Fahad Ahmad Bishara
Biographic Data
| ID | 368722 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fahad Ahmad Bishara |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fahad Ahmad |
| FAMILY NAME | Bishara |
| SIGNATURE | BISHARA F A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9965-2540 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Markets of Doubt: Islamic Law and the Omani Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean, c. 1870
This article explores how Omani jurist Saʿid bin Khalfan al-Khalili (d. 1871) theorized and regulated the Indian Ocean slave trade amid the intertwined transformations of empire and commerce in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a corpus of his fatwas on slavery, it reconstructs the legal reasoning through which al-Khalili sought to distinguish licit from illicit enslavement at a time when the boundaries between the two had become increasingly un…
Voyage Stories: The Natural and Supernatural on the Deck of a Dhow
In his tenth-century compendium of tales, The Book of the Marvels of India, the writer Buzurg b.Shahriyar relates the following:A sailor, native of the seaports of Iraq, tells me the following story, which he heard from an old ship's-captain.His ship left Siraf, and he had a man on board who, during the voyage, fell out with one of the passengers, swore at him, and transgressed all the limits of decency.The passenger made no reply; he was a forei…
Writing from the Coast: A Short Tribute to Michael Naylor Pearson
Circulation and Capitalism in a Maritime Bazaar
This article takes a single genre of the Persian Gulf pearl dive—the chau manual, used to determine the weight-based value of a pearl—and draws on it to think about circulation and commodification in the Indian Ocean world. In reading the chau manual, as well as other writings, it highlights the active processes by which economic actors in the region thought about, and indeed produced, capitalism at sea. As technologies—as means of doing—chau man…
The Stuff of Legal History
This concluding reflection on the forum, “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal History,” seeks to emphasize the contributing essays engagement with historical methodologies that take seriously objects, signs, and the theatrical
Arabia adrift
The Sailing Scribes: Circulating Law in the Twentieth-Century Indian Ocean
What did the practice of law look like on the high seas? This has been a matter of some discussion among legal historians, with the bulk of the evidence coming from encounters between European ships in the Atlantic and Asia. This article takes a different tack, taking as its starting point a series of contracts copied into the logbook of the early-twentieth century Arab dhow captain (nakhoda) ‘Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. Although some of these appe…
Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought, written by Hassan S. Khalilieh
U lrike F reitag . A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
For a port city of its importance, Jeddah has not received much attention among historians. This is perhaps in part because of the relative recentness of the oceanic turn in Middle Eastern history as well as its somewhat peripheral place vis-à-vis the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. If the Hijaz has received ample attention because of the hajj pilgrimage, the city of Jeddah itself has largely been overlooked, despite its place as the principal g…
Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but a…
The Diver’s New Papers: Wealth, People, and Property in a Persian Gulf Bazaar
This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa , a declaration exchanged by nakhoda s (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to th…
History at Sea: Route and World on an Indian Ocean Dhow
This article invites readers to rethink the work that routes can do in world history by braiding together the spatial and historical imaginaries of an itinerant community: the dhow captains (nakhodas) of Kuwait. Through a close reading of two genres of nakhoda writings, logbooks and nautical manuals, it explores the deliberate process by which they constructed their movement across the sea. It suggests that for dhows, travel across the Indian Oce…
Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic world
In this article, I survey the long‐standing debate on the place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism. I first mark out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implicitly, in comparative terms about the capitalist trajectories of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajectory; I then explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question of capitalist development …
Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism
Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Oce…
The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History
In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been s…
Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
This is an ambitious book that the author deserves high praise for writing. Thomas McDow draws on a broad range of sources in a number of different languages and from far-flung archives and librari
Imagining Oceans of Law: Oman and East Africa, circa 1910
This article takes a single moment—a court case that took place in Zanzibar in 1910—and uses it to explore the legal imaginaries that circulated around the Western Indian Ocean at the height of British imperialism. It stitches together the actions of litigants, the utterances of qadis, and the proclamations of jurists, reading them alongside the silences in the legal material itself to bring to life a world of law, mobility, and imagination. More…
Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937, written by Scott S. Reese, 2017
No country but the ocean: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900
This paper engages in a microhistory of international law, grounded in the contests surrounding theMuscat Dhowscase brought by Great Britain against France in 1905. At the heart of the case was the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and navigation passes to dhows from the southern Omani port of Sur that were suspected of transporting slaves. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the rul…
