SOUTH-SOUTH LINKAGES IN ISLAM 3 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 27, No. 1, 2007 doi 10.1215/1089201x-2006-039 © 2007 by Duke University Press Continuity and Disparity: South-South Linkages in the Muslim World Bettina Dennerlein and Dietrich Reetz ncreasing sociocultural, political, and economic connections both within and between various Asian and African parts of the Muslim world have attracted renewed academic interest since the end of the 1990s. As far as the modern period is concerned, this welcome revision of established research agendas is slowly broadening our view of change in Muslim societies beyond the earlier, rather one-dimensional focus on relations between “Islam” and the “West,” structured by dependency and hegemony. This debate was spurred as much by the intensiication of globalization processes as by the perceived or real revival of Islam on a global scale. The crisis of Western-induced modernity and inquiries into the state of postmodernity have added to the curiosity. Consequently, different paradigms can be dis- tinguished to interpret South-South interaction in the Islamic world. 1. A signiicant strand of this discussion has been attached to the globalization paradigm. 1 If glo- balization in more general terms could be understood as the compression of space and time, 2 the consequences have been ambivalent and sometimes paradoxical. 3 While traditional inancial, economic, and political centers have reasserted themselves, the (re)emergence of the periphery, the marginal, and the local has also been seen. 4 This diversiied focus challenges the view of the role of center and periphery both on a global scale and within the Islamic world. South-South relations in Islam are seen here as the emancipation of the Islamic periphery vis-à-vis historical centers of Islam, but also toward globalizing trends emanating from the West. 2. The conluence of the “revival” of Islam with globalizing trends brought to attention the long tradition of Islam as a global system in its own right. 5 Religious and secular knowledge have trav- eled across Muslim civilizations for centuries. 6 They created patterns of exchange that are recon- igured in the modern period and still shape South-South linkages in Islam. Recent studies have emphasized the network character of these relations between far-lung parts of the Islamic world 1. See Akbar S. Ahmad, Postmodernism and Islam: Promise and Predicament (London: Routledge, 1992); Akbar S. Ahmad and Hastings Donnan, eds., Islam, Globalization, and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1994); Jeff Haynes, Religion, Globalisation, and Political Culture in the Third World (Houndmills, UK: Mac- millan, 1999); Henner Fürtig, ed., Islamische Welt und Global- isierung: Aneignung, Abgrenzung, Gegenentwürfe (The Islamic World and Globalization: Appropriation, Dissociation, Counter- concepts) (Würzburg: Ergon, 2001); and Johan Meuleman, ed., Islam in the Era of Globalization: Muslim Attitudes towards Mo- dernity and Identity (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). 2. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stan- ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 3. See Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995). 4. For Islam, cf. Leif Manger, ed., Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1999). 5. John O. Voll, “Islam as a Special World System,” Journal of World History, no. 5 (1994): 213 – 26; Stefan Reichmuth, “‘Netz- werk’ und ‘Weltsystem’: Konzepte zur neuzeitlichen ‘Isla- mischen Welt’ und ihrer Transformation” (“‘Network’ and ‘World System’: Concepts on the Contemporary ‘Islamic World’ and Its Transformation”), Saeculum, no. 2 (2000): 267 – 93. 6. Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (London: Routledge, 1990). Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Published by Duke University Press