Khutba and Muslim Networks in The India

6
Khu ba and Muslim Networks in the

Indian Ocean (Part II) –
Timurid and Ottoman Engagements
Elizabeth Lambourn 1
This study continues a subject of research that was represented in my 2008 study
“India from Aden: Khu ba and Muslim Urban Networks in Late Thirteenth-
Century India,” 2 which posited the existence of a previously unidentified genre
of network operating in the Indian Ocean that linked Sunni Muslim communities
living as autonomous faith minorities within non-Muslim polities to Middle East
Islamic polities. Tentatively termed khu ba or ducā networks, these networks
focused on a component of the sermon (khu ba) given at Friday prayers and on
the occasion of cīd prayers known as al-ducā li-l-sul ān or dacwat al-sul ān, tra-
ditionally a prayer in the name of the reigning ruler that served as a public sign
of a local community’s wider allegiance. This first article gathered literary,
documentary, and epigraphic evidence for this practice across the Indian Ocean
from the ninth century onwards, although with a particular emphasis on the thir-
teenth century western Indian Ocean. Khu bas were a flexible vehicle for com-
municating a range of power hierarchies and relationships, a flexibility aided by
the fact that Islamic lawmakers consistently refused to even discuss the format
and content of the ducā li-l-sul ān.
While a common sense of Sunni belonging was frequently expressed via the
inclusion of the name of the Caliph in these khu bas, it was the inclusion of the
name of a contemporary Muslim ruler alongside this that allowed communities
to construct new and qualitatively different types of network. Whereas the
dacwat al-sul ān within Islamic polities was tightly bound to actual territorial
rule, among these autonomous mercantile communities the mention of the name
of a contemporary Muslim ruler in the khu ba formalized a relationship of alle-
giance ( āca) between each local Muslim community and a specific Islamic pol-
ity. From the evidence available so far these networks appear to have been con-
stituted essentially along politico-economic lines, forging and maintaining
favored trading relations between parties. The identification of this practice adds
131
132 Elizabeth Lambourn
an important new category of network to the many layers of linkage already
identified or imagined for the period. Khu ba networks provide another dimen-
sion to the understanding of relations between Islamic centers and their periph-
eries in the western Indian Ocean; they also reveal another level at which Mus-
lim identities and belongings were created and negotiated in the pre-1400 Indian
Ocean.
Map 6.1. Main Regions and Locations Discussed c.1400-1600
The present study gives me the opportunity to pursue my interest in Indian

Ocean sermon or khu ba networks beyond the fourteenth century. This study
focuses on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and explores the entry of two
new players, the Timurids and the Ottomans, into the Indian Ocean space and,
more particularly, their encounter with the khu ba practices that had previously
developed there. While the entry of each player was qualitatively and quantita-
tively very different—as far as we know, the Timurids only engaged in a single
diplomatic mission to south India whereas the Ottoman conquests of Egypt and
the Yemen made them direct players and a military force in the wider region –
for both, their arrival engendered complex cultural encounters with the myriad
Muslim communities and polities that inhabited the Indian Ocean space. Al-
though all nominally “Muslim,” in actual fact the Muslim societies of the Indian
Ocean had developed unique practices that made them every bit as alien to the
Timurids and Ottomans as the area’s many non-Muslim societies. In these new
and uncharted waters miscommunications inevitably arose and, inevitably too,
the very parameters at stake were transformed.
The first part of this study examines one such miscommunication through a
re-reading of cAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī’s now famous account from the Mat-
lāc al-sacdayn of his embassy from the Timurid court to south India in the early
1440s. The second part of this study moves on to the sixteenth century and the
question of the use of the Ottoman Caliph’s name in the khu ba of various Is-
Khu ba and Muslim Networks 133
lamic polities and autonomous communities in the Indian Ocean at this period.
In particular, this study discusses a complex, hybrid document from the Ottoman
archives known as T.S.M.A. E.8009, which maps a number of such networks in
south India, Sri Lanka, and Sumatra during the mid-1560s. Through the study of
this and other documents, this analysis suggests that the Indian Ocean’s khu ba
networks were transformed beyond recognition as superior Ottoman military
technology and Ottoman claims of universal Caliphal authority changed the rela-
tionship between parties into a barter of khu ba for cannon with which to con-
front the recent European entry into the Indian Ocean.
The Problem with cAbd al-Razzāq’s Presents
If khu ba networks appear to have been in extensive use across large parts of the
Indian Ocean from the thirteenth century onwards, we should by no means as-
sume that every entrant to that ocean expected to find such practices, or even
understood them when they were encountered. The problems encountered by the
Timurid envoy to India, cAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī, during his mission to
Calicut in the 1440s have occasioned as much puzzlement among later commen-
tators as they appear to have done to the envoy himself. This first section pro-
poses a new reading of the events that befell him there from the perspective of
khu ba networks.
The Debacle at Calicut
When cAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī, the Timurid envoy to India, had his audience
with the samūrī or Zamorin of Calicut in 846/1442-1443, he had every reason to
expect a warm welcome. He arrived in response to an earlier invitation delivered
by an envoy from the port kingdom to the Timurid court in Heart, who had trav-
elled with a returning embassy from Bengal (Map 6.1). cAbd al-Razzāq’s high
hopes and subsequent disappointment are palpable in his account as he relates
how, when he presented the “horse, pelisse, gold-embroidered dägälä and Jätä
nawrozi hat” 3 from the Khaqan, “the samūrī did not pay full respect, and I re-
turned to my quarters from the assembly.” 4 The whole awkward affair seems to
have been extremely perplexing to him, as indeed to subsequent commentators.
India scholar Richard Eaton has suggested that the samūrī’s failure to “pay full
respect,” as cAbd al-Razzāq terms it, is evidence of his presents having been
“insufficient, or inappropriate, or both,” 5 while in the most recent discussion of
this narrative historians Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam see this as
the fault of “the inflated claims imposed by the Timurid inheritance,” 6 essen-
tially, then, the fault lay with Timurid arrogance. But might there be another
explanation? The contention here is that the embassy failed because of the
Timurid’s unfamiliarity with the particular practices of allegiance and clientship
then operational in the Indian Ocean; the whole affair was one enormous cul-
tural misunderstanding. To understand this we must first examine the back-
ground behind the encounter, first and foremost the nature of the invitation that
originally came to the Timurid court and the identity and status of its carrier, but
also the broader framework of Indian Ocean practices to which it belonged.
Closer reading of cAbd al-Razzāq’s fortunately detailed account suggests a much
more complex interplay of agents and an inherent ambiguity in the original mes-
sage to the Timurid court.
“The walī of Calicut” he tells us “gathered all sorts of gifts and tribute and
sent a messenger to say that in his port in the Friday prayer and in the holiday
prayer the khu ba of Islam was recited, and if His Majesty [Shah Rukh] would
allow it, they would recite the khu ba in his royal name.” 7 The request sent to
the Timurid court thus had significant implications in terms of the allegiances of
the Muslim community at Calicut. According to cAbd al-Razzāq this messenger
also hinted that the ruler of Calicut might be encouraged to convert to Islam if
an emissary was sent, but it is clear that this was a secondary part of the message
and it was mentioned more as an afterthought in cAbd al-Razzāq’s account. 8
It is also important to note who sent the initial invitation. cAbd al-Razzāq
tells us that the messenger was a Persian speaking Muslim who brought the
message from the walī of Calicut. This detail is significant and has not been
properly recognized in previous interpretations where walī has tended to be seen
as identical with samūrī. 9 However, the two terms are quite different: samūrī
indicates the Zamorin of Calicut, the port’s non-Muslim ruler, whereas walī can
be loosely translated as “governor.” Less than a century later Duarte Barbosa
used precisely the term “governor” to describe how the Pardesi Muslims of
Calicut – that is the Arabs, Persians, Gujaratis, Khorasanis, and Deccanis – have
“a Moorish governor who rules over and chastises them without the King med-
dling with them.” 10 It is therefore likely that walī here signifies the head of the
Muslim community at Calicut, in effect its ra’īs al-muslimīn or ‘Head of the
Muslims’. Any approach to Herat directly from the samurī would surely have
made certain that his title or its Persian equivalent were made known to the
court, cAbd al-Razzāq was also a career courtier and very aware of titles and
protocol, as he knew them in the Persianate context of Timurid Central Asia,
and we would expect to read of an approach from the rājá or malik of Calicut,
not his walī. Whatever the different titles used, the most important point is that
samurī, and walī should not be read as interchangeable terms. 11
We can also now establish that the request—to include the name of the Ti-
murid sovereign in the khu ba at Calicut—belongs to well-established regional
practices, both specifically at Calicut and more widely along the entire South
Asian seaboard. From the sources Calicut’s Muslims emerge as particularly ac-
tive—even fickle—forgers of khu ba networks. Various sources document the
use of the names of the rulers of Delhi, previous rulers of Hormuz,, 12 the Rasu-
lids of the Yemen, 13 and even approaches by the rulers of Bengal and Samudra
at different times during the fourteenth century. 14 Calicut’s predecessor in the
region, the port of Chaliyam (al-Shaliyāt) also appears in a late thirteenth-
century list of stipends paid by the Rasulid court which, as suggested in the pre-
vious khu ba study, reflect the existence of extensive Rasulid khu ba networks at
this time. 15 If we trust cAbd al-Razzāq’s account of the khu ba mission to the
Timurid court, rather than suspect it as do Alam and Subrahmanyam, 16 the pic-
ture emerges of an active tradition of khu ba manipulation among Muslim auto-
nomous communities on the Malabar coast going back to the late thirteenth cen-
tury at the very least.
Calicut, Shāh Rukh and the Kings of Hormuz
The question immediately arises as to why Calicut’s Muslims should approach

