Introduction

For last few decades, there have been strong calls to decentralise the studies on Islam and Muslims that have disproportionately converged on the Middle East despite the majority of Muslim communities living outside the region. Although being a constantly connected region proximate to the Arabian heartlands of Islam, Muslims in various regions of the Indian Ocean, their religious cultural manifestations and scholarly contributions did not gain adequate scholarly attention in the study of Islam and Muslim societies. Muslims of these littoral regions have constantly been contributing to the realms of Islamic disciplines. As they wanted to engage with non-Muslim polities in new host locations and faced unprecedented maritime ecological necessities, the community produced novel interpretations of the religion and its legal requirements. The significant scholarly contributions from the region highlighting these interesting trajectories of Islam in the Indian Ocean, the maritime ecological realities and littoral specificities are not reflected adequately in the recent studies of Islam. Nor do we place correctly the littoral Islam in the study of the Indian Ocean. However, there have been intense scholarly efforts during the last few decades to read coastal regions of the entire Indian Ocean as a coherent entity formed by similar ecological and historical experiences. The maritime routes did not merely bring economic goods but also stranded many cultural elements that invested these vast coastal regions with unique cultural and historical features. This oceanic uniformity model first introduced in the Mediterranean Sea by Fernand Braudel has exemplarily had vivid results once reformulated in the Indian Ocean.

Religions especially Islam became one of the many crucial points in constructing this cultural uniformity in the Indian Ocean – a point historians such as Chaudhuri and Pearson pioneered decades ago. Muslims in the region attempted to reframe the religion in a way that was viable in the maritime littoral contexts and produced large chunks of literature which remain hitherto unutilised. This literature assumes similar patterns and modes of interpretation throughout the Indian Ocean. However, neither did the historians nor the scholars of Islam galvanise earnestly the possibilities of an emerging Indian Ocean perspective to comprehend local religious contributions and socio-historical prospects that these embarrassingly divergent Muslim societies in the region engendered. The present chapter discusses the prospects of having a nuanced Indian Ocean perspective to study Islam and Muslim societies and its culturally vibrant scholarly productions in the region.