ABSTRACT
Muslim societies living on the outskirts of the great Muslim empires, and hence use of the word periphery, are considered in this chapter. We will use the word to denote groups that represent the furthest extension of the critical mass of the mainstream Islamic empires. (I am uncomfortable with the word periphery as, again, the use of it depends on where the user stands: on a lecture tour in Paris I discovered that for French scholars South Asian Islam is ‘Islam du périphére’.)
1 ON THE PERIPHERY To categorize these groups is difficult. In cultural terms they are dissimilar. Their societies may be broadly identified as those living in parts of the USSR and China, south of the Sahara in Africa and in South East Asia, including the southern islands of the Philippines, and Indonesia. Their numbers are large. Malay Muslims, spread over the Malay peninsula and Indonesia, are estimated to number about 170 million. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. These societies provide the fourth socio-historical category in our construction of an Islamic theory of history.
