¹ There are a few Malayalam works on Arabi-Malayalam but these mostly focus on its etymological and lexicological aspects, overlooking the complex ideational and historical processes that led to its growth as a lingual-scriptorial variant: see Abu, O., Arabi-Malayala Sahitya Charitram (Kottayam, 1970)Google Scholar; Moulavi, C. N. Ahmad and Kareem, K. K. Mohammad Abdul, Mahattaya Mappila Sahitya Paramparyam (Calicut, 1978)Google Scholar; and Kunhi, P. K. Muhammad, Muslimkalum Kerala Samskaravum (Thrissur, 1982)Google Scholar. In a recent work, M. H. Ilias and Shamsad Hussain have attempted to analyse the morphological and phonological characteristics of Arabi-Malayalam script. However, larger questions about the historical origin of this script and important narrative shifts that happened in the Muhiyuddinmala remained outside the purview of their study, see Arabi-Malayalam: Linguistic and Cultural Traditions of Mappila Muslims of Kerala (New Delhi, 2017)Google Scholar.

² Lambourn, Elizabeth, “Borrowed Words in an Ocean of Objects Geniza Sources and New Cultural Histories of the Indian Ocean”, in Irreverent History: Essays for M.G.S. Narayanan, (eds.) Veluthat, Kesavan and Davis, Donald R. Jr (New Delhi, 2014), pp. 363–414Google Scholar.

³ See Tschacher, Torsten, Islam in Tamilnadu (Halle, 2001)Google Scholar; Perczel, Istvan, “Garshuni Malayalam: A Witness to an Early Stage of Indian Christian Literature”, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 17, 2 (2014), pp. 263–323Google Scholar; Gamliel, Ophira, “Jewish Malayalam”, International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics 38, 1 (2009), pp. 147–175Google Scholar.

⁴ Arafath, P. K. Yasser, “Malappattukal: Charitram, Rashtreeyam Pradhirotham”, Bodhanam Quarterly Journal 15, 13 (2014), pp. 67–91Google Scholar.

⁵ For human practices and social ordering in such habitus, see Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 35–41Google Scholar.

⁶ van Bruinessen, Martin, “Shaykh `Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani and the Qadiriyya in Indonesia”, Journal of the History of Sufism 1, 2 (2000), pp. 361–395Google Scholar; Malik, Hamza, The Grey Falcon: The Life and Teaching of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (Leiden, 2018)Google Scholar; Ciantar, Philip, The Ma'luf in Contemporary Libya: An Arab Andalusian Musical Tradition (Oxon, 2016), p. 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Musliyar, Kunjayin, Ithakunnathu Noolmadhu Enna Malayayirikkum, (ed.) Moosa, Kunji (Telicherry, 1875)Google Scholar, British Library Collection, Uncatalogued Texts, Asia-Africa Room, pp. 1–12. This extant text has been considered as the earliest vernacular versification of the Prophet Muhammed in the region, see Hussian, P. Sakkeer, Kunjayin Musliyarude Noolmadh (Kondotty, 2018), pp. 35–38Google Scholar; Ali, V. P. Muhammed, Mappilappattukal Noottandukaliloode (Calicut, 2007), pp. 148–149Google Scholar

⁸ Musliyar, Kunjayin, Ithakunnathu Kappappattayirikkum, (ed.) Abdu, N. (Telicherry, 1883)Google Scholar, British Library Collection, Uncatalogued Texts, Asia-Africa Room, pp. 1–8.

⁹ See Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800 (Delhi, 2004)Google Scholar; Aquil, Raziuddin and Chatterjee, Partha, History in the Vernacular (Delhi, 2008)Google Scholar; White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar; Jha, Pankaj, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century (New Delhi, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curley, David L., Poetry and History: Bengali Mangal-Kabya and Social Change in Pre-colonial Bengal (Delhi, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, 2000), pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

¹¹ The ulema of Malabar considered the sixteenth century as a period of fasad (disorder) for the excessive violence and destructions that the Portuguese caused, see Arafath, P. K. Yasser, “Malabar Ulema in the Shafiite Cosmopolis: Fitna, Piety and Resistance in the Age of Fasad”, The Medieval History Journal 21, 1(2018), pp. 25–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 2002), pp. 46–48Google Scholar.

