Abstract
Despite his familiarity with the well established Indo-Persian history‐writing traditions, ‘Abdullāh Muḥammad al-Makkī al-Āṣafī al-Ulughkhānī ‘Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’ (b. 1540) chose to write his history of the Gujarat Sultanate and of other Indo-Muslim polities in Arabic. Ulughkhānī consulted several Persian chronicles produced in Delhi and Ahmedabad, including Sikandar Manjhū’s Mir’āt-i Sikandarī (composed c. 1611) that has served as the standard history of the Gujarat Sultanate for modern historians. Despite its ‘exceptionalism’, Ulughkhānī’s early seventeenth-century Ẓafar al-wālih bi Muẓaffar wa ālihi has largely been seen as a corroborative text to Persian tawārīkh. This article re-evaluates the importance of Ulughkhānī’s Arabic history of Gujarat by situating the text and its author in the social, political and intellectual context of the sixteenth-century western Indian ocean. Specifically, it demonstrates how the several historical digressions in the text are not dispensable aberrations to his narrative but integral to Ulughkhānī’s expansive social horizons at the time of robust commercial, pilgrimage, diplomatic and scholarly connections between Gujarat and the Red Sea regions.
Acknowledgment
The writing of this article was made possible by the generous support of the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. I’d like to thank Christopher Bahl and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for offering their insights and suggestions on this article. Thanks to Christopher for also sharing his forthcoming (now published) article with me. I’m grateful to the anonymous reviewer for questions and comments. This article follows the IJMES system of transliteration for Arabic and Persian.
References
Ahmad, M.G.Zubaid (1968): The Contribution of Indo-Pakistan to Arabic Literature. From Ancient Times to 1857. Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf.Search in Google Scholar
Alam, Muzaffar/Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (2012): “Letters from a Sinking Sultan”. In: Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics. Edited by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. New York: Oxford University Press, 33–87.10.7312/columbia/9780231158114.003.0002Search in Google Scholar
Alam, Muzaffar /Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (2017): “A View from Mecca: Notes on Gujarat, the Red Sea, and the Ottomans, 1517-39/923-946 H”. Modern Asian Studies 51.2: 268–318.10.1017/S0026749X16000172Search in Google Scholar
al-Sakhāwī (1966): al-Ḍaw al-lāmi‘ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsi‘. Beirut: Dar Maktabat al-hayat 4: 104–105.Search in Google Scholar
Auer, Blain (2018): “Persian Historiography in India”. In: Persian Literature from Outside Iran: The Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia, Central Asia, and in Judeo-Persian. Edited by John R. Perry. London: I.B. Tauris, 94–139.Search in Google Scholar
Bahl, Christopher (2017): “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: 234–275.10.1515/islam-2017-0010Search in Google Scholar
Bahl, Christopher (2018): “Histories of Circulation – Sharing Arabic Manuscripts across the Western Indian Ocean, 1400-1700”. Ph.D. dissertation, SOAS, University of London.Search in Google Scholar
Bahl, Christopher (2020): “Transoceanic Arabic historiography: sharing the past of 2 the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean”. Journal of Global History 15/2: 203–223.10.1017/S1740022820000017Search in Google Scholar
Blackburn, Richard (2005): “Introduction”. In 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-Fawāʼid al-sanīyah fī al-riḥlah al-Madanīyah wa al-Rūmīyah. Edited by Richard Blackburn. Beirut: Orient-Institut, IX–XXIII.10.1016/B978-1-85573-916-1.50017-XSearch in Google Scholar
Blecher, Joel (2018): Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium, University of California Press.10.1525/california/9780520295933.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Burak, Guy (2017): “Between Istanbul and Gujarat: Descriptions of Mecca in the Sixteenth-century Indian Ocean”. Muqarnas 34.1: 287–320. https://doi.org/10.1163/22118993_03401P012.Search in Google Scholar
Casale, Giancarlo (2010): The Ottoman Age of Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377828.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Chekroun, Amélie (2012): “Manuscrits, éditions et traductions du Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša. État des lieux”. Annales Islamologiques 46: 293–322.Search in Google Scholar
