The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh

The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh

Author:Amitav Ghosh [Ghosh, Amitav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789352141135
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-12T08:00:00+00:00


VII

The Geniza documents reveal nothing about how Ben Yijū’s path came to cross Bomma’s. Ben Yijū may well have written to his correspondents in Aden when Bomma first came into his service, for the acquiring of a slave by a trader frequently also meant the introduction of a new employee into the business. But whether he did or not will never be known, for none of the letters Ben Yijū wrote to his friends in Aden ever made their way into the Geniza. What is left of his correspondence with them is as bafflingly one-sided as an overheard telephone conversation: what Ben Yijū had to say in his letters has to be deduced from his friends’ responses.

The first positively datable reference to Bomma occurs in a letter sent to Ben Yijū in 1135.137 Ben Yijū had already been at least three years in Malabar at the time.138

The letter is a remarkable one: one of the most unusual in the Geniza. In part it is a letter of complaint. The cause for complaint is Bomma: his behaviour has outraged the morals of Ben Yijū’s correspondent. But Ben Yijū’s correspondent has also had another, greater shock recently: Aden, where he lives, has been the target of a naval raid. What remains of the letter he wrote to Ben Yijū after the occasion bears the suggestion that Bomma, upon his very first appearance in the Geniza documents, may have been present at the enactment of a full-blooded historical event, more than a thousand miles away from his home in Mangalore.

The man who wrote this letter was a key figure in the trade of the Indian Ocean. His name was Maḍmūn ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Bundār, and he was the Nagīd or chief representative of the merchants of Aden.139 He was a relative of Khalaf ibn Iṣḥaq, the writer of the letter of MS. H.6, and he was also related to Ben Yijū’s third regular correspondent in Aden, a merchant and judicial functionary called Yūsuf ibn Abraham ibn Bundār.140 These three men, Khalaf ibn Iṣḥaq, Yūsuf ibn Abraham and Maḍmūn ibn Bundār, were relatives and had close connections with one another as well as with a vast network of merchants, both in Aden and far beyond.141 The threads of their relationships stretched like a cat’s cradle across the known world, from Morocco as far as Sumatra:142 it was a circumstance so dispersed that it almost precluded the notion of exile.

Ben Yijū himself had his origins in the western end of this far-flung world—in the city of Mahdia, which was then one of the premier ports in the region known as Ifrīqiya (North Africa). The material provides very few clues to his early life. What can be gathered of his father, Farḥia, suggests that he was a scholar and religious teacher. He may have dabbled in business like most scholars of his time, but on the whole his family probably lived in modest circumstances. He had four children altogether, three sons, Abraham, Mubashshir and Yūsuf, and one daughter, Barkha.



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