¹³ Abu, Arabi-Malayalam, pp. 15–16.

¹⁴ Moulavi and Kareem, Mahattaya Mappila, pp. 35–37.

¹⁵ Kunhi, Muslimkalum, p. 209.

¹⁶ Since the writing and reading largely remained the prerogatives of Muslim scholars and upper caste Hindus in pre-modern Malabar, most of the texts and other pieces of literature were circulated by word of mouth. Muslim scholar-scribes like Qadi Muhammed took this factor into consideration while composing religious texts for wider consumption. In this case, Qadi Muhammed was aware of the fact that scribal elites and scholars who wrote prose texts, dealing with subjects such as jurisprudence and resistance, used a range of hortatory methods such as ritualistic speeches and sermons. Like many vernacular communities in South India, the majority of Mappila Muslims in Malabar circulated their religious texts through the acts of memorisations, recitation and performances until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This article, thus, defines ‘oral-literate’ as a category which experienced the interplay of poetics, performance, recitation and memorisation before the Arabi-Malayalam printing press emerged in Malabar in the late-nineteenth century. The ‘oral literate’ subjectivity of the Mappilas became more complex in the late-nineteenth century when a significant number of them learned writing and reading and began investing in print as well.

¹⁷ For a detailed description of peripatetic traders in Malabar, see Pranje, Sebastian R., Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge, 2018), p. 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁹ Khaldun, Ibn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by Rosenthal, Franz (Princeton, 2005), p. 312Google Scholar.

²⁰ Khaldun, Muqaddimah, p. 81.

²¹ Agius, Dionisius A., Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden, 2008), p. 378Google Scholar.

²² Gibb, H. A. R. and Beckingham, C. F., The Travels of Ibn Battuta, AD 1325–1354, iv (London, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Abdur Razzaq, see Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 58Google Scholar.

²³ Makhdum, Zainuddin II, Tuhfat-al Mujahideen fi ba'd Akhbar al-Burtughaliyan, translated by Hamsa, C. (Calicut, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Letters from Kannur, 1500–50, A Little Explored Aspect of Kerala History”, in Clio and Her Descendants, (ed.) Devadevan, Manu (New Delhi, 2018), pp. 99–131Google Scholar.

²⁵ Freeman, Rich, “Rubies and Coral: The Lapidary Crafting of Language in Kerala”, The Journal of Asian Studies 57, 1 (1998), pp. 38–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 12; futhiya can be transcribed as puthiya (new), as it has been used today. But I retain many such expressions in the article as they were used in the Muhiyuddinmala so as to indicate how the Malabar ulama used Malayalam words during the period under scrutiny. I have used one of the earliest copies of the Muhiyuddinmala, printed in 1876 by M. Koyali Haji at Telicherry. This copy is preserved in the un-catalogued manuscript section at the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library. According to Koyali Haji, this lithographed version is a direct copy of the original manuscript which was preserved by the family of Qadi Muhammed. I compared this version with a number of other printed versions that are found at the British Library and were printed in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. They include Muhiyuddinmala (Telicherry, 1874)Google Scholar, Muhiyuddinmala (Telicherry, 1875)Google Scholar, and Muhiyuddinmala (Ponnani, 1909)Google Scholar. All translations from this text are mine, unless otherwise mentioned.

²⁷ Lambourn, Borrowed Words, p. 1.

²⁸ Varier, M. R. Raghava and Veluthat, Kesavan, Tharisappalli Pattayam (Kottayam, 2013), pp. 94–99Google Scholar; Gamliel, Ophira, “Back from Shingly: Revisiting the Premodern History of Jews in Kerala”, Indian Economic and Social History Review 55, 1 (2018), pp. 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁰ Battuta, Ibn, The Travels of Ibn Batuta with Notes and Illustration by Samuel Lee (London, 1829), pp. 169–172Google Scholar (hereafter The Travels of Ibn Batuta).

