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Mosques a legacy of Indo-Arab trade: expert By Vishnu Makhijani, Indo-Asian News Service New Delhi, Mar 15 (IANS) A string of mosques along India's west coast are an enduring legacy of the thriving trade between this country and Arab nations between the fourth and 15th centuries. "Even today, there is hardly a town on the west coast of India which does not have a mosque and a Muslim community, surviving testimony of the earliest Islamic traders to the east," British academician John Carswell said in a paper presented at an international seminar on marine archaeology here. The seminar was organised by the Indian Navy and the Archaeological Society of India (ASI). The trade itself was spurred by the discovery in the first century of monsoon winds and the fact that they could aid sailing. By the fourth century, ports in southern India had become important transhipment hubs for trade between China, India, the Arab world and nations in the Mediterranean. "Whilst China itself was aware of new markets or products such as silk and ceramics, it was the Arab and Persian initiative which led to the establishment of a highly sophisticated trading network between the Far East and the Mediterranean from the earliest days of Islamic expansion," Carswell maintained. It's just the other way around in the modern day world with Dubai and Colombo taking on the role of transhipment hubs, prompting the Indian government to develop one off Kochi. "Because of the pattern of bi-annual monsoons, eastbound shipping from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf was obliged to make a stopover in south India or Sri Lanka, whereas on the return journey by careful timing, the voyage could be made directly," Carswell held. In southern India, the most important port with contacts with both the Islamic world and the Far East was Quilon (now Kollam). "A roadstead rather than a natural port, like Calicut (now Kozhikode) further north, shipping of any size had to anchor offshore and goods transported back and forth by smaller craft. "Ships from the Persian Gulf would use the northeast monsoon to sail directly across the Indian Ocean to Quilon. The port was the furthest west that Chinese vessels reached," Carswell pointed out. Ironically, it was an Arab navigator who revealed the mysteries of the Indian Ocean to the Portuguese, the precursors of the European domination of the Indian sub-continent. "It is one of history's great ironies that it was the knowledge of an Arab, Ahmed Ibn Majid al-Najdi, that revealed the secrets of the Indian Ocean to the Portuguese in the 15th century," Carswell said. The arrival of the Portuguese also introduced and institutionalised violence between the visitors and the visited, said Om Prakash of the Delhi School of Economics. "Before the Portuguese came, there was hardly ever any serious violence between Arab traders and the locals. The Portuguese brought with them superior firepower because unlike the live-and-let-live attitude of the Arabs, they wanted to monopolise and dominate. "First there was violence between the Portuguese and the locals. Then between the Portuguese, French, British and Dutch, all of whom wanted to dominate," Prakash contended. --Indo-Asian News Service _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.goanet.org/mailman/listinfo/goanet
