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Back to Asia? South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula

Indian Ocean networks of Daʿwa, Tijāra, and Khizāna: The Bohras as Manuscript Agents in Yemen

Réseaux de l’océan Indien de Daʿwa, Tijâra et Khizâna : les Bohras comme agents de manuscrits au Yémen
Olly Akkerman

Résumés

Cet article se concentre sur la question de la circulation des manuscrits et du khizânât al-kutub (trésor des livres) entre la péninsule Arabique et le sous-continent indien au début de la période moderne. Plus précisément, il explore la façon dont une communauté mercantile chi‘ie ismâ‘îlî, connue sous le nom de Ṭayyibî Bohras, a fonctionné entre le Gujarat et le Yémen en tant que entrepreneurs financiers, étudiants, pèlerins, administrateurs, bienfaiteurs et érudits. En m’appuyant sur le contenu et la matérialité des sources du khizâna de Bohra, je soutiens que les bohras indiens étaient des acteurs clés parmi les Ismâ‘îlîs au Yémen, politiquement, économiquement et socialement, plutôt que des étudiants et des disciples passifs. Grâce à leurs réseaux communautaires de l’océan Indien de da‘wa (communauté) et de tijâra (commerce), ils ont joué un rôle essentiel en facilitant le réseau de mobilité et d’apprentissage des étudiants indiens au Yémen, en finançant la da’wa et en assurant sa survie en Inde en copiant et demandant des manuscrits à l’étranger, un processus qui s’est poursuivi jusqu’au XIXe siècle.

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Introduction: Situating the Bohras in the Indian Ocean

  • 1 Christopher Bahl, ‘Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court: Saʿd Allāh Khān’s an (...)

1This article focuses on the question of the circulation of manuscripts and khizānāt al-kutub (book treasuries) between the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Subcontinent in the early modern period. Rather than approaching the phenomenon of oceanic manuscript networks through the lens of authority, law, and royal courts, such as Ismail Alatas, Christopher Bahl, and Mahmood Kooria have done, we focus on the perspective of diasporic mercantile communities and their mobile manuscript repositories.1

  • 2 See for more information, Olly Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books. Arabic Manuscripts among (...)
  • 3 See for the history of the Bohras in East Africa, Hong Kong and Bangkok: Hussain Aminji, ‘The Bohra (...)

2More specifically, we explore how a mercantile Shiʿi Ismaʿili community, known as the Ṭayyibī Bohras, operated between Gujarat and Yemen as merchant tycoons, students, pilgrims, administrators, benefactors, and scholars. Drawing on the content and the materiality of sources from the Bohra khizāna, I argue that the Indian Bohras were key actors among the Ismaʿilis in Yemen, politically, economically, and socially, rather than passive students and disciples. Via their communal Indian Ocean networks of daʿwa (community) and tijāra (trade), they played a vital role in facilitating the network of mobility and learning of Indian students to Yemen, as well as financing the daʿwa, and securing its survival in India by sending, copying, and requesting manuscripts overseas, a process which continued well into the nineteenth century.2 For centuries, the Bohras have operated between India and Yemen as merchants, students, pilgrims, clerics, and scholars. They can be considered globalizing agents of the Indian Ocean, initially operating from the coast of Gujarat, and settling across the Indian Ocean in port cities such as Bombay, Mombasa, Aden, Nosibe, and as far as Bangkok and Hong Kong under the British Raj.3 What is lesser known, however, is that as Indian Gujaratis, the Bohras played an active role in the political, religious, and economic affairs of Yemen as members of their transoceanic daʿwa (community), the Ṭayyibī Ismaʿili community, moving far beyond the coast embedding themselves in the mountainous hinterland. In fact, as we will see, their involvement in the affairs of the daʿwa were of such a substantial nature, that, following political unrest and persecution in Yemen, its headquarters were moved to India in the tenth/sixteenth century.

  • 4 See for Indian Ocean cosmopolis: Ronit Ricci, Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Ara (...)
  • 5 Olly Akkerman, ‘The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: A Study in Social Codi (...)

3In this article I situate Shiʿism, in this case the Bohras and the upcoming field of “Bohra Studies”, at the center of the Western Indian Ocean, moving beyond the Indian Ocean cosmopolis of Sunni Shāfiʿism and its textual economy, focusing on the Ismaʿili Shiʿi oceanic networks of daʿwa (community), tijāra (trade), and khizāna (books) instead.4 I highlight the Bohras’ active involvement as lobbyists and political actors in the Indian Ocean rim, as well as manuscript agents and collectors in Yemen, instead of placing them at the margins as passive visitors and devotees from a distant land. I will do so by focusing on the content and the materiality and codicology of several Bohra textual sources, as well as relying on ethnographic observations, an interdisciplinary approach which I call Social Codicology.5

  • 6 Olly Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 10.
  • 7 Ibid, 156.
  • 8 Akkerman, ‘The Bohras as Neo-Fatimids: Documentary Remains of a Fāṭimid Past in Gujarat,’ Journal o (...)

4Despite the Bohras’ prominent commercial role in the mercantile macrocosm of the Indian Ocean, as Shiʿi Ismaʿilis, the community survived persecution through practices of secrecy and self-isolation over centuries.6 Through this habitus of taqiyya (precautionary dissimulation) the Bohras were able to preserve a unique manuscript culture dating back to the medieval period. Today, they are the custodians of one of the last ‘living’ manuscript cultures of the Muslim world. Across a millennium these Arabic manuscripts have played a central role over several continents in the communities’ locally lived Shiʿi, Isma’ili, and distinctly Indian Ocean experience of Islam as they were read, orated from, venerated, and manually copied in khizānāt al-kutub or book treasuries.7 It is through the material survival of these handwritten books, and the sacred spaces that domesticate them in Gujarat, that today the Bohras see themselves as heirs of the Fāṭimids, the Isma’ili empire which ruled North African and the Mediterranean from the late third/tenth to the sixth/twelfth century.8

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Map of the Western Indian Ocean, Yemen, and Gujarat, including the mobility of manuscripts.

Source: A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books.

  • 9 Thus far, scholarship on Yemen in this context has mostly revolved around Hadrami diasporic network (...)
  • 10 Bang, ‘Arabic-language manuscript and print as a source for Indian Ocean Islamic history: The case (...)
  • 11 See for an interesting parallel: Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (eds.), Islamic Connections. Mus (...)

5The story of the Bohras and the survival of their sacred manuscript tradition cannot, I argue, be seen without understanding the community’s presence in the mercantile history of the Indian Ocean. It is through the transoceanic trade routes of the Red Sea, Yemen, and the Indian Ocean that the Bohras trace their chain of manuscript transmission from Fāṭimid Cairo to modern-day India. Understanding this transmission history is not only relevant for the Bohras’ ‘Neo-Fatimid’ identity in the present, but it also sheds new light on the historical role of Yemen in the Indian Ocean as an export center of Ismaʿili ideas, practices, authority, and texts.9 Similar to Anne Bang’s work on the production and circulation of Arabic manuscripts in the Swahili world, the transmission history and manuscript mobility of the Bohras pivots a different example of the potential of Islamic Studies in the Indian Ocean region.10 The case study of the Bohras shows that the transfer of people, objects, and ideas, as well as larger processes of Islamization in the Indian Ocean did not only take place from west to east, but also east to west.11

  • 12 See Elizabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean Wor (...)

6Following the rhythm of the monsoon winds, manuscripts from the Bohra khizānat al-kutub traveled from Yemen to India, and, vice versa in dhows. Bohra book treasuries, I argue, are khizānāt of the sea par excellence: their manuscripts were constantly on the move between continents, reshaping communities and their collections. Thus far, the analysis of the mobility of “objects” within Indian Ocean studies has mainly focused on goods and documents and their commercial value in the western Indian Ocean economy as commodities.12 The case of the Bohras highlights a larger historical phenomenon in the Indian Ocean that remains relatively undocumented: the movement of sacred book repositories among the trade networks of diasporic communities.

  • 13 See Zahir Bhalloo’s contribution in this special issue. Oman’s Transregional Connections to Sindh a (...)
  • 14 Instead of using the lens of empire and its subjects, Ho sees the Hadrami diasporic community as lo (...)

7The Bohras may not be alone in constructing their community through religious texts which moved both geographically and hermeneutically in the Indian Ocean. Other groups, such as the diasporic Hadrami Yemenis, the Lawatiya in Oman, the Banias, Memons, and Parsis are mercantile groups that share similar practices.13 As Engseng Ho has noted, the textual repositories of these communities offer new light on Indian Ocean history from a localized, communal, non-Eurocentric, and non-imperial perspective.14 What I argue is unique about the case of the Bohras, however, is that in their movement from one continent to another, the social role their texts played was transformed within the community. Manuscripts changed from carriers of knowledge from the past, to sacred, inaccessible, and to a certain extent, untouchable objects in the present.

The Bohras: Past and Present

  • 15 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 318-312.
  • 16 Ibid, 73,

8Observing the Bohras in India as an outsider during their large and carefully choreographed processions, headed by the community’s dignitaries dressed in Mughal-style ceremonial gowns accompanied by tablas (ceremonial drums) and firecrackers, one may not be aware of the Bohras’ link to Yemen and their Indian Ocean connections. Yet their sacred manuscripts, which can only be accessed by the highest clerics of the community after extensive rituals of initiation, are entirely transmitted in Arabic, and contain many Yemeni codicological and paleographical features.15 Moreover, Bohra clerics carry Arabic titles and epithets from Ṭayyibī Yemen and Fāṭimid Cairo and the community’s ritual language, Lisān al-daʿwa, which literally means “the language of the daʿwa”, is a highly Arabized form of Gujarati which only insiders of the community are able to understand. The term daʿwa is used as a double entente: it refers both to the community in the here and now, as well as the Isma’ili daʿwa missions in the name of the Fāṭimids.16

  • 17 Ibid, 10.
  • 18 Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘The Da’udi Bohra Ṭayyibīs: Ideology, Literature, Learning and Social Practice’. (...)
  • 19 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 69.
  • 20 See for a comparative perspective on the Khoja Agha Khanis: Michel Boivin, Les âghâ khâns et les(...)

