Dr. Elizabeth Lambourn Lecture

Islam’s Forgotten Frontier – the Indian Ocean world 600-1000 CE

This paper presents work in progress, part of a monograph project aiming to integrate several forgotten (or at best neglected) frontiers of the early Islamic world into mainstream Islamic history. Currently when one speaks of an “eastern” frontier in the early Islamic world it is to Khurasan that most Islamicists turn, the aim of this project is to bring events and processes on Islam’s eastern maritime frontier – in effect the Indian Ocean – into the existing scholarship on the Arab conquests and their aftermath, challenging some of the assumptions and methodologies that prevail in this field and enriching it in the process.