The Gujarat Sultanate and the Bohras (1407–1573 CE)

The Rise of an Independent Sultanate

For most of the fourteenth century Gujarat was a province governed for the Delhi Sultanate. That changed in the chaos following Timur’s sack of Delhi (1398 CE), which shattered the imperial center and left its governors to fend for themselves. Around 810 AH / 1407 CE, the Gujarat governor Zafar Khan declared his independence and took the regnal title Muzaffar Shah I, founding a dynasty that would rule Gujarat as a sovereign Muslim kingdom for more than a century and a half.

The new Sultanate reached its mature form under Muzaffar’s grandson, Ahmad Shah I, who in 814 AH / 1411 CE founded a new capital on the Sabarmati River and named it after himself: Ahmedabad. Under Ahmad Shah and his successors the Sultanate became one of the wealthiest and most cultured of the regional Indian kingdoms, its prosperity resting on Gujarat’s textiles, indigo, and above all its command of Indian Ocean trade. Its zenith came under Mahmud Shah I, known as Mahmud Begada (r. 1458–1511 CE), under whom the kingdom expanded and its ports thrived — though it was also in his reign, in 1509 CE, that the Portuguese defeated a Gujarati–Mamluk fleet at Diu, opening the long contest for control of the western sea-lanes.

This is the world — outward-looking, commercial, and dominated by a Sunni Muslim court — in which the Tayyibi Ismaili community of Gujarat lived, traded, and quietly grew (see Gujarat Bohra History).

Merchants of Cambay and Ahmedabad

By the time the Sultanate arose, the Tayyibi da’wa had already been established in Gujarat for more than three centuries, having first reached the port of Cambay (Khambhat) around 460 AH / 1067 CE in the era of the Fatimid Imam al-Mustansir (see Fatimid Caliphate). The very name Bohra is generally derived from the Gujarati vohorvu, “to trade,” reflecting the community’s overwhelmingly mercantile character — a profile that fitted the commercial economy of the Sultanate almost perfectly.

Bohra merchants dealt in the staples that made Gujarat famous: cotton textiles, silk, indigo, dyes, and spices, moving goods through Cambay and the other Gulf-of-Khambhat ports into the wider networks that linked Gujarat to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and Southeast Asia. The founding of Ahmedabad gave the community a great inland metropolis as well, and Bohra families established themselves there alongside the older centers of Patan, Sidhpur, and Cambay. Commerce was not incidental to the community’s religious life; the trade routes that carried Gujarati cloth to the Yemeni and Egyptian coasts were the same routes along which students, letters, and religious dues passed between the Indian believers and their leadership in Yemen (see Bohra Commercial Ethics).

An Ismaili Minority Under Sunni Rule

The Gujarat Sultans were Sunni Muslims, and the Tayyibi Ismailis were a small, doctrinally distinct minority within a wider Indian Muslim society. Relations were not uniformly hostile, but the period was marked by real pressure. Historians record that in the first half of the fifteenth century the Ismailis of Gujarat were repeatedly exposed to persecution under the Sunni sultans — pressure severe enough that a portion of the community, particularly in Patan, drifted away from the Mustali-Tayyibi allegiance toward mainstream Sunni Islam. The later distinction between the (Ismaili) Bohras and the so-called Sunni Bohras has its roots in these fifteenth-century shifts.

To survive such pressures the community relied, as Ismailis long had, on taqiyya — the prudent concealment of belief under conditions of danger. Outwardly the Bohras lived as ordinary Gujarati Muslim traders; inwardly they preserved the Tayyibi creed and their loyalty to the hidden Imam al-Tayyib (AS) and to the line of Du’at Mutlaqeen acting in his name (see Imam Al Tayyib, Dai Al Mutlaq Institution). This discretion, combined with the cohesion that came from shared faith and shared trade, allowed the community to endure as a coherent body through the entire Sultanate period despite lacking any political power of its own. Precise details of this era rest substantially on community tradition and later devotional history, and specifics vary between sources.

The Dawat Comes to Gujarat

The most consequential development of the late Sultanate period for the Bohras was not political but ecclesiastical: the relocation of the supreme headquarters of the da’wa from Yemen to Gujarat. For nearly four centuries after the occultation (satr) of the 21st Imam al-Tayyib (AS), the Du’at Mutlaqeen had resided in Yemen, with India a flourishing but subordinate province of a Yemen-centered da’wa (see Yemen Dawat Period, Duat Mutlaqeen).

By the sixteenth century the balance had tilted decisively toward India, where the largest and wealthiest body of believers now lived, while in Yemen the Tayyibi leadership faced mounting hostility from the Zaydi rulers and the pressures of the age. The pivotal figure was Syedna Yusuf Najmuddin ibn Sulayman (RA), the 24th Da’i al-Mutlaq, who assumed the office around 946 AH / 1539 CE. Born in Sidhpur in Gujarat and descended from a distinguished scholarly family, he is remembered as the first Indian-born believer to hold the supreme office. Though he eventually travelled to Yemen to attend to the da’wa there, he conferred nass (designation of succession) on an Indian successor — and it was this choice that brought the dawat home to Gujarat.

That successor, Syedna Jalal Shamsuddin ibn Hasan (RA) of Ahmedabad, became the 25th Da’i al-Mutlaq. With his accession the central seat of the da’wa was transferred permanently from Yemen to Gujarat. Both the 24th and 25th Dais are recorded as having died around 974 AH / 1567 CE; Syedna Jalal Shamsuddin was buried in Ahmedabad, traditionally remembered as the first Da’i al-Mutlaq to have his mausoleum in India. From this point onward the spiritual and administrative heart of the Dawoodi Bohra community lay in Gujarat — a fact of enduring significance achieved while the independent Sultanate still stood (see Bohra History).

The Passage to Mughal Rule

Even as the dawat established itself in Gujarat, the Sultanate that had given the province its century of independence was failing. The sixteenth century saw repeated turbulence: the Mughal emperor Humayun overran Gujarat briefly in 1535 CE before withdrawing, and after the deaths of stronger rulers the throne passed to young sultans dominated by quarrelling nobles. With central authority collapsing into factional warfare, one of these nobles appealed to the Mughal emperor Akbar to intervene.

Akbar marched into Gujarat in 980 AH / 1572 CE, and by 981 AH / 1573 CE the conquest was complete: Gujarat became a province (suba) of the Mughal Empire, and its last sultan, Muzaffar Shah III, was eventually captured. The independent Gujarat Sultanate had lasted from 1407 to 1573 CE.

For the Bohras, the change of regime mattered less for the moment of conquest than for what followed. Mughal rule integrated Gujarat into a vast and comparatively cosmopolitan empire, and it was under this new order that the community’s defining schism unfolded. After the death of the 26th Da’i, Syedna Dawud ibn Qutubshah (RA), around 999 AH / 1591 CE, a disputed succession divided the Tayyibis between the followers of Dawud Burhanuddin ibn Ajabshah (RA) in India — the Dawoodi Bohras, the great majority — and the followers of Sulayman ibn Hasan in Yemen, the Sulaimani Bohras. Community tradition holds that the Mughal authorities of the time recognised Dawud Burhanuddin’s claim. The independent Sultanate had been the cradle in which the Indian da’wa matured; it was under the Mughals who succeeded it that the Dawoodi Bohra identity took its mature and lasting form (see Bohra Madhab).