Being in the sea:

Khoja thought and the Indian Ocean

Taushif Kara

This paper attempts to recover a theory of the sea from the archives of one of the Indian Ocean’s many peripatetic communities: the Khojas. While most research on the Khojas and similar trading groups like the Bohras or Baniyas tends to focus on their economic impetus and interests, this paper foregrounds methods from the history of ideas and comparative political thought. It begins with the proposition that the stark binary between land and sea articulated by the jurist Carl Schmitt might echo classical oppositions in Muslim thought, where land referred to form and particularity and sea to formlessness and universality. Drawing on a rich archive of the community’s poetry and literary aesthetics, I suggest that Khoja thinking sought to break these oppositions and instead tried to forge a subject that was not trapped between the universal and the particular but was formed at the very moment of their mutual destruction. The paper theorises out from several oceanic concepts or metaphors deployed in Khoja poetry, the most important of which is samudhra (convergence, confluence). The concept, often used to describe the moment of arrival at shore or the phenomenon of one wave crashing into another, was also directly associated with enlightenment, and thus quite literally linked freedom with the merging of waters at any scale. I conclude by suggesting that this Khoja theory of the sea resonates quite clearly with recent invocations of planetarity, which also tries to interrupt and indeed destroy the space between the universal and the particular.

Taushif Kara is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies and a member of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge. He studies the intellectual history of the Indian Ocean world and is particularly interested in Muslim and Indian political thought in the moments before and after decolonization. Kara obtained his PhD from the Faculty of History at Cambridge in 2021 with a dissertation on the modern intellectual history of the Khoja diaspora (ca. 1866 – 1972), which he is currently revising into a monograph for publication. His research has appeared in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2020) and Global Intellectual History (2021), for which he co-edited a special issue on the political thinking of Muslim minorities.

The Ocean in Yoruba (Southwest Nigeria) Cosmology:

Making Sense of its Symbolic Manifestations

Oluwafunminiyi Raheem

Among the Yoruba who are predominantly located in southwest Nigeria, the ocean known locally as Okun holds very symbolic meanings. In Yoruba myth, the ocean is believed to be the first earthly creation of Olodumare (Yoruba Surpeme Being) whose remnant (now a holy well) can be found in Ile-Ife, the famed home of the Yoruba. Directly associated with the ocean is the important primordial female numen or deity called Olokun (one who owns or governs the ocean). This deity is revered for her purity and because she possesses material wealth, worldly treasures, psychic abilities and water-based healing. She is also known for her child-bearing power. In other words, the Yoruba imagine, understand and make sense of the ocean beyond its fluid manifestation as a sacred body where rhythmic forms of religious and ritual practices are actuated. The origin and emergence of the ocean are not only steeped in interesting local myths and traditions, linked to this myth is the Yoruba story of creation, on the one hand, and the evolution of Ilé-Ifẹ itself as a sacred cosmos, on the other hand. Based on oral sources, participant-observation and extant literature, I examine the diverse manifestations of the ocean, with a focus on Ile-Ife, first as a powerful primordial water deity, second as a symbol of wealth, commerce and industry, and third as a holy well. I argue that the ocean in Yoruba cosmology retains archival evidence of a living agency that sustains life and holds therapeutic qualities that are capable of human well-being.

Oluwafunminiyi RAHEEM is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding, Osogbo, Nigeria. He is also a doctoral student in the Department of History and International Studies, University of Ilorin, where he is completing his thesis on the African context of holy wells in the Yoruba towns of Ile-Ife and Ondo, southwest Nigeria. Raheem’s research interests intersect many themes within African studies among which include Sacred Water Bodies (Holy Wells); Social and Cultural History; Yoruba Islam and Yoruba Belief Systems; Gender and Contemporary Popular Culture. His recent publication is titled: “Folk Liturgies and Narratives of Holy Wells among the Yoruba (Southwest Nigeria)”, Ethnological Tribune: Journal of Croatian Ethnological Society (Special Issues edited by Celeste Ray), Vol. 51, No. 44, 2021.