³¹ Gibb and Beckingham, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, pp. 68–73.

³² Lambourn, Borrowed Words, pp. 7–8.

³³ Friedman, Shakarwati Farmad, p. 245.

³⁴ Varthema, Travels, p. 151.

³⁵ Words from other languages such as serambi-rest house (Malay regions) and kanji-porridge (Ming China) show how various lingual components influenced the polyglossic life in Malabar. This region also housed a few polyglossic Muslim navigators who were familiar with European languages in the early-sixteenth century. See Pearson, M. N., The Portuguese in India (Cambridge, 1987), p. 11Google Scholar.

³⁶ Early Malayalam kavya texts also give us the detailed descriptions about the presence of people from different lingual-scriptorial regions, within India and outside. Written between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, such texts indicate the multi-layered trading networks in medieval Kerala. See Veluthat, Kesavan, “Trade, Markets and Urbanism: Perceptions of Literature from Medieval Kerala”, Studies in People's History 2, 1 (2015), pp. 54–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Barbosa, Duarte, Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 147–148Google Scholar.

³⁸ Cohen, Bernard, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), p. 33Google Scholar.

³⁹ Rizvi, S. A. A., “Islamic Proselytisation”, in Religion in South Asia, (ed.) Oddie, G. A. (New Delhi, 1991)Google Scholar; Prakash, Om, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Agius, Classic Ships, p. 87.

⁴¹ Ayyar, K.V. Krishna, The Zamorins of Calicut (Calicut, 1938)Google Scholar. Similarly, Afanasy Nikitin, a fifteenth-century Russian trader who travelled in India was well versed in Arabic. He transliterated many polyglossic urban usages that were interspersed among Arabic, Persian and Turkish expressions, see Knezevic, Anto, “The Case of Afanasii Nikitin: Some Remarks about a Political Friendship”, Islamic Studies 33, 4 (1994), pp. 488–490Google Scholar.

⁴² The Travels of Ibn Batuta, pp. 170–171.

⁴³ Metcalf, Alida C., Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500–1600 (Austin, 2005), p. 32Google Scholar; Kurup, K. K. N., “Arabic Tradition in Kerala”, in Arabic in South India: Papers in Honour of Professor S. E. A. Nadvi, (ed.) Kutty, E. K. Ahmed (Calicut, 2003), p. 41Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Jeanne, Hein, “On the Way to the East-Portuguese Communications with Africans on the Sea Route to India”, in The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed, (ed.) Lamb, Ursula (New York, 1995), pp. 9–10Google Scholar; European traders carried with them Arabic letters of correspondence to begin the initial conversations with local rulers in the Indian Ocean littoral region, see Ayyar, The Zamorins, p. 140.

⁴⁵ Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Letters from Kannur”, pp. 115–125.

⁴⁶ Khaldun, Ibn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by Rosenthal, F., (ed.) Dawood, N. J. (London, 1967), p. 294Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ This article uses ‘agrarianate city’ and ‘agrarianate society’ to reflect the fact that the nature of economic transactions in pre-colonial Calicut was largely based on agricultural products and services rather than manufactured goods.

⁴⁸ Unniyachi Charitam, (ed.) Pillai, P. K. Narayana (Trivandrum, 1970), p. 34Google Scholar; Allah'r could be understood as the first specific localised expression with which the local people identified Muslims in the region before they came to be known as Mappilas.

⁴⁹ Hein, “On the Way to the East”, p. 9.

⁵⁰ In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta reflected on the increasing network of Islamic institutions and Islamic habitus around mosques and shrines across Malabar where native Muslims could not hold religious posts such as qadi and mufti. Most of these designated positions were kept by scholars from Oman, Baghdad and other such centres, see The Travels of Ibn Battuta.

⁵¹ Gibb and Beckingham, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, p. 165.

⁵² Tschacher, Islam in Tamilnadu, p. 3.

