Mishkal Mosque: An ode to pluralism

When Nakhuda Mithqal, a Yemeni merchant trading with China and Persia, built what is today called the Mishkal Mosque in Kozhikode, little did he envision the significance this structure would assume over 600 years later as a testament to India’s pluralism. For while the going fallacy presents the subcontinent’s inaugural encounter with Islam as a resounding clash featuring blood and war, Mishkal is a reminder that the Prophet’s religion arrived in our land through peaceful embassies of commerce. Indeed, not only was Islam welcomed and embraced in the south, but the first mosque was consecrated on Indian shores in 629 AD, during the very lifetime of Muhammad, nearly a century before invaders forced their way into Sindh and opened a different kind of history in the north.

That ancient mosque still stands in Kodungallur, but it was in Kozhikode that Nakhuda chose to build his monument. By the 13th century, this Kerala port had emerged as one of the world’s great trading cities, and its Hindu rulers—the Zamorins—persuaded every fisherman to raise one son as a Muslim to sail in the eastern seas—Hindus lost caste if they ventured too far into the ocean. The Zamorin’s allies included the sultan of Egypt, the Ottoman Turks and the Deccani Shahs, whom he implored in the 16th century to declare jihad against the Portuguese reign of terror in international waters. Nakhuda was a celebrated merchant in the Zamorin’s capital and the Moroccan Ibn Battuta wrote of his tremendous wealth in his famous travelogue in the 1300s. Mishkal, and a Jami mosque, remain even today two of the city’s most important places of worship.

Kozhikode was reputed for absorbing all kinds of people and cultures. As late as the 17th century, “merchants from all parts of the world, and of all nations", lived there by “reason of the liberty and security accorded to them" and in “free exercise" of their faiths. While Arabs enjoyed overwhelming influence here, Jews controlled much of the commerce in Kochi, while further south in Kollam, Christians were in charge. And they all built sites of worship that were not only embodiments of devotion, but also ideals of cultural cross-pollination. The old Syrian Christian church in Chengannur, for instance, resembles the Hindu temples of its time, and the rites and rituals of all religions were influenced by those of their counterparts with whom they were in constant conversation.

Mishkal, for instance, is firm in its commitment to Islam—there has been a qazi here since 1343—but so, too, is it firm in its union with the land where it stands. Painted in turquoise blue, the structure has no dome and no minarets but multi-tiered gables and the tiled roof typical of Kerala buildings. Its 47 doors and 24 carved pillars display the workmanship of the same guilds that constructed the Zamorin palaces, and the exquisite motifs on the minbar from where the message of god is preached bears a direct affinity to the carvings adorning Hindu temples. The structure is set on a base of stone and steps run around the building where up to 1,000 faithful have gathered at a time for centuries and bowed to distant Mecca. Kerala, after all, had greater intercourse with Arabia than it did with even parts of India.

It was the Portuguese who introduced conflict into this universe. When Vasco da Gama arrived in Kozhikode in 1498, an Arab exclaimed, “The devil take thee! What brings you here?" It was a quest for Christians and spices that motivated the Portuguese, besides their economic ambition to displace Arabs from control of capital and the seas. The Zamorin refused to expel Muslims from his city as was presumptuously demanded, so the Portuguese disrupted trade. A ship full of Muslim pilgrims was burnt (after it was plundered, of course), and a Brahmin envoy was sent back with a dog’s ears sewed on. The Portuguese had no stake in peace.

Mishkal features significantly in a 1510 confrontation between the Portuguese and Kozhikode. The Zamorin and his forces were engaged elsewhere and the Portuguese arrived with 1,800 men to sack his capital. One commander, it is recorded, “forced his way with impetuous valour through the streets…and reached the royal residence". But while he proceeded to ransack the palace, leaving not even two bejewelled doors in their frame, a (possibly exaggerated) force of 30,000 men descended upon the city for its defence. The enemy made to retreat, but locals occupied the roofs and “poured upon (them) a continued shower of darts; while (the invaders) entangled in narrow lanes and avenues, could neither advance nor recede". By the time the white men reached the beach, hundreds were dead, including the over-bold commander.

The Zamorin, on his return, was furious. The Portuguese had set fire to the city and destroyed Mishkal. The ruler didn’t forget the insult. In 1570, generations after this episode, his heirs succeeded in demolishing completely a fort the Portuguese raised in Chaliyam, “leaving," a contemporary recorded, “not one stone upon another". All these stones and the wood from Chaliyam were carried into Kozhikode and placed in the yard at Mishkal for the mosque—the structure we see today, over five centuries later, still bears marks from the assault of 1510, but also features walls and doors made from material seized from the Portuguese who assaulted it in the first place.

Today, amid talk about consecrating a Hindu temple upon the ruins of a violently destroyed mosque, perhaps it would be worth reflecting on Mishkal, where a Hindu king reconstructed a Muslim place of worship, and avenged those who were not followers of his faith but were still his people. The Portuguese brought blood and hate into their world, but together this Hindu king and his Muslim subjects chose a greater ideal, preserving in Mishkal both a house of god as well as a timeless principle.

Medium Rare is a weekly column on society, politics and history. Manu S. Pillai is the author of The Ivory Throne: Chronicles Of The House Of Travancore.