THE MOSQUES AND THEIR STORIES “In the end, stories are what’s left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist.” Salman Rushdie “The good storyteller tells his story…One of these mornings, the old storyteller will not wake up. But someone of those who hears his stories will tell them to others. And later this someone will also die, and the stories will stay alive as long as there are big houses and people gathered around the fire.” Eduardo Galeano
Before discussing the individual mosques, it is helpful to consider the role of stories and oral histories. All of the mosques in this book have long chronicles with uncertain and varied building dates. A sixteenth century date can be expanded back in time to the fourteenth century; one authority may claim an eighteenth century building while another puts the construction earlier. Dates in old documents refer to the Malayalam or Islamic calendar, rarely the Western calendar. For centuries there was no written history in Cochin. Even the carved inscriptions can be interpreted in various ways, some are judged illegible. The European colonialists who wrote about or documented the area barely mentioned Mattancherry, the ‘native’ area south of the Fort Cochin settlement. The world of the native settlement was too complicated and too ‘foreign’ for the Europeans. Today, one member of a mosque gives one version of history while another recounts an altered version. The mosque we see today may have been rebuilt several times. Pieces of its past not immediately visible linger in the handed down stories. Even the history of Islam in Malabar is given varied interpretations. Because Islam so peacefully entered the life of the coast, its early arrival was discounted by major historians. Recently, more and more research points to the arrival of Islam on Malabar’s shores shortly after the lifetime of the Prophet. Logically, mosques would have been constructed from an early date. A mosque we see today may have had many antecedents, pieces of which could be visible in walls and foundations. At other sites, the remnants of older mosques have completely vanished. In India, the Western version of historic preservation is an alien concept. Instead, until contemporary times, there was a tradition of continuity in building practices, especially as they related to religious structures. A temple could be rebuilt to maintain the spirit of the original, using the same conventions of construction. Since the materials and methods remained similar, 26
