In Myanmar, from the Paleolithic to the early historic periods location has been an essential part of site layout and artifacts within wider cultural production. For all periods, there are issues of the classification and identification of implements that are complicated by multiperiod habitation. The result is frequent stratigraphic and artifactual ambiguity. Archaeological studies on the period from the Late Paleolithic to Neolithic eras have largely relied on artifact classification and minimally on the relationship to the local ecosystem. In many cases, hunter-gatherer foragers may have lived side by side with more sedentary groups who stored goods and stimulated a more hierarchical society. Archaeological research on the stone-using cultures began during the 19th century in tandem with colonial oil exploration. A pivotal 1943 survey was conducted of the geological terraces of the Upper Ayeyarwady River between Magway and Nyaung-U. This identified a Paleolithic culture utilizing fossil wood and river pebbles for tools dating to c.750,000 BP. The close link between environment and habitation strategies was matched in numerous Neolithic cultures that exploited natural resources at lowland open-air and cave sites. Near the Lower Chindwin, Upper Myanmar, associations with local resources are seen at Nyaung’gan, a bronze inhumation cemetery site of c.1500 bce on the rim of a extinct volcano. In a different way, local resources such as copper and soils determined the location of a series of bronze-iron mortuary sites in the plains of the Salween River (c.600 bce–300 CE) that flanked the Shan Plateau. These local chiefdoms exhibited status in abundant pottery and metal goods of burials. Mother-goddess figures and kye doke (bronze packets) representing bundles of fodder indicate a matrilineal ancestral culture engaged in incipient wet-rice cultivation. The subsequent emergence from c.200 bce of early urbanized Buddhist kingships and monastic communities continued in this agriculturally favorable landscape. Thus, for the period from the early stone cultures to the beginnings of the Buddhist societies that were expanding rice cultivation and interregional trade, understanding the local ecosystems is essential in accurately assessing the material culture.
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Archaeological Studies in Myanmar
Elizabeth Moore
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Bengali Literature of Arakan
Thibaut d'Hubert
Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, Middle Bengali became a major idiom of literary expression in the kingdom of Arakan. It is within the domain of this coastal kingdom, which then comprised the region of Chittagong in today’s Bangladesh, that Muslim subjects of the Buddhist kings started using the courtly vernacular that was previously cultivated by Hindu dignitaries of the Ḥusayn Shāhī sultans of Bengal. By the mid-17th century, which constituted a moment of economic prosperity and maximum territorial expansion, all genres of Middle Bengali poetry were represented in the corpus of texts written by authors living in the urban and rural areas of the kingdom. The many treatises on Muslim beliefs and meditative practices, the hagiographic literature, and the courtly romances testify to the formation of a local Islamic cultural ethos. After the Mughal conquest of Chittagong in 1666, local literacy was still cultivating standards set by authors of the Arakanese period such as Saiẏad Sultān and Ālāol. In Arakan itself, Bengali Muslim literature continued to be produced and transmitted until at least the first half of the twentieth century. A large number of manuscripts was collected in the first decades of the twentieth century and these are preserved in various institutions in Bangladesh. The Bengali literature of Arakan is characterized by its Indic religious idiom and Sanskritized poetics, but also by its complex intertextuality that reflects the region’s connections with north India and the Persianate trading networks of the Bay of Bengal. Up to the 2000s, the Bengali literature of Arakan has mostly been discussed within the framework of the national literary history of Bangladesh, but subsequently scholars have relocated this corpus within the cultural domain of the Bay of Bengal and the Islamicate literary traditions of South and Southeast Asia.
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Buddhist and Muslim Interactions in Asian History
Johan Elverskog
In the popular imagination, the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is often conceptualized as one of violence; namely, Muslims destroying the Dharma. Of course, in more recent years this narrative has been problematized by the reality of Buddhist ethnic cleansing and the genocide of Muslims in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Yet, what needs to be recognized is that the meeting between Buddhists and Muslims has never simply been one of confrontation. Rather, the interaction of these two religions—which has been going on for more than one thousand years across the length and breadth of Asia (from Iran to China and Indonesia to Siberia)—has also involved much else, including artistic, cultural, economic, and intellectual exchanges.