the Timurid court when the coastal areas of the Gulf that were the key to their
trade were then under the direct rule of the king of Hormuz, Fakhr al-Dīn Turān
Shāh II. Particularly as Calicut had used the name of Fakhr al-Dīn’s predecessor,
Sayf al-Dīn, in their khu ba before this, why did they suddenly change their fo-
cus from Hormuz to the distant Timurid capital? Lisa Balabanlilar has under-
lined the enormous status enjoyed by the Timurids in Asia and precedents do
exist for Indian Sultanates turning to the Timurids for legitimation and interven-
tion following the Timurid defeat of the Tughluqs and conquest of Delhi in
1398. Thus in the Deccan, Fīrūz Shāh Bahmanī (r. 1397-1422) is known to have
sent a diplomatic mission to the Timurids and, rather surprisingly, as a conse-
quence received rights over Malwa and Gujarat. 17 cAbd al-Razzāq’s account
itself describes a recent incident in which the Timurid ruler intervened deci-
sively to quell a dispute between the Sultans of Jaunpur and Bengal, and cites
this as critical in motivating the mission from Calicut to Herat. 18 However, in
this instance as autonomous Muslim communities, the motivations for Calicut’s
mission appear to be tied much more clearly to mercantile strategy rather than
concerns with either legitimation or direct local intervention.
Sayf al-Dīn was in fact Turān Shāh II’s brother, and had been overthrown
by him in 840/1436-37. Sayf al-Dīn had fled to the Timurid court at Herat where
his claim initially received Shāh Rukh’s backing, so much so that the troops of
Fars and Iraq were ordered to attack Turān Shāh and Hormuz’s seven principal
“external fortresses.” The rulers of Hormuz in fact paid tribute to the Timurids
(as later to the Aq Qoyunlu rulers of Iran) and Sayf al-Dīn’s flight to Herat in-
deed suggests a clear hierarchy of power with the Timurid Pādshāh at its apex.
However, news of Sayf al-Dīn’s unjust rule finally led the Timurid ruler to
switch his support to Turān Shāh, while his brother and rival Sayf al-Dīn was
retired to the Persian mainland. 19 Although we do not know the exact date at
which Calicut’s emissary set out for Herat, might we suggest that he did so in
response to these events, possibly soon after 840/1436-1437, rather than as a
consequence of the Timurid intervention between Jaunpur and Bengal as sug-
gested by cAbd al-Razzāq.
Work by Valeria Piacentini on the history of Hormuz has been important in
underlining the factional complexities behind these events, as she argues that
Sayf al-Dīn was backed by an essentially Iranian group of interests supported by
Turkish military power, whereas Turān Shāh came to power with the backing of
Hormuz’s Arab-cUmani merchants. 20 Although cAbd al-Razzāq furnishes sparse
information about the mission undertaken by Calicut’s Muslims, he does de-
scribe the envoy as a Persian speaker. One may wonder therefore whether the
mission was undertaken by a Persian faction from Calicut, dismayed by Sayf al-
Dīn’s deposition and worried by the rise of a ruler backed instead by Arab-
c
Umani interests. In this context, the decision not to adopt Turān Shāh’s name in
the khu ba at Calicut but instead to approach Hormuz’s hierarchical superior, the
Timurid Pādshāh, would make perfect sense. Even if such a straightforward
factional mapping of Hormuzi politics onto Calicut’s Muslim merchant groups
does not hold true, on a general level, it is clear that at a time of great upheaval
and factionalism in the kingdom of Hormuz, Calicut’s Muslims had acted
quickly to secure their interests by approaching Hormuz’s ultimate overlord, the
Timurid Pādshāh.
Map 6.2. Hormuzi Fortresses in the Gulf Area, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
(after Williamson, 1973)
Map 6.3. Settlement Patterns in the Lower Gulf, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centu-
ries (after Williamson 1973)
The kingdom of Hormuz controlled the Persian Gulf and thus Calicut’s ac-
cess to the important markets of Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. If the study
of trade in the fifteenth century has tended to focus on the Red Sea and its fa-
mous karīmī merchant groups, textual and archaeological sources make it clear
that the Gulf continued to be a thriving and active route. The independent king-
dom of Hormuz extended far beyond the present city of Hormuz. Based at this
time on the island of Jarun, Hormuz’s rulers controlled all the islands of the Gulf
and particularly the crucial ports and islands of Qishm, Qa’is, Qatif and Kharg.
On the Arabian coast of the Gulf, Dabac and Julfar were important ports under
their control. The kings of Hormuz also used Qalhat on the coast of Oman as
their second capital, and controlled the ports of Suhar and Khawr Fakkan. 21 Im-
portant archaeological survey work in the Gulf by Andrew Williamson in the
1970s corroborated and refined our understanding of this Hormuzi presence,
mapping Hormuzi fortresses in the area, from Bahrain as far as Gwadar on the
coast of present-day Pakistan – among these are certainly to be found the seven
“external fortresses” that Shāh Rukh initially ordered to be attacked (Map 6.2). 22
Williamson’s work highlighted the size and importance of Hormuz as a set-
tlement, while work along the main trade route between Hormuz and Shiraz, via
Lar and Khunj, also documented an extensive program of caravanserai construc-
tion under Turān Shāh II (Maps 6.2 and 6.3). 23 Williamson’s work leaves us in
no doubt that Hormuz was the Aden of the Gulf and occupied a similarly strate-
gic place at the very entrance to this area. In spite of the lacunae in our mapping
of Calicut’s various and changing khu ba networks, the deepest pattern is clear:
Calicut’s khu ba networks focused on the two regions of the Islamic world that
were key to the port’s international trade, namely the Red Sea and the Gulf em-
poria. The first brought goods to and from Egypt and the western Mediterranean,
the second, to and from Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. Good relations with
the rulers of Hormuz were essential to the success of Calicut’s international
trade via the Gulf. Whatever the precise motivations behind Calicut’s mission to
the Timurid court, it is clear that Calicut’s Sunni Muslims were able to operate
on an international stage in order to secure one of their two main trade routes.
Not only this, but they continued to do so, in part, by appealing to by then well-
established conventions of khu ba requests. It is far from evident, however, that
the Timurid court understood the operation of this system.
The Problem with cAbd al-Razzāq’s Presents

c
Abd al-Razzāq was a landsman in many senses of the term, the sea in itself
filled him with terror and he recounts how “when the smell of the ship reached
my nostrils and I experienced the terror of the sea, I lost consciousness to such
an extent that for three days I was dead to the world.” 24 However, he also found
himself, though an educated man and experienced courtier, culturally adrift in a
world of completely new practices and protocols. This, then, explains the failure
of the Timurid embassy to Calicut. cAbd al-Razzāq’s narrative suggests that the
Timurids felt they were arriving in Calicut as the result of an invitation from the
samurī himself, albeit delivered by one of the port’s Persian speaking Muslims,
the walī —literally governor—of Calicut, and that one of the key reasons for this
approach was the samurī’s interest in conversion to Islam. Certainly the envoy
may have exaggerated the involvement of the samurī in his mission and have
over-egged the conversion angle, however, if we contextualize this diplomatic
exchange within fifteenth-century Indian Ocean practices, at the core what we
see here is a traditional khu ba request initiated and carried out by Calicut’s
Sunni Muslim community in response to contemporary economic and political
shifts.
If the Rasulid sources suggest an early mastery and ease with the tensions
and complexities of these systems and practices, the Timurids were generally
content to leave the Gulf trade in the hands of nominally independent kingdoms.
As a consequence they misread the agency behind the emissary’s mission and
failed to understand the independent operation of its Muslim trading community.
c
Abd al-Razzāq is very clear that Calicut was dār al- arb in spite of the large
numbers of Muslims residing there. 25 The return embassy and presents should
have been sent to the head of the Muslim community, the ra’īs al-muslimīn or
walī of Calicut, rather than the samurī. The samurī’s failure to “pay full re-
spect”, as cAbd al-Razzāq terms it, was precisely because he had personally so-
licited no such exchange and certainly had no intention of converting to Islam.
After generations of close interaction with Muslim merchants and participation
in the tribute systems and diplomatic practices of the Indian Ocean, the samurī
was entirely capable of reading the presents for what they were: a presentation
of khil’a, the public awarding of a set of clothes and horse from a ruler who was
seeking to establish a client relationship. This was clearly a relationship the sa-
murī by no means wished to enter into. cAbd al-Razzāq and the Timurids he
represented were aliens in the Indian Ocean world and, certainly in this instance,
singularly failed to understand this world’s particular cultural practices. cAbd al-
Razzāq brought the right presents but he presented them to the wrong person.
A Postscript on the Khu ba at Calicut
Remarkably, the story of Calicut’s khu ba networks by no means ends here. The
text of a letter purportedly written in 973/1565 by cAlā’ al-Dīn Ri’āyat Shāh of
Aceh to the Ottoman Sultan Suleymān continues its story, citing as it does the
precedent of Calicut whose Muslim inhabitants are said to “have built twenty-
four mosques and also read the call to prayer in the noble name of your most
high and blessed imperial Majesty.” 26 The relationship is confirmed by a later
edict sent to the beglerbegi of Egypt sometime in the mid-1570s, which even
suggests an expansion in the number of mosques in the kingdom of Calicut cit-
ing the Ottoman Caliph in their sermons. The order provides for the payment of
one hundred gold pieces annually from the port of Jedda, this time for “the mos-
ques of the twenty-seven cities located in the Indian port of Calicut for the
khu ba [. . . ] without fail and in perpetuity.” 27
From one angle, Calicut’s shift towards the Ottomans can be seen as simply
the latest strategic shift of allegiance in a chain of allegiances extending back
into the fourteenth century. As with their earlier relationship with the Rasulids
of the Yemen, it secured important access to the Red Sea and the markets
thereof. Following the conquest of Egypt in 1517, the Ottomans now controlled
the northern half of the Red Sea, as well as being the recognized guardians of
the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. By the 1560s their control extended down
to the Yemen and Aden. But there is no denying that in the century between
these Ottoman documents and Calicut’s last known attempt to use the Timurid
Shāh Rukh’s name in their khu ba, the Indian Ocean had changed almost beyond
belief. The Portuguese Estado da India had changed the balance of power, trade,
and the culture of the Indian Ocean; large parts of the Persian Gulf were now
under Portuguese control although its northern shores were to come under Ot-
toman control by the 1560s. In particular, after a brief period in the hands of the
Aq Qoyunlu, by 1514 the kings of Hormuz had become vassals of the Portu-
guese and Hormuz was largely a Portuguese port able to control shipping in and
out of the Gulf. Closer to home, large areas of the western India seaboard were
now under Portuguese control or influence. Portuguese fortresses dotted the
coastline and the Portuguese forged close alliances with both the Empire of
Vijayanagara (before 1565) and many coastal polities. In this new context,
Calicut’s relations with the Ottomans undoubtedly aimed to secure more than
simply trade routes; as holders of advanced military technology the Ottomans
now offered local rulers firearm technology that provided them hope of resis-
tance against the Portuguese.
The complexity of the new geo-political situation in the Indian Ocean, as of
the Acehnese letter itself, demands much more detailed and focused research,
which forms the second part of this study. While this remarkable letter was first
published in 1909 and has been avidly discussed by Ottomanists and Southeast
Asianists since, 28 it still has much to yield. In the present context, I would like to
explore its importance as a document for the study of evolving khu ba practices
in the sixteenth century Indian Ocean.
Khu ba for Cannon –Remaking Khu ba Networks in the Ottoman