⁵³ The Travels of Ibn Battuta; apparently Battuta presumed that native Muslims did not have the required cognitive competence for holding any such theological and legal positions.

⁵⁴ Neeba, N. V., “Recognition of Malayalam Documents”, in Guide to OCR for Indic Scripts: Documents Recognition and Retrieval, (eds.), Govindaraju, Venu and Setlur, Srirangaraj (London, 2009), p. 128Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ A large number of such texts are preserved in the British Library and they include Chadaṅgu (sixteenth century), EAP584/1/4 Pt 2; Aśaucadīpīkā (sixteenth century), EAP584/1/5 Pt 2; and Tripura Stotra Vyakarana [sixteenth century AD], EAP208/13/4.

⁵⁶ Perczel, “Garshuni Malayalam”.

⁵⁷ For similar developments, see Rao, Velcheru Narayana, Text and Tradition in South India (Albani, 2016), pp. 81–82Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Hollmann, Thomas O., Chinese Script: History, Characters, Calligraphy (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ For such developments in the Jewish scribal sphere, see Wexler, Paul, “Jewish Inter Linguistics: Facts and Conceptual Frame Work”, Language 57, 1 (1981), p. 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ The Imperial Gazetteer of India: Bomjur to Central India, vol. 9 (Oxford, 1901), p. 289Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Graeme, H. S., Report on the Revenue Administration of Malabar, 1822, (ed.) Rejikumar, J. (Thiruvananthapuram, 2010), p. 37Google Scholar.

⁶² Letter from the Principal Collector of Malabar to the BOR, Settlement Report of Fusly, 1242 (1832/33) dated 15 January, Volume 4817 (1834), pp. 30–35.

⁶³ Ibid, p. 289.

⁶⁴ Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500–1650 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Miranda, Susana Munch, “Coping with Europe and the Empire, 1500–1620”, in An Agrarian History of Portugal, 1000–2000: Economic Development on the European Frontier, (eds.) Freire, Dulce and Lains, Pedro (Leiden, 2017), pp. 72–74Google Scholar; Barbosa makes many such exaggerated descriptions throughout his text, see Barbosa, Description, pp. 111–130.

⁶⁶ Barbosa, Description, p. 146; According to Varthema, the Mappila population was about 15,000 in the early-sixteenth century, far exceeding the description by Barbosa. Varthema's figure could be taken as exaggeration by a European who saw a considerable number of Muslims in a non-Islamic region, see Varthema, Ludovico di Varthema, p. 151. Similarly, the statement of Chinese traveller Ma Huan in the fifteenth century—“30,000 Muslims and more than twenty mosques”—also strains reality. Muslim traveller Abdu Razaq (fifteenth century), was closer to reality when he stated that there were only two mosques in the city and they were managed by a qadi and imam, and according to him the majority of the city population was non-Muslim.

⁶⁷ “In the interior of the country they (Mappilas) are very well provided with estates and farms”, see Barbosa, Description, p. 146.

⁶⁸ These texts included: Qadi Muhammed, Al Qutubat al Jihadiya, reprinted in Aydyuludiya wa Nnidal (Ideology and Struggle) (ed.) Kader, N. A. M. Abdul (Calicut, 2012)Google Scholar; Qaseedat-al-Jihadiya, reprinted in Aydyuludiya wa Nnidal (Ideology and Struggle), (ed.) Kader, N. A. M. Abdul (Calicut, 2012)Google Scholar; Qasidat-al-Fath-al-Mubeen (ed.) Aziz, Mankada Abdul (Calicut, 1996)Google Scholar; Zainuddin Makhdum I, Tahreel Ahl-al Imani ala-Jihadi Abdat-a-Ssulban, reprinted in Nadwi, Faisal Ahmed Bhaktali, Tehreek-e- Azadi me Ulema ka Kirdar: 1857se Pehele (Lucknow, 2003)Google Scholar; Makhdum, Zainuddin II, Tuhfat-al Mujahideen fi ba'd Akhbar al-Burtughaliyan, translated by Hamsa, C. (Calicut, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Arafath, P. K. Yasser, “Malayalam, Malabari and Arabi-Malayalam”, Madhyamam Weekly 21 (2018), pp. 36–49Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ VOC/OB 2310, MiD, fol.1218 vo), cited in Barendse, Rene J., Arabian Seas 1700–1763: The Western Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1 (Leiden, 2009), p. 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷² The second quarter of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the second wave of Arabi-Malayalam literarisation in the region with the writings of Kunjayin Musliayar (1700–86?), whose texts include Nool Madh (1737), Kappappattu (1750s) and Noolmala (1785) as mentioned above. See Moulavi and Kareem, Mahattaya Mappila, pp. 162–168; Hikmathulla, V., “Kunjayin Musliyarude Noolmala, Soofi Bhavanayude Prathalangal”, Thelicham Magazine 18, 5 (2017), pp. 30–33Google Scholar.

