The growing appreciation of the narrative sources composed in the Hijaz in the later medieval and early modern periods has generated recognition of the valuable information they provide on relations with neighbouring regionsFootnote 1 or, more recently, on problems of social, political, and intellectual history.Footnote 2 These local histories, biographical dictionaries, and other sources are an essential means to draw a balance between the view of the Hijaz as a geographically isolated region, enjoying considerable autonomy, and the view of it as a destination connected to other lands through the regular rhythms of pilgrimage and commerce. The tension in these apparently opposed views makes the Hijaz and its cities intriguing as an object of study: at one and the same time, it was a marginalised area, barely able to provide the means of existence for its inhabitants, much less its pilgrims, but also a vibrant centre of the faith due to the annual pilgrimage, the accompanying commerce, and the donation of voluntary alms (ṣadaqah) that offered an inexhaustible source of political prestige. In addition, our conception of the history of the Hijaz has been disrupted by the break between the late medieval and early modern periods, an issue addressed by Andrew Peacock in his essay on Jeddah and Ottoman imperial policy.Footnote 3 Thus the history of the region and its cities has often tended to fall back on historiographies and paradigms borrowed from adjacent regions. The result may be that the history of the region becomes overshadowed by these other subjects of historical investigation, and our understanding of the region itself becomes distorted by preoccupations with the global histories of more powerful neighbours in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In either case, the Hijaz, as an economically and politically marginal area, tends to become an object of historical investigation defined by its neighbours.
A more concerted examination of the Hijazi sources will draw on their value as a record of information about the continuities and transformations of the region across a major watershed in world history, the decades on either side of 1500. In the absence of documentary evidence in the Hijaz, the Meccan narratives constitute a record that allows us to trace developments from the time of al-Fāsī (d. AH 832/1429 CE) and his fourteenth-century predecessors, through the heyday of the Banū Fahd, to the chroniclers of the later centuries, such as al-ʿAṣimī (d. 1111/1699) and al-Sinjārī (d. 1125/1713). The period of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century was a time of especially detailed history writing in Mecca. Of course, scholars continued to write books on religious topics—on the traditions of the Prophet, the virtues of the Holy Cities, and the ritual practices of the pilgrimage—but there was also sustained interest in contemporary affairs and events unrelated to religious knowledge.
In brief, the first of the core historical works of this period was the biographical dictionary of al-Fāsī, a ṭabaqāt work with the customary entries on religious personages but which includes also information on current events.Footnote 4 Indeed, aside from his account of the Prophet’s life, the longest biography in the book of 3,500 entries was on Ḥasan ibn ʿAjlān (d. 827/1423), the ruling sharif of Mecca.Footnote 5 Al-Fāsī’s work as a historian recording life in Mecca and the Hijaz was continued by several generations of the Ibn Fahd family. Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Fahd (d. 885/1480), whose father Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 871/1466) was a prolific author of religious texts, continued al-Fāsī’s biographical dictionary, al-Durr al-Kamīn bi-Dhayl al-ʿIqd al-Thamīn.Footnote 6 Najm al-Dān also wrote an annalistic chronicle of Mecca, starting with the first year of the Hijra and running up to his lifetime, Itḥāf al-Wará bi-Akhbār Umm al-Qurá.Footnote 7 Najm al-Dīn’s son, ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 922/1517), continued his father’s chronicle with Bulūgh al-Qirá fī Dhayl Itḥāf al-Wará bi-Akhbār Umm al-Qurá, which was in turn continued by his son, Jār Allāh (d. 954/1547–48), who wrote Nayl al-Muná bi-Dhayl Bulūgh al-Qirá li-Takmilat Itḥāf al-Wará.Footnote 8 History writing was not an idle pastime for the descendants of Taqī al-Dīn. Aside from his religious training, Najm al-Dīn studied in Cairo with the well-known historians Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) and al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), and ʿIzz al-Dīn studied with the equally renowned al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497). Thus history writing in Mecca followed the pattern observed in various metropoles across the Islamic world, as observed by Tarif Khalidi. The historiographical approach of these authors—unlike their forebears who were devoted to narrating a momentous past—offered accounts of their ‘own present as being of equal if not greater significance’.Footnote 9 What is especially impressive about the information supplied by ʿIzz al-Dīn and Jār Allāh is the apparently systematic detail they offer on economic and social issues, as will be noted below. What is also noteworthy is that, although these accounts were composed as ‘continuations’ (sg. dhayl),Footnote 10 they were not uniform in their approach since each successor was not constrained by the historiographical parameters of his predecessor. Each author offered whatever detail he considered relevant to the events he recounted.Footnote 11 So while we do not have the luxury of a systematically collected archive, we do have the rich detail of observers who, cognizant of what their predecessors recorded, nonetheless reported extensively on a variety of topics, constituting a multigenerational series of narratives that we would be rash to dismiss.
