Malabar Mappila - History

Mappila - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Arab, Greek and Jewish contact with Malabar existed from at least the 10th century BC. This contact became predominant in the post-Roman period. Therefore the history of the Mappilas goes back to the Pre-Islamic period. In the Gazetteer of Bombay Presidency, Khan Bahadur Fazlullah Faridi, mentions the settlement of pre-Islamic Arabs in Chaul, Kalyan Supara and Malabar Coast and Arab merchants passing along the Coromandel Coast on their way to China.
One Uppukutan Mappila appears in the legend of Parayi Petta Pandiru Kulam, (The Twelve Tribes Born to a Paryai) and he is said to have lived in 378 BC. Ouwayi, who through extreme devotion made the goddess of Kozhikode appear before him, was a Jonaka Mappila.
It was with the advent of Islam that the Arabs became a prominent cultural race in the world. The Arab merchants and traders now became the carriers of the new religion and they propagated it wherever they went. When Islam spread among the Arabs, the Arab traders brought it to Malabar during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Francis Day’s assumption that the first settlement of the Muslims on the western coast took place sometime in the seventh century strengthens this view. George Sarton says in his Introduction to the History of Science that the most outstanding event of the seventh century was, of course, the explosion of Islam throughout Arabia and parts of Africa and that it might have reached the Malabar coast during those early days.
In Malabar, the Mappilas may have been the first community to come to the fold of Islam because they were more closely connected with the Arabs than others. Intensive missionary activities took place on the coast and a number of natives embraced Islam, joining the Mappila community. Thus among the Mappilas, we find descendants of the Pure Arabs, the descendants of Arabs through"