Mocha — also written Mokha, Arabic al-Mukhā — is the coffee port of Yemen on the Red Sea, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one of the principal ports of the Indian Ocean trade. Mocha is the place of the reverenced tomb of Ahmad Rifa’i — the founder of the Rifāʿiyya — and the city with which ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Aydārūs of Ahmadabad exchanged correspondence with a scholar. The port is one of the nodes of the Indian Ocean network that linked the religious scholarship of Yemen and Gujarat with the Malay-Indonesian world.
The tomb of Ahmad ar-Rifāʿī
The tomb of Aḥmad ar-Rifāʿī — the founder of the Rifāʿiyya — is reverenced at Mocha. Voorhoeve records, in the introduction to the 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises, that Raniri “was initiated into the Rifāʿiyya, founded by the saint Aḥmad Rifāʿī, whose tomb at Mocha is reverenced.” The association of the founder’s tomb with Mocha — rather than with the marshlands of southern Iraq where the order was actually founded — is itself a document of the devotional geography of the Rifāʿiyya as it was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian world: a geography in which the founder’s sanctity was located at a Red Sea port frequented by Indian and Indonesian pilgrims and traders, and so made accessible to the Malay-Indonesian devotees of the order.
The correspondence of al-Aydārūs
ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Aydārūs — a kinsman of Raniri and a prolific author of the Indian-Arab al-Aydārūs family — exchanged correspondence with a scholar at Mocha. The correspondence is one of the principal witnesses to the Indian-Arab religious network that linked the coffee port of Yemen with the religious scholarship of Gujarat, and through Gujarat with the Malay-Indonesian world. The exchange of correspondence with Mocha documents the means by which the orthodox Sufi scholasticism of the Arab and Persian worlds was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Significance
Mocha is one of the nodes of the Indian Ocean network that linked the religious scholarship of Yemen and Gujarat with the Malay-Indonesian world. The tomb of Aḥmad ar-Rifāʿī at Mocha is the devotional centre of the Rifāʿiyya as it was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian world; the correspondence of al-Aydārūs with a scholar at Mocha is one of the principal witnesses to the Indian-Arab religious network in operation. The port of Mocha is, with Surat, Tarim, and Acheh, one of the principal places of the Gujarati-Ḥadramī Sufi network from which the orthodox reaction of Acheh drew its principal Malay-Indonesian agents.
Sources
The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
See Also
- Abd al-Qadir al-Aidaros
- Ahmad Rifa’i
- Acheh
- Gudjarat
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Surat
- Tarim
- Abdurra’uf of Singkel
- Singkel
Source
Twee Maleise geschriften van Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī: in facsimile uitgegeven met aantekeningen door P. Voorhoeve. Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje, No. 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955. Inleiding §1 (“De auteur”), pp. 5–6.