⁷³ Koya, Parappil Mammad, Kozhikotte Muslimklude Charitram (Calicut, 1994), p. 144Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ “Mutthum Manikyavum Onnayi Kotthapol, Muhiyuddin Malena Kottnan Jnan Lokare”, Muhiyuddinmala, p. 3.

⁷⁵ The polyglossic language in Malabar was known by different expressions and came to be established as ‘Malayalam’ in the early-eighteenth century. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, terms such as Malayazhma, Malayanma and Malayalma were used to categorise the language of Malabar. Barbosa described it as Maleama, an expression that came to his Lusophone tongue. The Hortus Malabaricus, another seventeenth-century text, indicates that the term ‘Malayalam’ was used interchangeably to denote the region of Kerala and its language, see Van Rhede, Hendrik, Horti Malabarici (Amsterdam, 1678)Google Scholar. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that Qadi Muhammed who lived in Calicut in the same century was unaware of these terms such as ‘Malayalam’ and Malayanma. Similarly, in the early-eighteenth century, Johann Ernst Hanxleden (Arnos Pathiri) used the term ‘Malayalam’ in his Vocabulario Malavarico (1732) a Portuguese-English dictionary, to indicate the region and its people while using ‘Malame’ for the language they spoke. For a detailed discussion about this development, see Arafath, ‘Malayalam, Malabari’, pp. 36–49. Therefore, this article uses ‘Malayalam’ as a colligatory lingual term to indicate the coastal language of the natives who called it by different names in the seventeenth century before it entered into the larger bracket of ‘Malayalam’ in the early-eighteenth century.

⁷⁶ Freeman, “Rubies and Coral”, p. 58.

⁷⁷ Miller, Roland, Mappila Muslims of Kerala: A Study in Islamic Trends (Madras, 1992), p. 289Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 14; Qadi's verse involving eshudukil, a polyglossic expression for the act of ‘writing’, clearly shows that he intended to caution the scribal section among Muslims who used Arabic-Malayalam script for non-pietistic engagements According to Qadi Muhammed, scriptorial mistakes would cost them the anger of God and the Saint.

⁷⁹ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 2

⁸⁰ Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 2–6.

⁸¹ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 3.

⁸² Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 1–5.

⁸³ For the concepts—‘alchemy’ and ‘sublimation’—I am largely indebted to Rajani Sudan whose recent work uses these terminologies while examining the ways in which British colonialism changed the meanings and characters of geographical territories, commodities and technologies in India over a period of time. Sudan argues that the British introduced a range of new meanings and changes through the acts of adaptation and strategic accommodation to strengthen their political and intellectual agenda in the eighteenth century. See Sudan, Rajani, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and Technologies of Colonialism (New York, 2016), pp. 10–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸⁷ Tschacher, Islam in Tamilnadu.

⁸⁸ Gamliel, Ophira, “Jewish Malayalam” and “Fading Memories and Linguistic Fossils in Jewish Malayalam”, in Oral History Meets Linguistics, (eds.) Kasten, Erich, Roller, Katja and Wilburn, Joshua (Havel, 2016), pp. 83–106Google Scholar.

