Islamic Merchants and Material Culture along the Silk Roads

From the early Abbasid Empire on, Islam spread east into the urban oases along the Eurasian trade routes from Mesopotamia to China.  Islam and trade spread in tandem, a relationship based both on elite patronage and on highly developed Islamic commercial law.  Persian, Sogdian and Turkic urban populations adopted Islam under various circumstances, but by the end of the Mongol period Islam had become the dominant religion of the trading classes in West and Central Asia.  Minority dhimmi populations of Zoroastrians, Jews, and Nestorian Christians were also to be found in communities and niche occupations along the way.             Trade also brought Islam into Tang China.  Arab and Persian Muslim traders were active in southern coastal China in the very first century of Islam.  China’s oldest mosques can still be found in that area.  Islam followed the trade routes through the Tarim Basin and into western China shortly after, leading to the creation of Hui Chinese communities that still flourish in the Yellow River basin today.  The Uygur Turk oases of the Tarim Basin, ultimately Islamic, linked the Central Asian and Chinese trading worlds.            This presentation will focus on the urban centers and material culture of the Muslim merchants along the premodern Silk Roads.  We will examine the textile industry and long-distance trade infrastructure of the oases of Central Asia.  We will consider mosque architecture as a barometer of ethnic identity, as in the famous Great Mosque of Xi’an.  Finally, we will note the symbiotic relationship between mosques and bazaars supported by the Islamic waqf system of pious endowment.