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CHKISTIANS AND MOSLEMS IN MALABAR 81 The Arab traders found the same friendly reception at the Malabar ports after their conversion to Islam as in their old Sabasan days. Their name of Map- pillas, or Moplahs, was an honourable one, apparently in ancient times shared with the Christians. Those now fiercely bigoted Mussulmans were in the time of Da Gama composed of two classes: descendants of early Arabian settlers who took the mild Indian view of other faiths; and recent arrivals from Egypt or the Persian Gulf, inflamed with religious hatred which the Crusades had fanned, and to which the fall of- the Grenada Saracens added fresh fury. This distinction between the old Arab settlers in Malabar and the for- eign population of traders from Arabia must be borne in mind. The coast-rajas and their native subjects were pleased to do business with newcomers, whatever their creed. But the Arab and Portuguese strangers brought with them an explosive fanaticism always ready to blow religious toleration into the air. An avowed object of the greatest of the Indo-Portuguese governors, Albuquerque, 1509 - 1515, was to strip the shrine of Mecca and carry off the body of the False Prophet, with a view to ransoming the Holy Temple of Jeru- salem in exchange. In his Letters and Commentaries, as in the Papal Bulls, the struggle between Christendom and Islam, and the crusading spirit of the Portuguese, stand revealed. If the Portuguese were fortunate as to their place of landing in India, they were even more so in the time of their arrival. The great Hindu overlordship of