Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
68. The Portuguese Devastations in the Indian Ocean, Part 2 of 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Vasco de Gama’s first voyage was an intelligence gathering one. He returned in 1502 at the head of a flotilla of twenty-five ships armed with the most powerful cannons in the Portuguese inventory and bombarded the city states all along the east African coast.
His first encounter with shipping in the Indian Ocean was a vessel carrying 700 returning hajjis from Mecca to India. An Indian Muslim from Malabar, Merim, owned the ship. Disregarding pleas for mercy, de Gama burned the ship with all of its occupants, women and children included.
When the Portuguese arrived off the coast of Calicut, the Raja of Calicut, Manna Vikrama, sent an emissary, a Brahmin of high repute, to negotiate peace. The ambassador arrived on board the Portuguese flagship with his two sons and a nephew. De Gama cut off the hands, nose and ears of the ambassador, and had the three young men nailed to crosses. The bombardment of Calicut began in earnest, wreaking havoc on that ancient city. He then turned his attention to the ships in anchor. He treated the captured Hindus the same way he had treated the Brahmin ambassador of the Raja, cutting off their hands, noses and ears and piling them up in heaps on board his ships. But the most sadistic treatment was reserved for captured Muslims.
One Khwaja Muhammed, a noted merchant from Egypt was captured, beaten, his mouth stuffed with pig refuse, and then set afire. Such atrocities were repeated wherever the Portuguese went on the Indian coast.
The first Portuguese raids established a fortified position in East Africa. Shofala, a trading center established by Muslim merchants as early as 957, was captured. More powerful thrusts followed. In 1505, the Portuguese captain Almeida raided Kilwa and shot his way along the East African coast to Somalia, returning with a rich booty. In 1507, Bab el Mandap, at the entrance to the Red Sea fell. The Portuguese made an attempt to capture Aden (Yemen) but failed.
In 1508, they appeared on the coast of India, and captured Diu and Daman. Shortly thereafter, the port of Goa was captured from Sultan Adil Shah of Bijapur, who was betrayed by a renegade Adil Shahi sailor, Timoja. All of its Muslim male inhabitants were slain and the women were enslaved. The splendid port of Goa gave the Portuguese a commanding base from where to expand their operations, and it became the seat of their fledging empire in the Indian Ocean.
In 1511, Albuquerque was appointed the governor of Goa and was given command of operations in this sector. Ambitious, determined, and ruthless, Albuquerque vowed to turn the Indian Ocean into a Portuguese lake. In 1512, a powerful fleet sent from Goa arrived at the Straits of Malacca (Malaysia). Malayan resistance was valiant, determined and desperate but the greater firepower of the invaders proved decisive and Malacca fell. The control of Malacca gave the Portuguese a stranglehold on trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific (China). In 1515, Albuquerque captured the Straits of Hormuz in Persia at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and completed his conquests by occupying Muscat and Bahrain (1516).
Within a span of fifteen years, the Portuguese had destroyed the thriving city-states of East Africa, captured strategic naval posts all along the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, occupied the entrances to both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and disrupted the trade that had flowed from India, Sumatra and China to West Asia and East Africa. Once thriving cities on the African seaboard became ghost towns. Violence, greed, enmity and ruthlessness took over trade and cooperation. Portuguese hatred of Muslims was unbounded. Wherever they landed, their first targets were the Muslims. The Inquisition was instituted in Goa against both Hindus and Muslims, and instructions were passed out by the Portuguese governor that no Muslim was to be hired, even though the territory of Goa had been a part of the Sultanate of Bijapur, and had a large number of Muslims in it.
The global Portuguese challenge did not go unanswered. In the period 1261-1517, the Mamlukes of Egypt were the custodians of Mecca and Madina. The Caliphate resided in Cairo. The Mamlukes, as custodians of the Caliphate, were duty bound to help Muslims worldwide. When East Africa and Gujrat (India) cried for help, Mansuh al Ghalib, Mamluke Sultan of Egypt sent a powerful fleet from Yemen into the Arabian Sea, despite the fact that the Mamlukes themselves had serious financial difficulties. In 1508, this fleet defeated a strong Portuguese force off the coast of Chaul (near modern Karachi), and proceeded to lay siege to Diu (in Gujrat). The Portuguese held on; however, the Mamluke fleet was caught in a monsoon storm and had to moor at Surat, which was ruled by the Sultan of Gujrat. This episode shows that in the early part of the 16th century, there was close coordination between the Muslim states of East Africa, India and the Mamluke Caliphate in Egypt.
The battle at Diu was a turning point in history. The inability of the Mamlukes to expel the Portuguese solidified their hold on Goa, Diu and Daman. They stayed there for almost 500 years until the Indian Army ejected them in 1962.
