Scholarly exiles in Mecca – approaching a political practice of the Mughal court

This paper builds on a growing Indian Ocean historiography to explore political entanglements between Mecca and Medina with the Mughal imperial dispensation and its scholarly Muslim communities. As Michael Pearson noted in his Pilgrimage to Mecca. The Indian Experience, 1500-1800, Mughal Emperors and other South Asian sultans sent courtiers, family members, scholars, and professionals on the hajj and ‘into exile’ to Mecca over the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. While recent scholarship on South Asia by Ronit Ricci (2019) has explored Lanka/Ceylon as a place ‘banishment and belonging’ practices of exiling political protagonists remain largely unexplored in the context of the early modern western Indian Ocean. I will study the practice of exiling scholarly and professional elites from the Mughal court to Mecca and Medina and how this positioned scholarly communities in the holy cities vis-à-vis the Mughal court in political, religious and intellectual networks.

In particular, I want to start exploring ‘exile in Mecca’ as a political practice, how and to what end early modern South Asian rulers performed it, and what effects this had on Mecca and courtly politics in the subcontinent. Persian chronicles composed at those courts offer us one perspective on this practice. Arabic chronicles and collective biographies penned in the Hijaz and the subcontinent provide another view. Anecdotal evidence from biographical dictionaries of the period suggests that scholars, for example, often chose Mecca as a place of refuge when relationships with their patrons declined or turned sour. Sending courtiers on hajj to Mecca was probably also an offer that a Muslim servant could not easily refuse. However, it is not clear so far what meaning this practice had in the period, how it affected the scholarly community at the court, and what those exiles got up to in Mecca.

Christopher Bahl is Associate Professor in South Asian History at Durham University, UK. He is particularly interested in the political, social, and intellectual histories of Muslim communities in early modern South Asia and their links with communities across the western Indian Ocean region. His first monograph, entitled Mobile manuscripts – Arabic learning across the early western Indian Ocean was published in 2025. He is currently working on a new book project that studies the history of an ‘Indian community’ in Mecca and Medina from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

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After Christopher’s talk we will be heading to SPARK for an informal meal. Please email if you would like a seat in the taxi.