The Martin Buber Memorial Lecture.
By the time the Portuguese circumnavigated Africa, Islam had taken root around the greater part of the Indian Ocean rim. In some ways this is surprising. While the heartlands of Islam extended to the shores of the Indian Ocean, the coastal populations found there were demographically thin. Moreover, the ocean itself served as a barrier to military conquest, ensuring that the primary agents of the spread of Islam were merchants. Yet Islam became the first religion to achieve primacy around the Indian Ocean rim as a whole. The forms it took showed considerable variety, and these variations can in part be explained by a combination of divergent local conditions and the manner in which the religion spread. The expansion of Islam around the Indian Ocean was nevertheless unique: Although it reached the Atlantic and Pacific rims as well, it had no comparable success there.
Michael Cook teaches in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is a historian of the Islamic world who has worked on a variety of regions and periods. His latest book is Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 2014).
The lecture was delivered on 24 May 2018.