The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (review)

Engseng Ho's The Graves of Tarim continues a pattern within certain circles of scholarship that has, paraphrasing Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1999), delinked the notion of "modernity" and "mobility" from a European trajectory. This text focuses on the peripatetic early modern and modern world of the 'Alawi sayyids (collectively known as sada) from Hadramawt who are patrilineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through Ahmad bin 'Isa, "the Migrant" (d. 956). Instead of reproducing "autonomous" histories of regions, as evident in parochial area studies literature, Ho focuses on an Indian Ocean world involving an itinerant Hadrami sada that travels from Surat in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and Mecca in the seventeenth century, to the Malay archipelago from the eighteenth to twentieth century. The Graves of Tarim is also a narrative of the "expanding, transregional, cosmopolitan Muslim ecumene" that formed along the Indian Ocean trade routes from the thirteenth century onwards — an ecumene that Ho enters through his subjects, the Hadrami sayyids (p. 49).

Ho emphasizes that Hadrami sayyids participated in the Indian Ocean world through distinct and superior techniques to their European counterparts. Keeping the example of the Malay archipelago "uppermost in mind", he concludes that within diasporic societies, these sayyids entered into "more intimate, sticky and prolonged [relationships with the locals] than the Europeans could countenance" (pp. xxi, 155). Borrowing a concept used by Subrahmanyam and Chris Bayly, Ho suggests that in various contexts such as seventeenth century Surat and nineteenth century Singapore, the East India Company had to rely on these more established "portfolio capitalists" (pp. 269, 276). The book also refers to Hadrami sayyids as "local cosmopolitans" because of their histories of simultaneously integrating into local (diasporic) societies and maintaining a translocal ('Alawi sayyid) identity. Here, readers can benefit from a discussion of the idea of "cosmopolitanism" as a historical category of analysis. Indeed, while the term "cosmopolitan" has been used to describe a plethora of non-western "globalizing" practices in works such as Ho's, in both its etymology and programmatic activism, which the word embodies, the term is problematic. The Graves of Tarim is concerned with describing first, an early modern and modern, or pre-colonial and colonial, Indian Ocean world wherein Hadrami sayyids profited from mediatory roles as "local" and "cosmopolitan", and second, the turning point — the Second World War — which destroyed this world through a "universal lockdown" of "cosmopolitans" into nation-states (pp. 305–306).

The Graves of Tarim is a compelling read for diaspora studies, particularly because of its notes on symbolic and corporeal forms of remembering within a prominent segment of the Hadrami diaspora. Ho refers to this diaspora of Hadrami sayyid emigrants as a "society of the absent" because "invisible hands", such as dead saints buried in the city of Tarim, are a "constant incitement to discourse" (p. 19). While Ho's anthropological argot obscures at times, this should not impede world historians and diaspora scholars from the text's significant subject matter. For example, he leads readers into how Tarim, which was a destination of 'Alawi sayyids from Iraq in between the tenth to twelfth century, has been transformed into a "place of origins" for a far-flung Indian Ocean diaspora. This transformation has involved diverse processes through time and space ranging from the burials of prominent sayyid saints and elaborate shrine-based rituals to diasporic literature. Special attention is given to diasporic literature. Indeed, Ho traces this Indian Ocean diaspora through the regular records inscribed and circulated by the hyper-literate "Alawi Way", an "institutional complex" that unites two Islamic themes rooted in Tarim: the Prophetic patriline, and the Sufi tariqa (pathway) instituted by descendants of "the Migrant" in the thirteenth century (p. 28). Ho focuses largely on two canonical texts: first, The Travelling Light Unveiled completed by a creole sayyid, 'Abd al-Qadir al-'Aydarus (d. 1628) in Gujarat in 1603; and second, The Irrigating Fount: Biographical Virtues of...