Events in West Asia overtook this initial thrust of the Mamlukes. Following the Battle of Chaldiran (1514), the Ottoman Turks advanced into Egypt and took Cairo (1517). The Caliphate moved to Istanbul and the responsibility for the protection of the Muslims passed on to the Ottomans.
In 1525, Sulaiman the Magnificent, Ottoman Sultan and Caliph, sent his Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha to Cairo to reorganize the administration of Egypt. One of the accomplishments of Ibrahim Pasha was to energize the Egyptian (now Ottoman) navy in the Indian Ocean. In 1535, Sulaiman Pasha, Governor of Egypt, set out with a powerful fleet from Suez, drove the Portuguese from Yemen, and arriving in India, laid siege to Diu (Gujrat) in cooperation with the Sultan of Gujrat. The siege was, however, unsuccessful, and Sulaiman Pasha returned to Egypt.
The defense of the eastern trade routes took on added importance to the Ottomans when they captured Iraq and the Port of Basra (1546) from the Safavids. The Portuguese commanding the Straits of Hormuz blockaded Basra. Sulaiman the Magnificent ordered the blockade to be broken. The celebrated Admiral Piri Rais, sailed from Suez in 1551, inflicted heavy damage on the Portuguese garrisons in Hormuz, Muscat and Oman and made his way to Basra. Leaving his command in Basra, he returned the following year. However, he was unable to drive the Portuguese from Hormuz and the blockade of the Persian Gulf continued. The following year, another admiral, Ali Pasha, fought his way through the Portuguese blockade and laid siege to Diu together with the Sultan of Gujrat but had to abandon it due to a storm. Soon thereafter, Emperor Akbar (1556-1605) captured Gujrat and made Surat a principal port of export for the Moghul Empire. Akbar, although acknowledging the Ottoman Caliphate as one “in the tradition of the four rightly-guided Caliphs”, had his own ideas about how to deal with the Portuguese.
The Portuguese started negotiations with fellow Christians in Ethiopia to deny the Ottoman navy access to the Red Sea. To pre-empt this possibility, the Turks occupied Masawa (Eritrea) in 1557. In 1560, a Turkish force was assembled to recapture the Straits of Malacca (Malaysia) from the Portuguese, but the effort was abandoned due to the internal political situation in Malaysia. Nonetheless, through his determined efforts, Sulaiman the Magnificent broke the back of the Portuguese blockades by the time he passed away in 1565.
The war between the Ottomans and the Portuguese for control of trade routes continued throughout the 16th century. Admiral Ali Beg sailed from Yemen in 1580, and turning south from the coast of Somalia, raided Portuguese forts in Mombasa, Kilwa (modern Tanzania) and Malindi. In 1589, he repeated this feat again, but this time he was stopped south of Kilwa by a strong Portuguese fleet sent from Goa. This naval engagement had the far-reaching effect of preserving the East African coastlines in Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania for Muslim influence. However, the Portuguese held on to Mozambique, which became a Portuguese colony for 400 years, and an important source of slaves for shipments to Brazil.
The Portuguese threat subsided towards the end of the 16th century for four important reasons. First, the Portuguese had neither the material resources nor the manpower to monopolize the Indian Ocean trade. The limited land area of Portugal could not produce the timber required to support a large navy. By 1565, more trade flowed on Muslim ships than did on Portuguese ships, and Alexandria in Egypt was once again a flourishing trading post. Second, Portuguese trade was monopolistic, with the king of Portugal holding all the cards, and monopolies are inherently inefficient and do not survive for long. Third, the Portuguese ruling structure was feudal, with the governors beholden to the king, and little latitude for local initiative. And fourth, Ottoman resistance in the Indian Ocean broke the back of the Portuguese monopoly. The littoral empires of the Great Moghuls in India and the Safavids in Persia became so powerful that the Portuguese became no more than a nuisance. A more potent European challenge was to emerge in the following centuries, first from Holland, and then from England.
The Ottoman naval activities were global and were not confined just to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Arrayed against the Ottomans was the combined might of Europe involving Spain, Portugal, Venice, Austria, Russia and the Vatican. In 1552, when the Russian Czar Ivan IV captured Astrakan and Kazan, Sulaiman the Magnificent ordered a fleet into the Black Sea to recapture Astrakan. Sultan Sulaiman had a grand vision to dig a canal linking the Rivers Don and Volga so that Ottoman troops could bypass the opposing Safavids in Persia, and move through the Turkoman territories around the Caspian Sea to the friendly territories of the Moghul Empire in India. This dream persisted until the First World War (1914-1918) when the Ottomans made a desperate plan to strike at the British in India through the region of the Caspian Sea and link up with the large pro-Turkish, pro-Caliphate Muslim populations of Central Asia, Afghanistan and what is today Pakistan. Sulaiman’s efforts were unsuccessful in 1555, and the Ottoman efforts were frustrated in 1914 by Russian advances into eastern Turkey and northern Persia.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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