 56–60.

47 This is implicit in Stephen Dale, The Muslim empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

48 M. U. Memon, ‘Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, I/9, p. 939, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/razi-amin-ahmad (consulted 24 April 2020).

49 For this and the following, see Ronit Ricci, Islam translated: literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

50 Sheldon Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006, pp. 12–19.

51 For this and the following, see Ricci, Islam translated, p. 4.

52 Marshall Hodgson, The venture of Islam, volume 2: the expansion of Islam in the middle periods, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974, p. 293.

53 Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The importance of being Islamic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 32, 38, 53.

54 Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘Arabic in India: a survey and classification of its uses, compared with Persian’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 127, 3, 2007, pp. 315–38. This contrasts with the materials discussed in Zubaid Ahmad, The contribution of Indo-Pakistan to Arabic literature, from ancient times to 1857, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1968.

55 Ricci, Islam translated.

56 Gommans, ‘Continuity and change’.

57 Michael Pearson, ‘Communication in the early modern Indian Ocean world’, Transforming Cultures, 4, 2, 2009, pp. 23–7. See also Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘A handful of Swahili coast letters, 1500–1520’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 52, 2, 2019, pp. 255–81.

58 Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic republic of letters: Arabic knowledge construction, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.

59 Prange, Monsoon Islam.

60 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in connected history: from the Tagus to the Ganges, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 76–9.

61 Gagan Sood, India and the Islamic heartlands: an eighteenth-century world of circulation and exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

62 For a recent study of Arabic influences in Malabar in the context of Islamic law, see Mahmood Kooriadathodi, ‘Cosmopolis of law: Islamic legal ideas and texts across the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean worlds’, PhD thesis, Institute for History, Humanities, Leiden, 2016.

63 N. Ansari, ‘Bahmanid dynasty’, in Encyclopedia Iranica, 1988, vol. 3, fasc. 5, pp. 494–9.

64 Samira Sheikh, Forging a region: sultans, traders, and pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 205–6.

65 Jyoti Balachandran, ‘Texts, tombs and memory: the migration, settlement and formation of a learned Muslim community in fifteenth-century Gujarat’, PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012.

66 Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The dao of Muhammad: a cultural history of Muslims in late imperial China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 37.

67 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past & Present, 129, 1, 1990, pp. 30–78.

68 Andreas Goerke and Konrad Hirschler, ‘Introduction: manuscript notes as documentary sources’, in Andreas Goerke and Konrad Hirschler, eds., Manuscript notes as documentary sources, Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2011, pp. 9–20.

69 See, for example, Andhra Pradesh Oriental Manuscripts Library, Hyderabad, MS Taʾrīkh 994; Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna (henceforth KBOPL), MS Arabic 650; and RRL, MS 4424–5 and MS 4426–7. See also the respective catalogue entries.

70 RRL, Rampur MS 4424–5 and MS 4426–7.

71 KBOPL, MS Arabic 650, fol. 270v. See also the KBOPL catalogue.

72 Andreas Becker, Beyond translation: essays toward a modern philology, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

73 Ronit Ricci, ‘Islamic literary networks in South and Southeast Asia’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 21, 1, 2010, pp. 1–28; Ricci, Islam translated.

74 Ricci, Islam translated, pp. 246–7.

75 Ibid., pp. 248–9.

76 This is based on an examination of libraries in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Patna, and Rampur.

77 RRL, MS 4395, MS 4396, and MS 4397; KBOPL, MS Arabic 1071. See also the KBOPL catalogue.

78 KBOPL, MSS Arabic 657 and 658, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ḥalabī, al-Qabas al-Ḥāwī li-ghurarī ḍawʾ al-Sakhāwī (The collectors firebrand regarding the finest from ‘The light’ of al-Sakhāwī); see also KBOPL catalogue. Pīr Muḥammad Shāh Dargāh Library, Ahmedabad, MS 700, al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ; RRL, MS 4431, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Miṣrī, al-Nūr al-sāṭiʿ min al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ (The shining light from ‘The brilliant light’).

79 For example, KBOPL, MS Arabic 659.

80 KBOPL, MS Arabic 1091. For al-Samhūdī, see Harry Munt, ‘Mamluk historiography outside of Egypt and Syria: ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Samhūdī and his histories of Medina’, Der Islam, 92, 2, 2015, pp. 413–41.

