In its attempt to squash the influence of animism and pantheism or polytheism and to promote the idea of the One and Only Absolute God, Islam has come up against a tendency within itself to incorporate certain local religious traditions and practices. This book shares that combination of universality and local particularity, exploring this paradox and the contradictory tendencies contained in it.
This single-volume resource explores the five major oceans of the world, addressing current issues such as sea rise and climate change and explaining the significance of the oceans from historical, geographic, and cultural perspectives. The World's Oceans: Geography, History, and Environment is a one-stop resource that describes in-depth the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, and Southern Oceans and identifies their importance, today and throughout history. Essays address the subject areas of oceans and seas in world culture, fishing and shipping industries through history, ocean exploration, and climate change and oceans. The book also presents dozens of entries covering a breadth of topics on human culture, the environment, history, and current issues as they relate to the oceans and ocean life. Sample entries provide detailed information on topics such as the Bermuda Triangle, Coral Reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Ice Melt, Myths and Legends, Piracy, and Whaling. Contributions to the work come from top researchers in the fields of history and maritime studies, including Paul D'Arcy, John Gillis, Tom Hoogervorst, Michael North, and Lincoln Paine. The volume highlights the numerous ways in which Earth's oceans have influenced culture and society, from the earliest seafaring civilizations to the future of the planet.
Muslim communities throughout the Indian Ocean have long questioned what it means to be a “good Muslim.” Much recent scholarship on Islam in the Indian Ocean considers debates among Muslims about authenticity, authority, and propriety. Despite the centrality of this topic within studies of Indian Ocean, African, and other Muslim communities, little of the existing scholarship has addressed such debates in relation to women, gender, or sexuality. Yet women are deeply involved with ideas about what it means to be a “good Muslim.” In Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and gender studies scholars examine Islam, sexuality, gender, and marriage on the Swahili coast and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The book examines diverse sites of empowerment, contradiction, and resistance affecting cultural norms, Islam and ideas of Islamic authenticity, gender expectations, ideologies of modernity, and British education. The book’s attention to both masculinity and femininity, broad examination of the transnational space of the Swahili coast, and inclusion of research on non-Swahili groups on the East African coast makes it a unique and indispensable resource. Contributors: Nadine Beckmann, Pat Caplan, Corrie Decker, Rebecca Gearhart, Linda Giles, Meghan Halley, Susan Hirsch, Susi Keefe, Kjersti Larsen, Elisabeth McMahon, Erin Stiles, and Katrina Daly Thompson
The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India’s changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India’s strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India’s connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author’s unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.
The Indian Ocean is famously referred to as the "cradle of globalization," as it facilitated cultural and economic exchanges between Africa, the Arab world, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China, for 5000 years prior to European presence in the region. As this ocean's significance has gained increasing attention from scholars in recent years, few have examined the 'human' dimensions in Indian Ocean exchanges. Including the work of historians, geographers, anthropologists and literary analysts, each essay in this volume addresses a specific human factor, such as the fate of the creole in the Bay of Bengal, creolization as a globalized phenomenon, migrancy and diaspora, the lives of seafarers then and now, and the lives of those who inhabit the ocean's littoral. This volume is a necessary addition to the field of Indian Ocean studies.
In this stimulating and authoritative overview, Michael Pearson reverses the traditional angle of maritime history and looks from the sea to its shores - its impact on the land through trade, naval power, travel and scientific exploration. This vast ocean, both connecting and separating nations, has shaped many countries' cultures and ideologies through the movement of goods, people, ideas and religions across the sea. The Indian Ocean moves from a discussion of physical elements, its shape, winds, currents and boundaries, to a history from pre-Islamic times to the modern period of European dominance. Going far beyond pure maritime history, this compelling survey is an invaluable addition to political, cultural and economic world history.
The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims making the journey in any given year could come from Southeast Asia. The Longest Journey, spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.
Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World is a collection which covers a long time span and diverse areas around the ocean. Many of the essays look at the Indian Ocean before Europeans arrived, reminding the reader that there was a cohesive Indian Ocean. This collection includes empirical studies and essays focused on particular area or production. The essays cover various aspects of trade and exchange, the Indian Ocean as a world-system, East African and Chinese connections with the Indian Ocean World, and the movement of people and ideas around the ocean.
The Indian Ocean interregional arena is a space of vital economic and strategic importance characterized by specialized flows of capital and labor, skills and services, and ideas and culture. Islam in particular and religiously informed universalism in general once signified cosmopolitanism across this wide realm. This historical reality is at variance with contemporary conceptions of Islam as an illiberal religion that breeds intolerance and terrorism. The future balance of global power will be determined in large measure by policies of key actors in the Indian Ocean and the lands that abut it rather than in the Atlantic or the Pacific. The interplay of multiple and competing universalisms in the Indian Ocean arena is in urgent need of better understanding. Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism is a fresh contribution to Islamic and Indian Ocean studies alike, placing the history of modern South Asia in broader interregional and global contexts. It refines theories of universalism and cosmopolitanism while at the same time drawing on new empirical research. The essays in the volume bring the best academic scholarship on Islam in South Asia and across the Indian Ocean in the age of European empire to the readers.