In this article, I will sketch out a partial view of continuities and transformations in the Hijaz, as seen from Mecca,Footnote 12 drawing on the chronicles of ʿIzz al-Dīn and Jār Allāh,Footnote 13 to explore the interconnection of daily life and global connections across the turn of the sixteenth century historical divide. My main objective is to explore the richness of these sources from the late medieval and early modern periods and to propose a hypothesis about the reorientation of Mecca to the Indian Ocean as it became aligned with new flows of Asian commodities and voluntary alms. The Nile Valley has long been recognised as the bread basket of the medieval Hijaz; in the nineteenth century, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje observed that ‘India was Mecca’s real treasure chest’.Footnote 14 At the turn of the fifteenth century, we observe in the local narratives from Mecca the growing importance of mundane goods over the ‘splendid but trifling’Footnote 15 treasures from the East, to the extent that India’s bounty in rice became an additional source of nourishment for the Hijaz.
Continuities and the web of interests
In her landmark study on the pilgrimage, Suraiya Faroqhi argued that the Ottoman sultans legitimised their rule and integrated their empire by supporting Mecca and the pilgrimage, the latter being ‘a powerful integrating device’ through a ‘web of interests’ that connected various sections of the population of the Hijaz—including Bedouins, townspeople, residents of pious foundations, and merchants—to the Ottoman state.Footnote 16 The ‘interlocking mechanisms’ of commerce and subsidies linked government officials, tribal leaders, Hijazi notables, religious elite, and merchants within this web. The web was further bolstered by sources of income across the empire that supported charities within the Hijaz and by the overlap of commercial and pilgrimage traffic that formed the foundation of the connections to Mecca. The residents of the holy cities were thus integrated into the imperial system by providing goods and services to pilgrims and by receiving subsidies from pious foundations. In addition, rather than relying on military power in the Hijaz to provide security for pilgrims and merchants,Footnote 17 the Ottoman state relied on political means to extend its influence in the region. Faroqhi noted that Bedouin groups, demonstrating their ‘nuisance value’, received subsidies from the central authorities, establishing a form of political codependence between the sultan’s power and local groups. According to Faroqhi, the withdrawal of the sultan’s support would have meant ‘a disadvantage and not an advantage’ for the Hijaz.Footnote 18 One might add also that withdrawal of the sultan’s support would have similarly disadvantaged the legitimacy of the Ottoman Sultanate given the essential lustre that the protection of the pilgrimage gave to the sultans’ prestige and legitimacy. In many respects, Ottoman reliance on ‘political solutions’ in the Hijaz followed on the arrangements that the Mamluk sultans of Cairo employed in the region.
In an examination of the dynamics of the India trade in the Red Sea, and drawing on Ottoman archival sources together with Hijazi narrative sources, Peacock shows that the actions of the Meccan sharifs and Ottoman officials in the region deviated from Ottoman imperial policy. He traces continuities from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, noting many of ‘which have been overlooked by historians whose works concentrate on one side or the other of the Mamluk–Ottoman divide and have tended to overemphasise the effect of the Portuguese’.Footnote 19 While some historians have depicted ‘a free trade regime’ in the Red Sea, Peacock noted that the Ottoman law code promulgated in 1525 confirms the continuity of earlier policy and explicitly refers to Mamluk precedence:
It is necessary that in harbours attached to the lands of Egypt, dues and tithes should be taken from the merchants according to the custom and law that has been current from the time of Qayitbay till now, and nothing should be taken contrary to the custom and the law.Footnote 20
Adherence to this policy two decades later is confirmed in a Mühimme document, dated 951/1544, in which local officials are instructed to act in accordance with ‘ancient custom’.Footnote 21 The intention of this policy was to provide revenue to the sharif, which ‘was important to securing his position and thus the broader security of the Hijaz, a matter which, as in Mamluk times, also had the implications for Ottoman prestige through the success of the hajj’.Footnote 22 However, just as the Mamluk sultan in Cairo faced difficulty in ensuring administrative practice locally, the Ottomans also had to cope with ‘the same problems of unreliable officials, Sharifal mistreatment of merchants and Yemeni competition’.Footnote 23 Peacock observes that the Mühimme records affirmed the inability of the Ottomans ‘to control, or trust, their officials on the ground whose actions often directly contradicted the Porte’s instructions’.Footnote 24 In Peacock’s reading, the impact of the Portuguese is only rarely mentioned locally; the greater challenge for the Ottoman authorities appears to have been ‘the difficulties of negotiating the complex web of competing interests there’.Footnote 25 Thus Peacock observes the tendency in current historiography to ‘overestimate’ the significance of international conflict over the spice trade and ‘underestimates the significance of local politics’.Footnote 26 The Hijazi sources provide a distinctly local view, the Arabian context, which is an essential starting point for even a trans-regional view of Mecca and the Hijaz, encompassing a perspective that allows us to appreciate other modes of international competition, such as the giving of voluntary alms, and the significance of common goods in transforming local cultural life.
