Becoming Arab
Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World

Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction fared in the face of nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control.

Sumit K. Mandal (Author)

9781107196797, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 November 2017

280 pages, 15 b/w illus. 3 maps 6 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

'It is always a delight when a path-breaking doctoral dissertation is finally published, and Sumit Mandal's thesis, completed in 1994 at Columbia University, falls squarely into this category. Many scholars working on the Hadhrami diaspora, which spread from southern Arabia all around the Indian Ocean, have referred to this legendary text, and it is a real pleasure to see it in print at last. The book is replete with fascinating biographical sketches, and there are valuable tables detailing the economic activities of Hadhrami Arabs on Java … Cambridge University Press is to be congratulated for at last making this painstaking scholarly research available to a wider public.' William Gervase Clarence-Smith, South East Asia Research

Sumit K. Mandal uncovers the hybridity and transregional connections underlying modern Asian identities. By considering Arabs in the Malay world under European rule, Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction was altered by nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control. Mandal traces the transformation of Arabs from familiar and multi-faceted creole personages of Malay courts into alienated figures defined by economic and political function. The racialisation constrained but did not eliminate the fluid character of Arabness. Creole Arabs responded to the constraints by initiating transregional links with the Ottoman Empire and establishing modern social organisations, schools, and a press. Contentions emerged between organisations respectively based on Prophetic descent and egalitarianism, advancing empowering but conflicting representations of a modern Arab and Islamic identity. Mandal unsettles finite understandings of race and identity by demonstrating not only the incremental development of a modern identity, but the contested state of its birth.

Introduction
Part I. A Creole Malay World: 1. Lord Sayyids
Part II. Colonial Transformation: 2. From sea to land
3. Categorisation and control
4. Scholarship and surveillance
Part III. Modern Identity: 5. Turning to Istanbul
6. Sayyids remade
7. The contested state of modern Arab identity
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Islamic life & practice [HRHP], Islamic & Arabic philosophy [HPDC], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1], Asian history [HBJF], General & world history [HBG], History [HB]