The Two Arms of Cambay: Diasporic Texts of Ecumenical Islam in the Indian Ocean

Author: Ho, Engseng¹

Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Volume 50, Numbers 2-3, 2007 , pp. 347-361(15)

Publisher: BRILL

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Abstract:

Long-distance trade, entailing as it does repeated exchanges across countries and cultures, often brings in its train consequences beyond the exchange of goods and specie. As other exchanges—of warfare, kinship, supplication, devotion—thicken social relations across routes pioneered by trade, new ways of imagining society across a larger space emerge. This paper examines the transcultural work that may be performed to create such enlarged imaginations of society, with a particular reference to the Hadramis of Yemen. In such ways, we suggest that a world religion, such as Islam, can give specific cultural shape to the distant horizons of world trade, as both expanded across the Indian Ocean over the past five centuries.

Keywords: INDIAN OCEAN; HADRAMIS; CAMBAY; CULTURAL INTERACTION; AL-AYDARUS

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1163/156852007781787413

Affiliations: 1: Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, USA

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