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Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. By johan elverskog. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 384 pp. $69.95 (cloth).
Religion constitutes a long-lasting and inspiring field in world history, let alone interactions among world religions. Religious tensions, conflicts, and tolerance such as those between Christianity and Islam or between Christianity and Confucianism have been well studied, but few scholars have paid attention to the interactions between Buddhism and Islam along the Silk Road. This book successfully fills in such a vacuum.
Following the introduction, chapter 1, "Contact," sets up the background of the two world religions. Popular images in the modern world contrast the two religions: Buddhism as peaceful, spiritual, and refrained, while Islam as aggressive, materialist, and pro-violence. This conventional wisdom, however, is unable to be tested either by history or reality. On the contrary, the two have shared surprising similarities of social background for their own formation, expansion, feature, and space, despite the temporal gap of about one millennium. Both emerged from a turbulent society respectively that witnessed the rise of an urban merchant class. Both captured the needs of the new commercial class whom had been despised by the existing power structure. Speaking for merchant elites, the two religions gained their power and extended their influence through the trading networks along the Silk Roads. When Muslim rulers expanded into Central Asia and India, Buddhists as well as other heresies were largely tolerated, mainly because of "the central role of Buddhists in the local economy" (p. 53). To some people's surprise, Buddhism survived two centuries longer under Muslim rule than in the Hindu spheres. Gradually, the Islamic international, however, replaced its Buddhist counterpart.
Chapter 2, "Understanding," discusses their conceptualizations of one another over time based on primary sources and illustrates Buddhist influences on Islam, such as astronomy, mathematics, medicine, literature, and so on. The accumulation of knowledge, nevertheless, did not advance smoothly. Indeed, a Buddhist-Muslim split emerged when a geographical divide was created by the formation of three religio-economic units: the Muslim world, the Tantric Block around Inner Asia, and...