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The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760. By RICHARD M. EATON. Comparative Studies on Muslim Society, 17. Berkeley, and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1993. Pp. xxvii + 359 + 24 photographs, tables, maps. $50.
Euroamericans have for centuries been preoccupied with those portions of the Islamic frontier lying closest to them. To this day, the Arabic-speaking Middle East, though it contains something less than a quarter of the world's Muslims, looms largest in their minds when the word Islam is mentioned. A growing body of scholarship has urged, albeit in a quiet academic way, a shift of vision. Central Asia, for example, is aptly named for more than reasons of physical geography. Many religious and political developments in Islamdom from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries have been connected to Cisas well as Transoxiana. Richard Eaton's The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier explores a continuum between Central Asia, north India and the eastern extremities of the Ganges-Padma delta. It also chronicles the emergence of an Islamicized peasantry which, from a contemporary nation-state perspective, constitutes the second biggest Muslim population on the planet.
Much scholarship on the pre- or early modern Islamic world assumes that the most significant events took place in close proximity to imperial courts. In India, that amounts to the assumption that the Mughal padishahs provided the only show worth watching. Eaton's work demonstrates that...