Early Islamic Trade in India and Indian Ocean

Introduction
Religion is widely viewed in the realm of social sciences as instrumental for the understanding of
socio economic processes. In economics there is a growing body of work that links religious
affiliation and religiosity to differences in economic and political development across countries.
Similarly, within sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology and history, the volume
of research investigating the causes and effects of religion attests to its paramount importance.

The Rise of Islam

Arabia has a distinct geography with few places in Yemen, Bahrain, Central Arabia and several
scattered oases in the interior producing agricultural goods, such as frankincense, myrrh, vine,
dyes and dates in the eve of Islam. The rest of the peninsula features deserts and semiarid regions
where nomadic life-style was the norm. Across these infertile swaths of land, tribes were directly
involved in the collection of booty by conducting raids, known as ghazw, on commercial
caravans trading local produce as well as spices, gold, ivory, pearls, precious stones, and textiles
arriving at the local ports from Africa, India, and the Far East. Scholars have argued that this
distinctive geography shielded the local populations from any form of urbanization allowing
them to maintain their tribal culture, preventing the formation of a unifying social structure. At
the same time, the infrequent urban commercial economies in a limited number of oases
exacerbated social and economic inequities between clans.
In the pre-Islamic era, trade was maintained in the Peninsula as long as peripheral kingdoms
along the edges of Arabia, namely Himyarites, Ghassanids and Lakhmids, guarded the routes and
policed Bedouin tribes. These kingdoms all disintegrated in the course of the 6th century. As a
result, political and commercial control over the Bedouin communities could no longer be
exerted and the Arabian economy got in decline.
In parallel, the Persian and Byzantine empires had been fighting a series of long and exhausting
wars since the start of the 6th century. By the early 7th century the conflicts had disrupted the
major international trade routes between the two empires. Piracy in the Red Sea was also on the
rise due to the declining sea power of the Byzantines. These events caused a diversion of trade
through the peninsula giving profound commercial value to overland trade routes in Arabia. The
resulting trade diversion created new potential economic benefits for the relatively fertile
regions. First, by selling to the merchants they could take advantage of markets outside Arabia,
and second, the increased caravan traffic was equivalent to higher demand for local produce.

Islamic Economic Principles

Poverty alleviation and redistribution feature prominently among the Islamic economic traits.
Acts of charity are voluntary (sadaqa) and obligatory (zakat). Zakat is a religious obligation and
is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.1 The Qur’an requires a believer of sufficient economic means
to give a fraction of her accumulated income for alms. During the early decades of Islam zakat
was collected and distributed by the government appointed officials in a centralized manner and
it was effective in alleviating poverty. Over time, however, its centralized collection was
infrequently enforced and relegated to the local authorities.2 The role of equitable inheritance
laws, anti-usury laws and the prohibition on the rise of the corporation are other prominent
examples. In particular, the Islamic law by recognizing only natural persons effectively blocked

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the emergence of more complex organizational forms restricting the mobilization and pooling of
resources. Regarding inheritance laws Qur’an specifies that two-thirds of one’s wealth be
allocated to various family members, including very distant relatives making it a rather
egalitarian distribution system.3

The Islamic conquest of an empire that stretched from Spain to the borders of China in inner
Asia created an enormous economic unit that also linked together the maritime trade of the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (the greatest hubs of economic activity in the medieval
world). The lack of political barriers in this vast realm aided the movement not only of trade but
also of armies, craftsmen, scholars, and pilgrims. Government, cities, agriculture, and long-
range trade all nourished each other and consequently flourished. The large cities of the Islamic
world needed food and raw materials, while palaces, mosques, and aristocrats required luxuries
for the display of wealth and power. Arab merchants were ready to supply them. Contact with
Islamic traders by their counterparts in Italy also introduced new words into European
languages, among them, check, broker, tariff, traffic, magazine, caravan, and bazaar.4

