Surat

Properties2
tagsplace, city, port, gujarat, india, arab-migration, raniri, mughal-era, acheh, trade
aliasesSuratte, Surat, Soeratte

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Surat — also written Sūrat — is the great port of Gujarat on the north-western coast of India, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries one of the principal nodes of the Indian Ocean network that linked the religious scholarship of Gujarat with the Malay-Indonesian world. Surat is the port from which Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī departed for Acheh in 1637 and to which he returned in 1644; the city in which Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs (d. 1620) succeeded his famous grandfather as religious teacher; and the city in which Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān was received into the Rifāʿiyya by al-ʿAddārs.

The port of the Gujarati-Ḥadramī network

Surat was, in this period, the principal port of the Mughal empire on the Indian Ocean, and the principal node of the Gujarati-Ḥadramī Sufi network from which the orthodox reaction of Acheh drew its principal Malay-Indonesian agents. The Indian-Arab religious families of mixed blood — the al-Aydārūs family, the family of al-ʿAddārs, and the family of Raniri himself — had its centre in the towns of Gujarat, and Surat was the port by which the network communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world, including the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. The Persian manuscript of the *Maʿrifat al-madhāhib* in the India Office Library — Ethé 1920(11) — was copied at Surat in H. 1055.

The religious teachers of Surat

Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs, born in 1561 at Tarim in South Arabia, came to Gujarat at the age of nineteen and succeeded his famous grandfather as religious teacher, first at Ahmadabad and later at Surat. He died at Surat in 1620. His successor in the Rifāʿiyya was Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān — the shaikh of Raniri and Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — who was received into the order by al-ʿAddārs at Surat. The city was thus the principal centre of the Rifāʿiyya in Gujarat in this period, and the immediate source of the silsila that was carried to Acheh and Makassar by Raniri and Shaikh Yūsuf.

Significance

Surat is the port of departure and return of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī, and one of the principal nodes of the Gujarati-Ḥadramī Sufi network from which the orthodox reaction of Acheh drew its principal Malay-Indonesian agents. The religious teachers of Surat — al-ʿAddārs and Bā Shaybān — formed the spiritual genealogy of Raniri and Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar, and the city’s port was the channel by which the orthodox Sufi scholasticism of the Arab and Persian worlds was carried to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Account from Schets eener parlementaire geschiedenis (1955)

The following account is drawn from the parliamentary history of the Dutch Second Chamber as narrated by Vermeulen in the colonial section of the 1955 fourth revised edition of Rengers’s *Schets*.

Suratte — Surat, in the source’s spelling Soeratte — was, according to Nederlanders over de Zeeën, “de grootste haven” (the greatest harbour) of the Mogol empire on the north-western coast of India. The Dutch reached Suratte via Atjeh: “het was juist vanuit Atjeh, dat de Nederlanders, reeds tijdens de Voor-Compagnieën naar de grootste haven Soeratte voeren” (it was precisely from Atjeh that the Dutch, already during the Pre-Company period, sailed to the greatest harbour Suratte).

The Atjeh route to Suratte

The source records that the Dutch reached Suratte via Atjeh during the Voor-Compagnieën — the pre-1602 period of separate Dutch trading companies. The Atjeh route to Suratte was, in the source’s narrative, the conduit by which the Dutch entered the trade of the Mogol empire. The Gujerat-Atjeh trade was the principal Asian artery that the Dutch encountered when they entered the Indian Ocean trade.

The initial failure

The source records that the Dutch initial establishment at Suratte was “aanvankelijk nog met weinig succes, daar de Portugezen twee onzer kooplieden ophingen” (initially with little success, since the Portuguese hanged two of our merchants). The Portuguese opposition to the Dutch intrusion is the type-specimen of the Luso-Dutch commercial rivalry that would, after 1602, become one of the principal drivers of the VOC’s military expansion in the Indian Ocean.

Significance

Suratte is, in the source’s narrative, the Mogol-empire port that the Dutch reached via Atjeh. The Atjeh route to Suratte is the conduit by which the Dutch entered the trade of the Mogol empire — and the principal illustration, in the source, of the pre-Company Asian commerce in which Atjeh was a central node.

See Also

Sources

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; and §2b (“De bronnen van de Tibjān”), p. 13 (Ethé 1920(11), copied at Surat in H. 1055).

Nederlanders over de Zeeën: 350 Jaar geschiedenis van Nederland buitengaats, onder redactie van Dr. H. J. de Graaf, met medewerking van Prof. G. Gonggrijp, W. R. Menkman en Prof. Jhr Dr P. J. van Winter, 2e geheel herziene druk (Utrecht: W. de Haan N.V., MCMLV), p. 163.

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