Monsoon Islam

Sebastian Prange’s new book traces interrelated strands of connection across Muslim communities of the medieval Indian Ocean in developing a model of what he refers to as ‘Monsoon Islam’. He characterizes this dense world of interaction and shared dynamics as comprising a distinct model of Muslim society, in which ‘traditions, ideologies, and customs primarily reflect the values of merchants rather than the interests of a state, political elite, or state-supported religious class’ (pp. 298–9). With this, he presents a transregional model of Islamicate civilization that serves as both corrective and complement to dominant views of the history of pre-modern Muslim societies. Prange conceptualizes the world of Monsoon Islam as ‘a product of contacts and mobility’ (p. 207) constituted through intersecting commercial, religious, and political networks connecting a distinctive configuration of spaces and institutions. The chapters of the book are presented thematically with recurrent treatment of a long chronology punctuated by attention to particular transitions in the twelfth, fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Along this timeline, Prange presents a set of parallel stories illustrating overlapping institutional developments that served to construct and maintain this model of Monsoon Islam on the Malabar Coast of southern India

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