Indian Ocean 29
The 973/1565 letter of cAlā’ al-Dīn Ri’āyat Shāh of Aceh to the Ottoman Sultan
Suleymān is most often known by its archival reference number as document
T.S.M.A. E.8009. Behind this unprepossessing reference number hides what is
without doubt one of the most important and exciting sources on the khu ba in
the sixteenth-century Indian Ocean, and which yields information about Muslim
networking far beyond Calicut.
The Problem with T.S.M.A. E.8009
The document in question is a long letter dated jumāda al-ākhir 973 (equivalent
to August 1565) and addressed to the Ottoman Caliph Sultan Suleymān from an
anonymous Muslim ruler from the so-called “Lands below the Winds.” Only
archival copies of the Ottoman response to this letter enable us to identify this
nameless ruler as the Pādshāh of Aceh, at that time Sultan cAlā’ al-Dīn Ri’āyat
Shāh al-Qahhār (r. 937-976/1530-1568). 30 This remarkable document has been
known since 1909 but had previously been discussed largely on the basis of
summaries and paraphrases. In an important article only published in 2005
Giancarlo Casale was the first scholar to highlight the letter’s abundant detail, as
also its concomitant problems. The document is written in Ottoman Turkish and
is over one hundred lines in length; it covers a suitably vast and eclectic range of
issues and I rely here on Giancarlo Casale’s English translation to summarize its
main points. 31
At the letter’s heart is an entreaty to the Sublime Porte for material assis-
tance in the face of infidel—read Portuguese—attacks and a guarantee to facili-
tate routes of communication between Aceh and Istanbul, via the Maldives and
the Red Sea. The letter specifically requests the dispatch of certain types of siege
cannon and of other experts in fortress and galley construction. Sections of the
letter contextualize this latest request by referring to previous exchanges be-
tween Aceh and the Ottomans: a first Acehnese embassy sent under the aegis of
a certain Husayn and cUmar (whose presence in Istanbul in June 1562 is con-
firmed by Venetian sources), 32 the return visit to Aceh of ‘His Majesty’s Servant
Lutfi’ as well as a number of Turkish artillery experts who had already arrived
safely in Aceh and were working for the Acehnese Sultan. The Ottoman ruler is
entreated to offer this assistance on the basis of the sacred obligation of taking
up armed struggle for the faith (jihād) but spread across the letter too are various
subtle repetitions of the “payment” being offered for this assistance, namely that
the ruler of Aceh would offer his allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan making Aceh
an Ottoman province. He would no longer be “an independent ruler,” but instead
would become “in no way different from the governors of Egypt and Yemen”. 33
Alongside these sections are large portions of the letter whose contents have
led Casale to question its very authorship. Long passages give details of the Ot-
toman envoy Lutfi’s voyage, even including an account of a dream he had of the
Ottoman ruler. Another section recommends the promotion of a certain Gujarati
rūmī notable who had assisted Lutfi on his journey to the position of sançak of
Jedda. Finally, extensive passages detail three other khu ba networks then extant
in the western Indian Ocean, from Calicut, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, each of
which recognized the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph. The natural resources of these
areas are described and extolled.
If diplomatic correspondence commonly includes a certain element of
“news of recent events”, the volume and highly personal nature of the informa-
tion found here make this document quite unlike any other known diplomatic
letter. Casale’s conclusions are that “rather than a first-hand composition from
the Sultan of Aceh, [it] is instead the work of an individual from the Ottoman
Empire, who travelled to Aceh, penned a letter for its rulers, and included within
it his own extensive observations on the region and its inhabitants.” 34 The exten-
sive details of Lutfi’s voyage and the desire to recompense fellow rūmīs who
had eased his journey certainly suggest extensive input from “His Majesty’s
Servant Lutfi,” and for Casale there seems no doubt that the letter is entirely his
authorship, less a letter than a “report” of conditions in that part of the Indian
Ocean during that year. 35
As an object, the document unfortunately adds very little to our understand-
ing of its complex authorship; what survives is very clearly an Ottoman archival
copy of a so far lost original. The apparent loss of the original letter undoubtedly
robs us of a considerable body of material evidence that might have helped clar-
ify its authorship and place of production. We also do not know the language in
which the original letter was composed—as diplomatic correspondence was
routinely translated, the language of the copy is not necessarily that of its origi-
nal composition—a fact that again limits our ability to identify its author. The
question of the authorship of T.S.M.A. E.8009 is of more than simply archival
interest; an understanding of the single or many voices it represents is vital to
the subsequent interpretation of its contents.
Authorship in Cross-Cultural Correspondence
While Casale’s interpretation focuses on the search for a single “authentic” au-
thor, in contexts of diplomatic correspondence between parties working in dif-
ferent languages, and also across vast spaces, such sole authors may never have
existed. Although personal details of Lutfi’s voyage do figure prominently in
this letter, there is no denying the equally strong presence of a message from the
kingdom of Aceh requesting Ottoman military support, safe passage through the
Red Sea and the Ottoman ruler’s “ear,” in exchange for a pledge of allegiance
under which Aceh would become an Ottoman province. Would an envoy have
dared to invent a request of this magnitude, a request that in effect demotes an
Acehnese Sultan in favour of the Ottoman Sultan? Fresh analysis of this docu-
ment against the background of Indian Ocean khu ba practices helps authenti-
cate certain of the more surprising passages and suggests that we should at least
consider this a work of hybrid authorship.
Reading this letter against the backdrop of the Indian Ocean and its rich his-
tory of forging and even manipulating khu ba networks, large portions of the
text might be seen to fit into the framework of a formal khu ba request. Barely
hidden within the text of the document is the Pādshāh of Aceh’s offer to recog-
nize the Ottoman ruler in his prayers in exchange for military technology and
support, in effect a barter of khu ba for cannon. The proposed exchange is intro-
duced from the very opening lines of the letter, in the opening invocation in
Arabic, which states that “the most appropriate means of abrogating the causes
of abandonment and remoteness, and the most suitable way to secure [lasting]
devotion and sincere affection is through [. . . ] the offering of prayers (ducūt)
that are carried by angels to the seventh heaven and that are dedicated to the
most just, illustrious, and glorious of honorable rulers [my italics].” 36 Coming
from a ruler, this “offering of prayers” or ducūt can only refer to the ducā li-l-
sul ān or the da’wat al-sul ān component of the khu ba, which offers prayers in
the name of the reigning sovereign. This would indeed abrogate “the causes of
abandonment and remoteness,” as the inclusion of a particular sovereign’s name
is usually closely related to territorial rule and, in this case, would conceptually
bring the Acehnese periphery into the Ottoman center.
In this context too, the absence of cAlā’ al-Dīn Ri’āyat Shah’s name from
the text of the letter is not necessarily a sign of his lack of involvement in its
composition, as has been suggested, but part of diplomatic protocol. Work on
the formula and codes of diplomatic correspondence in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries indicate that senders frequently did not mention their identities.
As Annabel Gallop states “the letter-text commenced with a string of honorifics
preceding the name of the addressee, which was followed by greetings and
blessings, before proceeding to the business at hand. In other words, these
‘compliments’ only comprised a ‘to you’ component accompanied by benedic-
tions; the sender himself was not named, nor accorded titles or attributes.” 37 In
fact, as Gallop shows in her analysis of seventeenth century Acehnese corre-
spondence with Western, non-Muslim powers, when senders did include their
names and extensive titles it was often as a more or less overt insult to the ad-
dressee. 38 The Pādshāh of Aceh’s “absence” thus reinforces his status as suppli-
cant to the Ottoman ruler.
From this new angle, some of the report style content of the text need not be
interpreted only as the addition of a fascinated external (read Turkish) observer,
but might be seen as part of the substantiating argument offered by the Acehnese
ruler. All the geographical and political information, which makes up a signifi-
cant proportion of the text, helps to build regional precedents for Aceh’s recog-
nition of Sultan Suleymān and the use of his name in the khu ba, as well as to set
this in a wider local context. We are informed that twenty-four mosques in the
kingdom of Calicut also recognized the Ottoman ruler, as did fourteen mosques
in Sri Lanka (Seylān, in the Turkish) 39 and the entirety of the kingdom of the
Maldives until its recent conquest by the Portuguese in 970/1562-1563. There
are good precedents for this type of contextualization in what is essentially a
khu ba request. We so far know of one copy of a letter requesting the use of a
ruler’s name in the khu ba—the 795/1393 letter written by the qā̢ī of Calicut on
behalf of the town’s leading Muslims to the Rasulid al-Malik al-Ashraf II of
Yemen— and this also lays particular emphasis on contextualizing and citing
precedents for their request. Calicut’s approach to the Rasulids is explained as
following the precedents set by eleven kha ībs from eleven towns in India,
among them the town of Nalanbūr, probably the inland town of Nilambur in
Kerala. 40 The letter also states that previously other groups (jamāca) from places
such as Bengal, Samudra (the kingdom of Samudra-Pasai in north Sumatra), and
Hormuz had spent vast amounts of money trying to have the names of their Sul-
tans mentioned in the khu ba at Calicut but without success.
One marked contrast between the two letters is the earlier letter’s deliberate
avoidance of any mention of the nature of the relationship being entered into.
The 795/1393 letter asks to honor the minbar with the Rasulid Sultan’s name but
does not state what this act implied; it is the historian who included this letter in
his history, al-Khazrajī, who comments that Calicut was in effect pledging alle-
giance ( āca) to the Rasulids. 41 By contrast, our text is quite explicit in its expo-
sition of the exchange being proposed. By pledging allegiance to the Ottomans
Aceh would be seen as an Ottoman dependency and thus benefit from material
assistance against the Portuguese in terms of both access to the Red Sea and the
provision of military technology. Against this, the extensive detail on the physi-
cal character and resources of these areas, namely Calicut, the Maldives, and Sri
Lanka, underlines the material advantages for the Ottomans of accepting this
pledge, in effect laying out possible revenue streams from these resources and
regional trade.
In cases of inter-cultural and multi-lingual communication such as T.M.S.A.
E.8009, ideas of single authorship should probably be revised. Just as the “re-
port” like elements of the document make it unlike any other diplomatic letter,
there are also too many “letter” like elements in this document to allow it to sit
comfortably in the report category. Might we re-read this document as a more
complex hybrid, the grafting of a Turkish envoy’s aspirations and interests onto
an Acehnese epistolatory root, itself tinged by earlier traditions of khu ba re-
quest? Annabel Gallop’s recent work on Acehnese diplomatic correspondence in
the following century has helpfully highlighted the multiple players involved in
the authorship of diplomatic letters: from the importance of culamā’ such as
Syaikh Shamsuddin (d. 1630) in drafting royal correspondence with non-Muslim
rulers, to the role of European translators as intermediaries and ultimately alter-
ers of meaning during the course of transmission. 42 Gallop’s fascinating analysis
of the seventeenth-century Acehnese letters even suggests that the experience of
correspondence with non-Muslim powers ultimately impacted on epistolatory
style at Aceh and led to the emergence of new forms of address. 43 T.M.S.A.
E.8009 may well show that similar processes of hybridisation and acculturation
were taking place in the previous century. Discovery of the original document in
the Ottoman archives would undoubtedly help clarify this process. We have to
look to the results of the new British-Turkish collaborative project on the Otto-
mans and Southeast Asia to add new material to this debate. 44 Until then, we
should see this document as a unique hybrid, conceived in as yet unexplained
circumstances, but of dual Acehnese—Turkish parentage, a blend of personal
and distinctly Turkish aspirations and interests onto an Acehnese letter of alle-
giance.
The khu ba networks cited as precedents in T.S.M.A. E.8009 are extremely
diverse, encompassing both autonomous Muslim communities in Calicut and Sri
Lanka, a rebel government in exile in the Maldives, and a Muslim Sultanate, that
of Aceh. Whilst most debate has naturally focused around the relationship be-
tween the Sultans of Aceh and the Ottomans, since the letter came from the Sul-
tan of Aceh, let us begin by examining the other khu ba relationships mentioned.
Khu ba and Allegiance in the Sixteenth Century Indian Ocean—