Although accounts of fifteenth-century Mecca have not described a ‘web of interests’ per se, the constituent elements of such a web are nevertheless evident, thanks in large measure to the narrative sources that were composed there. During the Mamluk era in Mecca, the ruling sharif’s role in mediating with local tribal groups was certainly an important feature of that web. The other elements of the Ottoman-period web—the educated elite in the cities, pious subsidies and foundations, merchants, state officials—also had their Mamluk period antecedents.Footnote 27 The web of relations in the Hijaz, together with the extreme distances from imperial centres, was what endowed the sharifs of Mecca and Medina with a certain degree of strength to resist or, at least, mitigate external control. The power of the sultan, whether located in Cairo or Istanbul, and that of the ruling sharif in Mecca, were mutually reinforcing.
Overlapping webs of interest
It is noteworthy, also, that this array of interests extended well beyond the purview of either the sultanate of Cairo or, after 1517, that of Istanbul, so that we may speak of a number of webs of interest that connected the Hijaz, and Mecca more particularly, to other locations in the Islamic world. Commercial activity provides a clear example. Chroniclers in Mecca, from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century, seem to display a growing interest in the evidently burgeoning maritime traffic in the Indian Ocean, which had already played a role in shaping Rasulid Yemen, as Éric Vallet has so thoroughly documented.Footnote 28 Al-Fāsī and Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Fahd make occasional observations about maritime activity, often relating to the local political and economic interests of the Mamluk sultans in Cairo or the rulings sharifs in Mecca. Their reports tend to be rather vague in most cases, referring to the spice trade in general terms, or Indian ship captains, or rarely, the arrival of a noteworthy captain from an Indian port.Footnote 29 Certainly more detailed information about India was known to them, especially to Najm al-Dīn, who often records in his biographical dictionary individual scholars who left for destinations in India, such as Cambay, most often to conduct business, but also, at least in one case, out of curiosity.Footnote 30
In contrast, the latter’s son, ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn Fahd, and grandson, Jār Allāh ibn Fahd, wrote chronicles that show a growing familiarity with and appreciation of these trans-oceanic connections. ʿIzz al-Dīn’s chronicle is more systematic than his father’s in recording commercial activity to the degree that his chronicle’s detailed information is reminiscent of documentary sources, as noted by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.Footnote 31 The systematic nature of the data remains an open-ended issue, but lacking any more detailed alternative, we can get a sense, at least in relative terms, of the frequency of traffic coming from specific Indian portsFootnote 32 in the second half of the fifteenth century and continuing into the sixteenth, thanks to the continued reporting of Jār Allāh ibn ʿIzz al-Dīn. Jār Allāh’s presentation of this information was perhaps as different from his father’s as was his father’s from his grandfather’s. He gives us a rather different view of commercial activity, avoiding the numerical details that his father recorded but offering instead longer descriptions of various episodes and the principal figures involved. The repeated detail on maritime commerce allows us to discern with some nuance the significance of these long-distance connections. Overall, from the perspective of Mecca and Jeddah, commercial activity continued in spite of the Portuguese depredations, although some ports took on more prominent roles than others as the flows of commerce changed.
Another important element within the webs of interests entangling Mecca is that of pious donations to the Holy City, which effectively subsidised the livelihood of the population, highlighting the region’s dependence on distant parts of the Islamic world. In the context of the Ottoman pilgrimage, the provision of funds for the pilgrimage (ṣürre) was a key element to securing the safety of the pilgrimage route, underscoring the claim of the Ottoman sultan as the Servant of the Two Sanctuaries (khādim al-ḥaramayn),Footnote 33 as the Cairo sultans had previously claimed, which constituted a public declaration of responsibility for the safe conduct of the pilgrimage. Mamluk sultans and emirs founded institutions that continued to function after the Ottoman takeover, including, for example, those of sultans al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq (r. 842–857/1438–1453), al-Ashraf Qāytbāy (r. 872–901/1463–1496), and Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906–922/1501–1516). During the Ottoman period, some of these were ‘reformed and subsumed under the overall heading of the Greater Deshīshe foundation’.Footnote 34 These contributions of voluntary alms (ṣadaqah) supplied food to the populace and were subsequently doubled by Sultan Selīm I, then doubled again by Süleymān, and increased yet again by Selīm II, according to al-Sinjarī. Shortly before the death of Selīm I, in Ramaḍān 926 (started 15 August 1520), the sultan established a register listing all the pious sojourners (mujāwirūn) in Mecca, each of whom, it was stipulated, was to receive 100 dinars from funds supplied from Egypt.Footnote 35
This link connecting at first Cairo and then Istanbul to Mecca, when viewed from sources composed in Mecca, was part of a broader network of webs that connected Mecca (and no doubt Medina also) to numerous other polities across the Islamic world.Footnote 36 The khādim’s service to the Holy Cities, whether based in Cairo or in Istanbul, represented an assertion of preeminence in the Islamic world but did not preclude other rulers from engaging in acts of service as well. Thus, the sharifs of Mecca were connected through multiple lines of dialogue with political rulers elsewhere who hoped to enhance their own credibility as Muslim leaders, which they could wield as influence.Footnote 37 This occurred in different ways, for example with the dispatch of the pilgrimage palanquin (maḥmal) and the establishment of pious foundations; in the sixteenth century, Indian rulers added to the manifold connections by sending alms, pilgrims’ ships, or copies of the Qur’an.Footnote 38
