Monsoon Mosques: Medieval Malabar in Transoceanic Contexts

This presentation offers a reading of mosques on the Indian Ocean littoral as primary sources for the maritime history of the region. It considers the mosque as an actual place as well as a symbol of the place of Islam. In particular, it explores the relationship between the mosque as a place of worship and its role and function within the far-reaching Muslim trade networks that spanned across the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early-modern periods. Focussing in specific on the Malabar Coast in southwestern India, it asks what these monuments can reveal about the development of Muslim communities on the Indian subcontinent, about their links to wider Islamic commercial and religious networks, and about their status vis-à-vis the region’s predominant Hindu society and traditions. It is argued that these mosques can, to a degree, provide an indication of how these Muslims understood themselves in relation to their far-flung trading networks as well as to local society.

Transcending the boundaries between literary and material sources, the paper will centre on a close reading of two “monsoon mosques”: the Mithqalpalli (or Nākhudā Mithqāl Masjid) and the Muchchandipalli, both located in the port city of in Calicut (now: Kozhikode). Through these two buildings, the Islamic history of Calicut, which was the most important of Malabar’s maritime emporia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is revealed in different layers. Progressing along different layers of evidence—stylistic features, architectural changes, epigraphs, literary references, historical context—the argument will highlight the historical significance of these mosques to Indian Ocean history that extends far beyond their immediate purpose as Islamic places of worship.