9Historic mercantile links between the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Subcontinent played a central role in the spread of Isma’ilism, with missionary activities to al-Hind and al-Sindh carried out from Yemen dating back to as early as the third/ninth century.17 Even though much remains unclear about the details of these daʿwa missions, in Gujarat Hindus of various local castes, including the Vaishya traders’ caste and possibly members of Rajput families, converted to a form of Isma’ilism that reached them via the sea, and were eventually referred to as “Bohras”.18 It is often held that the conversion of the Bohras ended with the concealment of their Imam, which is stipulated in their interpretation of Fāṭimid-Ismaʿili law.19 What is more plausible, however, is that conversion took place in several waves up till the present, including, but certainly not restricted to, the late nineteenth and twentieth century.20

10What is clear, is that the Ṭayyibī Ismaʿilis, who will be discussed at length in the following pages, continued their missionary activities after the fall of the Fāṭimid empire to Gujarat, and remained in close contact with the Indian Bohra sister-community, which, over the centuries, had grown substantially in numbers. Following political unrest and persecution in Yemen, the headquarters of the Ṭayyibī community and its manuscripts in Yemen were transferred overseas to Gujarat in the tenth/sixteenth century.

  • 21 Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘Bohras’, E.I. THREE.
  • 22 Even though the original usage of the term Dāʿī in the Bohra Ṭayyibī was similar and is historica (...)

11At present, the Bohras are a small but vibrant community consisting of roughly 1,2 million believers, predominantly residing in Gujarat. “Bohras” is used in this article as a collective, which is not unproblematic as the contemporary community is, in fact, divided into three sub-groups, notably the Dawoodi Bohras of Surat (ca. 1 million believers), the Alawi Bohras of Baroda (Vadodara, ca. 10.000 believers), and the Sulaymani Bohras of Hyderabad, India and Yemen (ca. 8000 believers).21 Following various inter-communal schisms in the eleventh/seventeenth century in India, each of these communities or daʿwas follow a separate genealogy of spiritual leaders or Dāʿīs.22

  • 23 See, for instance, in the case of the Alawis the historical account Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn fī (...)
  • 24 See Akkerman,‘Bohra Ritual Life: Everyday Practices and the Sacred Materiality of Objects,’ in: Oxf (...)

12Except for these different spiritual lineages and religious headquarters, the three Bohra communities, who often refer to themselves as Fāṭimid Isma’ili Ṭayyibīs, share a certain ‘Bohra way of life’.23 The Dawoodis, Alawis, and Sulaymanis are all Gujarati mercantile communities with the same Indian Ocean history, they read and memorize the same sacred books, practice the same devotional rituals, follow similar interpretations of theology and Fāṭimid law, and frequent the same shrines in Yemen, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. They wear the same communal attire, which includes golden topis (skullcaps for men) and ridas (colorful laced capes for women), all use variants of Lisān al-daʿwa, and gather in similar spaces of worship (mosques), and communal centers (jamaat khanas) where they eat from the same Gujarati shared thali platters.24

Fig. 2

Fig. 2

Everyday life in the Bohra mohallah, Ahmedabad, 2014.

Photo: Olly Akkerman

  • 25 For more on the Ṣulayḥids see Hussain Hamdani, Al-Ṣulayḥiyyūn wa-l-ḥaraka al-Fāṭimiyya fī a(...)
  • 26 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 124.
  • 27 Ibid, 144.

13In addition to these social practices, which form this shared Bohra way of life within their Alawi, Dawoodi, and Sulaymani mohallas (quarters), all Bohra communities practice a form of taqiyya in the absence of their hidden Imam. The Bohras believe that their last Imam went into a state of satr (seclusion) in the sixth/twelfth century in Yemen. The Imam in question was al-Ṭayyib b. al-Amīr (d. unknown), a member of the Fāṭimid dynasty who, according to the tradition of the community, was the next in line to the throne following the death of his father Imam al-Amīr in 524/1130. Instead, his uncle seized the throne and Imam Ṭayyib, who was still an infant at the time, was taken by his followers to Yemen, a stronghold of Fāṭimid Ismaʿilism, where the so-called “Ṭayyibīs” flourished under the rule of the Ṣulayḥid dynasty (r. 439–532/1047–1138).25 According to the historiography of the Bohras, a local version of the Fāṭimid empire continued in Yemen until the seclusion of Imam Ṭayyib in the sixth/twelfth century.26 In the absence of the hidden Imam, the Ṭayyibī Ismaʿilis survived the fall of the Ṣulayḥids, and became governed by generations of Dāʿīs, former agents of the Fāṭimid daʿwa missions. Whereas in the Yemeni context, the office of the Dāʿī was that of a learned scholar and political figure, in the social and devotional context of South Asia the Dāʿī became the head of a sacerdotal “royal” family.27

  • 28 Akkerman, “Bohra Ritual Life: Everyday Practices and the Sacred Materiality of Objects” in The Oxfo (...)
  • 29 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 53-54.

14The hegemonic position of the Dāʿī among the Bohras today, is what makes them different from any other contemporary Muslim community. The Bohra Dāʿī is seen as the vice-regent of Imam Ṭayyib and his descendants, and he rules the community as the absolute spiritual, temporal, political, and clerical head. In this capacity, he is considered ka’ l-maʿṣūm (semi-infallible) and makes decisions about the private lives of believers, from cradle to grave.28 Finally, the position of the Dāʿī is hereditary, which means that long lineages of “royal” families, who trace back their ancestry to Yemen, have been ruling their daʿwas (communities) for centuries.29

Yemen from the Perspective of the Bohra Khizāna

  • 30 See for a further discussion: ibid, 128.

15Bohra Gujarat and Ṭayyibī Yemen have historically been portrayed as two separate geographic, socio-political, economic, and linguistic worlds that were only connected through trade and conversion until the tenth/sixteenth century when their religious headquarters merged.30 The Bohras’ participation in the political, diplomatic, economic, and intellectual history of medieval Yemen has hitherto received little attention.

16Approaching the question from the Bohra khizānat al-kutub, however, sheds a different light on their Indian Ocean, Yemeni-Gujarati Ismaʿili daʿwa as one shared trans-oceanic community that was highly connected. The books of the khizāna offer us a glimpse into this world, a world where the Bohras’ commercial endeavors often went alongside their spiritual pursuit of seeking knowledge, as well as ambitions of making a career in the ranks of the Yemeni daʿwa headquarters. The Bohras, as we will see, were in fact involved in the highest layers of Ṭayyibī-Yemeni society and its clerical circles and thus had far more agency than was previously assumed.

  • 31 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, Chapter 2.
  • 32 See for an overview Qutbuddin, ‘The Da’udi Bohra Ṭayyibīs: Ideology, Literature, Learning and Soci (...)

17The clerical headquarters of the respective Bohra communities in India, as well as individual scholarly Bohra and Ṭayyibī-Yemeni families, historically each had their own khizāna.31 This shared Bohra khizāna tradition, which continues today in South Asia among the Dawoodis, Alawis, and Sulaymanis, contains a vast corpus of manuscripts of Fāṭimid and Ṭayyibī authors in Arabic, including treatises, chrestomathies and anthologies that cover this period, as well as a smaller tradition of literature and historiographic works by Bohra scholars and clerics of later periods, and selected works by non-Isma’ili authors.32

18Rather than essentializing “the Bohra khizāna” as a fixed canon or institution, I use this term, as well as the notion of the “Bohra khizāna tradition” as a diverse, living phenomenon through which an expanding corpus of texts was preserved, copied, and sometimes enshrined. As we will see, this tradition has been in flux between communities and families, following internal as well as external factors, such as armed conflict, persecution, and bifurcations in their mobility over the Indian Ocean.

  • 33 Daʿwat al-ʿAlawiyya, Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn fī dhikr al-duʿāt al-muṭlaqīn al-yamāniyīn. (...)

19In this contribution we will focus on three khizāna sources, one modern, printed book and two sources which have survived in manuscript form. The first is Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn fī Dhikr al-Duʿāt al-Muṭlaqīn al-Yamāniyīn (History of Yamani Duaat-e-Mutlaqeen (aq)), a printed text which was gifted to me during my archival and ethnographic fieldwork among the Alawi Bohras in Baroda in 2014. It was published by the clerical headquarters of the Alawi community in Gujarati, Arabic and English in 1431/2011 (see fig. 3).33 The Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn is a biographical-historiographical work on Yemen, based on the manuscripts of the Alawi khizāna in Baroda. As such, it does not contain any esoteric teachings and is written for believers, who remain largely uninitiated to the ʿilm al-bāṭin (esoteric knowledge) enshrined in the khizāna.

20The Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn traces the genealogy of the Ṭayyibī Dāʿīs and other important individuals of the daʿwa in Yemen back to the Prophet Muhammad and his family. It should be mentioned that this is an Alawi Bohra source, that was written after the schisms that occurred between the Bohra communities in the eleventh/seventeenth century. This is not to say, however, that the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn is not of relevance to or representative of the other communities as it refers to a shared past before these splits, based on khizāna collections that are relatively similar in nature. The Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn is therefore treated in this article as a “Bohra” source.

21Fig. 3

Arabic title page of Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, Baroda, 2024.

Photo: Olly Akkerman

  • 34 I will discuss the provenance and codicology of these manuscripts in a forthcoming article titled ‘ (...)
  • 35 François De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts: The Hamdani Collection (London: I. B. (...)

22The manuscript sources analyzed for this article are Arabic handwritten texts which are currently held in European academic libraries (Berlin and Tübingen).34 The provenance, as well as the original textual habitat of these two manuscripts, is that of the scholarly milieu of the Yemeni-Gujarati Hamdānī family, and most likely also of their family khizāna. This book treasury, the khizāna al-Hamdāniyya, is an example of an Indian Ocean khizāna par excellence, as its collection traveled from Yemen to the Indian Subcontinent, and its individual manuscripts moved back and forth before it became scattered in collections all over the world in the last centuries.35 We will discuss the Hamdani family khizāna towards the end of this article.