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Charismatic Megafauna in Southeast Asia
Faizah Binte Zakaria
“Charismatic megafauna” refers to species of large mammals which engender widespread affection and serve as a focal point to mobilize conservation action. Most commonly associated with elephants, tigers, and orangutans, these animals play critical roles in the cultural, economic, political, and social histories of human communities. In the royal courts, they were harnessed to uphold premodern political authority and maintain military might, helping a ruler to exert control over his subjects. Among settled agriculturalists, they regularly came into conflict over destruction of crops and competition for ranging space but were concurrently part of everyday religious life. Animal charisma in this region emerged from shared experiences living in liminal spaces between wilderness and civilization, where relationships of codependence might emerge amid feelings of fear and awe. The hardening of nature–culture boundaries and intensified resource extraction during the modern period unraveled some of these relationships, placing wildlife in a vulnerable position. This troubled history suggests that conservation efforts need to take into account why particular species inspired a certain affect, not only to galvanize human energy to save them from extinction but also to reimagine spatial arrangements so as to accommodate cohabitation between humans and nonhumans.
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The Chinese in Colonial Myanmar
Yi Li
Exchanges of people and goods between Myanmar (formerly Burma) and China have a long history spanning over a millennium. However, it was during the British colonial era in Burma (1824–1948) that substantial and consistent migration of ethnic Chinese occurred, laying the foundations of Sino-Burmese communities in present-day Myanmar. Two distinct migration routes were initially taken by Chinese immigrants: the overland route between northern Burma and Yunnan, predominantly used by southwestern Chinese since precolonial days; and the overseas route connecting the southern coast of China with port cities in Southeast Asia, including Rangoon. The latter forms part of the Nanyang Chinese network and was primarily used by immigrants from Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Over time, regional differences between different Chinese immigrant groups blurred, and Chinatowns or Chinese quarters in Rangoon, Mandalay, and other major towns across the colony emerged with distinctive Chinese characters. In colonial Burma, migrants from China constituted a smaller population, were less influential commercially and socially, and were generally less visible than their Indian counterparts. Nonetheless, they were recognized as a distinct ethnic group in the colonial state. Given colonial Burma’s geographic and administrative position, Chinese immigrants, while maintaining strong connections with other Southeast Asian Chinese communities, experienced a unique trajectory under colonial rule, navigating through internal tensions and World War II, and, alongside their multiethnic fellow residents, in British Burma, declared the independence at the beginning of 1948.
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Colonial Contractions: The Making of the Modern Philippines, 1565–1946
Vicente L. Rafael
The origins of the Philippine nation-state can be traced to the overlapping histories of three empires that swept onto its shores: the Spanish, the North American, and the Japanese. This history makes the Philippines a kind of imperial artifact. Like all nation-states, it is an ineluctable part of a global order governed by a set of shifting power relationships. Such shifts have included not just regime change but also social revolution. The modernity of the modern Philippines is precisely the effect of the contradictory dynamic of imperialism. The Spanish, the North American, and the Japanese colonial regimes, as well as their postcolonial heir, the Republic, have sought to establish power over social life, yet found themselves undermined and overcome by the new kinds of lives they had spawned. It is precisely this dialectical movement of empires that we find starkly illuminated in the history of the Philippines.
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Commerce and Economy in Southeast Asia within the Sinosphere (Laos and Vietnam)
James A. Anderson
Before the 16th century, Southeast Asian trade within the Sinosphere (Laos and Vietnam) took place in a maritime trade network that drew together the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea (Eastern Sea). Land-based and maritime trade routes were interlinked across this region. Behind the maritime trade was the upland supply of forest products that included many of the items most desired by distant markets in China and Southeast Asian destinations. The upland access to trade items was as important as was control of the coastal ports. Westerners arrived in the early modern period, as others had, as traders, and were accommodated into established trading patterns. The general current of anti-imperialism was still to come in the 20th century.
