Over the past fourteen centuries the expansion of Islam has transformed societies all across Asia and Africa, producing a civilization of great complexity and internal diversity. Despite the demographic realities of the modern Muslim world, however, the academic study of Islam remains plagued by a resilient bias privileging the Middle East not only as “central” but also as normative. Such orientations to the study of Islamic civilization have had the unfortunate effect of implicitly reducing other regions (even those in large majority populations that have been Muslim for centuries) to the status of peripheries. While there are arguable cases to be made for the special position of the Arab world in particular — including the position of Arabic as a primary language of Islamic scripture and religious scholarship, as well as the importance of the pilgrimage to Mecca as a pillar of ritual observance — this can be and has been overstated. This persistence of what may be termed an “Arabist bias” has thus impaired understandings of the histories of Muslim societies outside the Middle East and produced distorted images of Islam in the contemporary world.

At the turn of the twenty-first century there are approximately 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide, with most of the major population centres located in Asia and the top five largest Muslim national populations located outside of the Arab Middle East.1 Today nearly 60 per cent of the Muslims living in the world do so in Asia. By comparison, the combined populations of all of the Arabic-speaking Muslim nations of the Middle East add up to less than 20 per cent of today's global umma. A demographer's visual mapping of today's Muslim populations on a geographic model would then place the “centre of gravity” of the Muslim world somewhere between Sukkur and Nawabshah along the banks of the Indus River.

Despite this, scholars focusing on studies of Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia continue to struggle against the inertia of dominant biases that relegate their investigations to the margins of Islamic Studies. Richard M. Eaton, among others, has earlier called attention to the imperatives that he saw implied by such a view of the Muslim world, stressing that “the question here is not whether South Asia can be considered as any sort of periphery, but rather how this region became a cultural and demographic epicentre for the entire Muslim world”.