The View from the Edge: The Indian Ocean's Middle East

Abstract

I first encountered the Indian Ocean on the shores of Makran. I thought I was at land's end, Asia's edge. The ocean hadn't entered my thoughts except as non plus ultra, an ending void. The map said Baluchistan, and I had come to find the Baluch. But I soon found Africans and Zikris, palm-frond huts and Omani passports, old soldiers (or mercenaries) from an overseas foreign legion and smugglers of whiskey, opium, and pharmaceuticals. Now China has built a port there; then, less than twenty years ago, they were still making dhows, subtle smuggling ships. Yet it was far from romantic. It was a rough and hard place where traders and fishers eked a marginal existence from the watery edge of a dust-powder desert. Karachi was thirty-six hours by bus then truck. But Pakistan was an abstract and suspect idea; locals talked more of Muscat. A year or two later, in the Tihama of Yemen, I watched as boatloads of Africans (refugees? job hunters? all men at any rate) ran ashore through the surf. My Arab colleagues, all from the highlands, said they arrived every day, and spoke ill of them. A while after that, in Muscat, I listened with curiosity to Arabic laced with Urdu (or was it Hindi, or Gujarati? They were just nouns, Wanderwörter: terms that travel). In Iran, it was different sounds of the ocean I heard when urban friends gave me tapes of bandarī, the music of the ports.

Whither West Asia? Exploring North–South perspectives on Eurasia

“…A number of recent studies have drawn attention to the problematic nature of the geographical category "Middle East" and sought to advance instead a growing recognition of other frames of analysis and geographic categories that this contested term has excluded from area studies literature (e.g., Bonine et al, 2011;Green, 2016). Some scholars have brought attention to the ways in which the notions of "the Middle East" and Central and South Asia have led to the scholarly peripheralization of borderland regions (such as the territories which today form Afghanistan) that straddle taken-for-granted culture areas (Green, 2016). An important body of literature has also focused on the maritime connections between the Arabian Peninsula and multiple contexts around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea (e.g., Green, 2013b;Sheriff & Ho, 2014;Tagliacozzo, 2009Tagliacozzo, , 2013.…”

Muslim Endowments in Asia: Waqf, Charity and Circulations

“…Making Asia the starting point of reasoning about Muslim endowments allows us to look beyond reified regional and cultural frontiers. 12 More than this, the articles collected in this issue seek to go beyond assumptions that have dominated the study of "inter-Asian" connections: a majority of works in the field have focused on the emergence of "societies" through the lens of mobile people, diasporas and their moving artifacts. 13 For instance, in his classic study of diasporic Hadhramis across the Indian Ocean, Engseng Ho investigates the role of genealogy in community formation across vast spatial and temporal territories.…”