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Commercial Laws of the Indian Ocean, 1400–1800 CE
Mahmood Kooria
Laws pertaining to commercial transactions in the Indian Ocean littoral emerged from diverse regional, political, religious, and philosophical orientations. While Muslim merchants dominated the oceanic waters up to the 15th century, European regimes attempted to assert their supremacy from the 16th century onward through various strategies such as treaty-making, diplomacy, and war. In both eras, a diverse array of legal systems contributed to the commercial frameworks in the oceanic littoral. These frameworks derived mainly from Islamic, Hindu, Christian, European, and Arabian legal systems, but regional and transregional Malay, Javanese, Indic, Persian, and Swahili frameworks also played a significant role. Jurists, rulers, companies, and traders from these various backgrounds made the commercial legal sphere of the Indian Ocean very complex and diverse, rooted in a long tradition yet breaking away from it with new forms, devices, institutions, and structures. While very few scholars have focused on the intricacies of commercial law in the Indian Ocean world between 1400 and 1800, the sources on this topic from multiple languages, regions, and collections are very extensive.
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Commercial Networks and Economic Structures of Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia (Thailand and Myanmar)
Geok Yian Goh
Theravada Buddhist polities in ancient Southeast Asia comprised kingdoms located in present-day Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. Theravada Buddhism became influential in mainland Southeast Asia in the 11th century. Little information exists on the economy of daily life during that period; existing records from 1100 until 1600 mainly deal with administrative and religious affairs, from which some information about the economy can be extracted. These mainland Buddhist polities are typically described as practicing “redistributive economic systems,” a term that Karl Polanyi used to refer to geopolitical entities in which the primary source of subsistence is agriculture, and an administrative center, usually located in the capital, collects revenue from taxes on agricultural production, trade, and other specialized activities that are owned or controlled by the central government or other designated authorities, such as religious orders. The redistributive model is contrasted with the market economies of maritime port polities such as those in insular Southeast Asia. This binary opposition is, however, overstated, as demonstrated by diversity found in mainland Southeast Asia, where some polities relied both on agriculture and maritime trade. Polanyi’s model does not satisfactorily account for the diversity of the Theravada Buddhist polities of Myanmar and Thailand. Some scholars from Redfield and Singer to Miksic have constructed more elaborate models including the orthogenetic versus heterogenetic spectrum, on the basis of Polanyi’s thought but which attempt to utilize polythetic rather than monothetic concepts and scalar rather than stadial classifications.
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Commercial Networks Connecting Southeast Asia with the Indian Ocean
Tom Hoogervorst
Southeast Asian history has seen remarkable levels of mobility and durable connections with the rest of the Indian Ocean. The archaeological record points to prehistoric circulations of material culture within the region. Through the power of monsoon sailing, these small-scale circuits coalesced into larger networks by the 5th century bce. Commercial relations with Chinese, Indian, and West Asian traders brought great prosperity to a number of Southeast Asian ports, which were described as places of immense wealth. Professional shipping, facilitated by local watercraft and crews, reveals the indigenous agency behind such long-distance maritime contacts. By the second half of the first millennium ce, ships from the Indo-Malayan world could be found as far west as coastal East Africa. Arabic and Persian merchants started to play a larger role in the Indian Ocean trade by the 8th century, importing spices and aromatic tree resins from sea-oriented polities such as Srivijaya and later Majapahit. From the 15th century, many coastal settlements in Southeast Asia embraced Islam, partly motivated by commercial interests. The arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, and British ships increased the scale of Indian Ocean commerce, including in the domains of capitalist production systems, conquest, slavery, indentured labor, and eventually free trade. During the colonial period, the Indian Ocean was incorporated into a truly global economy. While cultural and intellectual links between Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean have persisted in the 21st century, commercial networks have declined in importance.
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Connectivity across the Bay of Bengal in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Jayati Bhattacharya
The Bay of Bengal has had long history of commercial and cultural circulation across its maritime space, a lesser-studied region in the emerging discourse of Indian Ocean Studies, and extended much beyond, in both eastern and western directions. However, this maritime space has conventionally been regarded as separating contours of peoples, cultures, and economies, particularly in the realm of area studies which has been deeply embedded in academic scholarship as well as political discourses. On the contrary, the region presents us with fascinating stories of integration through family trees, kinship networks, family firms, financial exchanges, intra-community and inter-ethnic bonding, and other facets of circular movements around the Bay.