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⁹⁰ I take my cue from Shahab Ahmed's terminology—“Balkans-to-Bengal”—to identify the geographical, lingual, political and religious connectedness operating between Malabar and Ma'bar from early medieval period, see Ahmed, Shahab, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), pp. 82–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The multiple connectivity which included theological, scholastic and maritime exchanges in the ‘Ma'bar to Malabar Complex’ became very crucial in the developments of Islamic religious institutions and textual traditions in the Indian Ocean region from the fifteenth century.

⁹¹ According to Ronit Ricci, literisation of Arabi-Tamil texts only began around the end of the seventeenth century and the reasons can be found in vernacular scholars’ strong familiarity with Tamil script, unlike Muslim scholars in Malabar, see Ricci, Ronit, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and The Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago, 2011), p. 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁹³ Pollock, Sheldon, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500”, Daedalus 127 (1998), p. 41Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ For the regionalisation of Malayalam language, see Ramakrishnan, E. V., “Language, Power and Ideology: The Changing Contexts of Bhasha in India”, in Language Policy and Education in India: Documents, Contexts and Debates, (eds.) Sridhar and Mishra, Sunita (Oxford, 2017), pp. 57–58Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Scholars have paid very little attention to the Portuguese genocidal violence in various Indian Ocean regions. It is only very recently that historians have started engaging with the genocidal aspects of the Portuguese violence in Malabar and connected places such as Mecca, see Arafath, “Malabar Ulema”, pp. 25–68; Kooria, Mahmood, “Killed the Hajj-pilgrims and Persecuted Them: Portuguese Estado da India's Encounters with Hajj Pilgrimage, Sixteenth Century”, in The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, (ed.) Ryad, Umar (Leiden, 2017)Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ According to Varthema, the city of Calicut “was ruined by the king of Portugal”, see The Travels of Ludovico, p. 178; a decade later Barbosa agreed that “after that the King of Portugal made himself master there, and these Moors [pardesi] saw that they could not defend it, they began to leave the country, and little by little they went away from it, so that very few of them remain”, Descriptions, p. 147.

⁹⁷ Rao, Velcheru Narayana, “Purana as Brhamanic Ideology”, in Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts, (ed.) Doniger, Wendy (Albany, 1993), p. 95Google Scholar; also see Orsini, Francesca and Schofield, Katherine Butler (eds.), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Busch, Allison, “Hidden in Plain View: Braj Bhasha Poets at the Mughal Court”, Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010), p. 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁰⁰ Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 4–12.

¹⁰¹ For this debate, see Foucault, Michel, “What is An Author”, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, (ed.) F.Bouchard, Donald (Ithaka, 1997), p. 134Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Ibid, p. 124.

¹⁰³ Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 5–6.

¹⁰⁴ Qadi informs the readers that the Sufi was qualified to ensure the protection of Muslims and “God addresses the sufi as the supreme succor” (Avannam Allah Fadachavan Thaan Thanne, Ya Gawzul Ennu Allah Vilichovar), Muhiyiddeenmala, p. 3.

¹⁰⁵ Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 5–12.

¹⁰⁶ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 6.

¹⁰⁷ Naregal, Veena, “Colonial Bilingualism and Hierarchies of Language and Power”, Economic and Political Weekly 34, 49 (1999), pp. 3446–3456Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 12.

¹⁰⁹ Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 8–10.

¹¹⁰ “May Allah bless those who utter it, may Allah bless those who sing and hear this Muhiyuddinmala”, Muhiyuddinmala, p. 14.

¹¹¹ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 14.

¹¹² Foucault, “What is an Author”, p. 131.

¹¹³ Qadi refers to the intuitive teaching methods of Jilani who, according to him, made deep impact on Muslims through his hortatory speaking methods like wa'ad, Muhiyuddinmala, pp. 8–9. It is to be noted that Qadi himself wrote many hortatory texts like Al Qutubat al Jihadiya (Calicut, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹¹⁴ For Islamic religious public sphere, see Eickelman, Dale F., “The Religious Public Sphere in Early Muslim Societies”, in The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies, (eds.) Hoexter, Miriam, Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Levtzion, Nahemia (Albany, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹¹⁵ Makhdum, Zainuddin I, Manqus Mawlid, translated by Baqavi, Muhammed (Tirurangadi, 2014)Google Scholar; also see Arafath, Malabar Ulema, pp. 48–49.

