Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 1: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam: 7th-11th Centuries.

• Author: Lehmann, Fritz

By Andre Wink. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. Pp. viii + 396. HF1 165, $82.50.

This book is the first of a projected series of five volumes in which Dr. Wink intends to examine the changes which resulted from the Islamization of South and Southeast Asia. He has in mind placing these events and processes in a world historical context. Just as the growth of "Europe" in the middle ages needs a comparison and contrast of three cultures, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Islamic Middle East and North Africa to make clear what is uniquely European and what is not, so Wink proposes to examine another three cultures which interacted in the geographically adjacent stage of world history: the Islamic Middle East, Central Asia, and India. He argues that the Islamic Middle East and India were intimately involved with each other for a millennium (to the 18th century), and profoundly influenced each other in many different ways. "Al-Hind" (the Arab Islamic term for India in the early middle ages) was crucial to the Arabs, and in turn its peoples acquired a collective identity as Indians or Hindus in interaction with the Islamic world. Looking ahead to his intended future volumes, he states that "India became more and more central to the Muslim world at large" and the result of India being brought into the Muslim world trading system was that "India, with China and Europe, became one of the dynamic core zones of the world" (p. 360). In this volume, he develops a description and analysis of the early part of these developments. He describes the early Islamic conquests and the development of the caliphate-empire; the India trade; the "trading diasporas" of Muslims, Jews, and Parsis who carried on much of that trade; the political geography and political history of the frontier between the Muslim world and India in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan; and in his longest and most important chapter, "The Maharajas of India," the important Hindu states of early medieval times and their maritime hinterland in Southeast Asia.

This is an ambitious book (and even more ambitious project) and it has its good points and its bad ones. Based on the assumption that trade and commerce are the dynamic forces that bring about historical change, Wink has tried to show the implications for world history of developments in South Asia. Scholars who teach world history courses will have to admire the way in which Wink shows the interrelationship of events in the Old World...