The political and economic narrative of Asia transformed into one of Western colonial dominance in the 19th century, a process that had begun about almost two centuries earlier. The British emerged as the most powerful of the Western powers in this space having gained strong political footing in India, their most prized possession in the East. The long years were marked by consolidation of their political conquests and economic prowess not only in the Indian subcontinent but also in and around the Bay of Bengal region. The technological innovations and inventions further facilitated their economic aspirations. The 20th century brought about different kind of changes. The ideal of laissez-faire along with the geopolitical discourse on rising maritime powers unleashed a new direction of policies, collaboration, conflicts, and negotiations. An important feature of the century was the dynamic rise of the ideology of nationalism, which worked differently in Europe and Asia. While it led to the world wars in Europe, for Asian powers, it opened doors of opportunity to break the fetters of several years of colonial domination.
In the framework of a narrative of subjugation and domination, a macro-view of the Bay brings forth several circuits of circulation in the maritime space. While some of these circuits had been visible and dominant, others existed on the margins, connecting to the larger circuits obliviously, or existing in independent and almost invisible circulatory loops that did not find any place in Western historiography. This article attempts to provide a broad overview of different circulatory movements under four subthemes—acquisition and development of port cities that facilitated the circulatory process, merchants, banians, and capitalists—as both visible and also invisible actors of circulation in the Bay. It also discusses communities that were displaced, integrated, or acculturated around the rim of the Bay, and intellectual exchanges that motivated, influenced, and incorporated participation of a large number of people all over Asia. There is a focus on the mobile Indian communities in particular, both voluntary and involuntary migrants who were the dominant participants in the colonial economic narrative on both sides of the Bay. The legacy of these long years of exchanges and interactions has often been undermined in the postcolonial nation state centric discourses and needs to be revisited with a fresh perspective in view of the increasing geopolitical significance of the Bay in the 21st century.
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The Creation of Pakistan
Ayesha Jalal
The All-India Muslim League first voiced the demand for a Muslim homeland based on India’s northwestern and northeastern provinces in March 1940. Seven years later at the moment of British decolonization in the subcontinent, Pakistan emerged on the map of the world, an anomaly in the international community of nations with its two wings separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. Over a million people died in the violence that accompanied partition while another 14½ million moved both ways across frontiers demarcated along ostensibly religious lines for the first time in India’s six millennia history. Commonly attributed to the age-old religious divide between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, the causes of Pakistan’s creation are better traced to the federal problems created in India under British colonial rule. Despite sharing a common identity based on religious affiliation, Indian Muslims were divided along regional, linguistic, class, sectarian, and ideological lines. More Muslims live in India and Bangladesh than in Pakistan today, highlighting the clear disjunction between religiously informed identities and territorial sovereignty.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League, tried resolving the problem by claiming in 1940 that Indian Muslims were not a minority but a nation, entitled to the principle of self-determination. He envisaged a “Pakistan” based on undivided Punjab and Bengal. Since this left Muslims in the Hindu-majority provinces out of the reckoning, Jinnah left it an open question whether “Pakistan” and Hindustan would form a confederation covering the whole of India or make treaty arrangements as two separate sovereign states. In the end Jinnah was unable to achieve his larger aims and had to settle for a Pakistan based on the Muslim-majority districts of Punjab and Bengal, something he had rejected out of hand in 1944 and then again in 1946.
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Cultural Citizenship and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies
Henk Schulte Nordholt
By exclusively focusing on the agency of the Dutch, colonial historiography ignored the pivotal role of indigenous middle classes in sustaining the colonial regime. Conventional nationalist historiography, on the other hand, presumes a linear development from urbanization, the rise of the indigenous middle classes, education, and the spread of modernity toward nationalism and revolution as the logical outcome of this process. This article aims to disconnect modernity from nationalism by focusing on the role of cultural citizens in the late-colonial period in the Netherlands Indies, for whom modernity was in the very first place a desirable lifestyle. The extent to which their desires, capitalist strategies, and the interests of the colonial state coincided is illustrated by a variety of advertisements and school posters, which invited members of the indigenous urban middle classes to become cultural citizens of the colony. The image of the cultural citizen was framed within the confinement of the nuclear family, which had a conservative impact on gender relationships.