¹¹⁶ Mawlawi, Muhammed, Khil'at-ul Jamal fi Tarjamati al-Manqus (Thirurangadi, 1927)Google Scholar; Mawlid Manqus, (ed.) Ahmed, P. Kunji (Telicherry, 1875)Google Scholar; Mawlid Manqus, (ed.), Abu, N. (Telicherry, 1883)Google Scholar; all these versions have been preserved in the Asian and African Reading Room, British Library, and I accessed them in 2017.

¹¹⁷ al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, Mabadi ara ahl al-Madina al-fadila, translated by Walzer, Richard, Al-Farabi on The Perfect State (Oxford, 1985), pp. 201–245Google Scholar.

¹¹⁸ Foucault, “What is An Author”, p. 127.

¹¹⁹ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 3.

¹²⁰ Foucault, “What is An Author”, pp. 126–127.

¹²¹ Muhiyuddinmala, p. 8.

¹²² Green, Nile, “The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge Between Person and Paper”, Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010), pp. 241–265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²³ Qadi Muhammed, Fath-al-Mubeen, p. 32

¹²⁴ Koya, Mammad, Kozhikotte Muslimklude (Calicut, 1994), pp. 144–145Google Scholar.

¹²⁵ Hanaoka, Mimi, Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries (New York, 2016), p. 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁶ Green, “The Uses of Books”, p. 244.

¹²⁷ Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar for the Years 1849–53 (Madras, 1863)Google Scholar, India Office Library, V/3212, p. 251.

¹²⁸ Moplah Outrages, p. 251.

¹²⁹ This author has collected the copies published in the years 1874, 1875, and 1876.

¹³⁰ Foucault, “What is an Author”, p. 132.

¹³¹ Emmanuel Kant, one of the foremost German philosophers of the Enlightenment, points out such necessary interpretation of history based on probabilities and human experiences in order to explain certain historical period and incidents. See Kant, Emmanuel, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, translated by Humphrey, Ted (Indianapolis, 1983), pp. 49–51Google Scholar.

¹³² Werner, A., “The Languages of Africa”, Journal of the Royal African Society 12, 46 (1913), p. 121Google Scholar.

¹³³ Concerns about religious and pietistic transgressions were already expressed in the last quarter of the sixteenth century as the ulema were aware of the influences that the local rituals and normative practices had on a huge majority of the Mappilas, see Makhdum, Zainuddin II, Fath-al-Muin, (trans.) Faizi, Abdul Majeed. (Calicut: 1575/2012), p. 429Google Scholar.

¹³⁴ Dimock, Wai Chee, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122, 5 (2007), pp. 1377–1388CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³⁵ Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (Massachusetts, 1995), p. 35Google Scholar.

¹³⁶ For such constitutive traits, see Tzvetan Todorov and Richard M Berrong, “The Origin of Genres”, New Literary History 8, 1. Readers and Spectators: Some Views and Reviews (1976), pp. 159–170.

¹³⁷ To identify how such changes get reflected in literary genre and lyrical texts, see, ibid, pp. 161–163.

¹³⁸ Arafath, P. K. Yasser, “Malappattukal: Charitram, Rashtreeyam Pradhirotham”, Bodhanam Quarterly Journal 15, 13 (2014), pp. 67–91Google Scholar.

¹³⁹ For such interconnected acts, see, Ragab, Ahmed, Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam (New York, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; a number of mala texts and their performances continue to play important roles in shaping the moral and religious life of the Mappilas in contemporary Malabar, see Muneer, A.K., “Poetics of Piety: Genre, Self-Fashioning and the Mappila Lifescape”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3 (2015), pp. 1–19Google Scholar.