Webs of influence: alms, rice, the marketplace
Just as we have considerable detail on commercial connections, thanks to the reports of the chroniclers, so do we also have much information on the sending of voluntary alms to the Hijaz, which up through the fifteenth century largely consisted of wheat shipments. Regarding the Ottoman donations, Faroqhi suggests that ‘the alms granted to Meccans at least in part were meant to secure the loyalty of influential personages of the Holy Cities, and maybe even to cement their ties to individual Ottoman officials active in the Hejaz’.Footnote 39 This ‘loyalty’, however, should not be seen as a singular, zero-sum transaction; rather, the transactions were part of a dynamic of ‘dialogue’,Footnote 40 a vehicle as much for exerting influence as for maintaining interests. At the turn of the sixteenth century, while this dynamic was playing out, the rulers of India were initiating their own dialogue of donations that had its origins in the foundation of their charitable institutions in the early fifteenth century.Footnote 41 Their mosques and madrasas were important features of the institutional landscape of Mecca, but their donations of various commodities in the form of ṣadaqah indicate an especially clear shift in the reorientation of Mecca to the burgeoning commercial power of the South Asian economy. Recent investigations of the material history of maritime commerce have underscored the blurry lines between commodity and gift, typically at the scale of the individual merchant, to facilitate business transactions.Footnote 42 Voluntary alms sent by state authorities operated at a far greater scale, addressing the needs of the mass of pilgrims in Mecca and Medina. Goods sent as alms, like other objects, had a similarly multivalent quality, at times serving as charitable social assistance and at other times functioning as expediential political support. The shipment of large quantities of commodities for sale, the proceeds of which were distributed as alms, had a proportionate effect on the local economy and further blurred the line between charity and commerce. Since these shipments often included rice, there seems also to have been a comparable effect on the available diet in Mecca: grains like wheat, millet, and sorghum imported into the Hijaz were no longer the only staples.
Starting with the chronicle of ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn Fahd and continuing with that of Jār Allāh, alms were reported so frequently and with such regularity that one may again be tempted to draw on their accounts as a systematic record of such service. The frequency of reporting the data provides a glimpse of how these donations affected the economy and politics of Mecca and the Hijaz more broadly. As early as the reign of Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy (r. 825–841/1422–1436), Cairo made payments to the Sharif of Mecca, referred to as ‘noble alms’ (al-sadaqah al-sharifah) or the sultan’s alms, a practice that was followed by his successors al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq, al-Ashraf Ināl (r. 857–865/1453–1461), and al-Ashraf Qaytbāy. Their acts of charity doubled as political support, used to adjust Cairo’s fiscal hold over the Hijaz. Given the importance of all these subsidies to the livelihood of people in the Hijaz, ʿIzz al-Dīn directed considerable attention to the arrival of the donations. As I have discussed elsewhere, he often recorded their values in dinars and noted the role of the Shāfiʿī chief judge in supervising the distribution of the shares, in which ʿIzz al-Dīn himself received a share.Footnote 43 Up until the death of Sharif Muḥammad ibn Barakāt in 903/1497, the majority of donations ʿIzz al-Dīn recorded came from locations in India (15 out of 39 of known origin) and from Anatolia (13 out of 39 of known origin).Footnote 44 During the remaining period covered in the chronicle, India and Anatolia continued to predominate: out of 16 recorded donations, seven came from India, five from Anatolia, and three from Yemen; in only one record was the point of origin not indicated. These charitable acts carried significant political ramifications for the donors and patently demonstrated Mecca’s connections to foreign sources of wealth. After the Ottoman conquest, the practice of division of alms may have changed—a topic that needs further investigation. However, it is noteworthy that, during the time of Jār Allāh, the distribution of alms could also generate discord among the social groups that he identified in Mecca—the Arabs (ʿArab), the Turks (Arwām), and the ʿAjam (Persians and Indians?)—revealing the impact of other webs of influence connecting Mecca to other part of the Islamic world.Footnote 45
In the last decades of the ninth/fifteenth century, ʿIzz al-Dīn recorded the arrival of alms from India, information that his son Jār Allāh continued to supply as well. In 887/1482, ʿIzz al-Dīn reported the arrival of alms from Dabhol, although more interesting to him than the details of the gift, such as the value of the gift or its benefactor, was that the agent delivering it, Miftāḥ Kamālī, was beaten to death for embezzlement.Footnote 46 The following year, in 888/1483, alms for Ramaḍān arrived from al-Khaljī—presumably the ruler of Malwā.Footnote 47 Two years later, in 889/1484, he reported the arrival of alms consisting of muslin turban cloths (ṣadaqat al-shāshāt)Footnote 48 sent from Dabhol and delivered by Aḥmad ibn Khawājā Jāhān Mahmūd Gāwān, the prince of merchants (malik al-tujjār), whose father had achieved similar prominence in the Bahmani Sultanate.Footnote 49 In his usual fashion, ʿIzz al-Dīn recounted that these were distributed according to status: each of the chief judges received 20 cloths and he himself received seven, placing him considerably higher than those who received only one or two.Footnote 50 In 898/1493, he reported the arrival of rice, muslin, and bayram (a silk-like cloth?) coming from Cambay and Bandar Shilwī.Footnote 51 In following years, ʿIzz al-Dīn recorded the arrival of various commodities, such as rice and cloth, and sometimes also pistachios or other commodities, identified as coming from India, or more particularly specified as coming from Gujarat or Cambay, often mentioning the agent delivering the gift rather than the benefactor. Although al-Khaljī seems to have been known to him,Footnote 52 he does not mention the sultan of Gujarat, Maḥmūd Shāh (r. 863–917/1458–1511).
