Thorough exploration of the distinct culture of the Mappila Muslims of Kerala, India. This book provides a comprehensive account of the distinct culture of the Mappila Muslims, a large community from the southern Indian state of Kerala. Although they were the first Muslim community in South Asia, the Mappilas are little-known in the West. Roland E. Miller explores the Mappilas fourteen-century-long history of social adaptation and their current status as a successful example of Muslim interaction with modernity. Once feared, now admired, Keralas Mappilas have produced an intellectual renaissance and renewed their ancient status as a model of social harmony. Miller provides an account of Mappila history and looks at the formation of Mappila culture, which has developed through the interaction of Islamic and Malayali influences. Descriptions of current day life cycles, religion, ritual, work life, education, and leadership are included.
This book provides a comprehensive account of the distinct culture of the Mappila Muslims, a large community from the southern Indian state of Kerala. Although they were the first Muslim community in South Asia, the Mappilas are little-known in the West. Roland E. Miller explores the Mappilas' fourteen-century-long history of social adaptation and their current status as a successful example of Muslim interaction with modernity. Once feared, now admired, Kerala's Mappilas have produced an intellectual renaissance and renewed their ancient status as a model of social harmony. Miller provides an account of Mappila history and looks at the formation of Mappila culture, which has developed through the interaction of Islamic and Malayali influences. Descriptions of current day life cycles, religion, ritual, work life, education, and leadership are included.
Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian R. Prange argues that this 'Monsoon Islam' was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India's Malabar Coast, the much-fabled 'land of pepper', Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges. Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.
History of Mappila Muslims is known to scholars in the English-speaking world thanks to certain works which carved a niche in what later came to be known as Mappila studies. Although these works are considerably a few and their importance has been slighted by the coming generations as per the ever-evolving standards of historicity, they could set a paradigm in this area of historical exploration. Tuhfatul Mujahidin and Fatah al-Mubeen in the days of yore and Roland Miller’s Mappila Muslims of Kerala in the last century are among the paradigmatic texts which Other Books has either published or will soon publish. Classical works like Tuhfa and Fatah al-Mubeen are the masterpieces which resist any overlooking as per any standards of historical analysis, chiefly because they speak of the space and time in which their authors encountered the bloody enactment of a historical event: Gama’s arrival on the coast of Malabar. All other events preceding 1498 are narrated in these works in relation to or in the context of that apocalyptic coup d’etat. By publishing JBP More’s Origin and Early History of the Muslims of Keralam-700 AD 1600 AD, we would like to shed as much light as possible on the history preceding, as well as the history of more than a century succeeding, Gama’s arrival on the coast of Malabar. We have the same objective behind publishing the Malayalam translation of Roland E Miller’s Mappila Muslims, which too comes out all but simultaneously. As befitted a historian, More has gone through several sources, which he has duly footnoted, in the analysis of historical events narrated in the work. We hope these works will serve as lighthouses to guide explorations in the sea of literatures and oral narratives, chronicled or yet to be chronicled, on the history of Malabar and Mappilas. Since these works are second-hand sources, we request you to subject their historicity to scrutiny more than we do the historicity of classics. For example, a section of this book deals with Cheraman Perumal’s conversion into Islam- an incident in the history of Kerala which elicits many questions from academics and historians on its chronology and the nature of incident. Author’s discussion of the incident may not be agreeable to many readers. For example, in page 112 of the book, the author states that ‘if the prophet had really met Cheraman Perumal it would have been mentioned in the Hadith literature’. But in Al- Musthadrak of Hakim (1002- 03), a collection of ahadith, the following event is reported on the authority of Abu Saeed Al-Khudri, one of the famed companions of the Prophet and widely remembered Helper (Ansar) who has reported around 1170 prophetic narrations: "A king from India presented the messenger, a bottle of ginger, which the messenger handed to his companions for eating. He gave me some, too". The Indian king is believed to be Cheraman Perumal based on the analysis of narration. However, Other Books aims to bring out and strengthen many and varied discources on otherwise less discussed issues in the history of Kerala. We hope those readers will judiciously collate their data, compare them with the author’s sources and form an opinion accordingly.
The Muslims of Kerala, primarily in the northern region of the state called Malabar, are referred to as Mappillas. This book is a study of the social and institutional changes of the Malabar Muslims during the colonial period. It presents the Mappilla community in a wider Indian context and analyses its social, economic, religious, theological, political and educational aspects in detail. Particular emphasis has been laid on their women who are socially more powerful than their counterparts in the rest of the subcontinent. The Mappilla tharavaadus, which are matrilineal joint families, and kaarnotis, the female matrilineal heads of these families, are central to the understanding of the social history of this community. The British colonial system disrupted this traditional social order. The book argues that Mappillas do not per se represent a monolithic community, but show inter- and intra-regional variations and social hierarchies. The position and status of the Mappilla community in the twenty-first century has been compared with its Muslim counterparts in the other regions of the country. The book would be of interest to academics, researchers and graduate students of South Asian History and Sociology. NGOs working on the social welfare of minorities and general readers interested in the Islamic community of the west coast of India will find this book useful.
Not Only Is This Book The First Full Introduction To The Mappilas Available, It Is Also Likely To Remain The Definitive Study For Years To Come. Slightly Damaged Copy.
Islam in India, as elsewhere, continues to be seen as a remainder in its refusal to "conform" to national and international secular-modern norms. Such a general perception has also had a tremendous impact on the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who as individuals and communities have been shaped and transformed over centuries of socio-political and historical processes, by eroding their world-view and steadily erasing their life-worlds. This book traces the spectral presence of Islam across narratives to note that difference and diversity, demographic as well as cultural, can be espoused rather than excised or exorcized. Focusing on Malabar - home to the Mappila Muslim community in Kerala, South India - and drawing mostly on Malayalam sources, the author investigates the question of Islam from various angles by constituting an archive comprising popular, administrative, academic, and literary discourses. The author contends that an uncritical insistence on unity has led to a formation in which "minor" subjects embody an excess of identity, in contrast to the Hindu-citizen whose identity seemingly coincides with the national. This has led to Muslims being the source of a deep-seated anxiety for secular nationalism and the targets of a resurgent Hindutva in that they expose the fault-lines of a geographically and socio-culturally unified nation. An interdisciplinary study of Islam in India from the South Indian context, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Indian history, political science, literary and cultural studies, and Islamic studies.
