New frontiers and conversion

Abstract

Introduction By the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite Europe’s superior maritime and military power, Islamic commercial networks established along the fringes of the Islamic world, notably in Africa and South-East Asia, remained in place, linking the interior with coastal ports. These fringes were not exactly ‘frontiers’; in most cases, a substantial Islamic presence had existed for centuries. However, the majority of the population was not Muslim. These areas were to become the arena of substantial conversion to Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in large measure because of and not simply despite the imposition of European hegemony. The nature and extent of Islamic expansion along these fringes depended on the interplay of various factors: the social organisation of specific local societies; the prior history of Islamisation and of the integration of Muslims into these societies; and the ways in which different regions of the world were ultimately integrated into European-dominated global economic networks. In South-East Asia as well as East Africa, the spread of Islam was inextricably linked to maritime trading networks, with Islam initially confined to ports along the coast. However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the interior of Java was at least nominally Islamic, although Islam was still expanding to parts of the Sumatran interior. At the outset of the modern era, Muslims in East Africa remained exclusively along the coast, and it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that Islam began to expand into the interior.