Description
Mobile Manuscripts investigates the pivotal role of Arabic texts in shaping intellectual life across the early modern Western Indian Ocean world. Christopher D. Bahl traces how manuscripts moved across vast distances, connecting scholars, students, and communities from East Africa to India and beyond.
Rather than viewing the Indian Ocean as a barrier, Bahl demonstrates how it functioned as a highway for the circulation of Islamic learning. The study reveals how Arabic manuscripts served as vessels of knowledge, carrying religious, scientific, and literary traditions that transformed local intellectual cultures. Through careful analysis of manuscript provenance, annotations, and distribution patterns, the author reconstructs the networks of teachers and learners who engaged with these mobile texts.
This volume contributes to our understanding of early modern Islamic scholarship and the cosmopolitan nature of Indian Ocean societies, challenging Western-centric narratives of global intellectual history.
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