7 Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India

The expansion of Islam east of the Middle East has been, apart from a few notable exceptions, a relatively understudied subject. This is especially remarkable when one recalls that, by far, the world's greatest number of Muslims reside east of Karachi. The reasons for this neglect of scholarship, however, are not far to find. First is the identification of the Arab Middle East with the historical heartland of Islam, which makes it the natural object of study of classicists whose scholastic concerns often focus on the formation of cultural traditions. Second, despite its universalist claims and its undeniable status as a world religion, Islam is related to Arab ethnicity, language, and culture in complex ways that have always somehow made the study of Arab Islam a more legitimate or proper field on the Islamist's agenda than "Eastern" or sub-Saharan Islam. And third, for at least a century, severe methodological problems have prevented scholars from explaining the formation, through conversion, of the majority of the world's Muslim population living beyond the Middle East. There have appeared few convincing answers to such basic questions as: What is conversion per se? Can conversion to Islam be fit within a larger conceptual category, or must it be consid-