The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed in human history. Railroads linked remote hinterlands with cities; overland and undersea cables connected distant continents. New and accessible print technologies made the wide dissemination of ideas possible; oceangoing steamers carried goods to faraway markets and enabled the greatest long-distance migrations in recorded history. In this volume, leading scholars of the Islamic world recount the enduring consequences these technological, economic, social, and cultural revolutions had on Muslim communities from North Africa to South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and China. Drawing on a multiplicity of approaches and genres, from commodity history to biography to social network theory, the essays in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print offer new and diverse perspectives on a transnational community in an era of global transformation.

This book presents the first comprehensive survey of the multiple versions of Islam propagated across geographical, political, and cultural boundaries during the era of modern globalization. Showing how Islam was transformed through these globalizing transfers, it traces the origins, expansion and increasing diversification of Global Islam - from individual activists to organizations and then states - over the past 150 years. Historian Nile Green surveys not only the familiar venues of Islam in the Middle East and the West, but also Asia and Africa, explaining the doctrines of a wide variety of political and non-political versions of Islam across the spectrum from Salafism to Sufism. This Very Short Introduction will help readers to recognize and compare the various organizations competing to claim the authenticity and authority of representing the one true Islam.

Pilgrimage is one of the most significant ritual duties for Muslims, entailing the visitation and veneration of sites associated with the Prophet Muhammad or saintly figures. As demonstrated in this multidisciplinary volume, the lived religion of pilgrimage, defined by embodied devotional practices, is changing in an age characterized by commerce, technology, and new sociocultural and political frameworks. Traveling to and far beyond the Hajj, the most well-known Muslim pilgrimage, the volume's contributors reveal and analyze emerging contemporary Islamic pilgrimage practices around the world, in minority- and majority-Muslim countries as well as in urban and rural settings. What was once a tiny religious attraction in a remote village, for example, may begin to draw increasing numbers of pilgrims to shrines and tombs as the result of new means of travel, thus triggering significant changes in the traditional rituals, and livelihoods, of the local people. Organized around three key themes—history and politics; embodiment, memory, and material religion; and communications—the book reveals how rituals, practices, and institutions are experienced in the context of an inexorable global capitalism. The volume contributors are Sophia Rose Arjana, Rose Aslan, Robert R. Bianchi, Omar Kasmani, Azim Malikov, Lewis Mayo, Julian Millie, Reza Masoudi Nejad, Paulo G. Pinto, Babak Rahimi, Emilio Spadola, Edith Szanto, and Brannon Wheeler.

This volume explores and calls into question certain commonly held assumptions about writing and technological advancement in the Islamic tradition. In particular, it challenges the idea that mechanical print naturally and inevitably displaces handwritten texts as well as the notion that the so-called transition from manuscript to print is unidirectional. Indeed, rather than distinct technologies that emerge in a progressive series (one naturally following the other), they frequently co-exist in complex and complementary relationships – relationships we are only now starting to recognize and explore. The book brings together essays by internationally recognized scholars from an array of disciplines (including philology, linguistics, religious studies, history, anthropology, and typography) whose work focuses on the written word – channeled through various media – as a social and cultural phenomenon within the Islamic tradition. These essays promote systematic approaches to the study of Islamic writing cultures writ large, in an effort to further our understanding of the social, cultural and intellectual relationships between manuscripts, printed texts and the people who use and create them.

This book explores the Han Kitab, a corpus of early modern Chinese language Islamic texts that reinterpreted Islam through the lens of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian terminology.

In Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his Interlocutors: Conceptualizing Religion in a Globalizing World, Ammeke Kateman offers an account of Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Islamic Reformism in a globalizing and diverse world.

In this engaging study, Matthew J. Kuiper tells the fascinating story of how Islam became a world religion and cultural phenomenon of immense scale, astonishing diversity and global impact. His starting point is the dramatic upsurge in da‘wa: ‘inviting’ to Islam, or Islamic missionary activism.