Calicut and Sri Lanka
In the case of Calicut and Sri Lanka, the khu ba relationships continue in many
regards earlier practices found among autonomous Muslim minorities living
outside Islamic polities. The document’s importance in allowing us to continue
to track the networks originating from Calicut has already been mentioned. But
Calicut is mentioned here alongside Sri Lanka (Seylān) and the information
about fourteen mosques in Sri Lanka pronouncing the khu ba in the name of the
Ottoman Sultan is a precious new addition to our knowledge. There is no reason
to doubt the information provided here, which constitutes the first evidence for
the participation of Sri Lankan Muslim communities in khu ba networks. Al-
though not surprising as such, since Muslim settlement in Sri Lanka goes back
to the very first centuries of Islam, it is gratifying to gather yet more detail on a
type of network so freshly identified. Like Calicut, Sri Lanka’s autonomous
Muslim communities may well have forged khu ba networks before this; it is
simply that there is only one earlier record, and, like Calicut, Sri Lanka was in
part securing its access to the Red Sea route via Aden. Unfortunately, the docu-
ment gives no indication of where these fourteen mosques were located, whether
they were scattered around the island or were clustered around one significant
port or in one kingdom. A much earlier precedent is, however, known from the
Jaffna Peninsula. One of the more than forty locations in receipt of stipends
from the Rasulids in Aden in the mid-1290s, and listed in the Nūr al-macārif or
Light of knowledge, is Urwā ūa. Although not able to offer an identification for
this place in the earlier study, it now appears to be identifiable with the small
port of Orrathoray, near the deep water port of Kayts located on the island of the
same name to the west of Jaffna. 45 There is currently insufficient data to deter-
mine whether there was a continuity of khu ba networks out of Urwā ūa and
other mosques on the Jaffna Peninsula into the sixteenth century, as was the case
with Calicut’s regional predecessor Chaliyam, or whether the fourteen mosques
were located elsewhere. At this period Sri Lanka was divided into three king-
doms, the largest being Kotte, located near present-day Colombo, Jaffna in the
northern peninsula, and Kandy in the central highlands. 46 Kandy’s position in
the highlands makes it a less likely candidate, but the fourteen mosques involved
in these networks might have been located in the ports and cities of either Kotte
or Jaffna, or both. Bouchon indicates the importance of Mapilla Muslims in the
trade of Kotte, with links in particular to Cochin, Calicut and Cannanore, and it
is possible that khu ba networks in certain parts of Sri Lanka were extensions of
Indian networks. 47
Khu ba and Resistance—the Maldives during the

