Malabar Muslims

Malabar Muslims or Muslim Mappilas are members of the Muslim community found predominantly in Kerala state and the Lakshadweep islands in Southern India. The term Mappila is used to describe Malabar Muslims in Northern Kerala. Muslims share the common language of Malayalam with the other religious communities of Kerala.
According to some scholars, the Malabar Muslims are the oldest settled native Muslim community in South Asia. In general, a Muslim Mappila is a descendant of Hindu lower caste natives who converted to Islam. Mappilas are but one among the many communities that form the Muslim population of Kerala. No census report where the Muslim communities are mentioned separately is available.
The Muslim community originated primarily as a result of West Asian contacts with Kerala, which was fundamentally based upon commerce. As per local tradition, Islam reached the Malabar Coast and Kerala as early as the 7th century AD. Before being overtaken by the Europeans in the spice trade, Malabar Muslims were a prosperous trading community, settling mainly in the coastal urban centres of Kerala. The continuous interaction of Mappilas with the Middle East has created a profound impact on their life, customs, and culture. This has resulted in the formation of a unique Indo-Islamic synthesis—within the large spectrum of Kerala culture—in literature, art, food, language, and music.
Most Muslims in Kerala follow the Shafi'i school, while a large minority follow movements such as Salafism. Contrary to a popular misconception, the caste system, like in other parts of South Asia, does exist among the Muslims of Kerala. A number of different communities, some of them having distant ethnic roots, exist as status groups in Kerala. Among the Mappilas, there are numerous social groups. Various factors such as intermarriage, migration and conversion had led to creation of these groups, these groups were Sayyids, Keyis, Baramis, Themims, Pusalars, and Ossans found in different regions of Kerala.

Terminology

The name Mappila, otherwise transliterated as Māppila or Moplah, is a straightforward transliteration of the contemporary Malayalam lexeme. Although its etymology is not established, it is usually assumed to have originally been an honorific, created by combining mahā with piḷḷa.
Traditionally, the name was given to foreign visitors and immigrants, including Christian, Jews and Muslim as "Nazrane Mappila" and "Juda Mappila", respectively, either as a general term of respect or in a technical sense to mean "bridegroom" or "son-in-law." The second sense implies a practice of intermarriage, a reading which is supported by current vernacular usage in Malayalam and Tamil dialects.
Other hypotheses, including those of an Arabic etymology, have been proposed, but are not generally accepted. Mappila later became a name for the native Muslim community of Malabar, although it is still used sporadically of Syrian Christians who live in South Kerala.

Demographics and distribution

Demographics

According to the 2011 census, about one-quarter of Kerala's population are Muslims. The calculated Muslim population in Kerala state is 88,73,472. The number of Muslims in rural areas is only 42,51,787, against an urban population of 46,21,685.

Distribution

The number of Muslims is particularly high in the northern Kerala. Mappilas are also found in Lakshadweep islands in the Arabian Sea. The Mappilas inhabiting the islands of Androth, Kavaratti, Agatti and Kalpeni in the Lakshadweep were descended from Hindu migrants from the mainland who had converted to Islam in the fourteenth century. A small number of Malayali Muslims have settled in the southern districts of Karnataka, while the scattered presence of the community in major cities of India can also be seen. When the British supremacy on Malabar District was established, many Mappilas were recruited for employment in plantations in Burma, Assam and for manual labor in South East Asian concerns of the British Empire. Diaspora groups of Mappilas are also found in Singapore and Malaysia. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of Muslims have left Kerala to seek employment in the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
The 2011 Census of India collected data on the district-wise distribution of the Muslim population.