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The Dutch East India Company and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds, 1602–1795
Matthias van Rossum
Slavery and slave trade were widespread throughout the empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Asia. The VOC was not only a “merchant” company but also functioned as military power, government, and even agricultural producer. In these roles, the VOC was involved in the forced relocation (and forced mobilization) of people in direct and indirect ways. This entailed commodified slavery and especially slave trade, in which persons were considered property and sellable, but also a wider landscape of forced relocations (deportation, non-commodified transfers) and coerced labor regimes (corvée, debt, and caste slavery). Much more research into the histories of slavery, slave trade, and wider coercive labor and social regimes is needed to shed light on the dynamics and connections of local and global systems.
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Empire and Historiography in Southwest China
John Herman
Although frontier studies enjoy a long and robust history in China, a disproportionate amount of attention has focused on North China and its relations with Central and Northeast Asia, while only a handful of historians have paid much attention to the history of South and Southwest China. Those that do invariably offer a narrative that presents Southwest China (the current provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and the southwestern portion of Sichuan) as unequivocal parts of greater China since at least the end of the 3rd century bce. They accomplish this by selectively including only the events that reinforce inflated notions of Han superiority, while at the same time expunging from the historical records events and episodes that challenge the internal cohesion of this metanarrative and disparage the Han. Throughout China’s long history, they argue, Han from the Central Plain (zhongyuan) region of North China have continuously migrated south in search of land and opportunity, and over time Han cultural practices, centralized and hierarchical political institutions, a sophisticated written language, and a socially differentiated society that generates surplus revenue, have transformed nearly all of the “barbarian” non-Han into civilized Han. What the Chinese metanarrative fails to offer, however, is perspective, for it not only deprives the southwest of its own history, such as a thoughtful examination of the vibrant kingdoms that existed in the southwest, like the Cuan (338–747), Muege (c. 300–1283), Nanzhao (738–937), and Dali (937–1253) kingdoms, to name just a few, but also it refuses to offer a critical examination of how the Chinese empire colonized this territory.
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The Historical Roots of Contemporary Vietnam
Patricia Pelley
Contemporary Vietnam is the product of many factors, but several moments in particular stand out. Nam tiến, meaning “Southern Advance,” refers to the migration of people from the Red River Delta, the traditional heartland of Vietnamese civilization, to what are now the central and southern parts of the country. As a result of this process, which unfolded over hundreds of years, two regional polities emerged: Đàng Ngoài (literally “Outer,” meaning northern) and Đàng Trong (literally “Inner,” meaning southern). During the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788), members of two clans began to wield executive power: the Trịnh family in Đàng Ngoài and the Nguyễn family in Đàng Trong. Throughout this period, new social, cultural, and economic patterns also appeared. In the late 18th century Tây Sơn rebels subdued the Trịnh and Nguyễn lords (chúa) and caused the Lê Dynasty to collapse. Instituting the pattern of north–south political unity, the Tây Sơn established the template for monarchs of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) and for communist revolutionaries in the 20th century. During the French colonial occupation (1862–1954), colonists thoroughly refashioned the natural and built environments and created new economic realities. By dividing the country into three administrative units—the protectorate of Tonkin (northern Vietnam), the protectorate of Annam (central Vietnam), and the colony of Cochinchina (southern Vietnam)—the colonists further amplified regional identities. The French occupation also directly led to the First Indochina War and clearly contributed to the Second. After Northern Vietnamese (and their allies) defeated Southern Vietnamese (and their allies), a new united national polity emerged: the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with the Vietnamese Communist Party in command. At the conclusion of both Indochina Wars significant numbers of Vietnamese fled the country. To a striking degree, the ideological differences that divided Vietnamese in earlier decades are still evident in contemporary times.