  • 36 These sources may not be exhaustive, nor give the complete picture. I have selected them with the a (...)
  • 37 Three manuscript copies are known of the Qarāṭīs outside the Bohra daʿwa khizānāt: (1) Tübingen (...)
  • 38 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 133-145. See also Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Ye (...)

23The first manuscript title is Qarāṭīs al-Yaman (The Yemeni Letters), a collection of Arabic letters exchanged between daʿwa officials in Gujarat and Yemen between the early ninth/fifteenth and the late eleventh/seventeenth centuries (see fig. 4).36 Several manuscript copies of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman have survived in various forms.37 The letters contain lacunae and heavy editorial interventions. They are not preserved in chronological order, nor are they at times dated. They remain, however, an invaluable source. The letters, as I describe elsewhere in more detail, cover the period before the daʿwas oceanic transfer to Gujarat, and the communal schisms that followed. They contain information on a wide range of topics, from ordering textiles to discussing political intrigues, to the imprisonment and torture of the Ṭayyibī Dāʿīs and manuscript looting by the Yemeni Zaydis, and extortion by Ottoman officials. 38

Fig. 4

Fig. 4

Flyleaf of Qarāṭīs al-Yaman with the title of the work and Hamdānī owner stamp. Folio 1v, Ms Ma VI 330-Tübingen University Library.

Source: A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 129. 

  • 39 Tahera Qutbuddin, Kitāb Shihāb by Qāḍī al-Quḍā (critical edition). New York: NYU, 2016.
  • 40 See for an overview of his works: Tahera Qutbuddin, A Treasury of Virtues: Sayings, Sermons and Tea (...)
  • 41 Qutbuddin, xix. See for an exhaustive list of manuscript copies De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujar (...)

24The second manuscript title is a ninetieth-century copy of Shihāb al-Nabawī (The Blazing Star), a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad written by the Shāfīʿī qāḍī Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Salāma al-Quḍā’ī (d.454/1062, see fig.5).39 Al-Quḍā’ī served as a senior government official under several Fāṭimid caliphs and was the author of a collection of major works, including a history of the prophets and Fāṭimid caliphs.40 Shihāb al-Nabawī is an example of a text by an author who was not Ismaʿili, but who was associated with the Fāṭimids as prolific writer of his time and has therefore been incorporated into the Bohra khizāna tradition. The treatise is the author’s most famous work and is a relatively common title in the Bohra khizāna tradition as it can be found in many collections.41 Rather than focusing on the content of this treatise, we will analyze the codicology, provenance, and transmission history of this copy of Shihāb al-Nabawī from Gujarat to Yemen, and from Yemen to the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin.

Fig. 5

Fig. 5

First two folios of Shihāb al-Nabawī by al-Quḍā’ī. Folio 1v and 2r, Ms. or. oct. 3763 -Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin PK.

25Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, and Shihāb al-Nabawī are sources of a very different nature, both in terms of genre, audience, social usage, and the period of their composition and/or of copying. What they have in common, however, is that they give a voice to the Bohras in Yemen, as merchants, daʿwa officials, clerics, scholars, students. They depict the Bohras not as strangers, but as insiders, benefactors, confidants, scholars, copyists, and finally even as Dāʿīs of the trans-oceanic daʿwa.

  • 42 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 1.
  • 43 Ibid. Interestingly, the authors have a very large interpretation of Sindh as the region between In (...)
  • 44 See for an ethnographic account of the ziyra: Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 45-51.

26How is Yemen portrayed from the perspective of the Bohra khizāna tradition, based on these sources? Today, the Bohras may identify themselves as heirs of the Fāṭimid Imamate centered in Egypt, yet it is Yemen, as becomes clear from the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, that is seen as the most sacred and pure land. According to my Bohra interlocutors, however, the two do not exclude another, as Ṭayyibī Yemen is seen as a continuation of the Fāṭimid Imamate on the Arabian Peninsula. According to the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, the soil of Yemen was sprinkled with baraka (blessings) directly from God, blessing the daʿwa missions as well as trade endeavors overseas with “good fortune”.42Jazeerah (peninsula) of Yaman”, the authors write, “along with Hind (India) and Sindh (region between Saudi Arabia and India) is considered more auspicious than any other region in the world”43. It is therefore not surprising that ziyra (pilgrimage) to the graves of the Ṭayyibī Dāʿīs in Yemen (see fig. 6) is considered as important as visiting the shrines of the Prophet Muhammad and his family, the ahl al-bayt, in Medina, Karbala, Najaf, and Damascus.44

Fig. 6

Fig. 6

Map of Yemen in Gujarati with list of Bohra pilgrimage sites, Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, h,i. Baroda, 2024.

Photo: Olly Akkerman

27In the opening of the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, the authors explain the importance of Yemen as follows:

‘Just like both the sides of the throne of Allah (ʿArsh of Allah) are called Yameen (right),

the two peninsula of regions joined with Yaman -Hind and Sindh-, are called Yameen

(right) ….Hence as Faatemi Ismaa’ili Taiyebi mumin, color and fragrance of Yaman is

mixed with the spheres and Deen of Allah. We cannot imagine the Daʿwat without the

  • 45 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 1.

role of Yemen…’ 45

  • 46 The expression finds resonance especially among Shiʿi communities in the context of the ahl al-bayt(...)

28This passage shows how the Bohras see Yemen as an integral part of their history. The title of the work, Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, which literally means ‘people of the right hand’, is a play on the Arabic words Yaman (Yemen) which refers to Yemen geographically and spiritually as the community’s sacred land, and yamīn (right). Through the title of their publication, the Alawis refer to the Quran, where yamīn is mentioned six times.46 In the Bohra context the Quranic references are linked to their genealogy of semi-infallible Dāʿīs who, as the righteous Aṣḥāb, are the ideal learned scholars, authors of many works preserved in their khizāna, as well as spiritual leaders of their daʿwa.

  • 47 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 128.
  • 48 Ibid, 132, 133.

29If we change our perspective from the Indian Subcontinent to Yemen, we will see that the Indian Bohras had a very good reputation in Yemen among the Ṭayyibīs.47 Given the fact that the great majority of contemporary Ṭayyibī Yemeni sources such as the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman have survived, were re-copied, commented upon, and collated in Bohra khizānāt, this may not be surprising. In the modern historiography of the Aṣḥāb, the Indian Bohras are portrayed very favorably on many occasions during their trials and tribulations in Yemen.48 The Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn reports that Idrīs ʿImād al-Dīn (d. 872/1468), the 19th Dāʿī in Yemen and author of the historical multi-volume work ʿUyūn al-Akhbār (The Choicest of Reports), once said that:

‘The Indian students are superior to the mu’mineen from Yaman because of their

steadfastness and strong belief of Daʿwat, which brought them all the way from India

  • 49 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 101. See for a translation and critical edition of volume 7 of ʿUyūn al-Akhbā (...)

facing hardships and difficulties of journey’.49

30On another occasion mentioned in the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, Idrīs ʿImād al-Dīn reprimands his Yemeni brothers after they get into a conflict which the Indian Bohras:

  • 50 Ibid, 103.

‘Oh mumineen of Yemen, look at the submission and loyalty of the mumineen of India. Very soon that land will nurture the Noor of Daʿwat. The blessings of the Daʿwat will go away from here [Yemen, sic.]. Brothers of India who have sacrificed their lives and wealth for the Daʿwat will raise the flags of Faatemi Daʿwat on their land.’50

  • 51 See for the practice of raising Fāṭimid banners in foreign lands: Verena Klemm, Memoirs of a Missio (...)

31Leaving the interesting notion of “raising the Faatemi flag” in India aside for a moment, what these passages convey apart from praise, is a narrative of material, financial, as well as personal sacrifice, hardship, and inter-communal rivalry and ethnic tension.51 The authors of the Aṣḥāb, the Alawi Bohra clerics, seem to portray the Bohras, and perhaps also themselves, as the subalterns of the trans-oceanic Ismaʿili daʿwa. The letters of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, as we will see below, give far more agency to the Bohras. Let us first, however, investigate the position of the Bohras in Yemen, as well as the relationship between Ṭayyibī Yemen and Bohra Gujarat in the period prior to the letters.

Indian Ocean Networks of Daʿwa, Tijāra, and Jihād

  • 52 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 15.
  • 53 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 101, 102.

32According to the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, in Yemen, the Bohras were known as the muhjirūn (immigrants or converts). As their community in India had grown over the centuries and cities such as Khambhat, Patan and Sidhpur became centers of Ṭayyibī Isma’ilism, the Indian Bohras gained a reputation of being loyal followers, devout pupils, pilgrims, and reliable taxpayers to the Ṭayyibī headquarters in Yemen.52 The Qarāṭīs and Aṣḥāb report that, at a young age, cohorts of Bohra students were sent to Yemen to study ʿulūm al-daʿwa (sciences of the daʿwa).53 The oversea journeys and lodgings of these muhjirūn students were often sponsored by affluent Bohra traders, such as the famous merchant tycoon and author Ḥasan al-Bharūchī, to whom we will shall return shortly. Their studies, as well as their initiation into the knowledge of their community’s khizāna tradition, were thus directly facilitated by Ismaʿili Indian Ocean networks of the daʿwa (community) and tijāra (trade).

  • 54 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 132.
  • 55 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 102. The phrase ‘fī khidma daʿwat al-Fāṭimiyya’ can be found throughout the Qar (...)

33It was not unusual that the students were merchants themselves, or were in some way or another involved professionally in the trade networks of the daʿwa. Some commuted between the two continents with their goods, spending long periods in Yemen waiting for the Monsoon winds to move eastwards, whereas others ended up settling overseas permanently.54 The most promising pupils would remain in Yemen for several years before returning to their hometowns in Gujarat to work in the khidma (service) of the daʿwa.55 Some of them would become famous scholars, contributing to the knowledge transmission and intellectual history of the daʿwa, such as Ḥasan al-Bharūchī (see next section). The highest obtainable overseas post in India was that of the Mawālī al-Hind, who was responsible for governing the community on the subcontinent, collecting taxes, supplying the Yemeni daʿwa with goods, and reporting back to the headquarters in Yemen.

