The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography

Seven. An Ocean of Islands: Islands, Insularity, and Historiography of the Indian Ocean

198 seven An Ocean of Islands: Islands, Insularity, and Historiography of the Indian Ocean Roxani Margariti In his marvelous philosophical novella starring self-enlightened hero Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān (Alive son of Awake), the Andalusian philosopher Abū Bakr Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185/6) situates Ḥayy’s home in an equatorial island “lying off the coast of India below the equator,” and characterized by “the most tempered climate on earth.”1 It is precisely thanks to ideal insular conditions that Ḥayy comes about, through spontaneous genesis “without father or mother,”2 and it is perhaps partly thanks to the distractionfree universe of his island that he attains ultimate spiritual clarity. Ibn Ṭufayl allows for an alternative story of Ḥayy’s origins, presenting us with an additional insular construct: if not born of the island’s soil, the sageto -be may have arrived at this same perfectly temperate predator-free world as an infant castaway from a more worldly kind of island, one that is “rich and spacious,” densely populated, and ruled by “a proud and possessive . . . king.”3 Finally, the story ends with an episode that involves yet a third island, a small world inhabited by a diverse population that teaches Ḥayy and the audience a fundamental lesson: full-blown spiritual enlightenment is possible only for the exceptional few.4 At the end of the story, Ḥayy returns to his insular island. The three islands are, of course, imaginary, and there is nothing in Ibn Ṭufayl’s metaphorical geography and idealized topography to suggest that he was giving any serious thought to real Indian Ocean archipelagoes . But, the choice of archipelagic setting for Ḥayy’s development “off the coast of India” and below the equator, that is, at the other end An Ocean of Islands 199 of the known world from the author’s native Maghrib, is noteworthy. It lifts the tale to the “bounded, isolated, self-sufficient, and temporally distanced”5 space of conceptual islands, thus signaling its metaphorical quality. Yet at the same time it echoes the very literal conception of the eastern sea as a world of islands similar in this trait to the Mediterranean. This same conception appears graphically in the sea maps of the celebrated geographical compendium known as the “Book of Curiosities”: both the Mediterranean’s and the Indian Ocean’s green surfaces are dotted with circular and oval figures of islands, some nameless beyond the marking “island” (jazīra).6 Island shapes are the graphic equivalent of the color green: they evoke the sea. This chapter argues that islands and insularity are crucial subjects of study for Indian Ocean history and historiography—as they are for the Mediterranean—and that examinations of island lives enrich our understanding of Indian Ocean polities and communities and offer a new view of their participation in an interconnected world—as they do of the Mediterranean. I suggest that for certain chronological periods the Indian Ocean world can best be described as “an ocean of islands,” that is, a geohistorical entity of which the constituent parts were geographical and geopolitical islands. In particular, the era of ever-expanding maritime commerce from the tenth century on was characterized by the formation of independent, autonomous or semi-autonomous communities that played a significant role in the articulation of trading and other networks. Of these communities, many were based on geographical islands , so investigating their development, use of land and sea spaces, and connections with other island and non-island communities substantially fleshes out our portrait of the region in these early and little understood times. Furthermore, by exploring the connection between geographical insularity and geopolitical autonomy we arrive at a better understanding of the mechanisms that facilitated this autonomy. Moreover , insularity shapes the conduct of the long-distance trade, the flow of human migration, the formation of networks of knowledge, and the practices of pilgrimage; that is, all the major modes of connectivity that characterized the Indian Ocean world. In advancing this argument and then presenting the outline of a specific island case study, this chapter offers a rehabilitated concept of insularity, one that is only intelligible within a conceptual framework of interaction, and that is indeed crucial to understanding the articulation of the Indian Ocean world in the period that interests me, between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. 200 The Sea Indian Ocean Historiography, Thalassography, and Nesiology Ḥayy’s island metageography suggests conceptual schemes about the nature...