Writing in Arabic in Gujarat and the Hijaz: Some Reflections from the Early Modern Period

Abstract

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.