GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The Institute will address interactions between Islam and politics, culture, and commercial enterprise in the pre-modern world (up to about 1600).  Specifically, the project examines how multi-faceted networks of communication developed in the Islamic world, and how these were critical to changes taking place in existing but transitional as well as newly emerging cultures.  For example, in the process of early state formation, as well as in the often prior (or coincidental) development of new international commercial networks, there is sometimes a decided commitment to Islam by a leadership and/or population.  This commitment involves a rich new cultural synthesis between local practice and the fundamental demands of the Islamic religious tradition.  Entry into the community of Islam had both an internal as well as an external dimension.  Internally, acceptance of Islam was significant relative to local issues of sovereignty and cultural expression, as for example the superceding of earlier tribalism or "self-indulgent behavior." Members of the society who made this commitment accepted common laws of social conduct as appropriate to an inclusive Islamic community.  Those who did not might withdraw into a periphery rather than submit to the authority of Islamic values.  Externally, the commitment to Islam offered diverse opportunities for communication within an international Islamic political, cultural, and economic network, which in turn provided the moral basis for commercial, cultural/intellectual, and diplomatic exchanges between otherwise (and often hostile) strangers, and also enhanced local expressions of power.