Vol. 10, Issue 2, Part A (2024)

The framework of "lived Islam" overshadows the study of Islam in South Asia, presupposing a "local Islam" against a "global Islam". The local is potrayed as accomadative and peaceful in theoretical foregrounds. In studying contemporary trends in Islam, recent western scholarship has been asking how to conceptualize Islam itself, for only then one can speak of the issue of the legitimacy of Islam in the contemporary modern world. In the course of time, deliberate attempts have been done on behalf of several anthropologists and orientalists to essentialize Islam. Western scholarships on global history also take part in this process of essentialization. The history of Islam during premodern period in South Asia (between 12th and 16th century) is relied upon Indian Ocean history. Political histories have traditionally identified the european expansion in to the Indian Ocean as its central juncture. The choices of individual historians are inevitably influenced by their thematic preoccupations. The agency of articulation is firmly assigned to the Europeans who imposed themselves on a static Indian Ocean. This colonial venture are based almost exclusively on European sources. In this whiggish view of history, the narrative arc of Islam were constrained. And potrayed the spread of Islam across the Indian Ocean as a unilateral transfer of a stable, fully formed prototype. By shifting attention to the Muslim maritime movements in Indian Ocean, I emphasize the significance of trans-national trade and cosmopolitan diaspora in the exploration of Muslim lives. It offers a framework for conceptualizing a particular trajectory of Islamic history especially in South Asia. At its core, my scholarship is relied upon the tension between the distant and the local, between these Muslims role in far flung trading networks and an Islamic cosmopolis on the one hand and, on the other, their need to negotiate the specific social, economic, and political conditions of particular trading locations. This effort was rooted in the percpects of Muslim historical subjectivity through its universalist faith and cosmopolitan idiom. This ardent effort to bridge the gap between the global and the local is to assign a place for Islam within the social and political landscape of pre-modern South India, especially Malabar. I conclude that, It is this trajectory that has defined the lived reality of the majority of Muslims worldwide, while the Muslim Subjectivity is decisively framed within the constraints of modern western scholarships.