Gujarati connections to the Hijaz continued under the rule of Mahmūd Shāh’s successors, Muẓaffar Shāh II (r. 917–932/1511–1526) and Bahādur Shāh (r. 932–941/1526–1535).Footnote 53 Jār Allāh documented these manifold connections and regularly reported ṣadaqah donations. While his father ʿIzz al-Dīn offered details on points of origin, the monetary value of the donations, and the breakdown in the distribution of the alms, Jār Allāh more often identified the name of the donor and commented on the donation’s impact on the local market.Footnote 54 Regarding the latter, for example, on 13 Rabīʿ II 925/15 March 1519, he noted that, after a messenger from Jeddah arrived in Mecca announcing the arrival of Indian ships bearing alms from Muẓaffar Shāh II, prices decreased. A month later, when four more ships arrived from Cambay, he remarked that prices dropped again. He went on to note that people had not seen such a quantity of alms before, consisting of textiles, lac, and indigo, valued at 60,000 dinars—most of it for the people of Mecca and the remainder for the people of Medina—as well as a copy of the Qur’an in the handwriting of Muẓaffar Shāh.Footnote 55 Two years later, in 927/1521, Jār Allāh reported the arrival of the ‘alms of rice’ (ṣadaqat aruzz) from the ruler of Barwaj, a district in Gujarat, which arrived together with cloth.Footnote 56 More significantly, for the political resonance of these gifts, he named as the donors of these gifts either Muẓaffar Shāh or Malik Ayāz (d. 928/1522), the officer first appointed by Maḥmūd Shāh to expand Gujarat’s sea trade, extending their control to 84 ports, and establishing Maḥmūd Shāh’s reputation as ‘the Lord of the Sea’.Footnote 57 Malik Ayāz continued to serve under Muẓaffar Shāh, and their ṣadaqah donations to the Holy Cities of the Hijaz likely facilitated the more robust expansion of Gujarati trade into the Red Sea.
In Jār Allāh’s account, the donations from the Ottoman lands (including Egypt) and the Indian lands predominated, with occasional mentions of places like Yemen, as was the case during his father’s time. However, it is also noteworthy that he also recorded three occasions, from 1529 to 1536, when the emir of Upper Egypt sent ṣadaqah, specifying ‘Egyptian wheat’ in one report, to be distributed in Mecca, reflecting the relative autonomy of southern Egypt and the political aspirations of that emir.Footnote 58 Invariably, we see that the donations from the Ottoman lands and the Nile Valley were wheat or sorghum,Footnote 59 while those from India, as noted above, consisted typically of textiles and rice, as well as lac and indigo, and, in a couple of instances, high-value commodities like pepper, gems, and Chinese porcelain, all of which were products that would have been well received in the marketplace. A frequent practice of Indian rulers was to send commodities to Mecca for sale, the proceeds of which were distributed to the poor, or rice, which could be used as ballast and then sold or distributed as alms.Footnote 60
The reporting of these Indian commodities injected into the Meccan marketplace echoes the observation of Ashin Das Gupta on the significance of foodstuffs in the medieval export trade of Bengal and the Konkan coast and reveals the scope of, to quote Geneviève Bouchon, ‘what is generally called the Indian trade in India, which very frequently underlies the spice trade’. Sinnapah Arasaratnam refers to this as the ‘traditional Asian’ trade. The products of the Indian trade—Bouchon highlights three types of commodities: military animals, foodstuffs, and textiles—were ‘essential for all the lands of the Indian Ocean’, especially the trade in foodstuffs and textiles, qualifying that this commerce was of ‘secondary importance’ beyond that sphere, where the spice trade was of greater significance in markets ranging from the far east to the far west, from China to Europe.Footnote 61 Meccan chronicle reports from earlier in the fifteenth century mention the spice trade—in terms of pepper—but do not have much of anything to say about the more prosaic commodities of the Indian trade, like cloth and rice. It would seem that the appearance of these products was sufficiently novel to ʿIzz al-Dīn that he started reporting them, an indication that the Indian trade was becoming of primary importance in the Hijaz, and Jār Allāh in turn followed suit, noting when the influx of these commodities—as alms—affected the marketplace.