Portuguese Interregnum
One of the most fascinating details of the document relates to the Maldives. The
document rather straightforwardly states that the people of the Maldives’ 12,000
inhabited islands are all Muslims, follow the Shafici madhhab, and “read the call
to prayer in the noble name of your most high and blessed Imperial Majesty”. 48
T.S.M.A. E.8009 also clearly states that several years previously, in 970/1562-
1563, the Pādshāh of the Maldives had been forced to flee to Aden as a result of
Portuguese attacks. 49 Although brief, this passage in T.S.M.A. E.8009 appears
to substantially rewrite the history of one of the most obscure periods of Mal-
divian history.
Ottoman interest in the Maldives would appear to go back to the 1520s
when the Mamale of Cannanore, on India’s Malabar coast, had pioneered a new
route for spices from Southeast Asia to the Red Sea which was routed via the
Maldives in order to avoid Portuguese vessels sailing off south India. Records
dating to 1528 indicate that these ships were protected by armed escorts of Ot-
toman mercenaries. 50 Our document was written in the middle of a period of
Maldivian history commonly referred to as the “Portuguese interregnum,” a pe-
riod between 965/1558 and 981/1573 when the Portuguese intervened to cut off
this route, installing Adiri Adiri, a Portuguese Christian puppet ruler, in Male.
According to the Ta’rīkh, the traditional history of the Maldivian rulers
composed in the eighteenth century, the last Sultan before this interregnum was
Sultan cAlī VI, who was killed in shacbān 965/May-June 1558 in a battle against
the Portuguese. No Maldivian ruler is recorded between this date and rabīc al-
awwal 981/July 1573, when Sultan Ghāzī Muhammad Bodu Takurufānu, also
known as al-kha īb Muhammad Takurufānu, came to the throne. 51 The Ta’rīkh
informs us that during the sixteen years between 965/1558 and 981/1573, the
Maldivian resistance was led by a certain kha īb Muhammad ibn kha īb Husayn
and his brothers, from the island of Utim in Tiladummati Atol. Their families
were sent to the island of Maliku (Minicoy, part of the Lakshadweep islands),
then under cAlī Rājā cAlī, the first of the so-called cAli Rajas of Cannanore. Sig-
nificantly, Utim and Maliku straddle the nine degree channel, a significant navi-
gation route through the Maldives for ships sailing between South India and
Arabia; the Ta’rīkh thus suggests that these rebels retained strategic control over
a major regional sea route. It was kha īb Muhammad’s forces who finally over-
threw the Portuguese and he became Sultan in 981/1573. 52
The information provided in T.S.M.A. E.8009 suggests that Sultan cAlī VI
(d. 965/1558) in fact had a successor who recognized the Ottoman Caliph in his
khu ba and adopted the Shafici madhhab, at least in the period before 970/1562-
1563. This ruler was important enough to be in contact with the Ottomans and
apparently the Sultans of Aceh too. We do not know how soon this successor
emerged after the death of cAlī VI, but he ruled parts of the Maldives until
970/1562-1563, when our document informs us of his flight to Aden. Nor do we
know whether he ever returned to the Maldives from Aden, and it was to be an-
other eleven years before the Maldives shook off Portuguese control entirely.
There is no reason to doubt this information, the number of islands that make up
the Maldives and their vast geographical spread would certainly have facilitated
pockets of Muslim resistance and self-rule even while Male remained under
Portuguese control. The creation of an allegiance to the Ottoman Caliph usefully
reinforced contacts with the Ottomans and their much sought after military tech-
nology, although we do not know if in practice this brought significant diplo-
matic or military support. Aden was also the nearest Ottoman territory to the
Maldives, and thus made it an obvious place to have sought refuge.
This passage leaves many questions unanswered and the most significant is
surely that of who this unnamed Pādshāh was. One possible solution is that this
Pādshāh of the Maldives is identical with the resistance leader kha īb Muham-
mad, later Sultan Muhammad Bodu Takurufanu, mentioned in the Ta’rīkh. Who
better to understand the political potential of the khu ba than a kha īb, that is, the
individual responsible for saying the khu ba or Friday sermon in the mosque? In
such a scenario, the kha īb would have taken on formal leadership of the Mal-
dives from his base in Utim, and have abandoned the Maliki madhhab, well be-
fore his official enthronement as Sultan after the final expulsion of the Portu-
guese in 981/1573 as recorded by the Ta’rīkh. The story of this resistance would
also be more complex, with a serious reverse in 970/1562-1563 when he was
temporarily forced to flee the Maldives. Unfortunately the arrival of this Pād-
shāh of the Maldives in Aden appears to be unrecorded in the Ottoman and
Yemeni sources, and at present these cannot shed any light on the identity of this
individual. 53 If this same kha īb Muhammad did flee to Aden in 970/1562-1563,
did the Ottomans play any role in his eventual return in 981/1573? The Ta’rīkh
for its part indicates a measure of support for kha īb Muhammad from the cAli
Rajas of Cannanore. 54 The latter may even have facilitated contact with the Ot-
tomans since a letter written to the Sublime Porte in 1777 by the Ali Raja makes
reference to the dispatch of some military assistance some 240 years previously,
around 1537, or at least in the late 1530s. 55 Whatever the final answers, our
document suggests that a much more complex story of resistance was played out
in a much wider theatre than the Ta’rīkh suggests.
The Maldivian case also highlights more sharply than either Calicut or Sri
Lanka the rapidly changing parameters of the khu ba. Set against the backdrop
of the Portuguese interregnum, the use of the Ottoman Caliph’s name no longer
operated only, or indeed primarily, in the interests of trade but offered the hope,
real or imagined, of military support against the Portuguese and the defense of
shipping lanes to the Red Sea.
Khu ba and Allegiance in the Sixteenth Century Indian Ocean—
Aceh and the Ottomans
The khu ba relationship at the forefront of our document is of course that be-
tween the Sultan of Aceh and the Ottoman Caliph. As has been argued above,
although T.S.M.A. E.8009 has been interpreted by some as more of a Turkish
report than an Acehnese letter, significant letter-like aspects can be identified,
allowing it to be interpreted as a request from the Sultan of Aceh to include the
Ottoman Caliph’s name in his khu ba. Of the various relationships established
through the khu ba and reviewed so far, this ranks among the more traditional
uses, following as it does in a long tradition of Sunni Islamic rulers’ recognition
in their ducās of the Caliph as the symbolic head of the Sunni Muslim umma.
However, the request is quite remarkable for its suggestion of Acehnese integra-
tion into the Ottoman domains, as a province, rather than simply the recognition
of the Ottoman Caliph’s leadership of the Sunni Muslim umma. The solution is
extreme and one may indeed wonder whether this particular interpretation of the
relationship represents an example of “Lutfian” embroidery of what had origi-
nally been a more moderate Acehnese khu ba request. To some degree, perhaps,
it recalls Seydi Ali Reis’ description of his encounter with the governor of Surat,
Khwaja Safar, in the 1550s who reportedly expressed the wish that “the land of
Gujarat will soon be joined to the protected domains of the Ottoman Empire.” 56
Both requests might simply be read as stylistic affectations, the reality of such
an integration being negated by the extreme distance between the regions con-
cerned? However, as mentioned earlier, the difference is quite considerable and
one may wonder whether an ambassador such as Lutfi would have dared to
make such a considerable alteration, whereas such a request expressed in a
travel account held far less weight. The request is all the more surprising given
that, until this date, Aceh had been on comparatively friendly terms with the
Portuguese, allowing ships to restock at its ports, and focusing most of its mili-
tary interests instead on local expansion. 57 The switch in Acehnese policy re-
mains hard to explain, however, it marked a turning point in Acehnese relations
with the Ottomans. The nature of the request and the new parameters in the rela-
tionship deserve further study, since the sixteenth century Islamic world was a
place of competing Caliphal claims where the very definition of the Caliphate
had experienced substantial shifts.
The Ottoman Universal Caliphate in the Indian Ocean
The idea of Caliphate permeates Islamic history from its very beginnings as Abū
Bakr was nominated Caliph upon the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632.
The institution as such has a complex and often controversial history thereafter,
and there is no place here to review the oldest foundations of this institution. 58
However, a decisive moment in its history was the assassination of the last Ab-
basid Caliph in Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols, an event that marked the end
of what is often termed the “Classical Caliphate.” Thereafter, in spite of the in-
stallation of a successor Caliph in Cairo under Mamluk protection, no consensus
was ever reached as to who rightly represented the headship of the Sunni Mus-
lim umma. 59 As Azmi Özcan states “accordingly, a theory was developed by
jurists that if a Muslim ruler was righteous, governed with justice, and imple-
mented the Sharia, he would be entitled to use the title Caliph within his de facto
sovereign territories.” 60 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries therefore a num-
ber of Muslim rulers, including the Timurid Shāh Rukh, were using the title Ca-
liph in a variety of circumstances and contexts. 61 It is in this context that the
Ottoman Sultans began to explore and develop their own take on the issue of the
use of the Caliphal title and, in parallel, claims to the much more controversial
idea of Universal Caliphate, that is, their symbolic leadership of all Sunni Mus-
lims. As Martin Kramer expresses it, with the idea of Universal Caliphate came
the questions of whether “the Ottoman Caliph was the suzerain of Muslims over
whom he was not sovereign.” 62
As many commentators have pointed out, the issue of the Caliphate is com-
plex and multidimensional, involving minute issues of titulature and formal ter-
minology, questions of formal transfer and investiture and the validity of these,
as also the far wider problem of the “attitudes of the political partners toward the
caliphal concept in the political arena.” 63 Although the current consensus among
Ottomanists appears to be that a clear theory and statement of Universal Cali-
phal authority did not emerge until the mid-eighteenth century, there is plentiful
evidence for the intermittent exploration, use, and propagation of this idea by the
Ottomans during the sixteenth century, if not earlier. 64 With the Ottoman con-
quest of Egypt in 1517, the Caliphate was transferred to Ottoman hands and a
more overt policy of Universal Caliphal authority began to be developed. 65
Giancarlo Casale suggests that as early as 1518 “Selim began to actively pro-
mote himself as a universal Islamic ruler whose sovereignty, especially with
regard to the Indian Ocean, extended far beyond the borders of the areas under
his physical control”; official diplomatic correspondence cites “lordship over
Arabia, Yemen, Ethiopia, and even Zanzibar, although at the time he com-
manded no military forces at all beyond the Red Sea port of Jiddah.” 66
That this policy met with a positive reception is confirmed by the fact that,
immediately after the conquest of Egypt, the Sharif of Mecca and the Emir of
Aden swore allegiance to him while Malik Ayāz, the rūmī governor of Diu in
Gujarat, addressed him in a letter as “Caliph on Earth.” 67 Although the Otto-
mans were not of Quraysh descent, formerly a prerogative of Caliphal office,
“the theory of the Caliphate as circulated in the Ottoman Empire contained
hardly any allusion to Quraish descent and election, and substituted the en-
forcement of the holy war and the militant defense of Islam as valid criteria.” 68
Studies of Ottoman foreign policy have suggested that “the Ottoman sultans
used the notion of the caliphate as a guiding principle in their policy toward
other Muslim states, especially in remote areas that were not easy to dominate
directly by military means,” and work on Ottoman policy in the Maghrib indi-
cates an overt use of claims of Universal Caliphal authority in Ottoman relations
with the Saidi Sultans, in particular by Sultan Suleymān. 69 It is also worth con-
sidering the extent to which this Ottoman claim neatly counterbalanced the con-
temporary rise of the Safavids as leaders of the Twelver Shica community and
the khu ba networks they were then forming in the Deccan. 70
Ottomanists have tended to focus on the periodization of these claims, dis-
tinguishing between periods at which ideas of Universal Caliphal authority were
actively propounded and others during which they were not. However, one
wonders how much such nuances would have been felt or even listened to by
other Muslim polities or communities, particularly in areas such as the Indian
Ocean where these Ottoman claims so perfectly met latent needs and expecta-
tions. In short, once the Universal Caliphal cat was out of the bag, was it ever
possible to put it back again? 71
Converging Interests and New Parameters
It is against this background that document T.S.M.A. E.8009 was composed

