BOOK: GEORGE F. HOURANI - "ARAB SEAFARING IN THE INDIAN OCEAN IN ANCIENT AND EARLY MEDIAEVAL TIMES (1951).

An important one for Malay maritime history.

The book

George F. Hourani: Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Mediaeval Times (1951, Princeton University Press, 1952, first edition)

Hourani was a Lebanese-American historian of philosophy at Princeton. His dissertation was "Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries" (1938-39), which he expanded while working in the library of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. The book became the classic:

"In this classic work George Hourani deals with the history of the sea trade of the Arabs in the Indian Ocean from its obscure origins many centuries before Christ to the time of its full extension to China and East Africa in the ninth and tenth centuries."

He also gives attention to geography, meteorology, and ships themselves, including stitched planking and lateen sails.

What does he say about Malays?

Hourani's main subject is Arabs, but he is very clear that Arabs were latecomers. Before them, the masters were the Austronesians — Malays / Indonesians.

The most quoted passage is on p. 102, which is preserved in later scholarship. Lynda Shaffer summarises it in the Journal of World History (1994):

"Malay ships used balanced lug sails, which were square in shape and mounted so that they could pivot. This made it possible for sailors to tack against the wind."

"Due to the way the sails were mounted, they appeared somewhat triangular in shape, and thus the Malays' balance lug sail may well be... the prototype of the triangular lateen, which can also be used to tack against the wind."

In Hourani's own analysis cited by I.C. Campbell:

"The argument is well put by George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Mediaeval Times (Princeton, 1951), pp. 100, 103."

Campbell also notes the limits of Hourani's evidence:

"The exhaustive research of George F. Hourani failed to find either literary or pictorial evidence of any type of sail used in the western Indian Ocean before the fifteenth century."

What Hourani establishes is the following: 

1. Chronology: Malay sailors began to ride the monsoons sometime before 300 BCE, sailing two-thirds of the way from Southeast Asia to East Africa and reaching Madagascar by the first centuries CE.
2. Technology: Outrigger canoes, double-outrigger stability, stitched-plank hulls (no nails), and the balance-lug rig – a square sail set on a yard that can be tilted. That ability to pivot = tacking into the wind.
3. Diffusion: The Arab lateen, the Persian lateen, and eventually the Mediterranean lateen may have evolved from that Malay lug. Hourani suggests Arabs adopted it after contact with Malay/Indonesian sailors in Srivijaya ports and in Ceylon.

So when people quote Hourani as saying "Malays were masters of naval technology" – that's a fair paraphrase, not a direct verbatim quote. His actual technical argument is more specific: the most intrepid sailors were the Malays, living in what is now Malaysia, Indonesia, SE Vietnam and the Philippines, and their rig was the ancestor of the Arab sail.

Modern archaeology and genetics have only strengthened Hourani's point – the settlement of Madagascar by Banjar Dayak-Borneo seafarers around the 8th-11th century, the Borobudur ship depictions, and the spread of Austronesian languages to Easter Island and East Africa.

Reference:

1. Enrique of Malacca : Who was Enrique of Malacca?

Hj Zulheimy Maamor

30 September 2026: 11:07 p.m.