The opening chapter builds on a wide-ranging corpus of documents and texts, but at its core is a set of narrative accounts written South Asian hajj pilgrims between 1739 and 1857. Taken together, the sources illuminate how the hajj from India acquired distinctly “imperial” characteristics from the Mughals onward, and how Indian pilgrims hence also took mental stock of the later unraveling of empire through a signal watchword: “revolution” (inqilāb). The chapter begins by showing how Mughal patronage of hajj created ties of loyalty and subordination between the empire and its subjects. Taking readers from the classical Mughal era to the Sepoy Rebellion, it then reveals how – despite successive waves of regime change and revolution in both India and the Islamic world – the expansion of hajj equaled in South Asians experiencing pilgrimage as an interregional and even “global” undertaking, whose articulations, in turn, they recorded through personal narratives of travel firsthand accounts that offered views of mobility from the decks of Indian Ocean ships and from caravan journeys through the Arabian desert. At the broadest level, the chapter ultimately also contributes to recent scholarly efforts to situate the “age of revolutions” in non-European and global contexts.

This and the next chapter explore the gradations of this process in which Shāfiʿī texts contributed to and benefited from the eventual globalisation, modernisation, technological headways, legal and intellectual networks, and mobility of people, ideas and texts. This chapter in particular focuses on two supercommentaries on the Qurra via its autocommentary Fatḥ to analyse internal responses within the school to textual longue durée, coinciding with and influenced by several major historical developments across the world. It argues that the nineteenth century was a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm in terms of its geographical, intellectual and cultural realms, due to new challenges and prospects it came across in the wider society and specifically among Muslims. The existing internal and inherent divisions in the school were reconciled through constant efforts of its jurists, and this synthesis addressed a larger division in the Islamic world. Faced with new trials from political and legal entities and a few minor but radical sections of the community the traditional body of believers united against what they called bidʿa or false invention. These supercommentaries represent different geo-cultural and political backgrounds, as much as they reflect common trends of their time in adapting the attitudes of many divisions in the school.

The authoritative texts of the Shāfiʿī school such as the Minhāj began to be circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim, where its largest followers had started to take up residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj. This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century with a focus on one commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in Mecca. The trajectories of this commentary reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased mobility toward Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The Tuḥfa addressed its immediate regional contexts, while reasserting the geo-cultural superiority of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs. Its approach was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries. Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqas, now commentators on his Minhāj were divided into two sub-schools.

In the legal textual tradition of the Minhāj and the Tuḥfa, a particular subsequent text and its author mark a point from which to analyse Shāfiʿī experiments in the Indian Ocean rim. This chapter considers Fatḥ al-muʿīn, written by Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn bin Muḥammad Ghazālī al-Malaybārī (d. ca. 1583), an autocommentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn. Both the base text and the autocommentary form an independent family in the Shāfiʿī textual history with their own textual descendants, while they can also be considered as indirect progenies of the Tuḥfa, for they stimulated the Shāfiʿī legacy of Ibn Ḥajar and his oeuvre on the Malabar Coast and the wider territories around the Indian Ocean. They demonstrate how Indian Ocean Muslims made their way into the textual landscape of Shāfiʿīsm, and even into the heartlands of Islam. They added to the long pattern of Islamic thought in a traditional way and also advanced it. The chapter investigates how it criticised many methods and arguments of its intellectual predecessors and generated a different discourse within the school from its peculiar perspective from Malabar and the Indian Ocean at large.

As the territory and influence of Muslim political authority expanded, the realities of Islamized societies varied greatly. While the resilient appeal of Arabia cannot be denied, the transformation of Asia led Muslims to give Islamic meaning to actions, beliefs, practices, and sensibilities that might have taken form along different paradigms from those emerged in Arabia. Through the centuries Muslims found alternative locations for pilgrimages to fulfill their ritual obligation, but also questioned Mecca’s status as an ideal embodiment of Islamicity as an imagined construct. The hajj rituals show borrowings from pre-Islamic practices, as does the architecture of “classic” mosques in North Africa and the Arab Mediterranean; in Mecca the fusion of local customs with “the law of Islam” was not different than in Java, Aceh, Malaya, or the Levant. Muslim places of worship, general sense of aesthetic, rituals, and legal interpretations adopted and adapted to what existed before the arrival of Islam, in Asia as much as in Arabia. This chapter provides empirical examples and theoretical frameworks to explore and articulate how processes of Islamization necessitated negotiations and active engagement between past and new traditions without undermining Muslims’ commitment to Islam’s precepts.