In a certain sense, we already knew the main argument of Monsoon Islam. Since the field of Indian Ocean studies was inaugurated by K.N. Chaudhuri half a century ago, it has been the conventional wisdom that Islam was central to the mercantile world of the Indian Ocean. And yet, we have been so blithely satisfied in this belief that until now, no scholar has actually bothered to investigate this claim. In Monsoon Islam, Sebastian Prange has taken on the tortuous and intimidating task of substantiating this broad claim and in the process has overturned many of the assumptions that have long accompanied it.
Monsoon Islam is a study of Muslim life across the trading world of the Indian Ocean from the 12th to the 16th centuries of the Common Era. While there has been a profusion of work on the early modern and modern Indian Ocean world, the pre-modern ocean remains conspicuously understudied. This lack of attention is not surprising since the written record before the arrival of Vasco da Gama is sparse indeed. Prange consequently scours a stunning range of sources from Arab travel accounts, to Sanskrit chronicles, to epigraphic and archaeological evidence, to assemble a coherent picture of Islam and trade across the ocean. The triumph of Monsoon Islam is in dredging these vast depths to discover the few stray pearls of information and then stringing these together to enrich our understanding of this world.
In many ways, this is a work of synthetic analysis rather than a traditional research monograph, in that Prange draws substantially upon secondary scholarship and translations. He gives new life to long forgotten materials, draws attention to unpublished dissertations, and brings to light largely ignored scholarship produced in India and Europe. Perhaps this synthetic research is more common in scholarship on the pre-modern era where primary sources are so rare, but as a historian of the modern world, I was impressed with the scale of this endeavor for a first book. Moreover, Monsoon Islam is not merely a synthesis of others’ ideas but rather produces new conclusions by juxtaposing work from distant fields. By engaging with these disparate works, Prange puts forward bold new arguments about the spread of Islam, pre-modern empires and even the operation of caste hierarchies in Malabar.
The book is divided into four chapters, elegantly framed by four places: the port, the mosque, the palace, and the sea. While these chapters are quite long at about 70 pages each, the author subdivides them into more manageable sections. Very roughly, these follow the economic, religious, and political aspects of this medieval world with the final chapter retracing these three divisions across the broad networks that cross the ocean. However, these social scientific divisions are continually trespassed in the telling, as Prange shows how artificial these categories were to the world of the medieval Indian Ocean.
Holding together this sprawling scholarship is the story of Cheraman Perumal: the legendary ruler of Malabar who supposedly became the first Indian convert to Islam. He serves as a powerful metaphor for the book's arguments, but the legend itself is also unpacked as a source for understanding Islam in the Indian Ocean. While other scholars have used this legend as an interesting if apocryphal anecdote, Prange investigates the textual history that underpins the modern legend. Parsing the seemingly random specifics of these texts reveals the decline of the Chera Empire in Malabar, the growing dominance of Arab traders in the Indian Ocean, and power of Sufi networks in the spread of Islam in India. Ultimately, through this story, Prange explodes the traditional narrative of the dispersal of Islam and Islamic authority from Arabia out into the Oceanic world.
The book ranges across the ocean, but Prange firmly centers it on the pepper-producing Malabar Coast of Southwest India. Indeed we learn much about social structures, political tensions, and even the urban history of ports like Calicut. Prange presents fascinating evidence that as the Nair rulers of Malabar oppressed and persecuted lower castes, they nonetheless accepted conversion to Islam and even liberated converts from many of the worst humiliations of the caste system. Even more provocatively, he makes the case that the “jihadi fanaticism” of Mappila Muslims has its roots in Hindu caste ideals rather than Islamic theology. Indeed even as this is a book about Islam, we learn a tremendous amount about how this Hindu-dominated society accommodated and got transformed by its engagement with maritime trade.
Prange carefully balances and indeed argues for keeping the tension between the global and the local: uniting the mercantile and cosmopolitan Islam of the ocean with the peculiarities and demands of specific ports. However, this is the one area where I felt the book could have been more developed. While the book extensively traces connections with Yemen and insular Southeast Asia, East Africa and mainland Southeast Asia are much less present. This fact is no doubt an artifact of the sources and the networks that Malabar was part of. It would have been helpful to see a discussion of the routes by which Malabar connected to the broader Muslim world, and whether there were mediating forces that fostered some connections and hindered others. How might Monsoon Islam appear different when viewed from Zanzibar or Chittagong, and how would it look the same?
But these are small quibbles with an enormously rich book. Monsoon Islam will be of great interest to readers of this journal; it is well written, deeply researched, and persuasively argued. It should be of great interest to scholars of South Asia, the Middle East, world history, and economic history, and it should be required reading in Islamic studies and Indian Ocean studies.