Early Islamic Maritime Activities

The Arabs became more adventurous after the coming of Islam in 622 CE. During the Caliphate
of Umar ibn al-Khattab, the Muslims conquered Persia in 642 CE, and thus annexed the Sassanid
trading bases. Soon afterwards Uthman al-Thaqafi, the Arab governer of al-Bahrain started his
own vigorous sea raids on the Indian coastal town of Thane, near Bombay. He dispatched two of
his brothers on similar naval missions: Hakam, at the head of a contingent to Barauz (Broach),
and Mughira to the bay of al-Daybul (near modern Karachi) at the mouth of the Indus in 636 CE.
Like his predecessor, the dynamic governer of Bahrain, Al-Alaibn al-Hadrami raided without
specific orders from Umar ibn al-Khattab in the Persian Gulf in 638 CE, but his ships were
destroyed. He was reprimanded by the Caliph for his insubordination. By the end of the seventh
century, the Arabs had peacefully settled in parts of Sri Lanka, and this was the beginning of
Muslim penetration in Southeast Asia. The extant evidence, though limited, reveals the existence
of Muslim colonies in different parts of the Malay Archipelago before the mass conversion to
Islam took place in the thirteenth century.

1
It is interesting to note that the majority of those who contributed to the crystallization of the Muslim law over time
had a merchant or craftsman background.
2
Kuran (2001) notes that the third Caliph Uthman turned the obligation to pay zakat essentially into a tax on
agricultural output.
3
Equitable inheritance laws coupled with the fact that more wealthy individuals were allowed to have more wives
and consequently children, was an additional force against the concentration of wealth and the increase in inequality.
4
Skeen, Bradley A. "trade and exchange in the medieval Islamic World." In Crabtree, Pam J.Encyclopedia of
Society and Culture in the Medieval World. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. P.1

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The sea, more precisely the Arabian Sea, plays a large role in the story. Travel by sea, facilitated
or sometimes circumscribed by the monsoon wind pattern, has a very long history in this area.
The earliest boats were canoes made of reeds, still to be seen today in the marsh areas of the
Tigris–Euphrates delta. Wooden boats, which gain their buoyancy from enclosed air, mark a
major technological step forward. They go back at least some 5,000 years, to the time of the
Indus Valley Civilisation.5

Meanwhile, an important development took place that was destined to alter the course of the
history of the region. In an effort to establish cordial relations with the famous Umayyed viceroy
Al-Hajjaj bin Yusuf, the Raja of Sarandip (modern Sri Lanka) sent him a number of shipwrecked
Muslim orphans and widows living in his territory as a gesture of goodwill. However, on
approaching the coast of Debal, the vessels were attacked and looted by pirates, and those on
board, including the Muslim orphans and widows, were taken prisoner. Al-Hajjaj sent an
ambassador to the Raja of Sind demanding compensation and punishment of the offenders, but
latter claimed inability to control these pirates. This presaged the systematic conquest of Sind in
712 CE by Muhammad ibn Qasim, a youth of sixteen years, and it was incorporated into the
Muslim domain the reign of the Umayyad Caliph, al-Wahid ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 705-715 CE).

The Indian Ocean trade was monopolized in the 11th through the 13th centuries by the Karimis
(an Arabic term for "merchant" but given special meaning in connection with this group), a
group of about 50 merchant families organized in a network in Egypt, Yemen (at the mouth of the
Red Sea), Ceylon, and India. This group engaged purely in mercantile activity and did not
directly profit from, for instance, land owning or tax farming (a practice by which a private
contractor will pay a government a sum approximately equal to the expected tax revenues of a
province in exchange for the right to collect the actual tax). Their activities were financed as
joint-stock ventures with private investors. This same group of merchants ran the largest network
of international banks. The Karimis are sometimes viewed as a precursor to modern
multinational corporations.6

