Nile Green

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Nile Green

Nile Green

Professor and Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History

Email: green@history.ucla.edu

Office: 7256 Bunche Hall

Phone: 310-825-9498

Personal Website Class Website
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Biography

My overarching concerns relate to the history of human understanding: how individuals, organizations, and societies have understood the cosmos, the world, and its cultural constituents. As a world historian, I am interested in how such knowledge moves between different regions and cultures, and how different cultures have learned about each other. Attempting to place Islamic history in conversation with world history, my writings have addressed these concerns primarily from the perspective of Muslims.

 

My early books and articles dealt with Muslim attempts to understand the ultimate nature of existence through the Islamic mystical traditions known as Sufism. My subsequent writings turned to questions of intercultural understanding, whether by way of the Muslim understanding of Europe or attempts by various Asian societies to interpret each other’s languages, cultures and religions. Another branch of my work has focused on knowledge of the past—‘the history of history’—particularly the modern rediscovery of the ancient past.

 

In terms of region, my initial training was in Middle Eastern then South Asian studies, though my work has since expanded across the Indian Ocean to East Africa and across Central Asia to China and ultimately Japan. Hence, while much of my work has focused on the Muslims of India/Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, I have also worked on sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and the Arab Middle East, as well as the Indian Ocean and the Muslim minorities of Europe, Sri Lanka, and Japan. And in terms of period, my master’s thesis focused on the medieval era and by doctoral thesis mainly on the early modern era, after which I gradually moved forward in time. Since I maintain a strong interest in archaeology, I have also written about the reception of the ancient world, particularly the Muslim reception of archaeological knowledge of the pre-Islamic past.

 

In terms of theory and method, my main contributions have been in developing and refining the model of religious economy for the study of Islam, particularly in the many environments where Muslims lived alongside non-Muslims. My other main contributions have been in developing methods for the study of global Islam (and its distinct conceptual counterpart, world Islam) and in refining approaches to the Persianate world, the Arabicate world, and Indian Ocean studies. Methodologically, I have long been concerned with both practical and conceptual questions about language, along with the core empirical impact of which languages (or combinations of languages) are used to investigate particular regions, communities, or questions. In methodological terms, much of my work has built on the insights of anthropology and observations in the field, an approach that developed as I lived, researched and traveled in India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Chinese Central Asia, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Myanmar, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Balkans.

 

At one scale, my work has included a series of studies of the changing intellectual infrastructures of the Islamic world (and the intersecting cultural worlds generated by globalization), whether by way of the replacement of manuscript cultures by the printing of texts and images, or the advent of other communicational infrastructures, such as railroads, motor roads, and steamship networks. I have also worked on the emergence of new intellectual and religious institutions across the Muslim world and Eurasia at large. To a lesser extent, this has also led me to questions abutting the history of science and technology, particularly how scientific and technological knowledge is transferred across cultures, and its impact on other forms of knowledge.

 

Reviews of my books have appeared in the New York Times (including as Editors’ Choice), the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs (including as a Book of the Year), The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Review, Prospect, Time Out, as well as major newspapers across the English-speaking world from the Toronto Star to the Sydney Morning Herald (as Pick of the Week). Other reviews have featured in newspapers and magazines in South Asia and the Middle East.

Field of Study

World, South Asia, Islamic

Research

World history; Islam & Muslims in global history; inter-Asia; early modern & modern history of India/Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia; Muslim interactions with the non-Muslim world; Sufism; the Indian Ocean; Persian & Urdu travel writing; history of the Islamic book.

