This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

Law was one of the most important realms that set frameworks for transregional interactions among individuals, communities and institutions in the premodern world. It synchronised structures of exchange through commonly agreed practices and expectations. The written legal treatises, along with unwritten customs, norms and rituals, prescribed ideal forms of social, cultural, economic and political relations to maintain order, peace and affinity in the societies in which they operated. These written and unwritten laws influenced each other in the long run, both internally and externally, through spatial and temporal concurrences. While the unwritten laws of the premodern world may be inaccessible, the written texts provide a rich archive to understand the ways in which the communities struggled towards constructing an ideal world through the active and passive conversations of individual communities and institutions. In Monsoon Asia, the legal worlds of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, along with several minor traditions indigenous to specific lands and times, formed a cosmopolis of laws which expanded chronologically vertically and geographically horizontally. In the premodern period no tradition replaced another entirely. Instead, they all coexisted in a larger domain with fluctuating influences over time and place.

In the making of Islam and its laws, a learned community of jurists, authors, teachers and ordinary people intertwined their contributions across geographical and chronological borders. By contesting or undercutting political entities, they asserted the centrality of divine law in the socio-religious lives of humans and advanced the ways in which the law was perceived, practised and discussed. From the formative stages on, texts stood at the forefront of the progress of discussions. For the Shāfiʿī school, diverse transregional stimuluses helped it to survive and spread and occasionally to decay and contract between the ninth and the twentieth centuries. This chapter analyses the pivotal historical elements that enabled the expansion of the Shāfiʿī school, and Islamic law at large, in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean littorals with a focus on individual, collective and institutional circulations from circles of learning. The emphasis here is on the people who participated in and contributed to the circulatory regime from its formative lands to its eventual movements in the oceanic rims, while the next chapter focuses on the texts as such.

The ship plies the Eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth century. In a while, it is going to be anchored in a Levantine port. The captain and the crew negotiate whether to anchor at Tyre, Akko, Jaffa or Gaza. Out of many options and a compromise to stop at some of these places for a short visit, the captain decides to anchor at Dor for longer. From this port many passengers could venture further inland, following the Via Maris, an ancient and still surviving route, identified now as the Salah al-Din Road, after the Ayyūubid sultan who traversed Egypt and Syria two centuries earlier with his armies on the march between Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem.

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.

The journeys of Islamic legal texts and ideas across the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Mediterranean form the fulcrum of this book. With a focus on the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law, it observes how and why the texts shaped, transformed, influenced and negotiated the legal lives and juridical thoughts of a significant community over a whole millennium, crossing many boundaries of place and time.

Beyond the boiling desire of adventure, why did people travel risking their lives on the sea? For business, one might say. But also, for better prospects of life. Salvation. Pilgrimage. Propagation. In search of knowledge.

Before we sail further, keep in mind an oracular voice of Umberto Eco from another side of the Mediterranean. “There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.”

Let’s now sail from the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea, to the Malabar Coast in the sixteenth century. Reaching the ports of India, especially Malabar, the land of fabled spices, was the dream of Iberian explorers, including Vasco da Gama, Cristopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. They all wanted to undercut the monopoly of Arabs and Italians between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Gama’s fleet filled with sailors and prisoners from the Habsburg domains succeeded in traveling around Africa to Asia and arrive in the land of black pepper just before the turn of the fifteenth century.

This and the next chapter explore the gradations of this process in which Shāfiʿī texts contributed to and benefited from the eventual globalisation, modernisation, technological headways, legal and intellectual networks, and mobility of people, ideas and texts. This chapter in particular focuses on two supercommentaries on the Qurra via its autocommentary Fatḥ to analyse internal responses within the school to textual longue durée, coinciding with and influenced by several major historical developments across the world. It argues that the nineteenth century was a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm in terms of its geographical, intellectual and cultural realms, due to new challenges and prospects it came across in the wider society and specifically among Muslims. The existing internal and inherent divisions in the school were reconciled through constant efforts of its jurists, and this synthesis addressed a larger division in the Islamic world. Faced with new trials from political and legal entities and a few minor but radical sections of the community the traditional body of believers united against what they called bidʿa or false invention. These supercommentaries represent different geo-cultural and political backgrounds, as much as they reflect common trends of their time in adapting the attitudes of many divisions in the school.

The ship now travels faster and wider compared to when it started. You have come from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth and twentieth with a few stops at the sixteenth. Now you are blessed with steam engines and you are connected with telegrams and typewriters. The dynamic is more intense, with diverse personnel, abundant paraphernalia, and contacts from all over the world.

“Where there is no text, there is no object of study, and no object of thought either,” writes M. M. Bakhtin in his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. A sea of texts made people, and an ocean of people made texts. A perennial interconnection in the historic civilisations.

From voyaging in the oceanic scape of the sixteenth century, the ship slowly slides into the nineteenth century, with even more challenges ahead. The greatest challenge was a technological advancement, the steam engine.

This study has explored the circulation of Islamic legal ideas across the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world in the second millennium, with a focus on the Shāfiʿī school of law. In the course of the analysis I have been contributing to five major historiographical streams with varying spatial and temporal concerns: global history of premodern law outside Europe, intellectual (dis)continuity in the postclassical phase of Islamic law; the history of Shāfiʿīsm; trajectories of Islam beyond the Middle East; and Shāfiʿīsm’s historical reception along the Indian Ocean littoral.