The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (52 page)

Basra’s primary rival was Siraf, on the Persian shore about 375 miles from the head of the gulf. Founded by the fourth-century Sasanian king
Shapur II, Siraf had a spacious roadstead that accommodated deeper-draft ships more easily than the ports of the northern gulf, but it was situated in an otherwise hostile environment subject to extreme heat and lacking sufficient water to sustain a large population, much less agriculture. The latter problem was overcome by the construction of cisterns and freshwater canals that fed luxuriant gardens cultivated by the wealthy merchant elite, which prospered from the trade of Baghdad and of
Shiraz, the capital of the Persian province of
Fars 225 kilometers to the northeast. The port’s praises were sung by geographers and historians throughout the Abbasid era, and with good reason: its merchants could be found sailing as far as China, while they imported
teak and other woods from India and East Africa for constructing houses,
mosques, ships, and navigation towers called
khashabs
. Comparing Siraf with Shiraz, the tenth-century Persian geographer al-Istakhri noted, “
Siraf nearly equaled Shiraz in size and splendour; the houses were built of teakwood brought from the
Zanj country [East Africa] and were several stories high, built to overlook the sea.”

The Abbasids blazed brilliantly for barely a century before rebels and autonomous governors on the periphery of the caliphate began challenging Baghdad’s rule. Closer to home, the caliphate faced dissent across the social spectrum, from merchants to slaves. As in many states with a substantial slave population, the caliphates were plagued by uprisings. The earliest revolts occurred in the 680s, but
Zanj unrest culminated in a fourteen-year insurrection (869–883) that began as a revolt rooted in economic grievance but quickly metastasized into an assault on the authority of the caliph in which hundreds of thousands—more than half a million in some estimates—died. The Zanj received support from Persian Gulf merchants who resented the caliphate’s interference in their trade. Together they seized Ubulla,
Abadan, and, in 871, Basra, the fall of which was the government’s biggest defeat. Basra’s loss
benefited Siraf,
Suhar, and other ports over which the Abbasids exerted only nominal control—and sometimes none at all—and which were quick to capitalize on Baghdad’s weakness.

In the tenth century, the Abbasid caliphs were reduced to the status of puppets under the political control of Persian Shiite emirs called
Buyids who exercised almost absolute power at
Baghdad and along both shores of the Persian Gulf. The rise of the Buyids coincided with the Fatimids’ relocation from
Ifriqiya to Cairo and the ensuing revival of the Red Sea trade, which had been secondary to that of the Persian Gulf since the end of Byzantine Egypt. In 976,
Siraf was wracked by a weeklong series of earthquakes. This was not a defining event in and of itself, but it was a portent of the gulf’s commercial decline. Seljuq Turk invaders from
Central Asia captured
Shiraz in 1062 but established their capital at Isfahan, 750 kilometers north of Siraf, and took little interest in maritime trade. Unrest in southern Persia, the consequent emergence of a pirate state on the island of Kish in the
Strait of Hormuz, and the continued growth of the Red Sea ports under the Fatimids all conspired to make the Persian Gulf less attractive to merchants.

At first blush it seems paradoxical that the Muslim capture of Egypt in the seventh century did not lead to an increase in traffic on the Red Sea, apart from the pilgrim and grain trade to Mecca. The Nile and Red Sea had been vital avenues for exchange between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean since antiquity, but the establishment of Baghdad made the Persian Gulf the primary terminus of trade from the western Indian Ocean. Such commerce as flowed through the Red Sea before the Fatimid revival was in the hands of Persian Gulf mariners frequenting Jeddah and Aden where by the ninth century one could find “
all the merchandise of
Sind, Hind, China,
Zanzibar, Abyssinia, Fars [Persia], Basra, Jiddah, and Kulzum.” In 646 the Orthodox
caliph Uthman had designated Jeddah as the port of Mecca, about seventy-five kilometers to the southeast. Surrounded by salt flats and reefs through which ships can enter only via a narrow entrance, Jeddah was nonetheless one of the most important harbors in the Muslim world, especially during the
hajj, when the bulk of grain and other supplies for the pilgrims—and in some periods a majority of the pilgrims themselves—came by sea via
Qulzum (the ancient
Clysma, now
Suez). It was also a major entrepôt for goods bound to or from Egypt because it was more dangerous and less profitable for Indian Ocean ships to sail north of Jeddah. Red Sea traffic increased with the rejuvenation of Egypt’s commercial prosperity, and again after the
Seljuqs captured the Sinai in the 1060s. With the normal overland route from
North Africa to Mecca impassable, prospective hajjis traveling via Egypt embarked on a three-stage journey that took them by boat up the Nile to Qus or
Aswan, where they
joined a camel caravan that took three weeks to reach the humble port of
Aydhab, which had a permanent population of only about five hundred. Aydhab’s shipmasters charged extortionate fares for the 150-mile passage to Jeddah as well as for any provisions pilgrims might be forced to buy. But the Aswan–Aydhab–Jeddah route remained practicable until the first
Mamluk sultan of Egypt overthrew the
crusader states of
Palestine and in 1267/68 reopened the Sinai route to Mecca.

