Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Muslims and modernity: culture and society in an age of contest and plurality
- PART I SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
- 2 New networks and new knowledge: migrations, communications and the refiguration of the Muslim community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
- 3 Population, urbanisation and the dialectics of globalisation
- 4 The origins and early development of Islamic reform
- 5 Reform and modernism in the middle twentieth century
- 6 Islamic resurgence and its aftermath
- 7 The new transnationalism: globalising Islamic movements
- 8 Muslims in the West: Europe
- 9 Muslims in the West: North America
- 10 New frontiers and conversion
- PART II RELIGION AND LAW
- PART III POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT
- PART IV CULTURES, ARTS AND LEARNING
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
10 - New frontiers and conversion
from PART I - SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Muslims and modernity: culture and society in an age of contest and plurality
- PART I SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
- 2 New networks and new knowledge: migrations, communications and the refiguration of the Muslim community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
- 3 Population, urbanisation and the dialectics of globalisation
- 4 The origins and early development of Islamic reform
- 5 Reform and modernism in the middle twentieth century
- 6 Islamic resurgence and its aftermath
- 7 The new transnationalism: globalising Islamic movements
- 8 Muslims in the West: Europe
- 9 Muslims in the West: North America
- 10 New frontiers and conversion
- PART II RELIGION AND LAW
- PART III POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT
- PART IV CULTURES, ARTS AND LEARNING
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite Europe’s superior maritime and military power, Islamic commercial networks established along the fringes of the Islamic world, notably in Africa and South-East Asia, remained in place, linking the interior with coastal ports. These fringes were not exactly ‘frontiers’; in most cases, a substantial Islamic presence had existed for centuries. However, the majority of the population was not Muslim. These areas were to become the arena of substantial conversion to Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in large measure because of and not simply despite the imposition of European hegemony.
The nature and extent of Islamic expansion along these fringes depended on the interplay of various factors: the social organisation of specific local societies; the prior history of Islamisation and of the integration of Muslims into these societies; and the ways in which different regions of the world were ultimately integrated into European-dominated global economic networks. In South-East Asia as well as East Africa, the spread of Islam was inextricably linked to maritime trading networks, with Islam initially confined to ports along the coast. However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the interior of Java was at least nominally Islamic, although Islam was still expanding to parts of the Sumatran interior. At the outset of the modern era, Muslims in East Africa remained exclusively along the coast, and it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that Islam began to expand into the interior.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The New Cambridge History of Islam , pp. 254 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010