A Defensive Struggle

By Yoginder Sikand - Indian Muslims - San Diego, CA, USA
Thursday, January 24, 2008

The Tuhfat al-Mujahidin or ‘The Tribute to the Strugglers’ is one of the earliest extant historical treatises about the southern Indian state of Kerala.

Its author, the sixteenth century's Shaikh Zainuddin Makhdum, hailed from the renowned Makhdum family from the town of Ponnani in Malabar, in northern Kerala.

This family traced its descent to migrants from Yemen, who played a leading role in the spread of Islam in southern India.

Following in the footsteps of many of his forefathers, Shaikh Zainduddin rose to become a leading Islamic scholar. He spent ten years studying in Mecca, where he also joined the Qadri order of Sufism.

On his return to his native Malabar, he spent almost four decades teaching at the central mosque in Ponnani, then a major centre for Islamic studies in southern India. He also served as the envoy of the Zamorins, the Hindu rulers of Calicut, to Egypt and Turkey.

The Tuhfat is one of Shaikh Zainuddin’s several works, and is the best known among them. A chronicle of the stiff resistance put up by the Muslims of Malabar against the Portuguese colonialists from 1498, when Vasco Da Gama arrived in Calicut, to 1583, it describes in considerable detail events, many of which that the author had himself witnessed and lived through.

It was intended, as Shaikh Zainduddin says, as a means to exhort the Malabar Muslims to launch a struggle or jihad against the Portuguese invaders. The book thus extols the virtues of jihad against oppressors, and, at the same time, also provides fascinating details about the history of Islam in Malabar, the relations between Muslims and Hindus in the region and the customs and practices of both.

Islam’s first contact with India is said to have taken place in Malabar, and Shaikh Zainuddin offers a popularly-held account of this.

He writes of how the Hindu ruler of Malabar, impressed with a group of Muslim pilgrims on their way to Ceylon, converted to Islam and accompanied them back to Arabia. There, shortly before he died, he instructed them to return to Malabar.

They did as they were told, and the king’s governors welcomed them, allowing them to settle along the coast and establish mosques. Gradually, he writes, the Muslim community began expanding through the missionary efforts of Sufis and traders.

Relations between Muslims and the Hindus of Malabar, Shaikh Zainudin observes, were traditionally cordial.

(...)

In appealing to the Malabari Muslims to launch jihad against the Portuguese, Shaikh Zainuddin makes clear that this struggle is purely a defensive one, directed at only the Portuguese interlopers and not the local Hindus or the Hindu Zamorins, for whom he expresses considerable respect.

Nor is it, he suggests, a call to establish Muslim political supremacy and control. Jihad, then, for Shaikh Zaiuddin, was a morally just struggle to restore peace in Malabar and expel foreign occupiers, to return to a period when Muslims and Hindus in the region lived together in harmony.

This treatise is an indispensable source of Malabari history and would be invaluable to those interested in the history of Islam in South Asia. Much that Shaikh Zainuddin says with regard to the legitimacy of struggle against foreign occupation and oppression finds powerful echoes today.

Tuhfat al-Mujahidin (translated from Arabic by S. Muhammad Husayn Nainar)
Author: Shaykh Zainuddin Makhdum
Year: 2006
Pages: 139 Publisher: Islamic book Trust, Kuala Lumpur (http://www.ibtbooks.com/) & Other Books, Calicut (otherbooks@post.com).