Friday, January 8, 2010: 3:10 PM
Edward B (Hyatt)
Bombay Islam: Between Enchantment & Reform in the Western Indian Ocean, c.1860-1910
Nile Green
Abstract
Modernization has long been linked to the spread of ‘disenchanted’, ‘Protestant’ forms of Islam characterized by an emphasis on direct access to scripture and the acceptance of scientific agency and disseminated through new models of education and the spread of printing. Taking the cosmopolitan port city of Bombay as a case study for the Muslim experience of modernity, the paper re-examines this teleology of religious change by showing how the new mechanical and social technologies of the nineteenth century were used by Muslim organizations to disseminate an alternative, enchanted modernity through Bombay’s connections to the wider Indian Ocean. In a sense, these organizations therefore relied on technologies of originally ‘colonial’ provenance. In part, this was a question of cosmopolitan printing: Bombay’s Muslim printers issued works in languages as distant as Swahili and Persian, Arabic and Tamil. But it was also a question of steamship and rail travel and their faster circulation of the charismatic bodies of Muslim holy men. Framing Sufism as part of a larger cultural nexus that linked complex intercessionary theologies to popular practices of saint veneration, the paper argues that Bombay’s cosmopolitan modernity enabled the spread of ‘Protestant’ Islam were no less responsible for the creation of a parallel modernity of miracles and metaphysical middle men which were exported along the oceanic networks of the British Empire on the one hand and the Iranian merchant diaspora on the other.
Nile Green
Abstract
Modernization has long been linked to the spread of ‘disenchanted’, ‘Protestant’ forms of Islam characterized by an emphasis on direct access to scripture and the acceptance of scientific agency and disseminated through new models of education and the spread of printing. Taking the cosmopolitan port city of Bombay as a case study for the Muslim experience of modernity, the paper re-examines this teleology of religious change by showing how the new mechanical and social technologies of the nineteenth century were used by Muslim organizations to disseminate an alternative, enchanted modernity through Bombay’s connections to the wider Indian Ocean. In a sense, these organizations therefore relied on technologies of originally ‘colonial’ provenance. In part, this was a question of cosmopolitan printing: Bombay’s Muslim printers issued works in languages as distant as Swahili and Persian, Arabic and Tamil. But it was also a question of steamship and rail travel and their faster circulation of the charismatic bodies of Muslim holy men. Framing Sufism as part of a larger cultural nexus that linked complex intercessionary theologies to popular practices of saint veneration, the paper argues that Bombay’s cosmopolitan modernity enabled the spread of ‘Protestant’ Islam were no less responsible for the creation of a parallel modernity of miracles and metaphysical middle men which were exported along the oceanic networks of the British Empire on the one hand and the Iranian merchant diaspora on the other.