81 KBOPL, MS Arabic 1091, fol. 435v.

82 Ibid., fols. 10–13.

83 For a discussion of such notes as ‘notabilia’, see Adam Gacek, Arabic manuscripts: a vademecum for readers, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2012, p. 168.

84 Ibid., fols. 139r, 212v, and 260v.

85 Ibid., fol. 24v.

86 For this and the following, see Ulughkhānī, Arabic history of Gujarat, vol. 1, pp. v–ix.

87 For this and the following, see ibid., vol. 1, p. viii, and vol. 2, pp. ix–x.

88 Ibid.

89 Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 105.

90 For this and what follows, see Peter Jackson, ‘Ḥāḏɟḏɟī al-Dabīr’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_8583 (consulted 5 October 2017). See also Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 122.

91 Ulughkhānī, Arabic history of Gujarat, vol. 2, pp. xx–xxiv.

92 Richard Blackburn, ‘Introduction’, in Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Nahrwālī, Journey to the Sublime Porte: the Arabic memoir of a Sharifian agent’s diplomatic mission to the Ottoman imperial court in the era of Suleyman the Magnificent; the relevant text from Quṭb al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī’s al-Fawāʾid al-sanīyah fī al-riḥlah al-Madanīyah wa al-Rūmīyah, Beirut and Würzburg: Orient-Institut and Ergon Verlag, 2005, pp. xi–xiv.

93 For this and the following, see Ulughkhānī, Arabic history of Gujarat, vol. 1, pp. viii–ix.

94 Conermann, Historiographie.

95 Ulughkhānī, Arabic history of Gujarat, vol. 1, pp. 88–97.

96 J. Fück, ‘Ibn Ḵẖallikān’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3248 (consulted 5 October 2017).

97 Ulughkhānī, Arabic history of Gujarat, vol. 1, p. 184.

98 Fück, ‘Ibn Ḵẖallikān’.

99 Ulughkhānī, Arabic history of Gujarat, vol. 1, p. 32.

100 For this and the following, see Ho, Graves of Tarim, pp. 118–24; Oscar Löfgren, ‘ʿAydarūs’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_0899 (consulted 8 December 2013); al-ʿAydarūs, al-Nūr al-sāfir.

101 Ho, Graves of Tarim, pp. 122–4.

102 Ibid., pp. 118–24.

103 Ibid., pp. 118–19.

104 Al-ʿAydarūs, al-Nūr al-sāfir, p. 17.

105 Ho, Graves of Tarim, pp. 118–20.

106 Ibid., p. 120.

107 Ibid., p. 123.

108 For example, see Meloy, Imperial power.

109 For this and the following, see al-ʿAydarūs, al-Nūr al-sāfir, pp. 325–30.

110 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘View from Mecca’, pp. 297–303.

111 For this and the following, see al-ʿAydarūs, al-Nūr al-sāfir, pp. 325–30.

112 Ibid., pp. 447–53.

113 Ibid., p. 447.

114 This work has not yet been edited. I collected one set of surviving manuscripts in three volumes from libraries in Kolkata, Rampur, and London: see details in n. 22. For the Deccani sultanates, see Richard Eaton, A social history of the Deccan, 1300–1761: eight Indian lives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 5. For a rather dated account of the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar, see Radhey Shyam, The kingdom of Ahmadnagar, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966.

115 Roy Fischel, ‘Society, space, and the state in the Deccan sultanates, 1565–1636’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2012.

116 For this and the following, see Al-Sayyid Muḥsin al-Amīn, ʿAyān al-shīʿa (The nobles of the Shīʿa), 4th edn, 11 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Taʿāruf, 1986), vol. 5, pp. 175–9.

117 Werner Ende, ‘The Nakhawila, a Shiite community in Medina’, Die Welt des Islams, 37, 3, 1997, p. 271.

118 Al-Amīn, ʿAyān al-shīʿa, vol. 5, pp. 175–9.

119 Ende, ‘Nakhawila’; Ahmad, Contribution of Indo-Pakistan, pp. 184–5.

120 Jacqueline Sublet and Muriel Rouabah, ‘Une famille de textes autour d’Ibn Ḫallikān entre VIIe/XIIIe et XIe/XVIIe siècle : documents historiques et biographiques arabes conservés à l’IRHT’, Bulletin d’études orientales, 58, 2009, pp. 69–86.