Publications

Books (Monographs)

Books and Journal Issues (Edited)

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Transimperial Religion,” in Cyrus Schayegh and Damiano Matasci (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Transimperial History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
  • “Whose Ghaznavids? Afghan Nationalists and the Medieval Past,” in Martina Rugiadi (ed.), Living Marbles of Ghazni, Afghanistan (New York:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, forthcoming).
  • “The Hajj from Global Journey to World Literature,” in A Maldivian Pilgrim in the Middle East: The Dhivehi Travelogue of Abul Majeed Didi, edited and translated with Mohamed Farook and Garrett Field (forthcoming).
  • “Japan in Indian Ink: South Asian Accounts of Meiji Japan,” in Sushila Narsimhan and Amita Kini-Singh (eds), Lived Encounters: India and Japan (New Delhi: Manak, 2027).
  • “The Hotel as an Infrastructure of Cross-Cultural Learning: Indian and Iranian Tourists in Late Meiji Japan,” Journal of Global History (2026).
  • “Between Print and Public in East Africa: The Diasporic Publics of the Zanzibar Protectorate,” History in Africa (2026).
  • “A Tale of Two Technologies: The Adaptation of Typography and Lithography Across Three Muslim Zones of Diffusion, c.1800-1900,” in Fabien Simon (ed.), Typographic Orient: Printing ‘Oriental’ Languages, Between Europe(s) and the East(s) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026).
  • “A Persian Student in Regency Devon: A Translation and Reconstruction of the Diary of Mirza Muhammad Salih Shirazi,” Transactions of the Devonshire Association (2026).
  • “The Idea of ‘Asia’—and its Alternatives,” American Historical Review 130, 2 (2025).
  • “What Birmingham Taught Muslim India,” History Today 75, 9 (2025).
  • “Indian Books on Japan from Before and After the Russo-Japanese War,” in Nile Green, Kenji Kuroda, and Nobuo Misawa (eds), What Did the Japanese Narrow Victory Bring to Global History? Proceedings of the International Symposium ‘The Echoes of the Narrow Victory over the Russo-Japanese War’ (Tokyo: Asian Cultures Research Center, Toyo University, 2025).
  • “Introduction: An Island in a Sea of Languages,” in Nile Green (ed.), Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka and the Islamic Indian Ocean (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025).
  • “‘A Journey through the Sea’: An Indian Merchant Makes Sense of Ceylon in Urdu” [introduction and translation from Urdu], in Nile Green (ed.), Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka and the Islamic Indian Ocean (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025).
  • “Periodical Studies for the Islamicate World,” Oriente Moderno 105, 1-2 (2025).
  • “Geographies of Transimperial Religion: The Transformation of Religious Space in a World of Empires,” Religion 55, 1 (2025).
  • “Writing Confucian History in an Indian Language: The Transimperial Translation of a ‘Forged Classic,’” Journal of Asian Studies83, 4 (2024).
  • “Translating: In Search of the Global Public,” American Historical Review129, 1 (2024).
  • “The Persianate as Comparative Literature: A Concept in Search of a Method,” PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) 139, 2 (2024).
  • “Indian Ocean History for the Age of Non-Alignment: The ‘Moorish Connection’ of North Africa and Sri Lanka,” Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 8, 2 (2024).
  • “The Rekhta of Architecture: The Development of Islamic Art History in Urdu, c.1800-1950,” Journal of Art Historiography 28 (2023).
  • “Arabic as an Indian Language,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, 1 (2023).
  • “Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate Informant: Two Moments of Connection in the Persian Afterlives of a Latin Account of China,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33, 4 (2023).
  • “Rejecting the Persianate Past: A Pioneering Urdu History of the Indian Ocean,” in Andrew Peacock (ed.), Iran and Persianate Culture in the Indian Ocean World (London: Gingko Library, forthcoming 2024).
  • “Between the Monshi and the Company: Persian Literary Culture in Eighteenth-Century Hindustan,” in Abbas Amanat (ed.), The Shegarf-nameh-e Welayat  (شگرف نامه ولایت) of E‘tesam al-Din Pachnuri: The Edited Persian Text with Introductory Essays (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2023).
  • With Nushin Arbabzadah, “Between Afghan ‘Idolography’ and Kafir ‘Autoethnography’: A Muslim Convert Describes his Former Religion,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 142, 3 (2022).
