The Med are an indigenous fishermen and historically seafaring community from the coastal areas of Makran in Balochistan, Pakistan.
[1] They were mentioned in the early Muslim historiography as seafarers; some of them carried piracy as Bawarij in the Indian Ocean from their harbors in Debal, Kutch and Kathiawar, to as far as the mouth of river Tigris and Ceylon.
The incident in which they captured two treasure ships coming from Ceylon to Basra became casus belli for the 7th century Umayyad invasion of Sindh.
They were described by Muslim historians al-Idrisi and Ibn Hauqal as nomads living in a vast region between river Indus and Makran, and André Wink concludes from these geographical accounts that during this period Meds were mainly pastoral people, living on the "fringes of the settled Muslim kingdoms of Multan and Mansura".
They speak medī, a dialect of Balochi language, and tend to live in their own congested quarters known as medānī pāṛa.