1 Introduction: Global History, Prayer Books, and Other Small Things
It is hard to point to a precise date or moment when world, global, or transnational history, as we have now come to know it, started to take off as a field or subfield of historical studies, but since the early 1990s, there has definitely been steady growth in this area of research. As academic research and publication have moved along, so too have trade publishers taken the cue, and it is now not hard to find publications for popular consumption with âworld historyâ or some linked theme as their subject.
Of course, there have always been scholars who wrote about historical issues on a world scale, worked over large territorial expanses, and did not see the oceans and seas as areas of absolute separation. Within historical sociology and economic history, there are also long traditions of research on a global scale. Think, for instance, of Immanuel Wallerstein or AndrĂ© Gunder Frank, and the traditions of scholarship they come from, or the Annales school of historiography and the works on the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel, in particular. Indeed, there is a tradition of such global-scale writing that goes back to the Renaissance and picks up with the Enlightenment. So there exists a long line of scholars, impelled to âwrite the worldâ and write about the past of the worldâalbeit not necessarily in interconnected terms or in a way that take all sides equitably into accountâwith a certain âconscience de la globalitĂ©â (âsense of the globalâ), as Roger Chartier (2001) has termed it. Various traditions in different parts of the world (in and outside the West) have contributed to such history and philosophical history on a grand scale. It must however be recognized that, as Subrahmanyam (2014, p. 3) puts is, âhistory is vainâ, and there is a xenology at the centre of these histories; that is, the scholars and philosophers who wrote them assumed their own society, empire , or religionâthe one from within which they wroteâwas the most important in the world and the most significant sphere with which to concern oneself. Yet even such an approach to history has to recognize the other, even if not on equal terms.
There have also been divergent imperatives for producing such historical knowledge and historical interpretation. But the recent and continuing expansion in studies that connect diverse territories across oceans and seas is indeed a major new turn in historiography.1 A range of overlapping historical moments and trends enabled the growth in this field: the fall of the Berlin Wall (which, ironically, led to the notion of the âend of historyâ), the rise of new centres of economic growth and power in Asia, the decline of US economic dominance, and, within the history profession, a search for new turns in scholarship. There have been some bold statements outlining the major issues and themes historians should investigate, and there have also been some carefully focussed regional studies that take into account the wider oceanic expanse that connects one region to other parts of the globe.
Many historians have become interested in processes of globalization beyond empires and nation-states; instead the interest lies in examining processes devised by and affecting ordinary people who on one level appear insular and local, but on another are cosmopolitan and multilingual and connected. Studies of diasporas have, of course, examined a whole host of communities across the globe. This means that attention should also be paid to often neglected aspects of the historical experience and connections , or connectedness , across space, such as language, religion, cuisine, dress, and musicâto name but a few areas of life that the emerging historical scholarship addresses (or should address). It means focussing on sailors and dock workers, teachers and preachers, traders and business intermediaries, and many others.
The book, as a tangible physical object, has moved across vast spaces; it is a carrier of ideas and information, which is most often the focus, so that a book is usually understood in more metaphorical terms than its materiality is conceived. But perhaps a shift to looking at it as a thing deserves more attention, especially for the period before mass production and cheaper parcel mail prices made books much easier to produce and circulate over long distances. Books moved with people; or ideas in books moved beyond their birthplace to be articulated anew in new spaces. In the Indian Ocean world, where religious ideas, experiences, and personages were highly valued (yet hardly ever went completely uncontested), religious books circulated widely. In the case of Muslim communities, booksâin their manuscript and printed formsâwent wherever they went. However illiterate the greater number of Muslims may have been, there was always a handful of literate people among them. Bookselling and book buying, and reading and writing, were integral to Muslim diasporas in the Indian Ocean world (Green 2011). History on the global scale can therefore be about texts âas ideas and as thingsâin which ordinary readers and (non-reading) listeners are active participants. The difference between this approach and one that reads history as the play of great powers is demonstrated by the story of a community that provides the context for the elaboration on this prayer book below. Enseng Ho puts it as follows: âUnlike the Europeans, whose activities combined conquest and trade and who maintained monopolies by navies, Hadramis entered into wide-ranging exchanges with peoples in the Indian Ocean , especially in modes that come under the broad banner of religionâ (Ho 2006, p. 27).
This scholarship about the world as interconnected spaces where politics and diplomacy matter, but sometimes less so than writing paper and other seemingly small matters, is also animated by interdisciplinary approaches to the past and the emerging present, with historical ethnography offering a particularly fertile interdisciplinary approach. Methodologically, this entails moving between various scales of research, the micro, meso, and macro, often depending on the availability of sources to interpret. Theoretically, there is no orthodoxy; eclecticism appears to be a âschoolâ of thought. While the scale is grand, the theory informing the narratives is modest, it would appear. However, effectively carrying out such research requires proficiency in many languages (imperial and relevant regional languages), and access to many archives, or potential archives, as books and documents lie in fragments and forgotten in peoplesâ homes.
In this chapter, I shall use a small book as a point of entry to help me elucidate the many ways in which parts of Africa and Asia intermingled and mixed. The mixing affected every facet of life, and we have not yet really addressed the full, textured quality of the new, living fabric spun by the meeting of Africa and Asia. In what follows, I trace tangible elements from the field of religion that bear testimony to the rich and complex trajectories of history, where long distances are covered and re-covered by men and women, ideas and texts . The object I follow is a small prayer book.
2 The Global Dimensions of a Little Prayer Book
In 2010, a book of prayers was published in Cape Town . It is a soft-cover and just over 300 pages long, produced to a high standard in every respect, such as the quality of the paper and soft-cover binding. The Arabic text is printed in a clear and legible Arabic font (although not named in the back matter, it appears to be a contemporary typeface) and is accompanied by a translation into English as well as a transliteration into Latin script for those who cannot read Arabic . It cont...