  • 56 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 134.

34One could argue that, to some extent, the Ṭayyibī Isma’ili trans-oceanic daʿwa functioned like a small state with flags, careers, and ministries, sponsored by mercantile trade and tax revenues. The daʿwa and its networks were certainly exclusive, one had to be initiated to be part of it, based on taking oaths of allegiance and secrecy. The Aṣḥāb, for instance, reports that daʿwa officials traveled from India to Yemen in disguise.56 The letters of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman provide a unique insight into the otherwise closed world of the trans-oceanic Ismaʿili daʿwa and its networks of learning and commerce in the ninth/fifteenth and the eleventh/seventeenth centuries. Through the letters, as well as the identities of their senders and recipients, we learn that, over time, the position of the Gujarati Bohras in Yemen changed from visitors and disciples to administrators and even private advisors of the Dāʿī in Yemen.

  • 57 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 40r, 46v.
  • 58 See Brinkley Messick, Sharia Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Pres (...)

35The status quo in the power dynamics of Indian Ocean daʿwathe Ṭayyibīs Yemenis as the headquarters and the Indian Bohras as the peripherystarted to change in the tenth/sixteenth century. While the daʿwa on the Indian Subcontinent was flourishing through its networks of tijāra, in Yemen, the Ṭayyibīs experienced a turbulent period facing several internal fitnas (splits and conflicts) as well as external threats.57 Historically, the Ṭayyibīs had been at constant war with the Zaydi Imamate in Yemen, which ruled large parts of Yemen from 284/897 until 1962.58

  • 59 Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 42, 43.
  • 60 Ibid.

36Traboulsi argues that, to avoid persecution from the Zaydis in the highlands in the north, the Ṭayyibīs had relied on the protection of centralized states in the lowlands of Yemen, such as the Ayyubids, Rasulids and the Tahirids, until the Ottoman conquest of Yemen in 913/1507.59 Despite its embeddedness in the political and military landscape of Yemen since the seventh/thirteenth century, the Ṭayyibī daʿwa, he explains, never succeeded in becoming a military power in Yemen.60 Nevertheless, the Ṭayyibīs continued their jihād against the Zaydis, both with the pen, as can be traced in a rich tradition of polemic works from this period, as well as with the sword from their mountain fortresses and citadels in Thūla, Shibām, and Masār in Western Yemen. They were, however, fighting a losing battle after the Zaydis took over one of their main strongholds in Wadi Dhahr in 931/1525, after which the Ṭayyibī community was forced to join the other Ṭayyibīs in the Ḥarāz region.

  • 61 Ibid, 46.
  • 62 Ibid, 48.

37The Ṭayyibīs relied heavily for its survival on the networks of the daʿwa and their Indian brothers for support in this turbulent political crisis.61 It was in fact an Indian muhājir, the earlier mentioned Ḥasan al-Bharūchī, who financed the Ṭayyibī Yemeni daʿwa in its ongoing jihād against the Zaydis. He is known to have negotiated with the Zaydis on behalf of the Ṭayyibī Yemeni daʿwa and was responsible for bailing out several daʿwa officials out of prison.62 It is quite likely that, as a muhājir, al-Bharūchī was able to lobby for his cause as someone who was an insider in Yemen, yet at the same, an outsider, not allied to any of its local tribes. Ḥasan al-Bharūchī, however, as we will see in the following section, was not just any muhājir from India.

Two Bohra Muhājirs in Yemen: Ḥasan al-Bharūchī and Yūsuf b. Sulaymān

38The Indian Ocean networks of daʿwa and tijāra can best be illustrated by the trajectories of two Bohra muhājirs in Yemen, Ḥasan b. Nūḥ b. Yūsuf b. Muḥammad b. Ādam al-Bharūchī (d. 939/1533) and Yūsuf b. Sulaymān (d. 974/1567). Their correspondence has been preserved in the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, through which we are able to reconstruct a great deal about their life and career and the ways in which they operated.

  • 63 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108-16.
  • 64 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108. Poonawala, ‘al-Bharūchī, Ḥasan b. Nuḥ’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Deni (...)
  • 65 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108

39Despite the fact that Ḥasan al-Bharūchī was not a Dāʿī, a special section is dedicated to him in the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, where he is referred to as Saiyedi Hasan bin Nooh Bharuchi, and is given the honorary title Badruddīn (the full moon of religion).63 Also known as ‘al-Hindī’ (the Indian), Ḥasan b. Nūḥ b. Yūsuf b. Muḥammad b. Ādam al-Bharūchī came from a prominent Indian Ocean merchant family from Khambhat, Gujarat and established successful business dealings in greater Syria, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula.64 His name derives from the Indian city Bharuch, which was an important center of trade between the Western and Eastern Indian Ocean, from where he reportedly set off for Yemen in the year 873/1469.65

  • 66 Ismail K. Poonawala, ‘al-Bharūchī, Ḥasan b. Nuḥ’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, Joh (...)

40Al-Bharūchī did not follow the trajectory of coming to Yemen as a muhājir at a young age, nor did he receive the standard education in the Ṭayyibī madrasas in Yemen. Having amassed a considerable amount of wealth, al-Bharūchī’s position in the daʿwa was a privileged one, and he received his training directly from two Yemeni Dācīs in Masār and Shibām, Ḥasan b. Idrīs (d. 918/1512) and Ḥusayn b. Idrīs (d. 933/1527). After his initiation into the sciences of the daʿwa and completing his studies, al-Bharūchī dedicated himself to the khidma (service) of the daʿwa.66

  • 67 Ibid, 108.
  • 68 This work should not to be confused with the Zaydi fiqh compendium of the same title by Imam al-Mah (...)

41According to Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, the mu’minīn [believes, i.e the Bohras] of India owe immense favor and kindness to him, as the daʿwa in India prospered because of his effort… ‘He illuminated the land of Yemen and India with the cool moonlight and removed the darkness of ignorance’.67 Ḥasan al-Bharūchī had a multi-faceted career in the daʿwa in Yemen as benefactor, diplomat, overseer of the daʿwa’s financial affairs, appointer of the Mawālī overseas in India, as well as scholar. His scholarly legacy continues in the Bohra khizāna tradition through his multi-volume chrestomathy of Isma’ili literature, titled Kitāb al-Azhār (The Book of Flowers).68

  • 69 Ḥasan al-Bharūchī served the reign of four Dāʿīs in total, according to the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 10 (...)
  • 70 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108–9.

42As the private confidant and political advisor of several Dāʿīs, Ḥasan al-Bharūchī exercised a considerable amount of power in the highest circles of Ṭayyibī Yemen.69 He had become an indispensable figure to the daʿwa and as such, I argue, played an important role in preparing the Yemeni community for their inevitable trans-oceanic move to safer grounds in India. At the pinnacle of his career, Ḥasan al-Bharūchī was tasked to mentor and educate Yusūf b. Sulaymān, a Bohra muhājir from Sidhpur who would make history in the trans-oceanic daʿwa as the first Indian Dāʿī in Yemen. Ḥasan al-Bharūchī passed away in the Ṭayyibī fortress of Masar in 939/1533, where he was buried.70

43Despite Ḥasan al-Bharūchī’s diplomatic efforts, the position of the Ṭayyibīs in Yemen had weakened significantly and Yūsuf b. Sulaymān’s appointment in 946/1539 was therefore a strategic decision. Yūsuf b. Sulaymān ruled the two domains of the daʿwa, al-Yaman and al-Hind, from the village of Ṭayba, Wadi Dhahr, for a period of 28 years from 946 to 974 (1539–67). Yūsuf b. Sulaymān’s appointment is described in detail in the final chapter of the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn.

  • 71 Ibid, 130-31.

44It reports that the appointment of an Indian sovereign was required as the Yemeni believers had become disobedient to their Yemeni Dāʿī while the fortresses of the ‘Faatemi daʿwat’ were attacked and looted, and mausoleums and mosques were destroyed by ‘the enemies’. Under these circumstances the twenty third Dāʿī Muḥammad ʿIzz al-Dīn (d. 946/1539) fled to Zabīd, where he declared his naṣṣ (designation) upon Yūsuf b. Sulaymān on the other shore of the sea.71

  • 72 Ibid.
  • 73 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 134.

45An official decree of naṣṣ, the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn reports, together with goods and ‘treasures’, was sent from Yemen to Sidhpur. Upon receiving the decree Yūsuf b. Sulaymān accepted, after which the news was conveyed to every Bohra mohallah in Gujarat and his appointment was celebrated in every village and town.72 Following the instructions in the letters, Yūsuf b. Sulaymān sailed to Aden disguised as a merchant. An interesting fact the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn reports, is that ‘the disciples from India’ had to conceal their identities during travel to avoid persecution. Yūsuf b. Sulaymān’s disguise, however, was unsuccessful, and he was arrested in Yemen where his possessions, including his books, were confiscated.73

  • 74 Ibid.
  • 75 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 44r–46v. See also Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 51, 52.

46Yūsuf b. Sulaymān’s entry into Yemen as an Indian Dāʿī was not without its challenges. The sources report that the Indian Dāʿī struggled with the cool mountainous climate of Ḥarāz, and that, despite the advent of Ottoman rule and short interludes of respite from the Zaydis, the Ṭayyibī community in Yemen, the Aṣḥāb reports, had sunk into anarchy.74 The letters of the Qarāṭīs report that Yūsuf b. Sulaymān struggled to govern the community and its Yemeni tribal factions, leading to conflicts and rivalries between the Indian and Yemeni believers, as well as extortion from Ottoman officials.75

  • 76 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 135.
  • 77 Until the Sulaymani schism, see Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis: Their History and Doctrine (Cambridg (...)
  • 78 Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 52.