121 Ibn Shadqam, vol. 1 (see n. 22), fol. 7v; National Library, Kolkata, Catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts in the Būhār Library, Calcutta, 1923.

122 Ibn Shadqam, vol. 1, fol. 7v.

123 Ahmad, Contribution of Indo-Pakistan, pp. 184–5.

124 See the fihrist (catalogue) at the beginning of Ibn Shadqam, vol. 1.

125 Ibid., fol. 96r, and the following folios.

126 Ibid., fol. 71v.

127 Fischel, ‘Origin narratives’, pp. 71–3.

128 Eaton, Social history of the Deccan, p. 76. See Fischel, ‘Society’, p. 180, n. 4, for the preference for the term ‘foreigner’ rather than ‘Westerner’ as translated by Eaton.

129 Eaton, Social history of the Deccan, pp. 67–70, 76; Fischel, ‘Society’, p. 7; Gijs Kruitzer, Xenophobia in seventeenth-century India, Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009, pp. 74 ff.

130 Subrahmanyam, ‘Iranians abroad’; Fischel ‘Society’.

131 Here and in the following, see Fischel, ‘Origin narratives’.

132 Al-Malībārī, British Library, MS IO Islamic 2807e.

133 Al-Malībārī, Tohfut-ul-mujahideen: an historical work in the Arabic language, translated into English by M. J. Rowlandson, London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1833, pp. vii–xvi.

134 Al-Malībārī, British Library, MS IO Islamic 2807e, fol. 113v.

135 Stephen Dale, Islamic society on the South Asian frontier: the Māppilas of Malabar 1498–1922, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; Sebastian Prange, ‘A trade of no dishonor: piracy, commerce, and community in the western Indian Ocean, twelfth to sixteenth century’, American Historical Review, 116, 5, 2011, pp. 1269–93; Engseng Ho, ‘Custom and conversion in Malabar: Zayn al-Dīn al-Malibari’s gift of the Mujahidin: some accounts of the Portuguese’, in Barbara Metcalf, ed., Islam in South Asia in practice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 403–8.

136 Sebastian Prange, ‘The pagan king replies: an Indian perspective on the Portuguese arrival in India’, Itinerario, 41, 1, 2017, pp. 151–73.

137 The introduction to a new edition of the work sadly does not back up claims of Zayn al-Dīn’s transregional exploits and contacts across the Red Sea region. See Muhammad Husayn Nainar, Tuhfat al-mujahidin: a historical epic of the sixteenth century, Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2006, pp. xix–xxi.

138 Ho, Graves of Tarim.

139 Prange, ‘Measuring by the bushel’; Ho, Graves of Tarim, pp. 101–3.

140 Ho, Graves of Tarim, pp. 100–3.

141 Casale, Ottoman age of exploration, esp. pp. 4–8, 23–6.

142 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in connected history: Mughals and Franks, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

143 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘View from Mecca’, pp. 290–6.

144 Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 101.

145 Casale, Ottoman age of exploration; Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 101.

146 Al-Malībārī, British Library, MS IO Islamic 2807e. For further analysis, see Prange, Monsoon Islam, pp. 146–8.

147 Deborah Hutton, ‘ʿĀdil Shāhīs’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_23656 (consulted 24 May 2018).

148 Al-Malībārī, British Library, MS IO Islamic 2807e, fols. 112v–113v.

149 Ibid.

150 Sebastian Conrad, What is global history?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

151 Ibid., p. 9.

152 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 1997, pp. 736–45.

153 Arif Dirlik, ‘Performing the world: reality and representation in the making of world histor(ies)’, Journal of World History, 16, 4, 2005, p. 396.

154 These terms are emphasized in ibid. See also the conceptual approach in Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of translation: material culture and medieval ‘Hindu–Muslim’ encounter, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

155 Orsini, ‘Significant geographies’.

156 Dirlik, ‘Performing the world’, p. 392.

157 Vink, ‘Indian Ocean studies’.