Presenter
Hamdani Sumaiya - George Mason University, George Mason University, Fairfax VA, United StatesPanel
60 – New Perspectives in the Study of Isma’ilism in South Asia: Institutions, Economies, and EthicsAbstract
Indian Ocean studies have progressed to examine various diasporic communities that traversed it from Africa to Asia over the millennia, primarily for reasons of trade. And while scholars such as Enseng Ho (2006), Nile Green (2011) and Scott Reese (2017) have investigated diasporic Muslims in the Indian Ocean in particular, the Bohras (aka Daudi Tayyibi Ismaili Shia) of western India remain overlooked. They represent a community the evolution of whose identity has arguably differed from that of other diasporic Muslims. As this paper will suggest, Bohra identity has had less to do with how geography (Ho), technology (Green), or empire (Reese) connected this specific diasporic Muslim community to the larger Muslim community or umma, than in how fidelity to a particular history and its textual legacy allowed for the development of a distinct Muslim identity nurtured over multiple centuries and displacements. What defines the Bohras dates to the establishment in North Africa and Egypt of the Ismaili Shii Fatimid caliphate (909-1170), and the production because of it, of a specific Islamic textual corpus, whose preservation and transmission provided the community’s religious authorities with cultural capital over ensuing centuries and migration from Egypt to Yemen to India. This paper will explore the evolution of that cultural capital through three key moments: the establishment of a Daudi Tayyibi mission or da`wa in Yemen in the 12th century; the impact of the establishment of a British raj over India in the 19th; and efforts to reclaim Fatimid heritage as a usable past connecting Bohras over more recent global diasporas. Sources will include both textual and visual primary sources from the 12th, 19th and 21st centuries. As such, this paper hopes to revisit what scholars have proposed as the bases of identity formation among diasporic Muslims, in tracing the evolution of this community’s identity from the medieval to the modern periods.
