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.

As a region with a long coastline by the Arabian Sea in northwestern India, Gujarat has historically been connected to the maritime rhythms of the Indian Ocean and inter-regional developments in north India and the Deccan. These connections—commercial, but also political, cultural, and intellectual—remain central to the history of Gujarat as an independent sultanate in the fifteenth century and during the time of Mughal control from the late sixteenth century.1 The circulation of Muslim scholars and intellectuals between the urban centers of Gujarat and cities of the Hijaz, Hadramawt, and Egypt, shaped the intellectual enterprise of several prominent scholars in Gujarat (and more broadly South Asia) who wrote in Arabic—from al-Damamini (d. 1424) and ‘Ali Muttaqi (d. 1567) to Shah Wajih al-Din ‘Alawi (d. 1590) and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-‘Aydarus (d.1628). While these scholars’ works have received attention from modern scholars to varying degrees, this essay emphasizes the importance of foregrounding the early modern oceanic context in order to recover the transregional social and scholarly ties central to the lives and oeuvre of these intellectuals. Recovering transregional oceanic connections in turn calls for greater engagement with scholarly writings produced in Arabic, a language that has remained peripheral to South Asian historiography.

Composed by Amīr Khwurd around the middle of the fourteenth century, the Siyar al-Awliyā' presents a coherent history of the Chishti spiritual order (silsilah) in the Indian subcontinent from the early thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. Historians have mined the text for information on Sufis and Sufism while ignoring its special attributes. This article makes a historiographical and methodological intervention by showing how a Sufi biographical compendium (tazkira) can be used to write a history of the Muslim society and an incipient Chishti fraternity.

Narrative Pasts explores the narrative power of texts—genealogical, historical, and biographical—in creating communities. It retrieves the social history of a Muslim community in Gujarat, a region that has one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social, and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the book reveals the importance of learned Muslim men in imparting a distinct regional and historical identity to Gujarat. The prominence of Gujarat’s maritime location has often oriented the study of Gujarat towards the commercial world of the western Indian Ocean world. Narrative Pasts demonstrates that Gujarat was also an integral part of the historical and narrative processes that shaped medieval and early modern South Asia. Employing new and rarely used literary materials in Persian and Arabic, this book departs from the narrow state-centred visions of the Muslim past and integrates Gujarat’s sultanate and Mughal past with the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia.

The consolidation of a texted past around Sufi migrants in fifteenth-century Gujarat was accompanied by the development of the tomb-shrines of Aḥmad Khattū and two members of the Suhrawardi spiritual fraternity, Burhān al-Dīn ‘Abdullāh (d. 1453) and Sirāj al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1475). Texts and tombs represented conjoined processes that enabled ongoing community formation. The tomb shrines created regional networks of disciples and pilgrims focused on the burial sites of the Sufis just as texts increasingly cohered the history of the buried Sufis and their community into genealogies and overlapping personal connections. This chapter argues that the participation of the Gujarat Sultans in the creation of a sacral geography—through patronage, shrine veneration, and not least of all the building of palatial structures and royal tombs in close proximity—reflected the intertwined processes of state, community, and region formation in fifteenth-century Gujarat.