So long as Baghdad remained the primary market of the western Indian Ocean, the Red Sea functioned as a branch line for
Persian Gulf shipping. Even though one could find a wealth of merchandise in Aden, much of this passed through Persian Gulf ports first. This was true even of goods from the nearby coasts of East Africa. Persian Gulf trade with East Africa was not a new endeavor, but starting no later than the eighth century there was a concerted push south of the
Horn of Africa, where Islam began to exert a definite though limited influence. After their foray across the Red Sea into
Yemen in the sixth century, the kings of
Aksum had abandoned their maritime aspirations and
Omani traders from Siraf and Suhar gradually assumed their role on the African coast north of the Horn of Africa. By the eighth century they were settled on the island of
Socotra, which they used as a staging ground for trading and raiding beyond the Horn. Omanis and their Persian and Arab followers initially confined themselves to the relatively protected archipelagoes and offshore islands scattered along the coasts of
Kenya and
Tanzania, and even after settling on the mainland they did not penetrate the interior to any significant degree. Many of their ports were temporary in nature, or at least constructed of perishable materials, and most of the permanent towns established after the turn of the millennium were no more than a few kilometers from the sea.

Physical structures from the first three centuries of the Muslim presence
in East Africa may have been impermanent, but many sites nonetheless reached
impressive size—as much as twenty hectares (fifty acres) in some cases—and formed the basis for cities still thriving today: Mogadishu in
Somalia; the ports of Kenya’s
Lamu archipelago; the Tanzanian islands of Pemba, Zanzibar, and
Kilwa; and
Sofala,
Mozambique, which was the coastal terminus of the gold trade from Zimbabwe and effectively the southwest limit of Indian Ocean shipping until the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. While they owed their overseas connections to Muslim merchants, these sites were originally settled and continued to be dominated by African
Swahili speakers who by the eighth century had spread south along a two-thousand-kilometer stretch of the coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and who
were established in the Comoros archipelago in the ninth and tenth centuries. Despite a long-standing belief that
Swahili culture was indelibly marked by Arabic and Islamic influences from an early date, these were absorbed by rather than imposed upon the Swahili, who evolved a complex society that mediated between foreign and local African traditions. Part of the confusion has to do with the very word “Swahili,” which comes from the Arabic
sawahil,
meaning “coast.” However, Swahili is a
Bantu language with a limited Arabic vocabulary—chiefly specialist religious, commercial, and nautical
terms—most of which entered the language between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Omani Empire included part of coastal East Africa.

Among the earliest Swahili sites thus far excavated is at
Shanga, where finds of Persian ceramics show that Muslim sailors were visiting by the end of the eighth century. The town prospered and by the eleventh century it was the site of a Friday mosque and other structures built with coral and stone rather than more perishable wood and thatch. Of slightly later date is the
town of Kilwa, on an island that measures four by six kilometers in an enclosed bay on the Tanzanian coast. Kilwa reached its apogee between the late twelfth and sixteenth centuries, but excavations have revealed articles of Arabo-Persian and Chinese provenance (the latter shipped by way of Persian Gulf ports) dating from the ninth century. According to the sixteenth-century
Kilwa Chronicle,
the city was founded by
Ali ibn al-Husayn, the son of a sultan of
Shiraz. Sailing in seven ships, al-Husayn, his five brothers, and his father established themselves in seven locations in the Comoros and on the mainland opposite the Lamu archipelago, which al-Husayn is said to have bartered from a mainland ruler for some cloth. The story of al-Husayn echoes legends explaining the establishment of Mogadishu and the migration of Persians to India’s
Konkan Coast in the eighth century. Whatever its veracity, the story was probably half a millennium old when it was written down: finds at Kilwa include eleventh-century coins bearing the name of al-Husayn and his successors. Nor were members of al-Husayn’s family the first people to reach the Comoros. Initially settled by Malagasy speakers from
Madagascar, the archipelago grew in importance because it lay about midway between northern Mozambique and Madagascar and astride the offshore route between Sofala and Kilwa, the broad eastern arc of which was dictated by the prevailing winds and currents. In addition to the regular traffic between the Persian Gulf and Africa, there was direct trade between
Srivijaya and East Africa and possibly Madagascar. Here Srivijayan merchant sailors were said to be “
welcomed hospitably and conduct a lucrative trade … because each understands the other’s language,” because Malagasy derives from the
Austronesian language of the island’s first settlers.

