Gujarati Muslims

Gujarati Muslims
Regions with significant populations
India, Pakistan, United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Madagascar
 India5,800,000[1]
 Pakistan3,500,000[2]
Religions
Islam
Languages
Gujarati, Urdu, Kutchi[3]
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The term Gujarati Muslim is usually used to signify an Indian Muslim from the state of Gujarat on the western coast of India. Most Gujarati Muslims have the Gujarati language as their mother tongue, but some communities have Urdu as their mother tongue.[4] The majority of Gujarati Muslims are Sunni, with a minority of Shia groups.

Gujarati Muslims are very prominent in industry and medium-sized businesses and there is a very large Gujarati Muslim community in Mumbai and Karachi.[5][6] Having earned a formidable accolade as India's greatest seafaring merchants,[7] the centuries-old Gujarati diaspora is found scattered throughout the Near East, Indian Ocean and Southern Hemisphere regions everywhere in between Africa and Japan with a notable presence in:[8] Hong Kong,[9] Britain, Portugal, Canada, Réunion,[10] Oman,[11] Yemen,[12] Mozambique,[13] Zanzibar,[14] United Arab Emirates, Burma,[15] Madagascar,[16] South Africa, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Pakistan, Zambia and East Africa.

Throughout the medieval period, Gujarati Muslim merchants played a pivotal role in establishing Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia.[17]

