There has been a longstanding controversy over the place of Islam in the study of the Middle East. Of course, much goes on within the Middle East that has little to do with religion. Much of the earlier scholarship on the region placed Islam at its center, which to many readers and scholars reeked of essentialism and Orientalism. This was partially behind the push to move away from departments and tenure lines in “Islamic Studies” and towards area studies programs and regionally-oriented lines, monographs, and seminars in the “Middle East.” At the same time, new approaches to the study of religious exchange and globalization have made it increasingly apparent that Islam was one of the major sites of exchange between the Middle East and the rest of the world, drawing out some crucial features of modern Middle East history in global context. Nile Green's book Terrains of Exchange makes an enormous contribution to the methods of studying religious exchange and the globalization of Islam, arguing that religious exchange was a competitive, and ultimately generative and productive process, intersecting and overlapping with networks of imperial and commercial contact. In addition, by fixing his attention to global religious economies, Green makes the important point of re-centering global Islam on the networks of South Asian Muslim missionary activities, removing the Middle East from the center of the modern history of Islam.

The framework of this book draws from a combination of Michael Mann's sociological studies of the institutional bases of social power and the field of “Religious Economy.” Using the language of business and economics, we read of the competitive activities of Muslim religious “entrepreneurs” and “firms,” turning back the organizational methods of Christian missionaries and technologies towards the global spread of Islam. The text details how, in the context of imperialism and industrialization, technologies like the printing press and railway were appropriated by Muslim “religious firms” to compete in new spiritual “markets.” Muslim religious innovators used the organizational tactics and discursive strategies of Christian missionaries active in British India for their own purposes. While there is something off-putting about describing spiritual movements in the same way as you might a manufacturing operation, Green demonstrates the usefulness of this approach. We can view religious organizations like the Ahmadiyya movement, Muʾinullah's khanqah networks in northern India, and the Kobe Sunni Organization in Japan transforming the raw materials of religious texts and the spiritual commodities of salvation and blessings into new products of religious exchange.

Through a series of interconnected case studies, Green argues that religion was one of the key sites of global interaction in the nineteenth century. Within and through networks of global imperialism and commercial exchange, a cycle of generative and productive exchanges among religious organizers and thinkers fueled a massive expansion of Islam. In part one, applying Mann's insight that “control over institutions is critical to the production of social power,” we view the activities of Christian evangelicals espousing an “evangelical Orientalism” in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge. Refuting Edward Said's “knowledge as power” approach to the relationship between Orientalism and empire, Green suggests a more direct, tangible link between the producers of Oriental knowledge and Christian evangelical and missionary operations, which acquired social power and access to imperial networks through the universities: Evangelical networks set up printing operations to distribute their works and refute Islam. In doing so, they relied on Muslim middlemen who knew the languages and religious traditions that were the subjects of much of this printed matter. However, these evangelical networks, in turn, were tapped into and exploited by early nineteenth century Muslim travelers like Mirza Salih (who established the first printing press in Iran), offering new organizational tactics and technologies to Islamic movements.

In part two, Green moves to a series of case studies involving the frontier region of Hyderabad, nominally independent from British India, yet interconnected through railways and social networks. In Hyderabad, Green explores the adaptive strategies of Muslim religious organizations as they used the organizing tactics, technologies, and methodologies of Christian missionaries for their own ends. Here he traces a flourishing “religious economy,” with a plurality of competing Muslim organizations and “hybrid” movements like Hindu Sufism. The emphasis is placed on religious movements as networks and institutions, more so than just discursive or ideological movements. He makes the point that “agency is more important than identity to the works of religious economies,” stressing the activities and organizing tactics of religious figures as central to the spread of new Islamic movements.

In the final section, the generative cycle of exchange is completed by examining the global export of Muslim missionary activities to Detroit, Michigan, and Kobe, Japan. Here, we follow the founding of the first purposely built mosques in the United States and Japan through connections to organized religious networks. Although the founding of the mosques and activities of Detroit and Kobe Muslim communities have been told in the context of Black emancipation and port-city cosmopolitanism, here the starting point lies in the tactics of the missionary organizations that launched these projects. For instance, Green compares Muslim outreach to African American communities to the Christian missionary experience in India, where marginalized, caste-less, and disenfranchised peoples were targeted as underserved “markets.” What made them successful, Green says, is that they used these types of Christian evangelical missionary tactics in the service of spreading Islam in a vast, undifferentiated world of non-Muslims, much as Christian missionaries confronted non-Christians in the age of empire.

One of the great contributions of this book is a compelling explanation for the counterintuitive global flourishing of religion in the decades since the end of the Cold War. Green argues that “religion is increasingly generated as an outcome of exchange,” and thus as barriers to global exchange become obsolete, the generative cycles of interaction create new opportunities for religion to develop and flourish. While this remains to be investigated further, this highly fascinating study offers another set of tools to study religion in a way that places the process of exchange at the center.