When the Muslim scholar Sam Shihab al-Din b. Sulayman composed these lines in his native Tamil language sometime in the late seventeenth century, there was more than mere hyperbole to the list of countries where his father, the scholar and Sufi Sulayman b. Sadaq, was allegedly honoured. The coastal regions of southeastern India where Shihab al-Din's hometown of Kayalpattinam is located were connected through networks of trade and pilgrimage to all the countries mentioned, showing the poet's deep awareness of the wider world inhabited by Muslim communities. His own native land was known to early Arab geographers as Ma‘bar or “Crossing Point”, referring to the country along the coast eastward from either Quilon or Cape Comorin, that is, roughly the area of the modern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In contrast to its western neighbour Malabar, Ma‘bar has received little attention from scholars of Islam, its Islamic traditions appearing too “localized” to be of much interest for the history of the wider Islamic world.

The main exception to this trend has been the interest shown in the Tamil-speaking Muslim communities of South India and Ceylon by students of Southeast Asian Islam. Already in the late nineteenth century, South Indian origins for Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago had been considered by some scholars. Later, scholars such as G.E. Marrison and G.W.J. Drewes specifically pointed to Ma‘bar as the region from which Islam had spread to Nusantara. They called for a closer study of Islamic traditions in Ma‘bar, but their call was largely left unheeded, partly due to the fact that the few scholars who did research on Ma‘bari Islamic traditions were much keener to stress their localized, “Tamil” character, than to place them in the wider context of transnational Islamic cultural and religious networks. When the search for the supposed single place of origin of Southeast Asian Islam was abandoned as most scholars recognized it to be based on faulty assumptions, interest in the Islamic traditions of Ma‘bar similarly receded. As a result, up to now, the large-scale presence of Tamil-speaking Muslim traders in the ports of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula in the last five centuries has largely been seen as inconsequential to the history of Islam in Southeast Asia.