  1. ^ "Census of India Website: Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India". www.censusindia.gov.in. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  2. ^ "Karachi's Gujarati speaking youth strive to revive Jinnah's language". Arab news. 2 October 2018. Retrieved 2 October 2018.
  3. ^ "Gujarātī". Omniglot: online encyclopaedia of writing systems and languages. Retrieved 3 May 2014.
  4. ^ Indian Census 2001 - Religion Archived 12 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Patel, Sujata; Masselos, Jim, eds. (2003). Bombay and Mumbai: the city in transition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-566317-9.
  6. ^ Laurent Gayer (2014). Karachi: ordered disorder and the struggle for the city. Oxford University Press. p. 300. ISBN 978-0-19-935444-3. Retrieved 11 February 2015. Out of Pakistan's forty-two largest industrial groups, thirty-six were in the hands of Karachi-based businessmen - generally members of the Gujarati/Kutchi/Kathiawari trading sects, both Sunni (Memon) and Shia (Khojas, Bohras, etc.) Whereas they accounted for 0.4 per cent of Pakistan's total population, Gujarati trading groups (they are considered Muhajir since many of their members were already settled in Karachi before the independence) controlled 43 per cent of the country's industrial capital. Halai Memons alone (0.3 per cent of the national population) owned 27 per cent of these industries. And while he patronised Pashtun entrepreneurs in Karachi, Ayub Khan also relied upon Gujarati businessmen to finance his electoral campaign in 1964, while facilitating the entry into politics of some Muhajir entrepreneurs, such as Sadiq Dawood, a Memon industrialist who became an MNA, and the Treasurer of Ayub's Convention Muslim League.
  7. ^ Peck, Amelia (2013). Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-58839-496-5. Retrieved 4 February 2015. Of the Asian trading communities the most successful were the Gujaratis, as witnessed not only by Pires and Barbosa but by a variety of other sources. All confirm that merchants from the Gujarati community routinely held the most senior post open to an expatriate trader, that of shah-bandar (controller of maritime trade).
  8. ^ "Where on earth do they speak Gujarati?". Retrieved 29 January 2014.
  9. ^ Robert Bickers, ed. (2000). New frontiers: imperialism's new communities in East Asia, 1842-1953 (1. publ. ed.). Manchester [u.a.]: Manchester Univ. Press. p. 67. ISBN 0-7190-5604-7. The 1889 Hong Kong Directory and Hong List for the Far East lists three Sindhi firms in Hong Kong among a total of thirty-one firms, of which the majority were Parsi and Gujarati Muslim.
  10. ^ Nandita Dutta. "An Indian Reunion". littleindia.com. Archived from the original on 16 July 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2015. Raziah Locate is a manager in a hospitality school. Her grandfather Omarjee Ismael embarked on a voyage with his wife in 1870 from Kathor, near Surat, in Gujarat. He came to Reunion Island to seek better opportunities to further his trade in clothing. Her grandfather was one of the 40,000 merchants, traders and artisans from Gujarat who are said to have voluntary migrated to Reunion Island starting in the 1850s. Her grandfather was one of the pioneers who paved the way for other Gujarati Muslims to settle in Reunion, who have built a mosque and a madrasa on the island.
  11. ^ Hugh Eakin (14 August 2014). "In the Heart of Mysterious Oman". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 5 February 2015.
  12. ^ Nafeesa Syeed (24 September 2012). "Learning Gujarati in Yemen". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 9 February 2015. Mr. Haji, clad in the gold-trimmed, white cap that is standard for Bohra men, was in a flurry on a recent Friday, as he catered to streams of constituents and answered phone calls. He slid effortlessly between Arabic, Urdu, English and Dawat ni zabaan—a strain of Gujarati particular to Bohras that is peppered with Arabic and Persian. He explained that they have other shrines in Yemen, but this is one of the most important. Some 10,000 Bohras, mostly from India but also from their populations in Pakistan, East Africa, the United States, Europe and the Middle East, travel here each year.
  13. ^ Nazar Abbas (9 January 2014). "Pakistanis who have never seen Pakistan". The Friday Times. Retrieved 9 February 2015. After ties broke down between India and Portugal, Gujarati Muslims stranded in Mozambique were given Pakistani citizenship...Merchants from Diu had settled on the island of Mozambique in the early 1800s. Hindus from Diu, Sunni Muslims from Daman, and others from Goa migrated to Mozambique as small traders, construction workers and petty employees. Many Gujaratis moved from South Africa to Mozambique in the latter half of the 19th century.
  14. ^ Ababu Minda Yimene (2004). An African Indian Community in Hyderabad: Siddi Identity, Its Maintenance and Change. Cuvillier Verlag. pp. 66, 67. ISBN 3-86537-206-6. Retrieved 4 February 2015. Some centuries later, the Gujarati merchants established permanent trading posts in Zanzibar, consolidating their influence in the Indian Ocean... Gujarati Muslims, and their Omani partners, engaged in a network of mercantile activities among Oman, Zanzibar and Bombay. Thanks to those mercantile Gujarati, India remained by far the principal trading partner of Zanzibar.
  15. ^ Dr Asghar Ali Engineer. "Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and recent riots - an Aman Report". Centre for study of society and secularism. Archived from the original on 9 February 2015. Retrieved 9 February 2015. Lot of Muslims had gone from Surat and still there is a beautiful Surti mosque. Muslims in Myanmar are highly diverse. There are very few ethnic Burmese Muslims, most of them are migrants from different parts of India when Burma was a part of India. There are large number of Tamil, Gujarati and Bengali and Bohra Muslims and very few Urdu speaking Muslims since Urdu speaking are not in business.
  16. ^ Pedro Machado (6 November 2014). Ocean of Trade. Cambridge University Press. p. 232. ISBN 978-1-107-07026-4. Gujarati merchants may also have financed slave voyages to Madagascar in the nineteenth century. They sailed to its west coast from the mid 1810s to the mid 1820s but do not appear to have become extensively involved in this trafficking, either as shippers or as financiers. This is likely explained by the increasing presence in coastal Madagascar of Khoja and Bohra Shi'ia merchants from Kutch who, together with the Bhatiya merchants, established a significant presence there as financiers of the slave trade from the second decade of the nineteenth century.
  17. ^ Prabhune, Tushar (27 December 2011). "Gujarat helped establish Islam in SE Asia". The Times of India. Ahmedabad.