Port Cities in Islamic World

Yet in many ways, it was the port city that defined the Indian Ocean and offers a microcosm of
the global ideas and benefits it brings to World History. Ports littered the Indian Ocean littoral,
including Surat, Calicut, Aceh, Mocha, Cape Town, Hormuz, and Basra.7 Port cities offer an
excellent example of how local conditions interacted with the wider world in a single setting. It
was in the port city where networks and exchanges operated, where goods were traded, where
peoples discussed politics, religion, and daily life, and where ties to other ports were sustained.
Michael Pearson has defined port cities as not simply urban spaces next to the sea, but as those
places defined and dominated by the interactions of the port and its harbor rather than
connections to the interior.8

5
Pearson,Michael, THE MARITIME OECUMENE, Cambridge University, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p-1
6
Skeen, Bradley A. "trade and exchange in the medieval Islamic World." In Crabtree, Pam J.Encyclopedia of
Society and Culture in the Medieval World. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. P.1

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Indian Ocean studies has worked with other maritime fields to detail the elaborate cosmopolitan
quality of many of these port cities, which were defined by a fluid and steady exchange of
peoples, ideas, and goods. As such, to define a port city simply through its hinterland or even a
political state that may have governed it misses the very quality that breathed life into the city.
Indeed, it was the movement of peoples, from migrants to slaves to laborers, that not only
defined the port city, but also offer us a way to analyze the adaptation of peoples and the creation
of new ideas and cultures. Indeed, even "secondary cities," ports of lesser size and magnitude,
fulfilled this function of tapping into the networks of Indian Ocean trade and tying these cities as
well as the smaller villages and hinterland around them, to the major ports and Indian
Ocean.9 Further, McPherson reminds us that European empires began to establish themselves in
ports first, then moved inland in many instances, offering another vantage point to examine the
change that European empires brought as well as their limitations and extent they were
influenced by local ideas.10

Conclusion
During the Muslim period, in which the Muslims had dominated the trade across the Indian
Ocean, the Gujaratis were bringing spices from the Moluccas as well as silk from China, in
exchange for manufactured items such as textiles, and then selling them to the Egyptians and
Arabs. Calicut was the center of Indian pepper exports to the Red Sea and Europe at this
time with Egyptian and Arab traders being particularly active.
In Madagascar, merchants and slave traders from the Middle East (Shirazi Persians, Omani
Arabs, Arabized Jews, accompanied by Bantus from southeast Africa) and from Asia
(Gujaratis, Malays, Javanese, Bugis) were sometimes integrated within the indigenous Malagasy
clans.New waves of Austronesian migrants arrived in Madagascar at this time leaving behind a
lasting cultural and genetic legacy.
The spread of Islam and the Arabic language through North Africa to the Iberian peninsula laid
the foundations in Western Europe of modern science including geography and deep-seafaring
which resulted in the era of explorations and discoveries, the European Atlantic Slave Trade and
widespread colonization that solidified the foundations of the Christian Western civilization and
its dominance with Christopher Columbus crossing the Atlantic in late 1492 and returning to
Spain in early 1493.11

To the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Batuta, who visited East Africa at the beginning of 1332, the
Indian Ocean seemed to be “a Muslim sea” where Muslims controlled all the trade and ruled all
over the Indian Ocean world, pledging allegiance to the Caliph in Baghdad. This was early
globalization in the Indian Ocean World!

7
Hall,Kenneth, Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c 1400–1800,Lanham,
Lexington Books, 2008, Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities,
1500–1730,Washington, DC, Mage Publishers, 2006. R Michael Feener, Patrick Daly, Anthony Reid, eds. Mapping
the Achenese Past, Leiden, KITLV Press, 2011.
8
Michael Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era,
Baltimore,The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
M.N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, New York, Routledge, 2003

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9
Kenneth Hall, ed., Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c 1400-
1800 Lanham,Lexington Books, 2008
10
Kenneth McPherson, "Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 18902–1920s" in Leila Fawaz
and C. A. Bayly, eds. Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean ,New York, Columbia
University Press, 2002, p- 75–95.
11
Lodhi, Abdulaziz y., History and Culture of the Islamic International Symposium on the Civilization, Sweden,
Uppsala University, 2013

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