47Ḥasan al-Bharūchī never witnessed Yūsuf b. Sulaymān’s appointment, nor was he alive during one of the most crucial moments in the history of his community: the daʿwa’s trans-oceanic shift to the Indian Subcontinent. The authority of the Yemeni daʿwa crumbled further, and the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn reports that, as a result, the flags of the Daʿwat-e-Faatemi were raised in India.76 In the year 974/1566, the daʿwa headquarters, including its khizānāt al-kutub, scholars, clerics, and majority of believers, were shifted overseas to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where the genealogy of Dāʿīs was continued on the Indian Subcontinent.77 Traboulsi argues that the trans-oceanic move was urgent, as Ḥarāz was slowly taken over by the Zaydis while the Yemeni Ṭayyibīs were afflicted by a pandemic.78 It was a decisive moment in the history of in the daʿwa and its Indian Ocean networks that would eventually transform Ismaʿilism and transfer its centers of learning to South Asia for good.

A sixteenth-century Khizāna across the Indian Ocean

48The Qarāṭīs al-Yaman contains official correspondence between Ḥasan al-Bharūchī, who is referred by the copyist of the manuscript in the margins as ‘Sayyidi Ḥasan b. Nūh’, from Yemen to Yūsuf b. Sulaymān and other daʿwa officials in India from the period prior to its relocation. They reveal that Ḥasan al-Bharūchī was indeed anticipating, and possibly even making the necessary arrangements for this move to ensure the survival of the daʿwa and safeguarding its sacred khizāna tradition.

49In order to understand how Ḥasan al-Bharūchī operated, we return to the year 910/1509. Forty years after Ḥasan al-Bharūchī set foot on Yemeni soil, he had ascended the ranks of the daʿwa as the main advisor of Dāʿī Ḥasan b. Idrīs, who entrusted him with the affairs of the daʿwa. One of Ḥasan al-Bharūchī’s many duties was overseeing the affairs of the Indian community in Gujarat. In this capacity, he was in continuous correspondence with several generations of the Mawālī al-Hind, as well as with Yūsuf b. Sulaymān towards the end of his life, who was still in Gujarat at the time.

  • 79 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 116, 117. See for a detailed account on the Jaʿfari schism: Daftary, The Ismāʿī (...)
  • 80 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 9r.

50Ḥasan al-Bharūchī also corresponded frequently with Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shāja’ al-Dīn (d. 925/1519), the eighth Wālī al-Hind of Ahmedabad and head of the Bohra community in Gujarat. In the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn he is known as Moulai Raj Bin Moulai Hasan, a heroic martyr figure who was killed on the market square of Ahmedabad following a schism in the community.79 From Aden, Ḥasan al-Bharūchī writes to Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shujā’ al-Dīn in Ahmedabad on the eighteenth of the month of safar 910 (7 June, 1509) (see fig.7).80 The letter, which is written in Arabic, the official language of correspondence of the daʿwa, is in response to an earlier exchange from Ahmedabad, which has not survived.

Fig. 7

Fig. 7

Fragment of Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, folio 8v, Ms Ma VI 330-Tübingen, the correspondence between al-Bharūchī and Moulai Raj Bin Moulai Hasan. Note the catchword ‘fī al-khizāna’ (‘in the khizāna’).

Source: A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 136.

  • 81 The scribe has copied the text here as al-Zīj fi al-Taqwīm wa-l-Nujūm and later as al-Zīj wa-l- (...)
  • 82 An alternative reading of “fa-lam yūjad fī al-khizāna” could be quite literally: that it (the req (...)

51After extending formulaic greetings and informing Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shujā’ al-Dīn about the latest political affairs of the daʿwa in Yemen, Ḥasan al-Bharūchī mentions details of their overseas manuscript exchange. He mentions two titles, which Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shāja’ al-Dīn seems to have requested in an earlier letter.81 He informs him that he ordered a flawless copy of both titles from the eminent scholars of al-Ḥaql, a small village south-east of Sanaʿa, which, after some difficulties, Ḥasan al-Bharūchī picked up personally from the village after the movement of the caravan. He also refers to another nuskha (book) requested by Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shāja’ al-Dīn, which he searched for in the khizāna but was unable to find.82

  • 83 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 9r. Ibid., 17r.
  • 84 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 138.

52We will never know whether the manuscripts requested by Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shāja’ al-Dīn reached Gujarat, as his reply has not been preserved in the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman. The following letters are addressed to his successors, and deal with the exchange of gifts and goods (that were not books), as well as guidance and education of the daʿwa in Yemen, al-Hind as well as al-Sindh.83 Nevertheless, Sayyidi Rāja b. Ḥasan Walī al-Hind Shāja’ al-Dīn’s book request to Ḥasan al-Bharūchī is important as it points to the practice of sending and requesting manuscripts between Yemen and Gujarat through the networks of the daʿwa. More specifically, the mobility of these books, as I argued elsewhere, made possible the phenomenon of building Bohra khizāna collections in India. Remarkably, the tradition of exchanging, requesting, or gifting manuscript copies within communities, scholars, and continents, I observed during ethnographic fieldwork, continues today between the Bohra daʿwas in South Asia, and even Yemen.84

  • 85 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 34v.

53The fact that manuscripts were sent from Ṭayyibī Yemen to Bohra Gujarat, through an Indian Bohra muhājir middleman in Yemen, is perhaps not surprising. After all, the clerical headquarters and the book collections of the daʿwa were in Yemen, and the Indian Bohra community remained the periphery. The Qarāṭīs al-Yaman reveal that the mobility of manuscripts in the trans-oceanic daʿwa, however, was not restricted to one direction. Ḥasan al-Bharūchī, in fact, also ordered manuscripts from Gujarat to Yemen, as becomes apparent from his correspondence with an Indian daʿwa official named Miyān Nūḥjī b. Ādam.85

  • 86 This letter, as so many in the Qarāṭīs, is not dated, and given the fact that the chronological a (...)
  • 87 Unfortunately, these lists have not survived in the Qarāṭīs.
  • 88 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 34v.

54In the undated letter, Ḥasan al-Bharūchī refers to a book he ordered to be copied in Gujarat, as well as other goods, such as textiles from Ahmedabad, Khambhat, Surat, and Bharuch.86 Subsequently, he requests an inventory of what manuscripts are available in Gujarat. In return, he offers Miyān Nūḥjī b. Ādam a list of manuscripts available in Yemen, so that they can compare and order copies from another.87 He ends his letter as follows: Please sign the letters that are with you so that we know what is with you and what is with us, in order that if we need something, we can order it from you, God willing.88 This letter is of significance, as it not only illustrates that manuscript copies were indeed requested from Gujarat to Yemen, it also provides insight into how the mobility of books was facilitated. Manuscript copies were transported with commercial goods and trading commodities, such as textiles, from Surat and the coastal trading towns Khambhat and Bharuch to Yemen. This supports the earlier argument of this article of how Ismaʿilism functioned in the Indian Ocean through its networks of tijāra and daʿwa, which were intrinsically linked with another.

  • 89 Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 45. Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 139.
  • 90 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 139.
  • 91 Ibid, 139.
  • 92 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 40r, 46v.
  • 93 Ibid., 48v.
  • 94 One such source is ʿIbrat al-Labīb by Jābir b. al-Faḥd al-Makramī (fl. eleventh/seventeenth century (...)

55Why was Ḥasan al-Bharūchī ordering manuscript copies and book inventories from Gujarat, while he himself was at the center of the daʿwa? Reading Ḥasan al-Bharūchī’s letter, one gets the impression that in Ṭayyibī Yemen, which was slipping in potential anarchy and chaos, certain titles were no longer available, and there was a case of ‘manuscript drought’. In Gujarat, the social-political situation of the Bohras was less strenuous. With the exception of periods of persecution and internal conflicts, the Indian daʿwa was able to co-exist in peace with other communities, prospered through trade, and build khizānāt collections in cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad in tenth/sixteenth century.89 A local Indian khizāna tradition of manuscripts of Indian provenance, based on a historic influx of manuscripts brought from Yemen by the muhājrūn and Mawālī al-Hind, emerged.90 Based on colophons and marginal notes found in Bohra khizānāt, as well as the oral history of the communities, we can trace the flourishing of a Bohra-Gujarati manuscript culture in the tenth/sixteenth century.91 The Qarāṭīs al-Yaman confirm that, after al-Bharūchī’s death, the situation in Yemen deteriorated. Various letters from Yusūf b. Sulaymān to daʿwa officials in India, dated 969/1561, mention a fitna in the community in Ḥarāz, as well as the gradual relocation of the kutub al-daʿwa (the books of the daʿwa) from Ṭayba to the citadel of Thula.92 The attempt to safeguard the books of the daʿwa, however, was in vain, as a letter written after the death of Yusūf b. Sulaymān, dated 977/1569, comments on how the Zaydis attacked the fortress of the daʿwa, confiscated its books, and imprisoned the Dāʿīs and shaykhs.93 The book confiscation by the Zaydis, and their dispersal, is mentioned repeatedly in the letters that follow, and is confirmed in Zaydi historiographical sources.94

56These catastrophic events recorded in the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman took place after the death of Ḥasan al-Bharūchī. The crumbling of the daʿwa in Yemen towards the end of his life explains his inquiries for manuscripts from Gujarat. After all, the Ṭayyibī daʿwa was not able to operate without a well-stocked khizāna and a ‘manuscript drought’ would have had detrimental effects on a community that was already in serious decline. One could argue that, given the manuscript looting as well as the gradual relocation of the daʿwa, his efforts to rebuild the manuscript collections in Yemen were in vain. The daʿwa on the other side of the ocean, including its localized Bohra manuscript culture and khizāna tradition, however, was flourishing. Based on the fragments of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, we can conclude that Ḥasan al-Bharūchī was instrumental in this development in multiple ways: from khizāna building through sending and requesting manuscripts overseas, to financing the daʿwa through his trade imperium, as well as facilitating the mobility of the Indian students to Yemen.

  • 95 See for more information on the modern-day Sulaymani community: Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis, 295–300 and (...)