Green, Nile ed. (2019): The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520972100Search in Google Scholar
Hirschler, Konrad (2006): Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as actors. London and NY: Routledge.10.4324/9780203965290Search in Google Scholar
Ho, Engseng (2006): The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/california/9780520244535.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Ho, Engseng (2007): “The Two Arms of Cambay: Diasporic Texts of Ecumenical Islam in the Indian Ocean”. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50. 2/3: 347–361.10.1163/156852007781787413Search in Google Scholar
Kanalu, Naveen (2019): “Prefatory Notes on Persian Idioms of Islamic Jurisprudence: Reasoning and Procedures of Law-Making in Premodern Islamicate India”. Manuscript Studies 4.1: 93–111.10.1353/mns.2019.0003Search in Google Scholar
Kooriadathodi, Mahmood (2016): “Cosmopolis of law: Islamic legal ideas and texts across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean Worlds”. Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University.Search in Google Scholar
Kooria, Mahmood/Ravensbergen, Sanne (2018): “The Indian Ocean of Law: Hybridity and Space”. Itinerario 42.2: 164–167. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115318000244.Search in Google Scholar
Kugle, Scott / Margariti, Roxani 2017: “Narrating Community: the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ and Accounts of Origin in Kerala and around the Indian Ocean”. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60: 337–380.10.1163/15685209-12341430Search in Google Scholar
Lokhandwala, M. F. (1970 and 1974): The Arabic History of Gujarat (translation of Ẓafar al-wālih bi Muẓaffar wa ālihi) of ‘Abdullāh Muḥammad al-Ulughkhānī Ḥājjī al-Dabīr. Vols I & II.Search in Google Scholar
Mortel, Richard T. (1997): “Madrasas in Mecca during the Medieval Period: A Descriptive Study Based on Literary Sources”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60.2: 236–252.10.1017/S0041977X00036387Search in Google Scholar
Nimdihī, ‘Abd al-Karīm (c. 1490): T̤abaqāt-i Maḥmūd Shāhī. Ms. Eton (Pote) 160, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK.Search in Google Scholar
Petrovich, Maya (2012): “The Land of the Foreign Padishah: India in Ottoman Reality and Imagination”. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University.Search in Google Scholar
Power, Timothy (2012): The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate, AD 500–1000. Cairo/New York: AUC Press.10.5743/cairo/9789774165443.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Qutbuddin, Tahera (2007): “Arabic in India: A Survey and Classification of Its Uses, Compared with Persian”. Journal of the American Oriental Society 127.3: 315–338.Search in Google Scholar
Ricci, Ronit (2010): “Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia”. Journal of Islamic Studies 21/1: 1–28.10.1093/jis/etp084Search in Google Scholar
Ricci, Ronit (2011): Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226710907.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Smith, G. Rex 1984: “The Tahirid Sultans of the Yemen (858-923/1454-1517) and their historian Ibn al-Dayba‘”. Journal of Semitic Studies 29.1: 141–154.10.1093/jss/XXIX.1.141Search in Google Scholar
Smoor, P. (2012): “ʿUmāra al-Yamanī”. In: Encyclopedia of Islam. Second Edition. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 02 April 2020 <http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_1285>.Search in Google Scholar
Strothmann, R. / Smith, G.R. (2012): “Nadjāḥids”. In: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 10 April 2020 <http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1163/15733912_islam_SIM_5717>.Search in Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (2017): “Beyond the usual suspects: on intellectual networks in the early modern world”. Global Intellectual History 2.1: 30–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2017.1332884.Search in Google Scholar
Ṭūnī, ‘Abd al-Ḥusayn (1985): Tārīkh -i Maḥmūd Shāhī. Edited by S.C Misra. Baroda: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.Search in Google Scholar
Ulughkhānī, ‘Abdullāh Muḥammad al-Makkī al-Āṣafī ‘Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’ (1910–1928): Ẓafar al-wālih bi Muẓaffar wa ālihi. Edited by E. Denison Ross as An Arabic History of Gujarat, 3 vols. London: John Murray for Government of India.Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston