Indian Ocean

The seas around the Comoros connected island towns with the Swahili world and the wider western Indian Ocean. Between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, older urban settlements developed into city-states. These became centres of island sultanates associated with a Muslim elite whose connections reached the East African coast.

Their towns brought palaces, mosques and residential quarters into a maritime society shaped by exchanges across the ocean. At Moroni, an inscription in the Friday mosque dates to 1427 and invokes protection for Ali and his family. Such evidence gives a specific religious presence to the island towns behind the sea routes. Over time the sultanates developed institutions and urban forms linking local communities with wider Islamic networks. The surrounding waters were the approaches to these political and religious centres, whose histories belonged to the same oceanic world as the African mainland ports.