meetings
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4
4:30 pm, 254 Barrows
Bombay Islam: Iran-India-South Africa in the Religious Economy of the Indian Ocean
Professor Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles
This lecture traces the ties between industrialization, imperialism and the production of religion. By developing a model of religious economy, it shows how Muslim migration from the oceanic no less than continental hinterlands of Bombay fuelled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers as Christian missionary firms 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 mill hands no less than merchants in shaping the demand that drove the market. By drawing on hagiographies, travelogues, doctrinal works and poems in Persian, Urdu and Arabic, the lecture unravels a vernacular modernity which saw people from across the Indian Ocean drawn into Bombay’s industrial economy of enchantment.
This event is co-sponsored by the Near Eastern Studies Department, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Institute for International Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for South Asia Studies
