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In the following contributions, the reader will be able to see Islamic Africa connected and shaped by Afro-Asian connections (Mutiua, Raia, Vierke) as well as African-European connections (Musa, Kaag). As rightly pointed out by Edward Alpers, we can no longer continue to restrict our understanding of African History to the continental landmass known as Africa, as a unique monolithic system of exchange, a world apart.[4] Given a renewed attention to Africa's role in world history and, particularly, its relationship to the African diaspora, historians have already sought to study Africa as a conduit and to identify the Atlantic Africa, Mediterranean Africa, and Indian Ocean Africa as the three major world historical contexts in which to situate Africa. At the core of this special issue, I Travelling Islam: The Circulation of Ideas in Africa i , lies the editors' fascination with the circulation of ideas by means of African languages, texts and people in and from Islamic Africa. [Extracted from the article]

At a time of sociocultural changes that started questioning established Islamic learning traditions (independence years, post-Cold War/book market liberalization), printing diasporas exerted influence on the circulation of Islamic texts in East Africa: published overseas (Cairo, Beirut, and the Indian subcontinent) and/or locally reprinted on the Swahili-speaking Islamic coast, they came to play a seminal role in negotiating Swahili Muslim literary culture. How have transoceanic religious and intellectual networks operating beyond national borders become intertwined? In this paper, the beginnings of Swahili Muslim book publishing—and the entities underpinning it, such as Nairobi's Islamic Foundation Center, a Pakistani-oriented charitable foundation—will be outlined. I will then delve into the history of Indian-and-Swahili family-run publishers Adam Traders based in Mombasa in order to tackle hitherto neglected transoceanic connections and patterns of influence across the sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]