The World полностью

To the east, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, Arab traders in ivory, spices and slaves already traded in Zanj – east Africa – and they too brought Islam with them. The link between Arabia and Africa was as ancient as Solomon and Sheba. The Arabs traded with the Bantu-speaking Africans, gradually developing a new hybrid language, Swahili, from the Arabic al-Sahel – the Coast. In Sudan (from the Arabic Bilad al-Sudan – Land of the Blacks) and Ethiopia (which the Arabs called al-Habasha – Abyssinia), the old Christian kingdom of Axum was disintegrating.^* Wars and raids produced prisoners who were traded to the Swahili coast where Gulf traders – the sons of Omanis and Persians married to local African women – founded a port, Kilwa, the first of the Swahili trading cities. Voyages went both ways across the Indian Ocean: bananas that originated in south-east Asia arrived in these ships and were planted in Africa to become a quintessentially African crop, spread by the Bantu as they moved southwards. Kilwan sailors crisscrossed the Indian Ocean. The first outsiders to reach Australia were not Europeans (the Dutch landed there in 1606), but African sailors from Kilwa, as evidenced by the discovery of copper Kilwan coins, inscribed in Arabic with the name of an amir of Kilwa, dug up on Marchinbar Island, Northern Territory. Asians had travelled east and west much earlier: Javanese and Malays had probably reached Australia, as suggested by two Javanese inscriptions.

Indians, Javanese, Malays and Polynesians frequently sailed to Africa. Around 400, Malay sailors started colonizing Madagascar, the last major landmass, other than Iceland and New Zealand, to be settled.^* In 945, according to an Arab history, a Javanese–Malay fleet from Mataram/Srivijaya landed on the Swahili coast to seize ivory, furs and black slaves, but failed to seize whichever city they coveted.

The Arab slave traders, based in the Swahili cities from Mogadishu (Somalia) and Zanzibar (Tanzania) to Sofala (Mozambique), ruled by African-Arab merchant dynasties, bought slaves from Africans in the hinterland and traded them with the Indic and Arab worlds as far as Mataram. Medieval slavery was based on religion: Islam technically banned the enslavement of Muslims, but most east and central Africans were pagan, ripe for enslavement. That did not mean the Arabs who were now penetrating Africa were not racist: their guides to slavery shows their enjoyment of racist stereotyping.^* The tales of Buzurg in the Persian Gulf recount how the African king of Sofala traded ‘man-eating Zanj’ slaves (average price 20–30 dinars) with Omani traders, until he was captured himself and traded to Oman, then Cairo, before converting to Islam and returning to retake his throne. We have no idea of the numbers, but it is likely many millions of Africans were enslaved.^*

Back in north-west Africa, in Sijilmasa, the Mahdi’s jihad had almost ended before it started. In 910, the local sheikh arrested him, but his agents stormed the jail. On his liberation, riding on a wave of religious fervour, flourishing the white banners of House al-Fatimiyya, he and his Berbers galloped eastwards to seize Qairawan (Tunisia), founded a new capital, al-Mahdiya, and then advanced on Egypt. Soon declared caliph, his flotillas, commanded by his son al-Qaim, captured Sicily and raided Calabria, even Genoa. Al-Qaim reached Alexandria, but was beaten back by the ruler of independent Egypt, a talented Nubian eunuch.

AL -MISK’S PERFUMES, JAWAR’S FISH AND THE JEWISH VIZIER: THE HOUSE OF FATIMIYYA

Abd al-Misk Kafur, known as the Master, had been captured somewhere in east Africa, enslaved and castrated, then sold to a Turkic general, the Ikhshid (viceroy), who had ruled Egypt as an autonomous realm when the caliphs in Baghdad lost control of their empire. The Ikhshid noticed that while the other slaves rushed to stare at wild animals that arrived from inner Africa, Kafur never took his eyes off his master. Said to be ugly and deformed but sensitive and intelligent, he was such a connoisseur of perfume that he was named after two of them: black musk and white camphor. On his deathbed, the Ikhshid advised his son to employ Kafur as vizier, and ultimately he became the ruler in his own right: the Master.