District	Total Pop	Muslims	% of Pop	% of Muslims
Kasargod	1,307,375	486,913	37.24%	5.49%
Kannur	2,523,003	742,483	29.43%	8.37%
Wayanad	817,420	234,185	28.65%	2.64%
Kozhikode	3,086,293	1,211,131	39.24%	13.65%
Malappuram	4,112,920	2,888,849	70.24%	32.56%
Palakkad	2,809,934	812,936	28.93%	9.16%
Thrissur	3,121,200	532,839	17.07%	6.00%
Ernakulam	3,282,388	514,397	15.67%	5.80%
Idukki	1,108,974	82,206	7.41%	0.93%
Kottayam	1,974,551	126,499	6.41%	1.43%
Alappuzha	2,127,789	224,545	10.55%	2.53%
Pathanamthitta	1,197,412	55,074	4.60%	0.62%
Kollam	2,635,375	508,500	19.30%	5.73%
Thiruvananthapuram	3,301,427	452,915	13.72%	5.10%
All districts	33,406,061	8,873,472	26.56%	100.0%

Portuguese distinctions

The Muslims present in Kerala were distinguished by the Portuguese historians into two groups:

Mouros da Terra.
Mouros da Arabia/Mouros de Meca.

The latter, also known as the "Paradesi Muslims", in fact came from all over the Islamic world. They included Arabs, Persians, Egyptians, Turks, Iraqis, Gujaratis, Khorasanis and Deccanis. These Muslims were not unsettled navigators but had settled in Kerala. Historians hold differing views on the origin of the Mappila community, with no consensus on the matter. A Mappila is either,

A descendant of any native convert to Islam
A descendant of a marriage alliance between a Middle Eastern individual and a native low caste woman

According to Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese commercial agent, Mappilas were an indigenous Muslim community and displayed cultural affinity with Hindu castes like Nayars. He also made a distinction between them and Pardeshis, who were mostly wealthy expatriate Arab merchants and not permanent residents of Kerala.
Stephen Dale states that Barbosa accurately "identified the two aspects of Muslim-Hindu social relations," which were the primary causes of the growth of Muslim society in later centuries when the number of Arab traders had dwindled with the arrival of the Portuguese and other European powers in the Indian Ocean. These two aspects were conversion and intermarriage, he argued that "the Heathen, if displeased with anything at all, become Moors." He also noted the frequency of multiple marriages among Muslims and their concubinage of lower-caste women as having served as the genesis of a local Malayalam speaking Mappila society.
Till the 16th century, as noticed by the contemporary observers, Muslims settled mainly along the coastal tracts of Kerala, Cannanore, Tanore, Funan, Cochin and Quilon ). They were traditionally elite merchants who were all part of the brisk foreign trade. Until well into the European period, the Muslims were almost exclusively concentrated in the port cities. Middle Eastern sailors had to rely on lighterage at most of the Kerala ports in the medieval period. This led them to enter into mutually beneficial relationships with the traditional sea fishermen community. A large majority of fishermen, once low-caste Hindus, in northern Kerala now follow Islam.

Inland Growth

According to Dale, the "great majority" of conversions to Islam "must have come from lower castes," as lower castes, feeling degraded by the caste system, had the most reasons to convert, corroborating Zayn al-Din al-Malibari's attribution of conversion as the reason behind the rapid growth of Muslim settlements on the Malabar Coast. After and during the Portuguese period, some of the Muslim merchants were forced to turn inland in search of alternative occupations to commerce. Some acquired land and became landowners and some became agricultural labourers. Between 16th and 20th centuries, the collective Mappila numbers increased rapidly in Malabar and Travancore and Kochi regions, chiefly by the conversion among the lower and 'outcaste' Hindu groups of the South Malabar interior. The peak of the Muslim distribution in Kerala had gradually shifted to the interior Malabar District. William Logan, comparing the Census Reports of 1871 and 1881, famously concluded that within ten years some 50,000 people from the Cheruma community converted to Islam. Muslim growth in the 20th century has considerably outpaced that of the general Kerala population due to higher birth rates.

British distinctions

During the British period the so-called Mappila Outbreaks, c. 1836–1921 led the officials to make and maintain a distinction between the interior Mappilas and the 'respectable' Mappila traders of the coastal cities, such as Calicut. The two other regional groupings are the high-status Muslim families of Cannanore in North Malabar — arguably converts from high caste Hindus — and the Muslims of Travancore and Cochin. The Colonial administrates also kept a distinction between coastal and inland Mappilas of the South Malabar.

Thangals – at the top were the aristocratic Tangals, who claim descent from the family of Muhammad.
Landed Aristocracy - the Arabis were followed by the landed aristocracy, centred on Cannanore, North Malabar, arguably converts from high caste Hindus.
Lastly, there were the converts from the Backward and Scheduled Hindu castes.