Religion and Politics in the Indian Ocean:
Buddhism (and Islam)

surveys the development, interaction, and spread of Buddhist and Muslim people, ideas, practices, and political formations in the Indian Ocean region. The course is intended for History, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies majors, and can be adapted for online, hybrid, and writing–intensive environments and learning outcomes. Our voyage begins with ordination networks of seafaring nuns in the fifth century, drops in on wandering Southeast Asian and Silk Road tariqas and traders, explores two waves of European trading company mediation of religious life in the region, and ends with international women’s networks and gendered postcolonial Buddhist nationalism in early twentieth century Asia. 

In order to assess how emerging paradigms in “global” or “connected” history can help us take stock of religion as a major feature in the history of the region, our approach will be to pair primary and secondary source readings from nuns, political elites, traders, missionaries, ordinary people, and religious texts alongside developing literature on Indian Ocean history, global and connected history, and with insights from religious studies and cultural anthropology. Throughout, the course emphasizes cultivating the skills to “see through the eyes” of Buddhist and Muslim religious specialists, monarchs, and especially the everyday people whose writings, artwork, stories, meditations, poems, and dreams cut across these richly textured, trans–historical flows we have come to call “Buddhism” and “Islam.”

The connected ideas, people, moments, and images we explore will allow us to engage Buddhism and Islam as both an historical reality alongside our own developing perspectives about these rich and diverse cultural flows. As a broad survey, this course is chiefly geared toward exploring the many horizons of the land-and-seascapes of Buddhism and Islam as they have existed, changed, and been imagined and invoked over many centuries.