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To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2010.00902.x Byline: NILE GREEN (1) Abstract: As Islam was transformed into a missionary religion in the modern sense around the turn of the twentieth century, three questions were faced by almost all writers called on to publicise the deeds of the new breed of mobile Muslim pietists: How can a biographer turn the often tedious chores of the missionary into exciting reading? How can the humdrum tasks of founding mosques and schools be turned into the narrative trappings of a Muslim hero? And how can a modern Muslim be portrayed as a saint without recourse to 'superstitious' miracle stories? The essay addresses these questions through an examination of an Urdu biography written to publicise the deeds of an Indian Muslim missionary to South Africa. In view of the revival of interest in biography, through inspecting one such missionary organisation's understanding of the life of its founder, the essay explores the necessary compromises involved in writing a life at any given moment in history. Author Affiliation: (1)Department of History, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA Article note: Nile Green is a professor in the Department of History, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the effects of steam transportation infrastructure on the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, known as the hajj. According to the author, industrial transport networks brought Muslim travelers into increased contact with non-Muslim spaces, ideas, peoples, and technologies. Particular focus is given to evidence drawn from pilgrims' writings. Topics discussed include globalization and imperialism.

The article analyzes the writings of Muslim intellectual travelers from older Islamic lands in Asia visiting so-called western areas such as Great Britain, Germany, and Egypt between 1870 and 1930. It examines their perceptions of the concepts of space and time brought about by travel via steamship and rail, in addition to the development of industrial communication. According to the author, such journeys were transformative events and reshaped formulations of language, history, and geography. The article discusses Europe as a place for the rediscovery of Islam among Muslim travelers.

This article discusses the emergence of a Sufi-inspired movement of Muslim reform in the princely state of Hyderabad during the first half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which the movement arose, using archival material to discuss the activities of Christian missionaries in the city in which it first emerged. Located in Aurangabad, away from the capital of the Nizam's State, the history of the rise of Mu'īn Allāh Shāh's Sufi organisation shows the ways in which pan-Indian religious disputes and developments in Indian Islam were reflected in the provinces of princely India. The modernist character of Mu'īn Allāh's Sufi teachings is reconstructed and discussed in detail. Preaching a return to the core tenets of Islam in the villages of Hyderabad, Mu'īn Allāh and his successor Hamīd 'Alī nonetheless envisioned this minimalism as central to the mystical rediscovery of the pure and unadulterated self. However, since the movement was closely connected to the expansion of the textile industry in Aurangabad, attention is also paid to its relationship with the social and religious effects of industrialisation in a provincial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between travelling Sufis and the creation of sacred Muslim space. Beginning with a discussion of the theme of travel in Sufi writing and practice, the discussion moves to an analysis of the role of migrant Iranian and Arab Sufis in the evolution of a regional sacred geography for Muslims in South Asia. The figure of the migrant holy man is interpreted as the crucial means by which emerging holy sites in South Asia could be connected to the peoples and places of the Islamic Heilsgeschichte in the Near East. An illustration of this process of inter-linking geographies is given with reference to the real and imagined journeys of the Sufi saints of Aurangabad, as reflected in the hagio graphic literature associated with their shrines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]