57The trans-oceanic relocation of the daʿwa headquarters in 974/1566 did not put an end to the mobility of books and people between Bohra Gujarat and Ṭayyibī Yemen. The Indian Ocean networks of daʿwa and tijāra continued to exist, as they facilitated the return of a part of the community to Yemen after a schism occurred in the daʿwa in India in 999/1591. Accepting the naṣṣ of Sulaymān b. al-Ḥasan (d. 1005/1597), the so-called Sulaymanis re-established themselves on the Arabian Peninsula, and would eventually settle in Najrān, Saudi Arabia, where they continue to exist to the present day as the Makārima.95

Ismaʿili scribal networks between Bohra Gujarat and Makārima Yemen: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries96

  • 96 This section was discussed during a paper titled "The confiscation and survival of Ismaʿili manuscr (...)
  • 97 Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis, 280–2.
  • 98 The last letter of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman in the Tübingen manuscript is dated 1199/1688. It would (...)
  • 99 Poonawala, Biobibliography, 199-200 (no.1), 212 (no.7 and 8).
  • 100 See for a discussion on this phenomenon, as well as practices of confiscation: Akkerman, A Neo-Fati (...)

58The Yemeni Makārima and the Indian Bohras went separate ways, following different lineages of Dāʿīs.97 Nonetheless, the tradition of exchanging letters, manuscripts, and khizāna ‘building’ practices continued between Bohra Gujarat and Makārima Yemen. The last letter of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, for instance, dates back to the late twelfth/seventeenth century.98 Another source which supports our hypothesis of the continuing tradition of textual movement between Bohra Gujarat and Makārima Yemen is Ismail Poonawala’s monumental Biobibliography of Ismaʿili Literature. It lists several official sijillāt (scrolls) issued by the Dawoodi daʿwa addressed to what Poonawala describes as “their deputies” in Yemen, issued in the twelfth/eighteenth and early-thirteenth/nineteenth centuries.99 One could argue that the movement and exchange of these texts became the lifeline between the otherwise estranged Yemeni and Gujarati communities, a cleavage which must have widened over the centuries as the Bohra community came into its own in terms of authority and legitimation, and manuscripts and khizānāt became more centralized and less accessible beyond the clerical milieus of the daʿwa.100

  • 101 Ismail K. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts from Yemen’, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 5 (2014), 22 (...)
  • 102 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi. Poonawala, Biobibliography, 208–209.

59In Yemen, the Ismaʿili khizāna tradition has survived among the Makārima, domesticated in the private homes of generations of scholarly families over the centuries.101 One of the most renowned families in this regard were the Hamdānis from Ḥarāz, who traced back their lineage to the sixth/twelfth century to Amīr Saba’ b. Yūsuf al-Yaʿburī, the military supporter of Ḥātim Ibn Ibraḥīm al-Ḥāmidī (d.596/1199).102 Al-Ḥāmidī served as the third Dāʿī of the Ṭayyibī community in Yemen and was a contemporary of the Fāṭimids in their final days.

  • 103 Ismail K. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts from Yemen’, 231, 232. De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Guj (...)

60In the twelfth/eighteenth century the Indian Bohra community, which by that time had bifurcated into a separate Alawi and Dawoodi daʿwa, once more made an appeal to its sister community in Yemen. The Dawoodi Dāʿī Ibrāhīm Wajīḥ al-Dīn (d. 1168/1754) invited ʿAlī b. Saʿīd b. Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-Yaʿburī al-Hamdānī al-Ḥarāzī, a renowned scholar and calligrapher from the Hamdānī lineage, to migrate from Yemen to Surat with his family and his khizāna. He accepted, and the Hamdānī family ended up serving four generations of Dawoodi Dāʿis in Surat.103

  • 104 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi-xxvii. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts fr (...)
  • 105 Ibid, xxvi-xxvii.

61The new influx of Yemeni Ismaʿili and non-Ismaʿili manuscripts in Gujarat enriched Bohra khizānāt collections and transformed its centers of learning and transmission.104 According to Francois De Blois, the copying of old Yemeni manuscripts proliferated in the ḥalaqas of the Hamdānīs in Surat. ʿAlī b. Saʿīd b. Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-Yaʿburī al-Hamdānī al-Ḥarāzī’s children and grandchildren, who had now become Surti Hamdānis, established a large khizāna in Surat, the Khizānat al-Muammadiyya al-Hamdāniyya, which became dispersed in the generations that were to follow among the different branches of the family.105

  • 106 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts. Delia Cortese, Arabic Ismāʿīlī Manuscripts: (...)
  • 107 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 234-236. De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscri (...)

62Today, the scholarly and scribal output of the Hamdani family can be traced in manuscript form in most Bohra clerical khizānāt in India as well as in European and South Asian academic libraries. The largest collection of Hamdānī manuscripts is held at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, consisting of the Muhammad Ali Hamdani Collection and parts of the Zahid Ali Collection.106 As I described elsewhere in more detail, Bohra manuscripts of Hamdānī provenance can be recognized instantly based on their codicology, paleography, and Hamdānī octagonal owner seal, which can also be found in the manuscript copy of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman discussed in this article (see fig. 4).107

  • 108 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi-xxvii.

63The movement and later dispersal of Hamdānī manuscripts from Surat to other clerical or family khizānāt and institutions has been described by Francois De Blois in his catalogue of the Hamdani Collection.108 In retracing the manuscripts from the Khizānat al-Hamdāniyya as an Indian Ocean Bohra treasury of books, however, one location is still missing: Yemen. Through the oceanic relocation of the Khizānat al-Hamdāniyya and its custodians overseas, the Hamdānī family in Yemen and India had become a trans-oceanic network of Ismaʿili scholarship and books in the modern period.

  • 109 An interesting example in this regard are the travels of Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Fayḍ Allāh al-Hamdānī in (...)

64In the thirteenth/nineteenth century, members of the Hamdānī family frequently traveled back and forth from Gujarat to the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen, as well as to Mecca and further to the Levant as can be traced from letters between Hamdānis in Surat and Ḥarāz.109 Vice versa, Hamdānis still residing in Yemen also frequented Surat and copied books, as the colophon of the second manuscript source we will analyze in this article, the copy of Shihāb al-Nabawī by al-Quḍā’ī, demonstrates (see fig. 8).

Fig. 8

Fig. 8

Al-Shihāb al-nabawī, copied in 1314/1897 in the village of Ṭūẓān near Surat by 'Abd Allah b. al-Husayn b. Hādi al-Hamdani, MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. or. oct. 3763, fol. 39a.

Source: Christoph, Rauch, “Yemeni Manuscripts of Diverse Provenance at the Berlin State Library,” in Yemeni Manuscript Cultures in Peril, (ed.) H. Ansari & S. Schmidtke, New Jersey, Gorgias Press, 2022, 398.

  • 110 https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN1669558991&PHYSID=PHYS_0127&DMDID=DMD (...)

65The neat thirteenth/nineteenth-century copy of Shihāb al-Nabawī is, in fact, part of a multiple-text manuscript, containing another treatise, titled al-Khuṭab al-Ma’thūra ʿan Rasūl Allāh (Transmitted Sermons on the Messenger of God, f.4r-58v), copied in the same clean naskh hand on European watermarked paper reading “Howard Jones London”, followed by several duʿā (supplications) written in an informal hand on the last fly leaves on paper with a different watermark, reading “Paris”.110 The fact the manuscript does not contain the famous Hamdānī owner seal discussed earlier, suggests that it was not part of the Khizānat al-Hamdāniyya in Surat.

66The two treatises each contain their own colophon and are copied by a certain ʿAbd Allāh b. usayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī in the same year of 1314/1897. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate him in the family tree of the Hamdānis. The colophon of Shihāb al-Nabawī, however, contains valuable information on the whereabouts of ʿAbd Allāh b. usayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī, and reads as follows:

The (copying of this) book, Shihāb al-Nabawī, was finished with the help of God, in the foggy morning of the sixteenth of Shacbān in the year 1314/1897, it was copied in the land of India (bilād al-Hind) in

the city of Surat. It was completed with the help of God and the Prophet, salutations

upon him and his pure progeny, in the handwriting of the most humble of his slaves

requiring the forgiveness of his sins and who seeks repentance from

his Lord, ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥusayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī, who is an

inhabitant of the village of Ṭūẓān, and there is no power or

strength except through God, the exalted,

may it be so, the great, lord of the worlds.

  • 111 Ms. Or. 3775 and Ms. Or. 3763.
  • 112 Ms. Or. 2028 and Ms. Or. 3764.

67Based on the colophon we can reconstruct that ʿAbd Allāh b. usayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī lived in Ṭūẓān, a village north-west of Sanaʿa part of the Hamdān district, and must have traveled to Gujarat to copy this manuscript in Surat, most probably from the collection of the Khizānat al-Hamdāniyya. It seems that his multiple-text manuscript copy of Shihāb al-Nabawī and al-Khuṭab al-Ma’thūra ʿan Rasūl Allāh was not a one-off scribal exercise, but rather a deliberate choice by ʿAbd Allāh b. usayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī to select these titles to complement his khizāna in Yemen. Two other Ismaʿili manuscripts at the Staatsbilbiothek also mention ʿAbd Allāh b. usayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī’s name in the colophons as ʿAbd Allāh al-Hamdānī al-Ṭūẓānī: in a manuscript dated 1315/1897 and another manuscript dated 1316/1898, both are copied in Surat.111 These manuscripts were copied in same period as the multiple-text manuscript of Shihāb al-Nabawī and al-Khuṭab al-Ma’thūra ʿan Rasūl Allāh and through their colophons we know our copyist was living in Surat from 1314/1897 to 1316/1898. In addition to manuscript copying in Surat, several other manuscripts from this small collection at the Staatsbibliothek indicate that other members from the Hamdāni family from Ṭūẓān frequented bandar Surat (the port of Surat) to buy manuscripts for their collections in Yemen in the late thirteenth/nineteenth-century.112

  • 113 Rauch, ‘Yemeni Manuscripts of Diverse Provenance at the Berlin State Library’, 394.

68The small collection of Ismaʿili manuscripts at the Staatsbibliothek are thus a mélange of Bohra manuscripts of Indian provenance, copied in Gujarat by Indian Bohra scribes and bought by Yemeni Hamdānis, as well as manuscripts copied by Yemeni Hamdāni scribes in Surat, which most likely were taken back to Ṭūẓān in Yemen. In addition to information provided in the colophons on these manuscripts and the owner statements and statements of acquisition, we known for certain that these manuscripts were indeed kept in Yemen in the early fifteenth/twentieth century. On his sojourns to South Arabia between the years 1900 and 1909 the German merchant, Orientalist, and collector Hermann Burchardt purchased a collection of thirty-nine manuscripts in Yemen, including the Hamdāni manuscripts, which were sold to the Prussian State Library in 1939.113

  • 114 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 146.

