The Sailing Scribe: Mansur al-Khariji and the Oceanic Worlds of the Gulf

Authors

  • Author

  • Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Keywords:

Nakhodas, Indian Ocean, Gulf, Historiography, Dhow

Abstract

How did Gulf nakhodas [dhow captains] produce the routes they traversed around the Indian Ocean? This article draws on the writings of one Kuwaiti nakhoda , Mansur bin Ibrahim al-Khariji (1879-1954) to explore the intellectual labour that made movement and circulation in the Gulf and Indian Ocean possible. His manuscript, which he composed after a long sailing career, includes notes on navigation, transactions, and the political geographies he crossed, together with stanzas of poetry. His notes shed light on the workings of a world in motion; of institutions and ideas that animated circulation around the Gulf and Indian Ocean. Through engagement with al-Khariji’s writings, this article offers reflections on a nautical world that has been pushed to the margins of a terrestrially moored historiography.

References

  1. Here, I understand the Arabian Sea to stand in for much of the Western Indian Ocean, at least in geographical terms. However, as a historiographical category, I argue here that thinking with the Arabian Sea might help us open up the historical container of the Arabian Peninsula to broader oceanic processes and currents, allowing us to resituate it in the world-historical map.
  2. This is a point that has been made in a few different places. See, for example: Michael Christopher Low, “The Indian Ocean and other Middle Easts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , vol. 34, no. 3 (2014), pp. 549-555; Fahad Ahmad Bishara, “The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies , vol. 53, no. 2 (2020), pp. 397-412.
  3. There are clear exceptions to this. See, for example: Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); Engseng Ho, “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: The View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History , vol. 46, no. 2 (2004), pp. 210-246; Michael Christopher Low, Imperial Mecca: The Ottoman Hijaz and the Indian Ocean Hajj (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Lindsey Stephenson, “Rerouting the Persian Gulf: The Transnationalization of Iranian Migrant Networks, c. 1900-1940,” PhD. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2018; Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nancy Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009).
  4. See, for example: Ulrike Freitag, A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Farah Al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Low, Imperial Mecca ; Stephenson.
  5. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass & Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750-1950 (London: Anthem Press, 2006), pp. 2-3.
  6. See, for example: Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2015); Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century World and the Dawn of the Global World (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); Erika Rapaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
  7. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), p. 587. As a feature of economic life, circulation dominated the second (and perhaps even the third) of Braudel’s trilogy on capitalism in world history: the technologies, institutions, and infrastructures of circulation in Europe take up virtually all of The Wheels of Commerce , whereas Braudel’s third volume, The Perspective of the World , was effectively an economic history of imperial expansion in the early-modern period.
  8. See, for example: Ogborn; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800 (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2019).
  9. M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1995); Tania Bhattacharyya, “Ocean Bombay: Space, Itinerancy and Community in an Imperial Port City, 1839-1937,” PhD. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2019; Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf, 1745-1900 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997); Yacoub Y. Al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea: A Brief Economic and Social History (London: Arabian Publishing, 2010).
  10. Markovits, Pouchepadass & Subrahmanyam (eds.), p. 2.
  11. Isa al-Qitami, al-Khāliṣ min Kull ʿAyb fī Waḍ‘ al-Jayb (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2007); Isa al-Qitami, al-Mukhtaṣar al-Khāṣ lil-Musāfir wa-l-Tājir wa-l-Ghawwāṣ , 2nd ed. (Kuwait: Kuwait Printer, 1924); Isa al-Qitami, Dal ī l al-Muḥtār fi ʿ Ilm al-Biḥ ār, 3rd ed. (Kuwait: Government Printer, 1963).
  12. Nasser bin Ali al-Khaduri, Ma‘dan al-Asrār fi ʿIlm al-Biḥār , 2nd ed., Hassan Saleh Shihab (ed.) (Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture,
  13. al-Qitami, Dalīl al-Muḥtār fi ʿIlm al-Biḥār , p. 13.
  14. al-Qitami, al-Mukhtaṣar al-Khāṣ lil-Musāfir wa-l-Tājir wa-l-Ghawwāṣ , p. 8.
  15. Mansur al-Khariji, al-Qawāʿid wa-l-Mayl wa-l-Natīja fī ʿIlm al-Biḥār (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2007), p. 105. Throughout this article, I will be making reference to the printed version of al-Khariji’s manuscript so that interested readers can refer back to it.
  16. Ibid., pp. 59-63.
  17. On profit-sharing on dhows, see also: Dionisius Agius, The Life of the Red Sea Dhow: A Cultural History of Seaborne Exploration in the Islamic World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), pp. 175-192; Al-Hijji, pp. 78-92; Alan Villiers, “Some Aspects of the Arab Dhow Trade,” Middle East Journal , vol. 2, no. 4 (1948), pp. 399-416.
  18. al-Khariji, pp. 128-129, 146-150.
  19. See also: Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018).
  20. Fahad Ahmad Bishara, “‘No Country but the Ocean’: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, c. 1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History , vol. 60, no. 2 (2018), pp. 338-366; Lauren Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History , vol. 47, no. 4 (2005), pp. 700-724.
  21. al-Khariji, pp. 145-146.
  22. See also: Scott Reese, Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); R. J. Gavin, Aden Under British Rule, 1839-1967 (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1975).
  23. al-Khariji, pp. 167-181.
  24. Philip Howard Colomb, Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean: A Record of Naval Experiences (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873); George L. Sulivan, Dhow-Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and on the Eastern Coast of Africa: Narrative of Five Years’ Experience in the Suppression of the Slave Trade , 2nd ed. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1873).
  25. Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
  26. al-Khariji, pp. 67-68.
  27. Nelida Fuccaro, “Knowledge at the Service of Empire: The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia,” in: Inga Brandell, Marie Carlson & Önver A. Çetrez (eds.), Borders and the Changing Boundaries of Knowledge , vol. 22 (Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Transactions, 2015), pp. 17-34; Alexis Wick, The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), p. 144; James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Cover of العدد 18, Almuntaqa

Downloads

PDF (Hosted)
HTML

Published

2025-09-01

Usage statistics

38 views 63 downloads

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 018 (2025): Issue 018

Section

المقالات

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Almuntaqa

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.