Bombay Islam
The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915

Nile Green's Bombay Islam shows how Muslim migration from Bombay fueled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers.

Nile Green (Author)

9780521769242, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 March 2011

344 pages, 19 b/w illus. 2 maps
23.4 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

'From the first page onwards, Green not only provides a piece of profound historic research but takes the reader on a trip from the dockyards and cotton mills to the saints' shrines and bookshops of Bombay to Hyderabad, Gujarat, Iran or South Africa. Thereby he enriches his narrative language with anecdotes, stories of myths and miracles from nineteenth-century accounts … this book is milestone in analyzing religious networks and their activities in South Asian history!' Fabian Falter, Sehepunkte (www.sehepunkte.de)

As a thriving port city, nineteenth-century Bombay attracted migrants from across India and beyond. Nile Green's Bombay Islam traces the ties between industrialization, imperialism and the production of religion to show how Muslim migration fueled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers, as Christian missionaries competed with Muslim religious entrepreneurs for a stake in the new market. Enabled by a colonial policy of non-intervention in religious affairs, and powered by steam travel and vernacular printing, Bombay's Islamic productions were exported as far as South Africa and Iran. Connecting histories of religion, labour and globalization, the book examines the role of ordinary people - mill hands and merchants - in shaping the demand that drove the market. By drawing on hagiographies, travelogues, doctrinal works, and poems in Persian, Urdu and Arabic, Bombay Islam unravels a vernacular modernity that saw people from across the Indian Ocean drawn into Bombay's industrial economy of enchantment.

1. Missionaries and reformists in the market of Islams
2. Cosmopolitan cults and the economy of miracles
3. The enchantment of industrial communications
4. Exports for an Iranian marketplace
5. The making of a Neo-Ism?'?lism
6. A theology for the mills and dockyards
7. Bombay Islam in the ocean's southern city.

Subject Areas: Islam [HRH], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Asian history [HBJF]