69The complex Indian-Yemeni provenance of the manuscripts copied by ʿAbd Allāh b. usayn b. Hādī al-Hamdānī and their link to Surat demonstrates that the ancient trans-oceanic routes of manuscript mobility remained meaningful even centuries after the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman and the inter-communal schisms between the Bohras and the Makārima. As such, they are a testament to the rich microcosm of the Indian Ocean, the mobility of mercantile communities, and the production and circulation of Arabic manuscripts in it. Even though without being directly present, through their khizāna in Surat, the Indian Bohras thus continued to play a role in Yemen in the transmission and preservation of its Ismaʿili manuscript repositories in the modern period. In fact, the practice of khizāna building in Yemen continues to the present day among a small population of Bohras residing in Yemen. These modern muhājirūn were not only commissioned by the daʿwa in India to restore Ṭayyibi shrines and oversee Bohra pilgrimage prior to the civil war in 2014. The Bohras in Yemen, I was told, were also actively involved in consulting private khizānāt of the Makārima, with the aim of copying and exchanging manuscripts overseas.114

70Despite civil war and inter-communal schisms, the Ismaʿili scribal networks of the Indian Ocean, facilitated by the daʿwa and its living khizāna tradition, are as relevant today as they were in the times of Ḥasan al-Bharūchī half a century ago. As such, the transoceanic mobility of manuscripts is central to the Bohras’ communal identity as a Neo-Fāṭimid Ṭayyibis in the present time.

Conclusion

71In this article we looked at the mercantile macrocosm of the Western Indian Ocean, and the mobility of people, trading goods, and books in it, through the lens of a Muslim minority community and its historic presence in Yemen and Gujarat. The aim of this contribution was to situate Shiʿism in the context of the Indian Ocean with Yemen as an export center of Ismaʿili ideas, practices, authority, institutions, and texts.

72I have demonstrated that, contrary to other Ismaʿili communities, it is the oceanic routes of the Indian Ocean connecting Yemen to Gujarat, and not the routes over land, that were central to the Bohras’ communal networks of daʿwa, tijāra, and jihād, and the mobility, transmission, and preservation of its manuscript repositories. The historic letters of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman and the modern historiographical work Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn provided a glimpse into the Indian Ocean world of a transoceanic daʿwa. They reveal the active role the Bohras played as students, merchants, political advisors, scholars, and benefactors in the affairs of the Ṭayyibī daʿwa, as well as the gradual relocation of the community and its manuscript khizānāt to the Indian Subcontinent.

73Based on the nineteenth-century colophons written by a Yemeni Hamdānī scholar in Gujarat, I argue that, the scribal networks between Yemen and Gujarat continued well into the nineteenth-century. As I argued in the introduction of this article, the case of the Bohras offers a comparative perspective to the study and reconstruction of book cultures and manuscript libraries in the Arabophone Muslim world beyond the Middle-East, and transoceanic circulation beyond the Sunni-Shāfīʿ example. The locally lived, communal perspective of the Bohras’ transoceanic manuscript culture and inter-communal networks of copying and collecting also invites us to re-think the concept of manuscript provenance through an emic lens. As such, it contributes to the field of provenance studies, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus on colonialism and the mobility and displacement of book collections in the region.

74The world of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, with Yemen at the center of the Indian Ocean Ismaʿili daʿwa, may have vanished in the twelfth/seventeenth century. However, the Bohra communities in India today, as I observed during ethnographic fieldwork, remain intrinsically connected to the soil of Yemen and its baraka, as they continue to operate via the same historic routes of their daʿwa visiting Yemen as devout believers, pilgrims, and scholars, restoring shrines and consulting and exchanging manuscripts.

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Bibliographie

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———. Bohra Ritual Life: Everyday Practices and the Sacred Materiality of Objects.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shiʿi Islam, edited by Sajjad Rizvi and Ahab Bdaiwi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023 (forthcoming).

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———. Islamic Law in Circulation. Shafi'i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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Notes

1 Christopher Bahl, ‘Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court: Saʿd Allāh Khān’s and Shāh Jahān’s Enactments of the Sharḥ al-Radī’, Philological Encounters vol. 5, no. 2 (2020): 190–222. Ismail F. Alatas, What is religious authority? Cultivating Islamic communities in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Mahmood Kooria, ‘Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration. Islamic Law Books in the Indian Ocean Littoral’, Sociology of Islam 6 (2018): 60–83; Islamic Law in Circulation. Shafi'i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

2 See for more information, Olly Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books. Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of Baroda, 3.

3 See for the history of the Bohras in East Africa, Hong Kong and Bangkok: Hussain Aminji, ‘The Bohras in East Africa’. Journal of Religion of Africa 7 (1975): 27–61; Anita M. Weiss, ‘South Asian Muslims in Hong Kong: Creation of a “Local Boy” Identity’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 25, no. 3 (1991): 423, 424, and Raymond Scupin, ‘Muslim Accommodation in Thai Society’, Journal of Islamic Studies vol. 9, no. 2 (1998): 245.

4 See for Indian Ocean cosmopolis: Ronit Ricci, Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Kooria, Islamic Law in Circulation. Shafi'i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and Anne Bang, ‘Arabic-language manuscript and print as a source for Indian Ocean Islamic history: The case of East Africa,’ History Compass, 20(7), (2022): 7.

5 Olly Akkerman, ‘The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: A Study in Social Codicology,’Philological Encounters 4 (2019): 182–201.

6 Olly Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 10.

7 Ibid, 156.

8 Akkerman, ‘The Bohras as Neo-Fatimids: Documentary Remains of a Fāṭimid Past in Gujarat,’ Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 1 (2020): 286–308.

9 Thus far, scholarship on Yemen in this context has mostly revolved around Hadrami diasporic networks, see Ulrike Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut: Reforming the Homeland (Leiden: Brill, 2003) and Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 6

10 Bang, ‘Arabic-language manuscript and print as a source for Indian Ocean Islamic history: The case of East Africa’, 1, and Islamic Sufi networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c. 1880-1940). Ripples of Reform (Leiden, Brill, 2014).

11 See for an interesting parallel: Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (eds.), Islamic Connections. Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2009.

12 See Elizabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018). An exception in this regard in the contexts of manuscripts is the above-mentioned contribution by Mahmood Kooria.

13 See Zahir Bhalloo’s contribution in this special issue. Oman’s Transregional Connections to Sindh and Gujarat. for instance, Engseng Ho and Anne K. Bang, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860-1925 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

14 Instead of using the lens of empire and its subjects, Ho sees the Hadrami diasporic community as local yet cosmopolitan and mobile. Ho, The Graves of Tarim, xxii.

15 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 318-312.

16 Ibid, 73,

17 Ibid, 10.

18 Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘The Da’udi Bohra Ṭayyibīs: Ideology, Literature, Learning and Social Practice’. In Farhad Daftary (ed.), A Modern History of the Ismaʿilis: Continuity and Change in a Muslim Community (London: I. B. Tauris), 345. Jonah Blank, Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Dawoodi Bohras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 14.

19 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 69.

20 See for a comparative perspective on the Khoja Agha Khanis: Michel Boivin, Les âghâ khâns et les Khojah: Islam chiite et dynamiques sociales dans le sous-continent indien (1843–1954) (Paris: Karthala, 2013).

See for a discussion on conversion in Gujarat in the pre-modern period: Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 162.

21 Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘Bohras’, E.I. THREE.

22 Even though the original usage of the term Dāʿī in the Bohra Ṭayyibī was similar and is historically related, in its modern context it does not mean missionary officer. See for a discussion: Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 73-75.

23 See, for instance, in the case of the Alawis the historical account Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn fī dhikr al-duʿāt al-muṭlaqīn al-yamāniyīn. Baroda: Daʿwat al-Alawiyya, 1432 AH, 1. See also Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 60.

24 See Akkerman,‘Bohra Ritual Life: Everyday Practices and the Sacred Materiality of Objects,’ in: Oxford Handbook of Shiʿi Islam, ed. Sajjad Rizvi Ahab, Bdaiwi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See for an ethnography of the Dawoodi Bohras Blank: Mullahs on the Mainframe, and on the Dawoodis in Madagascar specifically Denis Gay: Les Bohra de Madagascar. Religion, commerce et changes transnationaux dans la construction de l’identité ethnique (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009).

25 For more on the Ṣulayḥids see Hussain Hamdani, Al-Ṣulayḥiyyūn wa-l-ḥaraka al-Fāṭimiyya fī al-Yaman (Cairo, 1955).

26 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 124.

27 Ibid, 144.

28 Akkerman, “Bohra Ritual Life: Everyday Practices and the Sacred Materiality of Objects” in The Oxford Handbook of Shiʿi Islam, ed. Sajjad Rizvi and Ahab Bdaiwi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023 (forthcoming). See for a detailed description: Blank, Mullahs on the Mainframe, 53-81.

29 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 53-54.

30 See for a further discussion: ibid, 128.

31 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, Chapter 2.

32 See for an overview Qutbuddin, ‘The Da’udi Bohra Ṭayyibīs: Ideology, Literature, Learning and Social Practice’, 338-344; Samer Traboulsi, ‘Sources for the History of the Ṭayyibī Ismāʿīlī Daʿwa in Yemen and Its Relocation to India,’ Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 5 (2014): 246–74. See for a discussion on the Dawoodi Bohra printed tradition: Michael O’Sullivan, ‘The Multiple Registers of Arabic in the Daudi Bohra Daʿwa and South Asian Public Life, c. 1880–1920,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 1–7 (2023), 2.

33 Daʿwat al-ʿAlawiyya, Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn fī dhikr al-duʿāt al-muṭlaqīn al-yamāniyīn. A second volume on the history of the Bohras in Gujarat, I was informed, is forthcoming.

