Author Description
Terrains of Exchange offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the expansion of Islam in the modern world. Through the model of religious economy, it traces the competition between Muslim, Christian and Hindu religious entrepreneurs that transformed Islam into a proselytising global brand.Drawing Indian, Arab, Iranian and Tatar Muslims together with Scottish missionaries and African-American converts, Nile Green brings to life the local sites of globalisation where Islam was repeatedly reinvented in modern times. Evoking terrains of exchange from Russia's imperial borderlands to the factories of Detroit and the ports of Japan, he casts a microhistorian's eye on the innovative new Islams that emerged from these sites of contact.Drawing on a multilingual range of materials, the book challenges the idea that globalisation has given rise to a unified "global Islam." Instead, it reveals the forces behind the fracturing of Islam in the hands of feuding and fissiparous "'religious firms".Terrains of Exchange not only presents global history as Islamic history. It also reveals the forces of that history at work in the world today.
Menrva's Summary
THE THESIS
This book investigates how the expansion of Islam in the modern era was driven by competitive religious economies rather than a singular, unified global movement. Nile Green, a historian specializing in Islamic history, utilizes a comparative framework to analyze how various religious entrepreneurs—including Muslims, Christians, and Hindus—interacted in diverse global settings. By examining these interactions, the author argues that modern Islam is a collection of reinvented, localized practices shaped by market-like competition between different religious factions.
THE SCOPE MAP
What You Will Find
- A comparative analysis of religious competition across diverse geographies including Russia, India, Japan, and the United States.
- The application of the 'religious economy' model to understand the proliferation of Islamic practices.
- A microhistorical approach focusing on specific sites of contact and exchange.
Scope Limits
- The text does not provide a comprehensive theological history of Islam.
- It does not attempt to define a singular, orthodox version of global Islam.
THE AUTHORITY PERSPECTIVE
Scholars frequently note the book's innovative use of multilingual primary sources to challenge traditional narratives of religious globalization. Experts highlight this as a significant contribution to the study of how religious identities are constructed and contested in modern, transnational contexts.
Page Count:
413
Publication Date:
2015-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0190257563
ISBN-13:
9780190257569
History
Religion
Islam
Globalization
Special Topics
Islamic Studies
World Civilization
Sociology of Religion
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