and, most importantly, that the other khu ba networks it describes—in Calicut,
Sri Lanka, and the Maldives—were forged. The letter unequivocally addresses
Suleymān, not simply as Caliph within his domains, but in terms that allude with
varying degrees of explicitness to his status as Universal Caliph. In the opening
Arabic portion the addressee is referred to by this title, he is “the magnificent
authority, the Caliph of God” and indeed “the successor of [the four rightly
guided] caliphs, like Abu Bakr in honesty and truthfulness, like Omar in Justice
and contentment, like Othman in good manners and modesty, and like Ali in
courage and [generosity].” 72 In the following text he is also referred to once as
“God’s Caliph in the World” and in four instances he is the “Refuge of the
World and Shadow of God on Earth.” 73 In keeping with Ottoman theories of the
Caliphate, the letter appeals to Suleymān in that capacity to support jihād and
guarantee safety on the pilgrimage routes. The document clearly suggests a will-
ingness to engage with the idea of Ottoman claims to a Universal Caliphate
among varying Muslim communities and polities in the Indian Ocean.
To many Islamic polities and autonomous Muslim communities, the Otto-
man claim to the Universal Caliphate offered a solution to the long problem of
the absence of unified Sunni leadership since 658/1258. However, the examples
of thirteenth-century networks indicate that the primary motivations in the for-
mation and alteration of early khu ba networks were commercial, rather than
religious, and there is no doubt that the networks described here consolidated
commercial ties and trade routes to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, particularly
with regard to the spice trade. 74 Another facet to this equation, and a problem
indeed mentioned in the Acehnese letter, is that of the safety of pilgrimage
routes. Giancarlo Casale has noted how Indian Ocean trade routes also coincided
with pilgrimage routes to Mecca, leading to a convergence of commercial and
religious interests, a convergence made even more acute by new Caliphal defini-
tions based upon the safeguard of the hajj. 75 But even more importantly, the new
definition of Caliphal authority and duties in terms of the defense of Islam
opened the possibility of military assistance from the Ottomans, in this case
against the Portuguese.
As has been long recognized, the Ottomans enjoyed considerable prestige in
the Islamic world as “diffusers of firearms and technologies current in Europe to
Muslim peoples threatened by Portuguese, Russian, or Iranian expansion.” 76
The Ottoman fleet had engaged the Portuguese directly off the coast of Gujarat,
and indeed around the western Indian Ocean in the mid-1530s to 1540s. 77 As a
result the Ottomans were repeatedly petitioned thereafter by various polities for
assistance against the Portuguese. An approach by the rulers of Cannanore
sometime in the 1530s has already been mentioned; in 1561, the Nizam Shahis
of Ahmednagar in the Deccan are known to have proposed a bilateral alliance
with the Ottomans. 78
The story of the entry of firearms into the Indian Ocean and South Asia is
one that is still being written and will not be discussed here. 79 What is clear is
that this technology was both closely guarded by those who possessed it, shared
carefully only with selected allies, but that, once shared, or once it escaped con-
trol, it was capable of being developed and merged with local knowledge and
skills extremely rapidly.
The two key holders of this technology in the Indian Ocean are traditionally
seen as the Portuguese and the Ottomans, however, new work by Richard Eaton
has been able to gather multiple instances of firearms use, including cannon,
among various Deccani Sultanates from as early as 1502, indicating that more
complex processes and routes of transmission are at play here. 80 Certainly by the
1520 battle of Raichur, the cAdil Shahi forces of Bijapur were equipped with
400 heavy cannon, although paradoxically these did not provide them the advan-
tage they anticipated and they lost to the forces of Vijayanagara. Six years later,
in 1526, field cannon were deployed more successfully by Babur at the battle of
Panipat against the Lodis.
The point is that by the mid-1560s, when document T.S.M.A. E.8009 was
written, cannon technology was widely available across South Asia, the “mili-
tary revolution” had already happened. That Aceh should be so desperate to ac-
quire trained artificers suggests that it had been substantially and possibly delib-
erately excluded from this revolution. Aceh’s technological isolation might
explain the extreme tone of the address to the Ottoman ruler and its readiness to
accept an offer of a substantially inferior position in the relationship. The extent
of this desperation is borne out by a report in the Portuguese source do Couto,
which mentions that in the late 1560s the Acehnese sovereign “also sent ambas-
sadors to Chingiz Khān, Lord of Bharuch, with other offerings, gifts and pre-
sents, to persuade him to expel the Portuguese from Malacca [. . . ] [he] also sent
him great help in the form of personnel and artillery.” 81 Claude Guillot and Lud-
vik Kalus’ recent work uncovered physical proof of this relationship in the form
of two Gujarati cannon that made their way to Aceh. 82 The two cannons can be
linked through their inscriptions to the aforementioned Chingiz Khān, governor
of the ports of Bharuch and Surat and de facto ruler of Gujarat until his death in
1568, and to his rival, the noble Ictimād Khān. 83 Guillot and Kalus cogently ar-
gue that the two cannon probably reached Aceh in 1567 with Chingiz Khān’s
assistance.
Commentators have tended to deride the paltry assistance given to Aceh by
the Ottomans (under ten firearms experts were sent) when compared to the hun-
dreds of experts working in state run arsenals across the Ottoman Empire; how-
ever, the case of South Asia demonstrates how quickly the knowledge of a few
individuals could be exploited through its association with local metalworking
skills. Eaton discusses the rapid growth of a firearms industry at Goa under the
c
Adil Shahis based on the arrival of Turkish escapees from the defeat of an Ot-
toman navy at Diu in 1509. This local industry became so accomplished that
after the Portuguese seizure of Goa, when samples of heavy cannon were sent
back to Portugal, in 1513, barely four years after the arrival of the Ottoman es-
capees, the Portuguese Viceroy could report that the matchlocks made there
were as good as any made in Bohemia. 84 South India’s centuries old expertise in
metalworking surely goes some way to explain the speed with which this new
technology could be transmitted and then developed independently. Aceh also
appears to have developed and sustained expertise in this field once it had re-
ceived Ottoman assistance, since sometime after the Portuguese attack on Male
in 1034/1624 Aceh is reported to have provided the Maldives with fourteen
bronze cannon.
Ottoman Khu ba Networks in the Indian Ocean
We do not know when exactly these khu ba networks were first forged between
the Ottoman Caliph on one hand, and Calicut, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives on
the other. It may have been as early as 1517, coincident to the conquest of
Egypt, when the Emir of Aden, the Sharifs of Mecca, and Malik Ayāz in Gujarat
acknowledged the Ottomans, or as late as the 1530s, when the Ottoman Empire
made significant inroads into the Indian Ocean and developed what might be
termed an Indian Ocean policy. 85 Famous eventful dates in this entry are com-
monly given as Suleymān’s order of 1537 to build a powerful fleet with which
to challenge Portuguese power in the Indian Ocean, and the 1538 naval cam-
paign against the Portuguese base at Diu in western India. However, Anthony
Reid cites 1530 as the date when direct shipments of pepper began to be made
from Aceh to Cairo, Alexandria and Venice via the Red Sea route, so circum-
venting Portuguese control along the west coast of India and the Gulf. 86 From
the 1520s onwards, Ottoman conquests in Egypt and later the Yemen and Iraq,
in effect along the main sea routes between the Middle East and the Indian
Ocean, and their dominant intervention in the spice trade, would have made
them the new and natural strategic allies in the eyes of the many Indian Ocean
polities and communities. The Ottomans thereby became the obvious successors
to the khu ba networks developed earlier with the rulers of Qa’is and Hormuz in
the Gulf, and the Rasulids in the Yemen.
What we can say is that khu ba networks with implications of Universal
Caliphal authority would appear to have been established by the mid-1550s and
to have extended well beyond the western Indian Ocean. A passage in the travels
of the Turkish admiral Seydi cAli during the mid-1550s relates the following
anecdote, reported to him by two merchants from Surat, one Khwāja Bakhshī
and a rūmī expatriate named Qara Hasan:
. . . in the land of China (vilāyet-i Chīn), when Muslim merchants wish

to offer prayers on the occasion of the Feast of the Sacrifice (beyram),
each community (her tāyife) had wanted to pronounce the khu ba in the
name of its own Padishah. Then the merchants of Rum went to the sov-
ereign of China (khāqān-i Chīn) and represented the following to him:
“Our Padishah is the Padishah of Mecca, Medina and the direction of
prayer (qibla).” Even though he was a kāfir, the monarch showed evi-
dence of his justice (in āf) and said: “Pronounce the khu ba then in the
name of the Padishah of Mecca and Medina.” The merchants from
Rum gave the preacher (kha īb) a robe of honour, mounted him on an
elephant, and paraded him through the city. Thereafter the prayer was
heard and the khu ba was read in the land of China in the name of the
Padishah-i Rum. To whom else has such a thing ever happened? 87
This passage, as so many in Seydi cAli’s account, is clearly designed to illustrate