34 I will discuss the provenance and codicology of these manuscripts in a forthcoming article titled ‘Provenance and Codicology of Bohra Manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin’. The author would like to thank Christoph Rauch for pointing out these manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin.

35 François De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts: The Hamdani Collection (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), xxv-xxxiv.

36 These sources may not be exhaustive, nor give the complete picture. I have selected them with the aim of being mindful of the community’s wish to not disclose more of their khizāna collection. See for a more in-depth discussion on the ethics of disclosure in relation to this topic, Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 30, 102-104.

37 Three manuscript copies are known of the Qarāṭīs outside the Bohra daʿwa khizānāt: (1) Tübingen University Library, MS Ma VI 330 (containing letters from 906 to 1199/1500 to 1688, dated 19th century). This manuscript was originally part of the khizāna of the Hamdani family (and bears its original family seal). (2) Institute of Isma’ili Studies, No. 5, Adam Gacek, Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London: Islamic Publications, 1985), 2. (3) Hamdani Collection Manuscript, donated to the IIS and originally part of the Hamdani family khizāna, thus far not catalogued (containing letters from 800 to 1100/1397 to 1688, dated 19th-century). Unfortunately, I only had access to the Tübingen manuscript, which covers a slightly shorter period than the copy catalogued by Gacek. See for further details Traboulsi, ‘Sources for the History of the Ṭayyibī Ismāʿīlī Daʿwa in Yemen and its Relocation to India’, 256–9; Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen: The Ismaʿili Perspective’, in J. Hathaway (ed.), The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 45; and Ismail, K. Poonawala, Biobibliography of Isma’ili Literature (Malibu: Gustave von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA/Undena Publications, 1977), 403.

38 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 133-145. See also Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 41–60.

39 Tahera Qutbuddin, Kitāb Shihāb by Qāḍī al-Quḍā (critical edition). New York: NYU, 2016.

40 See for an overview of his works: Tahera Qutbuddin, A Treasury of Virtues: Sayings, Sermons and Teachings of 'Ali (New York: NYU Press, 2013), xix, xx. De Blois, 192, 194.

41 Qutbuddin, xix. See for an exhaustive list of manuscript copies De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts 192, and Poonawala, Biobibliography of Isma’ili Literature, 360.

42 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 1.

43 Ibid. Interestingly, the authors have a very large interpretation of Sindh as the region between India and Saudi Arabia.

44 See for an ethnographic account of the ziyra: Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 45-51.

45 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 1.

46 The expression finds resonance especially among Shiʿi communities in the context of the ahl al-bayt, the immediate family of the Prophet Muhammad.

47 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 128.

48 Ibid, 132, 133.

49 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 101. See for a translation and critical edition of volume 7 of ʿUyūn al-Akhbār: Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid, Paul Walker, and Maurice A. Pomerantz, The Fatimids and their Successors in Yemen. The History of an Islamic Community (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).

50 Ibid, 103.

51 See for the practice of raising Fāṭimid banners in foreign lands: Verena Klemm, Memoirs of a Mission: The Ismaili Scholar, Statesman and Poet, Al-Mu’ayyad Fi’l-Din Al-Shirazi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 92.

52 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 15.

53 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 101, 102.

54 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 132.

55 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 102. The phrase ‘fī khidma daʿwat al-Fāṭimiyya’ can be found throughout the Qarāṭīs when referring to the services that daʿwa officials carried out.

56 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 134.

57 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 40r, 46v.

58 See Brinkley Messick, Sharia Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 11–19.

59 Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 42, 43.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid, 46.

62 Ibid, 48.

63 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108-16.

64 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108. Poonawala, ‘al-Bharūchī, Ḥasan b. Nuḥ’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_25156 (last accessed 25 August 2020).

65 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108

66 Ismail K. Poonawala, ‘al-Bharūchī, Ḥasan b. Nuḥ’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. 3, (last accessed 25 August 2020).

67 Ibid, 108.

68 This work should not to be confused with the Zaydi fiqh compendium of the same title by Imam al-Mahdī Aḥmad b.Yaḥyā al-Murtaḍā (d. 841/1437). Poonawala, ‘al-Bharūchī, Ḥasan b. Nuḥ’; al-Bharūchī, Kitāb al-azhār wa-majmaʿ al-anwār al-malqūṭa min basātīn al-asrār, ed. ʿĀdil al-ʿAwwā (Damascus: Muntakhabāt Ismāʿīliyya, 1958). See for a detailed description of the work and its volumes, Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 109-16.

69 Ḥasan al-Bharūchī served the reign of four Dāʿīs in total, according to the Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108.

70 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 108–9.

71 Ibid, 130-31.

72 Ibid.

73 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 134.

74 Ibid.

75 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 44r–46v. See also Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 51, 52.

76 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 135.

77 Until the Sulaymani schism, see Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis: Their History and Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 280–2.

78 Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 52.

79 Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, 116, 117. See for a detailed account on the Jaʿfari schism: Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis, 278, 280.

80 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 9r.

81 The scribe has copied the text here as al-Zīj fi al-Taqwīm wa-l-Nujūm and later as al-Zīj wa-l-Taqwīm.

82 An alternative reading of “fa-lam yūjad fī al-khizāna” could be quite literally: that it (the requested title) was not present in the khizāna, meaning that is was not part of the khizāna collection. Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, f. 8r–9v. The book Moulai Raj Bin Moulai Hasan requested earlier is a polemical work mentioned in f. 7v., which was collated by the Dāʿī and written against someone (fulān) who was against the Ṭayyibīs, who are referred here to as the ahl al-ḥaqq.

83 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 9r. Ibid., 17r.

84 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 138.

85 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 34v.

86 This letter, as so many in the Qarāṭīs, is not dated, and given the fact that the chronological arrangement of the letters is sometimes unclear, we cannot be certain that this letter was indeed written after the previous letter.

87 Unfortunately, these lists have not survived in the Qarāṭīs.

88 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 34v.

89 Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 45. Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 139.

90 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 139.

91 Ibid, 139.

92 Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, 40r, 46v.

93 Ibid., 48v.

94 One such source is ʿIbrat al-Labīb by Jābir b. al-Faḥd al-Makramī (fl. eleventh/seventeenth century). See Traboulsi, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Yemen’, 48.

95 See for more information on the modern-day Sulaymani community: Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis, 295–300 and Ismail, K. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts from Yemen’. Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 5, 2–3 (2014): 220–45.

96 This section was discussed during a paper titled "The confiscation and survival of Ismaʿili manuscripts in Yemen and Gujarat", presented during a workshop titled Displaced or Stolen? Removed Archives and Written Artefacts, organized by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) in 2022 in Hamburg.

97 Daftary, The Ismāʿīlis, 280–2.

98 The last letter of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman in the Tübingen manuscript is dated 1199/1688. It would be interesting to explore the other existing manuscript copies of the Qarāṭīs al-Yaman -to which I unfortunately do not have access- to see if these copies contain letters of later dates.

99 Poonawala, Biobibliography, 199-200 (no.1), 212 (no.7 and 8).

100 See for a discussion on this phenomenon, as well as practices of confiscation: Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 143-144.

101 Ismail K. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts from Yemen’, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 5 (2014), 220–45.

102 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi. Poonawala, Biobibliography, 208–209.

103 Ismail K. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts from Yemen’, 231, 232. De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi.

104 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi-xxvii. Poonawala, ‘Ismaʿili Manuscripts from Yemen’, 231, 232.

105 Ibid, xxvi-xxvii.

106 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts. Delia Cortese, Arabic Ismāʿīlī Manuscripts: The Zāhid Alī Collection (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).

107 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 234-236. De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi.

108 De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxvi-xxvii.

109 An interesting example in this regard are the travels of Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Fayḍ Allāh al-Hamdānī in serach of the hidden Ṭayyibī Imam. See De Blois, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, xxviii, xxix.

110 https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN1669558991&PHYSID=PHYS_0127&DMDID=DMDLOG_0001

111 Ms. Or. 3775 and Ms. Or. 3763.

112 Ms. Or. 2028 and Ms. Or. 3764.

113 Rauch, ‘Yemeni Manuscripts of Diverse Provenance at the Berlin State Library’, 394.

114 Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 146.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1
Légende Map of the Western Indian Ocean, Yemen, and Gujarat, including the mobility of manuscripts.
Crédits Source: A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-1.png
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Titre Fig. 2
Légende Everyday life in the Bohra mohallah, Ahmedabad, 2014.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 1,2M
Légende Arabic title page of Ta’rīkh Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, Baroda, 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 895k
Titre Fig. 4
Légende Flyleaf of Qarāṭīs al-Yaman with the title of the work and Hamdānī owner stamp. Folio 1v, Ms Ma VI 330-Tübingen University Library.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-4.png
Fichier image/png, 477k
Titre Fig. 5
Légende First two folios of Shihāb al-Nabawī by al-Quḍā’ī. Folio 1v and 2r, Ms. or. oct. 3763 -Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin PK.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-5.png
Fichier image/png, 1,2M
Titre Fig. 6
Légende Map of Yemen in Gujarati with list of Bohra pilgrimage sites, Aṣḥāb al-Yamīn, h,i. Baroda, 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-6.png
Fichier image/png, 1,1M
Titre Fig. 7
Légende Fragment of Qarāṭīs al-Yaman, folio 8v, Ms Ma VI 330-Tübingen, the correspondence between al-Bharūchī and Moulai Raj Bin Moulai Hasan. Note the catchword ‘fī al-khizāna’ (‘in the khizāna’).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-7.png
Fichier image/png, 1,3M
Titre Fig. 8
Légende Al-Shihāb al-nabawī, copied in 1314/1897 in the village of Ṭūẓān near Surat by 'Abd Allah b. al-Husayn b. Hādi al-Hamdani, MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. or. oct. 3763, fol. 39a.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cy/docannexe/image/9603/img-8.png
Fichier image/png, 1,6M
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Olly Akkerman, « Indian Ocean networks of Daʿwa, Tijāra, and Khizāna: The Bohras as Manuscript Agents in Yemen », Arabian Humanities [En ligne], 17 | 2023, mis en ligne le 01 juillet 2023, consulté le 29 septembre 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cy/9603 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cy.9603

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Olly Akkerman

Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

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