A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950
In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a mélange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of trade and…
Ships Passing in the Night? Reflections on the Middle East in the Indian Ocean
The study of the Middle East is witnessing a sea change (excuse the maritime metaphor). The traditional geographic poles of Middle East studies (Turkey, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq) stand firm, but are now facing a challenge from places once thought to be peripheral to the historiography: namely, South Arabia and the Gulf. The rising tide of scholarship on those areas is due in large measure to the opportunities that now present themselves in res…
The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa
This book has been a long time in the making. The author, a renowned historian of Oman, first introduced the idea for the book in a footnote in his classic text The Imamate Tradition of Oman (Cambr
A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850–1940
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law across the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean
Sometime during the middle of the nineteenth century, a correspondent from the interior of Oman wrote to the jurist Sa‘id bin Khalfan Al-Khalili (c. 1811–70) with an observation: “The Mazru‘is have wealth on the Swahili coast [ al-Sawāḥil ] and wealth in Oman.” This in itself was no surprise: the Mazru‘is, along with scores of other Arab clans, included a branch that had long since established its political authority in Mombasa, on the coast of w…
No country but the ocean: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900
This paper engages in a microhistory of international law, grounded in the contests surrounding theMuscat Dhowscase brought by Great Britain against France in 1905. At the heart of the case was the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and navigation passes to dhows from the southern Omani port of Sur that were suspected of transporting slaves. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the rul…
Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism
Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Oce…
Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law across the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean
Sometime during the middle of the nineteenth century, a correspondent from the interior of Oman wrote to the jurist Sa‘id bin Khalfan Al-Khalili (c. 1811–70) with an observation: “The Mazru‘is have wealth on the Swahili coast [ al-Sawāḥil ] and wealth in Oman.” This in itself was no surprise: the Mazru‘is, along with scores of other Arab clans, included a branch that had long since established its political authority in Mombasa, on the coast of w…
A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850–1940
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History
In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been s…
The Diver’s New Papers: Wealth, People, and Property in a Persian Gulf Bazaar
This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa , a declaration exchanged by nakhoda s (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to th…
Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
This is an ambitious book that the author deserves high praise for writing. Thomas McDow draws on a broad range of sources in a number of different languages and from far-flung archives and librari
Ships Passing in the Night? Reflections on the Middle East in the Indian Ocean
The study of the Middle East is witnessing a sea change (excuse the maritime metaphor). The traditional geographic poles of Middle East studies (Turkey, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq) stand firm, but are now facing a challenge from places once thought to be peripheral to the historiography: namely, South Arabia and the Gulf. The rising tide of scholarship on those areas is due in large measure to the opportunities that now present themselves in res…
Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but a…
Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic world
In this article, I survey the long‐standing debate on the place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism. I first mark out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implicitly, in comparative terms about the capitalist trajectories of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajectory; I then explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question of capitalist development …
A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850–1940
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law across the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean
Sometime during the middle of the nineteenth century, a correspondent from the interior of Oman wrote to the jurist Sa‘id bin Khalfan Al-Khalili (c. 1811–70) with an observation: “The Mazru‘is have wealth on the Swahili coast [ al-Sawāḥil ] and wealth in Oman.” This in itself was no surprise: the Mazru‘is, along with scores of other Arab clans, included a branch that had long since established its political authority in Mombasa, on the coast of w…
The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa
This book has been a long time in the making. The author, a renowned historian of Oman, first introduced the idea for the book in a footnote in his classic text The Imamate Tradition of Oman (Cambr
Ships Passing in the Night? Reflections on the Middle East in the Indian Ocean
The study of the Middle East is witnessing a sea change (excuse the maritime metaphor). The traditional geographic poles of Middle East studies (Turkey, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq) stand firm, but are now facing a challenge from places once thought to be peripheral to the historiography: namely, South Arabia and the Gulf. The rising tide of scholarship on those areas is due in large measure to the opportunities that now present themselves in res…
A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950
In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a mélange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of trade and…
