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 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.

Bringing together cutting-edge research from a range of disciplines, this handbook argues that despite often being overlooked or treated as marginal, the study of Islam from an African context is integral to the broader Muslim world. Challenging the portrayal of African Muslims as passive recipients of religious impetuses arriving from the outside, this book shows how the continent has been a site for the development of rich Islamic scholarship and religious discourses. Over the course of the book, the contributors reflect on: The history and infrastructure of Islam in Africa Politics and Islamic reform Gender, youth, and everyday life for African Muslims New technologies, media, and popular culture. Written by leading scholars in the field, the contributions examine the connections between Islam and broader sociopolitical developments across the continent, demonstrating the important role of religion in the everyday lives of Africans. This book is an important and timely contribution to a subject that is often diffusely studied, and will be of interest to researchers across religious studies, African studies, politics, and sociology.

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 book describes the worlds where Swahili is spoken as multi-centred contexts that cannot be thought of as located in a specific coastal area of Kenya or Tanzania. The articles presented discuss a range of geographical areas where Swahili is spoken, from Somalia to Mozambique along the Indian Ocean, in Europe and the US. In an attempt to de-essentialize the concepts of translocality and cosmopolitanism, the emphasis of the book is on translocality as experienced by different social strata and by gender and cosmopolitanism as an acquired attitude. Contributors are: Katrin Bromber, Gerard van de Bruinhorst, Francesca Declich, Rebecca Gearhart Mafazy, Linda Giles, Ida Hadjivayanis, Mohamed Kassim, Kjersti Larsen, Mohamed Saleh, Maria Suriano, Sandra Vianello.

In Buying Time, Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies as well as economic and social history to explain how, in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. That vibrant and enormously influential swath extended from the desert fringes of Arabia to Zanzibar and the Swahili coast and on to the Congo River watershed. In the half century before European colonization, Africans and Arabs from coasts and hinterlands used newfound sources of credit to seek out opportunities, establish new outposts in distant places, and maintain families in a rapidly changing economy. They used temporizing strategies to escape drought in Oman, join ivory caravans in the African interior, and build new settlements. The key to McDow’s analysis is a previously unstudied trove of Arabic business deeds that show complex variations on the financial transactions that underwrote the trade economy across the region. The documents list names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of people—Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave—who bought, sold, and mortgaged property. Through unprecedented use of these sources, McDow moves the historical analysis of the Indian Ocean beyond connected port cities to reveal the roles of previously invisible people.

Given the intense political scrutiny of Islam and Muslims, which often centres on gendered concerns, The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender is an outstanding reference source to key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into seven parts: Foundational texts in historical and contemporary contexts Sex, sexuality, and gender difference Gendered piety and authority Political and religious displacements Negotiating law, ethics, and normativity Vulnerability, care, and violence in Muslim families Representation, commodification, and popular culture These sections examine key debates and problems, including: feminist and queer approaches to the Qur’an, hadith, Islamic law, and ethics, Sufism, devotional practice, pilgrimage, charity, female religious authority, global politics of feminism, material and consumer culture, masculinity, fertility and the family, sexuality, sexual rights, domestic violence, marriage practices, and gendered representations of Muslims in film and media. The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, Islamic studies, and gender studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, sociology, anthropology, and history.

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 the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be “heard” outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm—which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures—the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.

A pathbreaking history of Sufism, from the earliest centuries of Islam to the present After centuries as the most important ascetic-mystical strand of Islam, Sufism saw a sharp decline in the twentieth century, only to experience a stunning revival in recent decades. In this comprehensive new history of Sufism from the earliest centuries of Islam to today, Alexander Knysh, a leading expert on the subject, reveals the tradition in all its richness. Knysh explores how Sufism has been viewed by both insiders and outsiders since its inception. He examines the key aspects of Sufism, from definitions and discourses to leadership, institutions, and practices. He devotes special attention to Sufi approaches to the Qur’an, drawing parallels with similar uses of scripture in Judaism and Christianity. He traces how Sufism grew from a set of simple moral-ethical precepts into a sophisticated tradition with professional Sufi masters (shaykhs) who became powerful players in Muslim public life but whose authority was challenged by those advocating the equality of all Muslims before God. Knysh also examines the roots of the ongoing conflict between the Sufis and their fundamentalist critics, the Salafis—a major fact of Muslim life today. Based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Sufism is an indispensable account of a vital aspect of Islam.