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The History of Natural Hazards in the Philippines
Gregory Bankoff
The danger from natural hazards is omnipresent in the Philippines. Disasters like typhoons, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and fires, among others, occur so often that they have become embedded in socioeconomic norms and practices and, over time, communities have learned to adapt to their regularity. Typhoons, and the epiphenomenal floods that too habitually accompany them, have caused more loss of life and property than any other natural hazard, and the magnitude and frequency of both are only likely to increase with climate change. Earthquakes not only have repeatedly racked urban centers and rural neighborhoods, leading to tremendous destruction and loss of life, but in the 21st century also threaten the cultural heritage of the nation. Volcanic eruptions have punctuated the history of the archipelago, causing significant population movement as well as economic disruption. Urban fires, largely the product of colonial settlement, remain a largely hidden and unrecorded menace, especially in areas of more informal housing that ring most modern population centers. In sum, the constant exposure to these risks has played a pivotal role in shaping the country’s historical development and in influencing its contemporary culture.
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History of the Banda Sea
Hans Hägerdal
The Banda Sea is a watery landscape in eastern maritime Southeast Asia, encompassing much of the present Maluku Province of Indonesia. Historically, its hundreds of islands include the economically vital Banda Islands and Ambon, as well as the outlying islands of Wetar and Kisar, and the Kei and Tanimbar archipelagos. In spite of its relative remoteness in relation to the historical centers of Indonesia, the sea evolved as a vibrant economic crossroads from about the 14th century, mostly because of the trade in cloves and nutmeg that attracted visitors and settlers from various parts of Asia. The islands also delivered sea and forest products of some consequence. The potential commercial profits made the Banda Sea an early priority for colonial encroachment after the arrival of Europeans in Asian ports. The Portuguese established a presence after 1512, followed by the Dutch and English in 1599. European powers strove to impose monopolies in the spice trade. The contest for the islands was eventually won by the Dutch East India Company, whose dispositions turned the sea into a colonial backwater. This it remained during the Dutch Colonial State of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Indonesian Revolution in 1945–1949 was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to establish an independent South Malukan state in 1950. The relative neglect and the transmigration policies of the successive Indonesia governments led to local civil war in 1999–2002.
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Indonesia’s Colonial Sugar Industry
Roger Knight
Colonial Indonesia’s sugar industry, developed under Dutch and Sino-Indonesian auspices over a period of almost three centuries, beginning c. 1650, evolved into one which exhibited a unique configuration in which an industrialized sugar complex became embedded within much larger “peasant” economy of the farming of rice and “second” crops. It was on this agrarian and largely self-financed basis that Indonesia’s colonial sugar industry, located exclusively in the island of Java, became one of the leading sectors of the international sugar economy of the late colonial era, eventually even rivaling Cuba—the nonpareil of such producers—as an exporter to world markets. During the interwar Depression of the 1930s and subsequent decade of war and revolution, it lost much (and eventually all) of its international standing—yet managed to survive into Indonesia’s postcolonial era, albeit in an attenuated form. There were four main phases to the industry’s colonial-era history. The first, foundational phase, which saw the establishment of modern industrialized manufacture extended from the 1830s through to the 1880s. The second phase, from the 1880s to 1930, was the period of sugar’s peak expansion. The third phase, beginning in 1931 and ending in 1942, was one of retrenchment and (partial) recovery prior to the spread of the Second World War into Southeast Asia. The fourth phase, 1945–1958, was one of postwar reconstruction.
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Islam in Southeast Asia to c. 1800
R. Michael Feener
Southeast Asia has been a historical crossroads of major world civilizations for nearly two millennia. Muslim traders were sojourning along the shores of the Indonesian archipelago from at least the 8th century, and by the turn of the 14th century local Muslim communities had taken root, and the region’s first sultanate was established in northern Sumatra. Since then, Muslim communities had been established across many other parts of Southeast Asia, where in the 21st century they comprise demographic majorities in the nation-states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei and significant minority populations in the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and Singapore.
The Islamization of these societies, and their inclusion into an expanding constellation of Muslim societies in the medieval and early modern periods, was facilitated by intensifications of activity along the maritime trading routes linking Southeast Asia to ports on the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Swahili Coasts with those of India and China over the medieval and early modern periods. Over the course of this history, the expansion of Islam in the region was not dominantly directed from any single source but rather the result of diverse, interlaced strands of commercial and cultural circulations that connected the region to multiple points in an expanding Muslim world—adopting local traditions to produce diverse and dynamic vernacular forms of Islamic cultural expression.