Exports from East Africa were varied but consisted chiefly of natural
resources, principally gold, mangrove wood, tortoiseshell, iron for Indian metalsmiths, and ivory. Imports are harder to determine until the ninth century, when
Chinese ceramics and glass were added to the manifest of Muslim and Indian merchants. Because these are less perishable than organic materials, it is easier to trace their distribution through time and space, which is one reason the history of East Africa comes into comparatively clear focus at this time. Yet there was another less heralded mainstay of Indian Ocean commerce: the trade in enslaved Africans. There were already enough slaves in
Iraq to mount a rebellion in the seventh century, but the traffic in slaves shot up in the ninth century. Between 850 and 1000 ce, slavers shipped an estimated
2.5 million black Africans from south of the
Horn of Africa, which in time was called the Cape of Slaves. Another 10 million followed before 1900. The Indian Ocean
slave trade has received less scrutiny than its later Atlantic counterpart, partly for want of written records, and partly because of differing attitudes toward slaves and the slave trade
in Asia. Unlike in European societies, slaves in the Muslim world had broad legal rights and could hold high office, earn money, and own property, even while being the property of someone else. They could purchase their freedom and marry other slaves or free persons. Initially, at least, the degree of racial prejudice associated with slavery was less in the Islamic world than elsewhere, and Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims and
dhimmis
—“protected people,” as Christians, Jews,
Zoroastrians, and other recipients of divine scripture were called. Nevertheless, black Muslims were routinely enslaved, a fact about which African rulers and Muslims jurists complained, just as African Christians would later complain about their treatment at the hands of European Christians.

Hardly any documentation about the medieval
East African slave trade exists, but we do know of a few individuals who rose to high rank—one ruled Egypt, first as regent and then in his own right—and writers did record unintended consequences of the trade like the
Zanj rebellions. A unique source for the trade per se is the story of an unnamed African ruler and an Omani merchant named
Ismail ibn Ibrahim ibn Mirdas. In 922, Ismail was en route to
Pemba Island when he was forced south of his destination. Landing near Sofala, he and his crew began bartering with the locals—“
a trade that was excellent for us, without any hindrances or customs duties,” so common in the rest of the Indian Ocean world. When the trading was completed, the local king boarded the ship to see off the merchants. “When I saw them there,” recalled Ismail, “I said to myself: In the market in Oman this young king would certainly fetch thirty dinars, and his seven companions sixty each. Their clothes alone are worth not less than twenty dinars. One way and another this
would give us a profit of at least 3,000 dirhams, and without any trouble.”
^b
So he bundled the king and his retainers in with the two hundred slaves already aboard his ship and sailed for home. The king was sold at Oman, which would be the end of the story were it not for the fact that several years later Ismail fetched up again near Sofala only to find himself before his erstwhile prisoner.

Recounting his adventures to the justifiably nervous Omani, the unnamed king told how after being sold he lived in
Basra and
Baghdad, where he converted to Islam. He escaped his owner by joining pilgrims bound for Mecca, from where he continued to Cairo. Determined to return home, he sailed up the Nile and struck out for the coast, where he boarded a vessel that brought him home. Without definite news of his fate, his people had not chosen a successor, so he resumed the throne. “My people listened to the account of my story, and it surprised them, and filled them with joy.” More important, he told Ismail, “Like myself, they embraced the religion of Islam.… And, if I have forgiven you, it is because you were the first cause of the purity of my religion.” Bidding Ismail farewell, the king asked him to “let Muslims know that they may come here to us as to brothers, Muslims like themselves. As for accompanying you to your ship,” he observed, “I have reasons for not doing so.” The king’s refusal to avenge his kidnapping on Ismail testifies to his reverence for his new faith, but as his penultimate remarks reveal, his people’s adoption of Islam had a practical side and they could promote their new faith in the same way a business might post a sign saying “
Arabic spoken here.”