The shifting food frontier of rice
These products from India, whether they served as objects of charity or as objects of commerce, also served as markers of new stages in an expanding economy. In her study of the material culture of the Indian Ocean, Elizabeth Lambourn astutely identifies a number of food products, such as rice, wheat bread, mango, and pepper pickles as ‘civilizational markers’, by which one can detect the ‘shifting food frontiers in the western Indian Ocean’.Footnote 62 Similarly, trade goods such as Indian textiles have served archaeologists as such a cultural marker, and the frequent reference in the Meccan chronicles to Indian cloth complements their occurrence in archaeological contexts in the lands of Western Asia and East Africa.Footnote 63 Intriguingly, rice is also mentioned somewhat frequently in the narrative accounts. One reason is that rice seems to have been largely unavailable in Mecca during most of the fifteenth century, unlike such imported cereals like wheat, sorghum, and other grains. In his comprehensive study of price data from Mecca, Richard Mortel compiled over 270 references, culled from the Meccan and Egyptian chronicles, on the prices of various grains and staple foods: wheat, sorghum, millet and barley, flour, clarified butter, and meat and dates. His price data on rice are limited to three citations in his last table, which includes a wide variety of other commodities such as honey, chickpeas, olive oil, sugar, raisins, etc.Footnote 64 A second reason that rice is especially noteworthy is that, like the other commodities coming from India, it could be sold in the marketplace, but it could also be distributed as a staple, supplementing the nourishment provided from the dashīshah or the shipments of wheat coming from the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans. According to Kirti N. Chaudhuri: ‘Rice was a valuable trading commodity in the Indian Ocean trade. It could be kept for several years, and old rice improved in taste’; in contrast, ‘wheat was susceptible to insect attack and was seldom transported by sea for any considerable distance because of the risk of spoilage’.Footnote 65 Thus the rulers of India possessed in great supply a very useful commodity that they could donate to Mecca to complement the supply of other staple cereals, like wheat and sorghum, coming from localities in Egypt, Anatolia, and Yemen. By sending rice as alms to the Hijaz, the rulers of India were reinforcing, if not expanding, the scope of the Indian trade in non-luxury goods with a consequent impact on popular consumption.
Of course, rice was known across the lands of the Middle East and the Mediterranean from ancient times. In the early Islamic context, while it was cultivated in Egypt in places like the northern Delta, the Fayyum, and parts of Upper Egypt, its production was apparently limited, although previously it had been more extensive.Footnote 66 Detailed study of its cultivation in the Fayyum during the Ayyubid period serves as a valuable reminder that the production of rice could fall quite dramatically when landowners shifted cultivation to cash crops, like sugar cane.Footnote 67 There is limited evidence for the export of Egyptian rice—for example at QuseirFootnote 68—however, not in substantial quantities. Across Egypt as a whole, Paulina Lewicka has observed that over the course of the Mamluk period an increasing number of references to rice indicate that its consumption increased, but it could not compete with wheat as a staple grain. In Mecca, meager references to it indicate that it was available only rarely until the turn of the sixteenth century.
It should be noted that a number of scholars have suggested that rice did not become a food of mass consumption in Egypt until much later, in the nineteenth century,Footnote 69 and that rice became available in ‘sizable quantities’ only in the seventeenth century, as documented in the records of the European chartered companies trading in eastern India.Footnote 70 Faroqhi concluded that:
In this early period [the first decades of the seventeenth century] we hear of rice distributed as alms in the name of the Sultan of Golconda, rather than private dealers in rice. Quite possibly, the inhabitants of Mecca and Medina first became accustomed to the consumption of rice because it came as a free gift. Only after they had become familiar with this grain, and the possible ways of preparing it, were people ready to spend money on the purchase of rice, and only then did opportunities open up for commerce.Footnote 71
On the west coast of India, Kanara was a region that produced a surplus of rice,Footnote 72 which would have also been a convenient source for the early ṣadaqah shipments to Mecca. On the basis of the chronicles of Mecca, it would appear that the inhabitants of the Hijaz started to become familiar with rice at the turn of the sixteenth century, thanks to the charity of the Indian rulers, establishing a practice continued by the ruler of Golconda.