the universal scope of the Ottoman Sultan’s rule and the anecdote is presented in
the context of a conversation between the author and the Mughal ruler Humayun
in order to demonstrate Ottoman superiority. As a consequence, it has largely
been dismissed as hyperbole, as have so many anecdotes that relate to khu ba
practices. It may, however, contain a grain of truth. At the very least this passage
suggests that rūmī, merchants used the Ottoman ruler’s name in their khu ba
when travelling outside the dār al-islām. There are no reasons to doubt that mer-
chant communities in China had previously forged networks with external Is-
lamic polities, indeed, al-Khazrajī mentions that in the late thirteenth century the
Rasulid Sultan al-Malik al-Mu̿affar had intervened on the behalf of Muslims in
China who had been prevented from circumcising their sons, an intervention that
suggests some genre of formal link. 88 However, the anecdote’s main message is
that on the basis of his rule over Mecca and Medina, the Ottoman ruler’s name
replaced those of all other Muslim sovereigns. In effect, the Ottoman Sultan was
recognized in China as the Universal Caliph of the Muslims, and this by non-
Ottoman as well as Ottoman subjects. Such a thing had indeed not happened to
anyone else, since no other ruler at the period was elaborating or toying with
ideas of Universal Caliphal authority so explicitly. The claim may be inflated
but our document and the later edict of the mid-1570s suggest that there may be
an element of truth here.
Conclusions
The two important documents studied here continue our understanding of the
existence and development of khu ba networks in the Indian Ocean into the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries and the dawn of the Modern era. Unfortunately,
the present documentation does not allow us much more detail into the genesis
of khu ba networks involving the Ottoman Empire. We know nothing of the
Ottoman’s initial encounter with existing Indian Ocean khu ba networks; we can
only guess as to whether, as with the Timurid Shāh Rukh, these particular prac-
tices took the Ottomans some time to understand or not. Similarly, we do not
know whether these networks were conceived through direct Caliphal interven-
tion, through the agency of Ottoman envoys or the rūmī diaspora in the region,
of rūmī clerics, or even at the initiative of autonomous Muslim communities and
polities themselves. But it is already important simply to be able to state on the
basis of this new research that distinctive and well established khu ba practices
already existed in this area, practices that the Ottomans obviously encountered
and in time changed during the course of their exploration of the Indian Ocean.
It is clear too that the quality and function of these networks changed radi-
cally during the sixteenth century. The disjuncture between the Calicut request
to Shāh Rukh in the 1440s and the situation one hundred and twenty years later
is enormous. From an approach entirely motivated by the desire to reaffirm trade
interests and influence following a period of political and military upheaval, by
the 1560s, the core aims of the Acehnese approach are multi-faceted, including
military, religious, and commercial motivations. From a barter of khu ba for
trade privileges and influence, we arrive at a barter of Universal Caliphal recog-
nition for cannon.
The further history of the khu ba networks described in the Acehnese letter
of 973/1565 cannot be traced in their entirety, however, as we have seen, the
edict sent to the beglerbegi of Egypt sometime in the mid-1570s demonstrates
the continuity of this practice in relation to Calicut, at least, and even suggests
an expansion of the locations citing the Ottoman Caliph in their sermons. The
sixteenth-century Ottoman documents and accounts interestingly prefigure the
dominant role that the name of the Ottoman Caliph eventually come to wield
from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, as a more formal Ottoman Caliphal
policy was developed. It was upon these bases that nineteenth-century revivalist
Muslim movements in South Asia such as the Khilafat movement built their
policy of uniting the fractured Muslim umma. Various reports indicate that by
then it was the Ottoman Caliph’s name that was used among Muslim communi-
ties from Sri Lanka through to northern India. The issue of the khu ba under
Colonial rule, under the British in South Asia and indeed under other colonizing
powers elsewhere in Africa and Asia, is not one to be entered here. It is clear,
however, that the issue continued to play an important role in the expressions of
allegiance and thinking of Muslims living under non-Muslim rule well after the
sixteenth century, and indeed to this day.
____________
Notes
1. As always I have many people to thank for their willingness to dialogue with me
and share material as this article progressed. Annabel Teh Gallop patiently answered my
queries about Malay diplomatic letters and pointed me towards the online text of her
conference paper “Gold, Silver and Lapis Lazuli: Royal Letters from Aceh in the 17th
Century”, presented at the First International Conference of Aceh and Indian Ocean Stud-
ies, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore & Rehabilitation and Con-
struction Executing Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR), Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 24 – 27
February 2007 (available online from: http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs%5CAceh-
project%5Cfull-papers%5Caceh_fp_annabelgallop. pdf). Many thanks too to Giancarlo
Casale for willingly talking to this Ottoman novice and more particularly for generously
sharing proofs of his book The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2010) before it was actually published.
2. Elizabeth Lambourn, “India from Aden – Khutba and Muslim Urban Networks in
Late Thirteenth-Century India,” in Kenneth R. Hall ed., Secondary Cities and Urban
Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1000-1800, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2008), 55-97.
3. Samarqandī, Kamāl al-Dīn cAbd al-Razzāq, Matlāc-i sacdayn. W. M. Thackston
(Eng. Trans.) “Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi. Mission to Calicut and Vijayana-
gara,” in W. M. Thackston (Eng. trans. and ed.) A Century of Princes. Sources on Timu-
rid History and Art, (Cambridge, MA.: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture,
1989), 304.
4. Samarqandi, A Century of Princes, 305.
5. Richard Eaton, “Multiple Lenses: Differing Perspectives of Fifteenth Century Ca-
licut,” in Essays on Islam and Indian History, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000), 83.
6. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of
Discoveries, 1400-1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65.
7. Samarqandī, A Century of Princes, 304.
8. Samarqandī, A Century of Princes, ibid.
9. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 64.
10. Duarte Barbosa, Livro das cousas da Índia. M. Longworth Dames (Eng. trans. &
ed.), The Book of Duarte Barbosa. An Account of the Countries Bordering the Indian
Ocean and Their Inhabitants, 2 vols., (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918-1921), 147. These
Pardesi groups are seen as different from the heavily indigenized Mappilla community
who did not operate under an autonomous governor. The term ra’īs al-muslimīn was also
commonly used along the coast to designate exactly this role, as illustrated by numerous
mentions in Ibn Battuta’s account of Muslim communities along the Malabar coast in the
mid-fourteenth century and confirmed into the late seventeenth century at Calicut itself
by an inscription on the minbar of the Mithqalpalli recording its renovation by the ra’īs
al-muslimīn and shāh bandar or head of the port, Khwaja cUmar Antabī in 1088/1677-
1678, see M. Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture in South India: the Sultanate of Ma’bar
and the traditions of maritime settlers on the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts, (London:
Routledge Curzon, 2003), 168.
11. In the most recent reading by Subrahmanyam and Alam, the use of the term walī
is seen as a dismissive term for the samurī adopted by cAbd al-Razzāq: “he found that the
conversion of the Samudri Raja (whom he dismissively titles the wali of Calicut) was
pretty much a chimera”, Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 64.
12. See Lambourn, “India from Aden,” 73-76.
13. See Lambourn, “India from Aden,” idem.
14. cAlī ibn al-Hasan al-Khazrajī, al-cUqūd al-lu’lu’iyya , ed. Shaykh Muhammad
Asal and J. W. Redhouse, The Pearl-Strings; A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen,
5 vols. E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series vol. III (Leiden and London: E. J. Brill and Luzac
and Co, 1907-1918), v. 245, The tone of the source, a letter dated 795/1393 from the qā ī
of Calicut to the Rasulid Sultan al-Ashraf II, suggests that these approaches were refused.
This reference seems to refer to the then rulers of the Sultanate of Samudra-Pasai in north
Sumatra, and to the Ilyas Shahi’s of Bengal,approaching Calicut’s Sunni Muslims to have
their names read in the port’s khu ba. The pairing of Bengal with Samudra at this period
may not be accidental. Picking up on early Portuguese accounts that emphasize the im-
portance of Bangali Muslims in the kingdom of Samudra-Pasai and on a few trace Turk-
ish titulatures on recently deciphered royal tombstones from the kingdom, Claude Guillot
had suggested a “Turkish” interregnum between approximately 1340 and 1400. The ar-
gument is still far from being watertight but the pairing of Bengal and Samudra in the text
of this letter is highly unusual and might point to a common khu ba approach based on
close contacts between the two areas. As the letter is dated 795/1393 and refers to this as
an earlier approach, it also works with Guillot’s proposed chronology. See Claude Guillot
and Ludvic Kalus, Les monuments funéraires et l'histoire du Sultanat de Pasai, (Paris :
Cahiers d’Archipel, 2008), 69-74.
15. See Lambourn, “India from Aden” and for al-Shaliyāt see Map 3.5 and No. 30 in
the Appendix of locations.
16. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 62-63 where the two authors
suggest that the request to recite the Sultan’s name in the khu ba might be part of cAbd al-
Razzāq’s “version” of events rather than an accurate record of the request made.
17. Lisa Balabanlilar, “The Timurid Kings of India: Turco-Mongol Islamic Identity
at the Mughal Imperial Court,” paper delivered as part of Panel 248: “Muslim Empires in
World History,” American Historical Association 124th Annual Meeting, San Diego, 10
January 2010. On the Mughal uses of the Chingizid legacy see Lisa Balabanlilar, “Lords
of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent,”
Journal of World History, 18, 1 (2007): 1-67.
18
. Samarqandī, A Century of Princes, 304.
19. Jean Aubin, “ Les princes d'Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Journal Asiatique,
CCXLI, 1, (1953) : 118.
20. Valeria Piacentini Fiorani, “Hurmuz and the Umani and Arabian World (fif-
teenth century)”, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 30, (2000), 180 and
181-85.
21. Piacentini Fiorani, “Hurmuz and the Umani and Arabian World”, 178-179.
22. Andrew Williamson, “Hurmuz and the Trade of the Gulf in the 14th and 15th
centuries AD,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 3 (1973), 52-68.
23. Williamson, “Hurmuz and the Trade of the Gulf.”
24. Samarqandī, A Century of Princes, 300.
25. cAbd al-Razzāq states that Calicut is “a city of infidels and therefore [it] is in the
dar al-harb,” adding by way of afterthought that “however, there is a Muslim population
resident” (Samarqandī, A Century of Princes, 303).
26. Quoted from the comprehensive edition and translation of the letter by Giancarlo
Casale in his article “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’. The career of a previously unknown
sixteenth-century Ottoman envoy to Sumatra based on an account of his travels from the
Topkapı Palace Archives,” Turcica, 37 (2005): 60.
27. See Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 148. “An edict to the Governor-
general of Egypt: In times past, one hundred gold pieces [a year] were sent to the
mosques of the twenty-seven cities located in the Indian port of Calicut for the Friday
sermon [̻u be]. However, it has been reported that for the last few years only fifty gold
pieces have been sent, and sometimes not even that amount . . . . Be diligent in this affair
and see to it that, in fulfilment of the requirements of my orders, one hundred florins are
sent every year without fail and in perpetuity from the port of Jiddah for the abovemen-
tioned sermons. As far as any payments that have still not been made from previous years
are concerned, these also should be paid in full from the revenues of Jiddah.” Ottoman
Turkish original given in footnote 151.
28. For a summary of the document’s publication history and use by Southeast
Asianists see Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 44-49.
29. For the most comprehensive study yet of Ottoman involvement in the Indian
Ocean see Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration.
30. See Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 45 and note 5.
31. See Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 61-70, transcription of the Arabic
opening and transliteration of the Ottoman Turkish given on pages 71-80. The document
is discussed more briefly in Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 127-131.
32. Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 49 footnote 7.
33. Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 67.
35. This view is stated more bluntly in Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Discovery
of the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century,” in J. H. Bentely et al., Seascapes. Mari-
time Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2007), 99.
37. Gallop, “Gold, Silver and Lapis Lazuli: Royal Letters from Aceh in the 17th
Century,” 21, referring to V. L. Ménage, “On the constituent elements of certain six-
teenth-century Ottoman documents,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Stud-
ies, (1985) 48 (2): 289.
38. Gallop, “Gold, Silver and Lapis Lazuli,” 22.
39. The form Sarandīb will be more familiar to Arabists but the form Sīlān is known
from the thirteenth century when it appears in the geographical work of Yaqūt.
40. al-Khazrajī, al-cUqūd al-lu’lu’iyya, V, 245.
41. al-Khazrajī, al-cUqūd al-lu’lu’iyya, V, 244.
42. See Gallop, “Gold, Silver and Lapis Lazuli,” on Shaykh Shamsuddin see 22-24,
on translators see 9-11, 13, 18-19. As Gallop states “there is no denying the great impor-
tance of European translations of early Malay letters, especially when they are the only
surviving record of the correspondence, but the above examples are a salutary reminder
that contemporary translations are rarely a truly faithful record of what was written”
(Gallop, “Gold, Silver and Lapis Lazuli,” 10).
43. See Gallop, “Gold, Silver and Lapis Lazuli,” 21-22.
44. The “Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean” project is funded by the
British Academy and administered by the British Institute at Ankara and the Association
of South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom. For a preliminary report see İsmail
Hakkı Kadı, Annabel Teh Gallop and Andrew Peacock, “Islam, Trade and Politics
Across the Indian Ocean,” British Academy Review, issue 14 (November 2009): 36-39.
45. Discussed in Lambourn “India from Aden,” Appendix No. 42, p. 90 and then as-
sumed to be on the Indian coast. The place name is given on Walker’s East India Com-
pany’s Charts held in the British Library (IOL MAPS 147 e19), see “Chart of the Palk
Strait and Gulf of Mannar 1838-1845,” 62a.
46. See S. Arasaratnam “Ceylon in the Indian Ocean Trade: 1500-1800,” in A. Das
Gupta and M. N. Pearson, eds. India and the Indian Ocean 1500-1800, (Calcutta: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 224-239. On Kotte see Geneviève Bouchon, “Les rois de Kō ē
au début du XVIe siècle,” Mare Luso-Indicum, I (1971): pp. 66-96.
47. Bouchon, “Les rois de Kō ē,” 73.
48. Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 64. Bouchon usefully informs us that in
the early sixteenth century Portuguese sources the Maldives’ islands were numbered at
12,000, of which 8,000 were inhabited; see Bouchon, “Les rois de Kō ē,” 44 and note
35.
50. Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 45.
51. See H. C. P. Bell, “Excerpta Maldiviana. No. 10 The Portuguese at the Mal-
dives,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon, XXXII, No. 84 (1931): 76-97, for
the rough translation of relevant passages in the Ta’rīkh. For the corresponding passages
in the original Arabic text see Hasan Tāj al-Dīn, Muhammad Muhabb al-Dīn and Ibrāhīm
Sirāj al-Dīn, Ta’rīkh al-islām dībā mahal, Hikoichi Yajima (Arabic text ed. and Eng.
trans.) The Islamic History of the Maldive Islands, 2 vols., Studia Culturae Islamicae 16
(Tokyo, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1982), vol.
1, 17-20.
52. H. C. P. Bell, “Excerpta Maldiviana. No. 10 The Portuguese at the Maldives,”
91-95. Pyrard de Laval also refers to a Maldivian resistance under two Catibes (read
kha ibs) but locates their resistance in Huvadu Atol, to the south of the Maldives see Bell,
“Excerpta Maldiviana. No. 10 The Portuguese at the Maldives,” 88-89.
53. My thanks to Giancarlo Casale and Nancy Um for responding to my query about
this point.
54. H. C. P. Bell, “Excerpta Maldiviana. No. 10 The Portuguese at the Maldives,”
94, 95.
55. The letter is mentioned in a footnote in Azmi Özcan, “Attempts to Use the Ot-
toman Caliphate as the Legitimator of British Rule in India,” in A. Reid and M. Gilsenan
eds. Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia, (London: Routledge, 2007), 77, note 3 citing
Name Defteri, No. 9, pp. 80-81, Ottoman Archives, cited in I. H. Uzunçarşili, Osmanli
Tarihi, Vol. IV, Part II (Ankara, Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1982), 156.
58. Fred Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
59. On the reinstated Abbasid Caliphate in Cairo see P. M. Holt, “Some
Observations on the ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, 47, 3, (1984): 501-507. For Rasulid attempts to take over Sunni
leadership in the Indian Ocean see Eric Vallet, “Les sultans rasūlides du Yémen,
protecteurs des communautés musulmanes de l’Inde (VIIe-VIIIe/XIIIe-XIVe siècles),”
Annales islamologiques, 41, (2007): 149-176.
60. Azmi Özcan, Pan-Islamism. Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain (1877-
1924) (Leiden, E J Brill, 1997), 3 and note 6 referring to H. A. R. Gibb, “Some
Considerations on the Sunni Theory of the Caliphate,” Studies on the Civilization of
Islam, Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk eds., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul),
1962) 141-150.
61. See D. Sourdel, “Khalifa – the institution of the caliphate after 658/1258,” in P.
Bearman et al. eds. Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill Online. School of
Oriental and African Studies).
62. Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled. The Advent of the Muslim Congresses (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 4.
63. Abderrahmane El Moudden, “The Idea of the Caliphate between Moroccans and
Ottomans: Political and Symbolic States in the 16th and 17th-Century Maghrib,” Studia
Islamica, 82 (1995), 105.
64. For the most recent take on this as it relates to Ottoman policies in the Indian
Ocean see Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 147-148.
65. For a discussion of this event and its validity, as well as an extensive
bibliography see Özcan, Pan-Islamism, 2, footnotes 4 and 5. Özcan also observes that
already in the early fifteenth century Bahmani correspondence with the Ottoman Sultan
addressed him as Caliph, 2, note 2.
67. Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, ibid.
68. Kramer, Islam Assembled, 3-4.
69. Abderrahmane El Moudden, “The Idea of the Caliphate,” 104.

