This volume provides an understanding of how Islam changed the Indian Ocean world and vice versa — a world historical lesson that stretches across several centuries, a vast ocean, its littoral, and in some cases well into the interior parts of this world. It underscores the role of Islam as a religious, economic, social, and political force in the Indian Ocean world. This title is useful both for instructors who base their approach to world history on encounters and connections and to those who use a civilizational model and need help in showing such connections at key historical moments. Including accounts from Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists, the documents highlight a complex and nuanced picture of the spread and influence of Islam. Document headnotes, a chronology, and analytical questions help students to place the spread of Islam across the Indian Ocean world in global historical context.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of religious traditions. At the core of Eisenlohr’s concern is the interplay of voice, media, affect, and listeners’ religious experiences. Sounding Islam sheds new light on a key dimension of religion, the sonic incitement of sensations that are often difficult to translate into language.

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian R. Prange argues that this 'Monsoon Islam' was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India's Malabar Coast, the much-fabled 'land of pepper', Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges. Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.

"In Imperial Muslims we have a tremendously valuable and highly readable contribution, one that has filled a serious gap in our reading of modern Indian Ocean history, and that has also added significant depth to our understanding of Muslim religious life under colonial rule... It is beautifully written, deeply textured, and eminently accessible." -- Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Die Welt des Islams "In Imperial Muslims, the author's ingenious use of British archival sources and Arabic contemporary publications make 19th and early 20th century Aden come alive in front of the readers' eyes. His assertion that at the turn of the century Britain ruled over forty percent of the global Muslim population is enough to explain why Aden is an important case study in providing a window into the social and spiritual life of a Muslim community within the British Empire." -- THANOS PETOURIS, BYS newsletter.

This book explores the ways in which Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world produced and shaped Islamic law and its texts, ideas and practices in their local, regional, imperial, national and transregional contexts. With a focus on the production and transmission of Islamic law in the Indian Ocean, the chapters in this book draw from and add to recent discourses on the legal histories and anthropologies of the Indian Ocean rim as well as to the conversations on global Islamic circulations. By doing so, this book argues for the importance of Islamic legal thoughts and practices of the so-called "peripheries" to the core and kernel of Islamic traditions and the urgency of addressing their long-existing role in the making of the historical and human experience of the religion. Islamic law was and is not merely brought to, but also produced in the Indian Ocean world through constant and critical engagements. The book takes a long-term and transregional perspective for a better understanding of the ways in which the oceanic Muslims have historically developed their religious, juridical and intellectual traditions and continue to shape their lives within the frameworks of their religion. Transregional and transdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be of interest to scholars of Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Legal History and Legal Anthropology, Area Studies of South and Southeast Asia and East Africa.

In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar and Cape Town. Through an investigation of the texts, ritual practices and scholarly networks that went alongside Sufi expansion, this book places religious change in the western Indian Ocean within the wider framework of Islamic reform.

‘This book with its felicitous title brings together with great skill and sensitivity a large amount of current historical scholarship on the trade and civilization of the Indian Ocean during the Islamic centuries. It will be welcomed by both students and teachers as a fine introduction to a complex subject.”