Lewicka has noted ‘the increase of both the quantity and quality of references to this cereal in the literature of the Mamluk epoch [which] may point to the increase of its role in the local culinary culture’.Footnote 73 Rice is documented in a variety of sources, including cookbooks which feature recipes for rice prepared in both sweet and savory dishes. Prominent among these were dishes with now familiar names, but which no doubt at that time had rather different tastes, such as aruzz bi-laban, ‘rice pudding with milk’, made with rice crushed ‘until it is as fine as flour’, sweetened with sugar, honey, or dibs, and flavoured with cinnamon, walnut oil, or mastic, or coloured with saffron.Footnote 74 Or aruzz mufalfal, ‘fluffy rice with separate grains’, for which ‘you need a lot of meat and duhn (sheep-tail fat), rice, mastic gum, Ceylon cinnamon (qarfa), and chickpeas’.Footnote 75 Another notable dish was maʾmūniyyah, named after the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mūn (d. 218/833), ‘a sweetened rice-based porridge’.Footnote 76 All of these dishes had variants. Lewicka notes that many of these recipes, typically associated with sophisticated milieus, were simplified over the course of the fifteenth century and renditions of these dishes became within reach of ‘an average, middle-class inhabitant of the ninth/fifteenth century Cairo’.Footnote 77 However, rice never held the ‘special esteem’ that it enjoyed in Persian cuisine and, because rice remained more expensive than wheat in late medieval Egypt, according to Lewicka, it ‘never gained the position of a primary staple, nor did it ever manage to equal bread in its popularity’.Footnote 78
Yet rice’s prevalence steadily increased. In Egypt, by the late sixteenth century, foreign travellers observed that rice had become more common. Jacques De Villamont (circa 1590) noted the use of rice in ‘soups’, and Mustafa Ali (d. 1599), when referring to the generosity of Egyptians in his account of Cairo, reported that the wealthy would give to the poor substantial quantities of food (although he said it was ‘tasteless’), which he described as ‘only stewed meat and rice and saffron pudding like the food offered at a wedding’.Footnote 79 In the seventeenth century, Johann Wansleben (d. 1679) noted substantial export of rice from Damietta to Turkey, although the magnitude of the trade has been questioned.Footnote 80 Antonius Gonzales (d. 1683) observed that rice:
is so common in Egypt, and grows in such quantities, that it is exported abroad in boatloads. Not only children eat rice, but so do all the inhabitants, tradesmen, bourgeoisie, and even grand lords. There is no meal that is not accompanied by some rice dishes or dishes prepared with rice. It is tasty, filling, and inexpensive. Boiled in goat or cow milk with meat drippings, it becomes even more digestible and flavorful.Footnote 81
Gonzales was probably describing a middle-class diet rather than one available to ‘all the inhabitants’, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it would seem that rice was commonly available and ‘an indispensable item of the local menu’.Footnote 82 In the nineteenth century, Edward Lane (d. 1876) described a simple dish with a name that hearkened back to earlier centuries: ‘boiled rice (called “ruzz mufelfel”, the “pilav” of the Turks), mixed with a little butter, and seasoned with salt and pepper is generally that from which the last morsels are taken’.Footnote 83
While rice was becoming more common in Egypt, the Meccan chronicles report it becoming available in Mecca, as we have seen above. Jār Allāh recorded occasions on which it was provided as alms to the poor and offered at lavish banquets. In Ramaḍān 924/started 6 September 1518, the year before the arrival of rice and other commodities from Cambay, mentioned earlier, he wrote that donations of rice and meat soup (ṣadaqat shurbat al-ruzz bi-laham) were prepared in the kitchen of the hostel (ribāṭ) of Khawājā Shams al-Dīn ibn al-Zaman, a charitable act undertaken by Khawājā ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Qārī al-Dimashqī, who had provided the food also in the preceding months of Rajab and Shaʿbān.Footnote 84 More often, Jār Allāh mentioned the serving of rice in the context of banquets held on special occasions, such as the celebration of a circumcision or the festivities accompanying a wedding. On these occasions, rice dishes were offered that were evidently not the simplified recipes noted by Lewicka; on the contrary, Jār Allāh repeatedly described the fare with such superlatives as ‘sumptuous’, ‘elegant’, or ‘astonishing’.Footnote 85 It should also be noted that these events represented an occasion for the meeting of different culinary cultures, of Arabs and non-Arabs. For example, in Mecca in Dhū al-Qaʿdah 925/started 25 October 1519, the Grand Khawājā of the Ottoman (Rūmī) state offered a splendid banquet on the terrace of his house at al-Suwayqah to celebrate his marriage to the daughter of the aforementioned Khawājā Zayn al-Din al-Dimashqī.Footnote 86 The guests were served splendid dishes of sweetened (al-ruzz al-hilw)Footnote 87 and mufalfal rice, ma’mūniyyat al-ḥamawī and ma’mūniyyat al-sakab,Footnote 88 and harīsah Footnote 89 dishes of pistachios and of meat. Also served were rice, ḥabb,Footnote 90 zāyirbāj,Footnote 91 māwardiyyah,Footnote 92 Asyūṭī loaves, sweet and sour shīshyarak,Footnote 93 ‘and other such foods of the ʿArab and the ʿAjam’.Footnote 94 At another splendid feast in Rabīʿ I 936 (1529), Jār Allāh commented that most of the dishes served were foods of the ʿAjam, ‘the names of which were unknown’.Footnote 95
These festive foods, many of which featured rice, and the provision of rice as alms, represent the social integration of these multiple webs of influence, binding together the cultural and economic worlds of people from Anatolia and Egypt to Iran and India. As a destination of pilgrimage, Mecca has always been a locus of human diversity. The anthropologist Mai Yamani has observed that food in Mecca ‘became no longer labelled Indian, Indonesian, Egyptian, or Turkish; the rich variety of cuisine is now proudly referred to as “Meccan”’.Footnote 96 In a more rustic context, the explorer John Lewis Burckhardt noted in his Notes on the Bedouin: ‘In Hedjaz the usual dish of the Arabs is Indian rice, mixed with lentils and without any bread; this they find cheaper than corn and equally nutritious; but wherever dates grew, that excellent fruit constitutes their chief diet.’Footnote 97 The chronicles of ʿIzz al-Dīn and Jār Allāh provide a valuable glimpse of this culinary transformation at the turn of the sixteenth century in Mecca as the Holy City became an outpost on a food frontier.