70. The topic appears to be barely studied. However, in the Deccan, the Qutb Sha-
his, who were Twelver Shi’as, recognized the religious leadership of the Safavids and the
first ruler Qulī Qutb Shāh (r. 1518-43) is reported to have included Shāh Ismacīl Safavī’s
name before his own name in his khu ba, the same hierarchy was maintained in the Qutb
Shahi khu ba at the time of Shāh cAbbās (r. 1587–1629). See V. Minorsky, “The Qara-
qoyunlu and the Qutb-shāhs”, Turkmenica, 10 (1955): 72, footnote 2 citing Firishta. The
c
Adil Shahis of Bijapur are also reported to have included the name of Ismacīl I. See Kate
Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy. Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Do-
main, (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997), 72.
71. Further evidence for the independence of this idea once released comes from
Gujarat and the pretensions of the noble Imād al-Mulk to be “lord of the standard of the
Ottoman Sultan.” See Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 105.
73. Casale, “‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi’,” 64, 66.
74. On this see particularly “The spice trade as an engine of Ottoman foreign pol-
icy,” in Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 145-147.
76. Kramer, Islam Assembled, 4, with reference to Halil Inalcik, “The Socio-
Political effects of the Diffusion of firearms in the Middle East,” in V. J. Parry and M. E.
Yapp eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 195-217.
77. See Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, and Map 3.1.
79. See for example the recent innovative work of R. M. Eaton, “‘Kiss My Foot,’
Said the King: Firearms, Diplomacy, and the Battle for Raichur, 1520,” Modern Asian
Studies (2008): 1-25; and P. Wagoner, “Firearms, Fortifications, and a “Military Revolu-
tion” in the 16th Century Deccan.” Conference paper presented at the Seminar on “Is-
lamic India in Transition: The Sixteenth Century”, Part II: The Built Environment, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, March 17, 2007. I am grateful to Phil Wagoner for circulating
these papers to me.
80. Eaton, “‘Kiss My Foot’,” 9-10.
81. C. Guillot and L. Kalus, “Inscriptions islamiques sur des canons d’Insulinde du
XVIe siècle, ” Archipel, 72 (2006), 88.
82. Guillot and Kalus, “Inscriptions islamiques sur des canons d’Insulinde,” 69-94.
83. Guillot and Kalus, “Inscriptions islamiques sur des canons d’Insulinde,” No. 2,
80-82, and No. 3, 82-94.
84. Eaton, “‘Kiss My Foot’,” 10 and footnote 23.
85. On this see Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration.
86. Reid, The Ottomans in Southeast Asia, 4.
87. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 113-114; the incident is also
discussed in Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 122-123.
88. al-Khazrajī, al-cUqūd al-lu’lu’iyya, I, 235.

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6

Khu ba and Muslim Networks in the

Map 6.1. Main Regions and Locations Discussed c.1400-1600

The present study gives me the opportunity to pursue my interest in Indian

The Problem with cAbd al-Razzāq’s Presents

The Debacle at Calicut

Calicut, Shāh Rukh and the Kings of Hormuz

The question immediately arises as to why Calicut’s Muslims should approach

The Problem with cAbd al-Razzāq’s Presents

A Postscript on the Khu ba at Calicut

Khu ba for Cannon –Remaking Khu ba Networks in the Ottoman

The Problem with T.S.M.A. E.8009

Authorship in Cross-Cultural Correspondence

Khu ba and Allegiance in the Sixteenth Century Indian Ocean—

Khu ba and Resistance—the Maldives during the

The Ottoman Universal Caliphate in the Indian Ocean

Converging Interests and New Parameters

It is against this background that document T.S.M.A. E.8009 was composed

Ottoman Khu ba Networks in the Indian Ocean

. . . in the land of China (vilāyet-i Chīn), when Muslim merchants wish

This passage, as so many in Seydi cAli’s account, is clearly designed to illustrate

69. Abderrahmane El Moudden, “The Idea of the Caliphate,” 104.

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