Between Damascus and Delhi: travelers and pilgrims in the early modern Middle East and Indian Ocean
Panel 227, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 16 at 5:30 pm
Panel Description
It has become commonplace to state that the early modern world was increasingly connected as distant lands came into contact with each other. Yet what were the tangible circuits and practices of early modern connectivity in the Islamic world? Too often this question has focused on those itineraries to Europe and beyond, but doing so ignores the multiple, often well-established, connections between the Middle East and South Asia, both overland and across the ocean. This panel examines the cases of three different travelers—scholars, bureaucrats, and pilgrims—between the Ottoman empire and the Indian subcontinent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. How did these writers and their readers understand these journeys and how did they use their travelogues in the society?
The first paper follows the journey of a sixteenth-century Gujarati Muslim intellectual from his adopted home in Mecca to Istanbul and demonstrates the centrality of the intellectual’s scholarly and social networks in shaping the account of his travels. The second paper uses the travelogue of Ibn Ma’sum, a seventeenth-century Meccan youth moving to Hyderabad, to explore the larger and relatively unknown body of Arabic travelogues in the early modern Middle East. It demonstrates that Arab intellectuals’ deep investment in linguistic and poetic mastery radically restricted the people they chose worthy of description in their works. The third paper focuses on Indo-Persian Hajj narratives from the eighteenth century against the political reality of the increasingly decentralized Mughal and Ottoman empires. By following the itineraries of a north Indian Sunni scholar and a southern Indian Shi'i royal to the Hijaz, the paper discerns not only a sharper focus on the pilgrim rather than pilgrimage, but also an increasing recognition of perceived differences between global Muslim cultures encountered on hajj.
Through these three papers and a commentator, this panel recovers the multifarious ways in which circulation within the urban centers that connected South Asia to the Middle East produced as well as altered a Muslim traveler’s sense of the self, community, and his place in the Muslim world from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Overall, this panel attempts to better understand the place of the Middle East in the global early modern world by making a deliberate effort to bridge the regional, linguistic and archival boundaries that have often shaped our scholarly endeavors.
The defining marker of global early modernity is the intensified connectivity of different segments of the world and travelogues are often regarded as its archetypical text. As people journeyed ever further they began to record their experiences of encounter with other cultures and lands. The early modern Ottoman Empire both conforms to and confounds this pattern. On one hand, there are a growing number of travelogues, an unrecognized corpus of hundreds of works, but they rarely if ever venture beyond the boundaries of the empire. For example, despite the numerous visits and relations between Ottoman subjects and Venice, there exists only one short, never fully circulated travelogue from the empire to the Most Serene Republic. These asymmetries point to an intriguing problematic in the relationship between circulation and its textual expression that needs to be teased out to disentangle the narrative of global early modernity.
In this presentation, I examine the major corpus of travel writing in the Ottoman Empire—the numerous travelogues of the Arab writers describing their journeys initially to Istanbul and then to other major urban cities—by examining them as social and material objects. These travelogues were neither a continuation of earlier medieval Arabic travelogues nor did they conform to our own notions of a travelogue’s structure. They described places not through their geography or peoples but through collections of poems dedicated to those men the writers visited. In particular, I focus on travelogue of Ibn Ma’sum, which describes the author’s travels from Mecca to Hyderabad as a twelve-year old boy in the mid-seventeenth century. Intriguingly, although he was moving to a Persian-speaking court, and knew the language, he only registers the existence of those who spoke Arabic. This travelogue then demonstrates the social role of language and poetry in the logic of these works.
This paper is a preliminary attempt to reconstruct the scholarly community and social networks of Qutb al-Din Muhammad al-Nahrawali (d.1582), a Muslim intellectual from Gujarat, India, who settled in Mecca, and led a diplomatic mission to Istanbul on behalf of the Meccan sharifs in 1557-58. In his record of the mission – concerned with seeking a replacement of the Ottoman representative in Mecca – al-Nahrawali noted the various places he traveled to and halted at in great detail, and included numerous observations on the political elites, scholars, Sufis, and friends he met and stayed with on his journey. Al-Nahrawali’s journey attests to the organic and vibrant ties between Islamic knowledge production centers of Cairo and Mecca on the one hand, and cities like Ahmedabad in Gujarat in western India on the other. A reconstruction of al-Nahrawali’s intellectual networks is thus integral to understanding the production of knowledge in the western Indian Ocean world. Overall, this paper employs al-Nahrawali as an important medium to open up the regional, archival and linguistic boundaries that have often defined our own modern scholarly communities.
Reading hajj narratives against political-administrative archives, this article elaborates a global microhistory of how the Meccan pilgrimage afforded new horizons of Muslim engagement as the Mughal and Ottoman empires declined and decentralized to give way to European hegemony (c. 1750-1830). It is argued that the sacred sites of Arabia acquired novel meaning for Indian pilgrims seeking a mirror for moral and political regeneration at home. At the same time, the turbulence of imperial transformations induced greater willingness to come to grips with the realities of votive travel, and in turn greater recognition of perceived differences between global Muslim cultures encountered on hajj. Hajj accounts thus signaled a radical break from classical genres, wherein objective experiences were subordinated to the immanent. Recovering the itineraries of Rafi‘-ud-Din Muradabadi (1721/22-1810), a north Indian Sunni scholar who journeyed by sea, and ‘Abdul Husain Karnataki (d. 1830), a southern Indian Shi‘a royal who traveled overland to the Hijaz, the essay observes that, conceived in the shadow of regime change in India and the Indian Ocean, their reflections anticipated essential modern trends in Muslim mobility. These included discrete distinctions between its religious and irreligious entailments, and an emergent episteme that further illuminates how the Muslim world was reimagined after the Muslim empires.