Reorientations
The patronage of the pilgrimage offered an important source of political legitimacy for a range of polities from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries: Ottoman sultans, various Indian rulers, even the emir of Upper Egypt. Mecca may have been ‘served’ by the khādim in Cairo and Istanbul, but it was also the recipient of royal benefactors elsewhere. From the perspective of Mecca, the pilgrimage also offered a source of legitimacy for the sharifate; since the strands of Mecca’s webs extended outwards, Mecca was also shielded from excessive external domination. In turn, Mecca was blessed with the provision of goods from a variety of lands; with the introduction of Indian rice as ṣadaqah into the Hijaz in the last decades of the fifteenth century, that bounty increased. Thus the web of interests that Faroqhi identified in her study of the Ottoman pilgrimage was not just one that integrated the Ottoman empire, but it was coincident with broader webs of interest and influence that incorporated ‘the traditional Asian trade’ or ‘the Indian trade’, to echo Arasaratnam and Bouchon, reorienting Mecca culturally and economically to localities in South Asia, forming the basis of ‘India’s principal market abroad’ that developed in the sixteenth century.Footnote 98 The reorientation of Mecca served to further close ‘the gap’ between the Islamic Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world, as evidenced in Lambourn’s assessment of the merchant Abraham’s luggage.Footnote 99
The historical sources from Mecca and the Hijaz provide essential evidence for the dynamic underlying grand imperial conflicts of the time, as others have shown, but they also serve as yet another reminder that we should not overestimate the effects of geopolitical events on the region. The Arabian context, as Peacock has observed, should be our starting point to reorient our approach to the history of the region. The Hijazi sources, which deserve much more investigation, will illuminate additional aspects of geo-cultural connections across the Islamic world, some mundane, but all equally vital. By following the narratives across the 1500 divide, we can trace continuities locally, but we can also see more clearly the gradual shift in the disposition of Mecca, if not the Hijaz more broadly: local patterns of trade—for example, the variety of commodities—were certainly not static. The connection to the Ottoman lands was by no means diminished during this time, but the connections to India become more evident over the course of the fifteenth century, starting with the foundation of endowed institutions and the arrival of seafarers and merchants, and may well have ended up with the culinary transformation of the Hijaz and Egypt.
The reorientation of the Hijaz may be seen in parallel with the ‘realignment’ of Egypt, observed by Jean-Claude Garcin.Footnote 100 What Garcin described as the ‘méditerranéisation’ of Egypt in the fifteenth century was, as he noted, a fracturing of the country—the north part to the Mediterranean, with the southern part of Egypt cut off, partly demonstrated here by alms sent to Mecca directly from Upper Egypt, an expression of al-Ṣaʿīd’s aspirations for local autonomy. One might be tempted to see in the Mediterraneanisation of northern Egypt and Mecca’s sustained political connection to Istanbul that the Hijaz was part of this realignment with the Mediterranean. However, Mecca and the Hijaz were simultaneously reoriented to the wealth, prestige, and culinary sustenance of the East. Given the Hijaz’s sustained connections to the Indian Ocean world, it would seem rather that both Egypt and the Hijaz were realigned to the commercial connections between the burgeoning economies of Europe and South Asia, an interdependence that would eventually be subordinated to the emerging world economy.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Dr Zacharie Mochtarie de Pierrepont and Professor Frédéric Bauden for inviting me to participate in the workshop on ‘The Ḥijāz and the making of Islamic history: cultural and social engagements in Western Medieval Arabia’, held at the University of Liège in May 2023, and to the workshop participants for their observations and insight on a project that has changed dramatically since that gathering. My thanks are also due to colleagues in AUC’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences and in the University Library for their kind assistance and conversation, which would often end with comments on ways to prepare rice. Any errors are my responsibility alone.
Conflicts of interest
None.