Imagining Oceans of Law: Oman and East Africa, circa 1910
This article takes a single moment—a court case that took place in Zanzibar in 1910—and uses it to explore the legal imaginaries that circulated around the Western Indian Ocean at the height of British imperialism. It stitches together the actions of litigants, the utterances of qadis, and the proclamations of jurists, reading them alongside the silences in the legal material itself to bring to life a world of law, mobility, and imagination. More…
Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937, written by Scott S. Reese, 2017
No country but the ocean: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900
This paper engages in a microhistory of international law, grounded in the contests surrounding theMuscat Dhowscase brought by Great Britain against France in 1905. At the heart of the case was the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and navigation passes to dhows from the southern Omani port of Sur that were suspected of transporting slaves. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the rul…
Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
This is an ambitious book that the author deserves high praise for writing. Thomas McDow draws on a broad range of sources in a number of different languages and from far-flung archives and librari
Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic world
In this article, I survey the long‐standing debate on the place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism. I first mark out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implicitly, in comparative terms about the capitalist trajectories of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajectory; I then explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question of capitalist development …
Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism
Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Oce…
The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History
In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been s…
Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought, written by Hassan S. Khalilieh
U lrike F reitag . A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
For a port city of its importance, Jeddah has not received much attention among historians. This is perhaps in part because of the relative recentness of the oceanic turn in Middle Eastern history as well as its somewhat peripheral place vis-à-vis the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. If the Hijaz has received ample attention because of the hajj pilgrimage, the city of Jeddah itself has largely been overlooked, despite its place as the principal g…
Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but a…
The Diver’s New Papers: Wealth, People, and Property in a Persian Gulf Bazaar
This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa , a declaration exchanged by nakhoda s (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to th…
History at Sea: Route and World on an Indian Ocean Dhow
This article invites readers to rethink the work that routes can do in world history by braiding together the spatial and historical imaginaries of an itinerant community: the dhow captains (nakhodas) of Kuwait. Through a close reading of two genres of nakhoda writings, logbooks and nautical manuals, it explores the deliberate process by which they constructed their movement across the sea. It suggests that for dhows, travel across the Indian Oce…
Circulation and Capitalism in a Maritime Bazaar
This article takes a single genre of the Persian Gulf pearl dive—the chau manual, used to determine the weight-based value of a pearl—and draws on it to think about circulation and commodification in the Indian Ocean world. In reading the chau manual, as well as other writings, it highlights the active processes by which economic actors in the region thought about, and indeed produced, capitalism at sea. As technologies—as means of doing—chau man…
The Stuff of Legal History
This concluding reflection on the forum, “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal History,” seeks to emphasize the contributing essays engagement with historical methodologies that take seriously objects, signs, and the theatrical
Arabia adrift
The Sailing Scribes: Circulating Law in the Twentieth-Century Indian Ocean
What did the practice of law look like on the high seas? This has been a matter of some discussion among legal historians, with the bulk of the evidence coming from encounters between European ships in the Atlantic and Asia. This article takes a different tack, taking as its starting point a series of contracts copied into the logbook of the early-twentieth century Arab dhow captain (nakhoda) ‘Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. Although some of these appe…
Writing from the Coast: A Short Tribute to Michael Naylor Pearson
Voyage Stories: The Natural and Supernatural on the Deck of a Dhow
In his tenth-century compendium of tales, The Book of the Marvels of India, the writer Buzurg b.Shahriyar relates the following:A sailor, native of the seaports of Iraq, tells me the following story, which he heard from an old ship's-captain.His ship left Siraf, and he had a man on board who, during the voyage, fell out with one of the passengers, swore at him, and transgressed all the limits of decency.The passenger made no reply; he was a forei…
Markets of Doubt: Islamic Law and the Omani Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean, c. 1870
This article explores how Omani jurist Saʿid bin Khalfan al-Khalili (d. 1871) theorized and regulated the Indian Ocean slave trade amid the intertwined transformations of empire and commerce in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a corpus of his fatwas on slavery, it reconstructs the legal reasoning through which al-Khalili sought to distinguish licit from illicit enslavement at a time when the boundaries between the two had become increasingly un…
Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (20 works) · History (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · History (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Ancient history (9 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Politics (8 works)