Historian reframes Malabar: Hindu ruler led Muslim communities

In an intellectual landscape often shaped by binaries, historian Dr. Abbas Panakkal offers a strikingly different lens.

- MURTAZA ALI KHAN

His latest book, Hindu Amir of Muslims, revisits the Indian Ocean world with a focus on Malabar, mostly drawing on archival material, literary sources, and social history, Panakkal, a historian currently affiliated with the University of Surrey and the University of Birmingham, reconstructs a past in which communities did not just tolerate each other, but actively collaborated, negotiated, and co-created shared worlds.

At the heart of his work is a nuanced argument: that the Hindu ruler, the Zamorin of Calicut, functioned in a role akin to an “Amir” for Muslim communities—an interpretation that invites a rethinking of conventional assumptions about religious authority and identity.

“The title challenges a longstanding assumption,” Panakkal explains. “That the leader—or Amir—of a Muslim community must be Muslim. In Malabar, historical records show that the Zamorin of Calicut, a non-Muslim king, effectively operated as the central authority recognized even within Muslim social and military hierarchies.”

This was not a symbolic arrangement but a deeply institutional one. Muslim leaders, Panakkal notes, “acknowledged his authority, received his patronage, and defended his rule.” Such a configuration points to what he calls the “indigenisation” of Islam—a process through which religious life adapts to local political and cultural ecosystems rather than remaining tethered to distant centres.