Muslim circulations and networks in West Asia: Ethnographic perspectives on transregional connectivity

Abstract

This article explores the concept of West Asia in relationship to recent work in the global history of Islam that points toward the existence of transregional arenas of historic significance that incorporate many of Asia’s Muslim societies. Recent anthropological work has also brought attention to the dynamic nature of the relations and cultural connections between peoples living in regions that once formed part of expansive arenas of interaction yet were divided by imperial and national boundaries, as well as the ideological conflicts of the Cold War. Against this political and historical context, we deploy West Asia as a geographical scale that brings to light interconnected forms of life that have been silenced by traditional area studies scholarship. We compare our field work experiences with two different networks made-up of Muslims that span different axis of Muslim Asia. We argue that “West Asia” brings attention to influential connections, communities, and circulations that both bear the imprint of deeper pasts as well as the influence of emergent and shifting transregional dynamics in the present. Furthermore, by emphasizing connective dynamics that move beyond the rather conventional focus on east–west relationships, the category West Asia also encourages scholarship to highlight multiple yet hitherto little explored inter-Asian north–south connections.

West-Central Asia: A comparative analysis of students’ trajectories in Russia (Moscow) from the 1980s and China (Yiwu) from the 2000s

“…Arenas allows us to appreciate other spheres of interaction and movement shaping different geographical spaces and theoretical outlooks that might escape the “regions” rigidly conceived of as the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, or South Asia. There are important studies, for example, of the ways in which Central Asia intersects with historical, social, and political processes in West Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia (e.g., Balci, 2009; Ghazal, 2014; Ibañez Tirado, 2018a; Marsden, 2016a; Marsden & Henig, 2019; Mostowlansky, 2018; Yolacan, 2019). As Green (2014) suggests, however, we need a “conceptual pluralization” of the regions’ geographies to understand such intersections, and to remember that, “geographies are in essence conceptual categories that scholars can adopt, adapt, or abandon.…”

Aleppo in Asia: Mercantile networks between Syria, China and post-Soviet Eurasia since 1970

“…4 I also find helpful perspectives that focus not on the transmission of cultural forms between discrete regions, but on the 'recurring circulations that result in interpenetrated societies' (Marsden and Mostowlansky 2019, 7). Henig, for example, demonstrates that Sufi networks blur the regions of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, by tracing the active connections of a brotherhood based in Bosnia with sites of religious experience in Mashhad, Istanbul and Northern Syria (Marsden and Henig 2019). Marsden makes a similar argument about the interpenetration of Eurasia and West Asia, showing that trading families from Central Asia have for centuries circulated between this region, the Arabian peninsula and Anatolia (Marsden and Henig 2019).…”

Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures

“… 8. The National Museum of Ethnology and the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam use ‘Asia’ and ‘West Asia’, rather than the ‘Middle East.’ This approach predates Ahmed’s book, but is compatible with his ‘Balkan-to-Bengal complex.’ Marsden and Henig (2019: 12) defend the term West Asia with reference to Ahmed:Indeed, looked at from this perspective, ‘the Middle East’ appears less as the center of wider trends and developments in the Muslim societies of Asia than existing at the fringes of the complex networks and flows of knowledge that cut-across multiple Asian settings. …”