  • “The Languages of Indian Ocean Studies: Models, Methods and Sources,” History Compass 20, 7 (2022).
  • “New Histories for the Age of Speed: The Archaeological–Architectural Past in Interwar Afghanistan & Iran,” Iranian Studies 54, 3-4 (2021).
  • “Afghanistan in Asia: Reflections on the Study of Afghan Transnationalism,” Afghanistan 4, 1 (2021).
  • “Rethinking the Institutionalization of Islamic Mysticism: A Review Essay,” Journal of Sufi Studies 10, 1-2 (2021).
  • “Jawād (Sometime Nathaniel) Sābāṭ b. Ibr. Sābāṭ al-Ḥasanī and the Text al-Barāhīn as-Sābāṭīya,” in John Chesworth (ed.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, 1500–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
  • “Consummating Sainthood: Death, Desire and Saintly Power in the Indo-Muslim Rituals of the ‘Urs (Spiritual Wedding),” in Tonaga Yasushi (ed.), Kyoto Studies in the History of Sufism (Kyoto: Kyoto University, 2021).
  • “Sufism and the Growth of State Power in Northern India and the Deccan,” in Richard M. Eaton and Ramya Sreenivasan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Mughal Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
  • “The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900),” in Nile Green (ed.), The Persianiate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019)
  • “Proletarian Bodies and Muslim Festivals: Disciplining Pleasure in Colonial Bombay,” in Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat and Rachel Dwyer (eds), Bombay Before Mumbai (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
  • “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123, 3 (2018)
  • “From Persianate Pasts to Aryan Antiquity: Transnationalism and Transformation in Afghan Intellectual History, c.1880–1940,” Afghanistan 1, 1 (2018)
  • “What is ‘Global Islam’? Definitions for a Field of Inquiry,” Diogenes 256 (2018)
  • “The Afghan Discovery of Buddha: Civilizational History & the Nationalizing of Afghan Antiquity”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, 4 (2016)
  • “The View from the Edge: The Indian Ocean’s Middle East”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, 3 (2016)
  • “Muslims, Europe, and the ‘Clash of Civilizations’: How Can Historiography Help Us?”, Perspectives on Europe (2016)
  • “Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, 2 (2016)
  • “A History of Afghan Historiography”, in Nile Green (ed.), Afghan History through Afghan Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)
  • “The Hajj as its Own Undoing: Infrastructure & Integration on the Muslim Journey to Mecca”, Past & Present 226 (2015)
  • “Islam in the Early Modern World”, in Jerry Bentley & Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The New Cambridge World History: The Early Modern Period, vol.6, pt.2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  • “Buddhism, Islam and the Religious Economy of Colonial Burma”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46, 2 (2015)
  • “The Global Occult: An Introduction”, History of Religions 54, 4 (2015)
  • “Re-Thinking the ‘Middle East’ After the Oceanic Turn”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 3 (2014)
  • “From the Silk Road to the Railroad (and Back): The Means and Meanings of the Iranian Encounter with China”, Iranian Studies 48, 2 (2015) (download pdf)
  • “Breaking the Begging Bowl: Morals, Drugs & Madness in the Fate of the Muslim Faqir“, South Asian History & Culture 5, 2 (2014)
  • “Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the ‘Muslim World'”, American Historical Review 118, 2 (2013)
  • “Shared Infrastructures, Informational Asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c. 1890-1930”, Journal of Global History 8, 3 (2013)
  • “Locating Afghan History”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, 1 (2013)
  • “Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan”, Journal of Asian Studies 72, 3 (2013)
  • “Maritime Worlds and Global History: Comparing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay”, History Compass 11, 7 (2013)
  • “Anti-Colonial Japanophilia and the Constraints of an Islamic Japanology: Information and Affect in the Indian Encounter with Japan”, Journal of South Asian History and Culture 4, 3 (2013)
  • “The Afghan Afterlife of Phileas Fogg: Space and Time in the Literature of Afghan Travel”, in Nile Green & Nushin Arbabzadah (eds), Afghanistan in Ink: Literature between Diaspora and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)
  • “The Rail Hajjis: The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Long Way to Mecca”, in Venetia Porter (ed.), Hajj: Collected Essays (London: British Museum, 2013)
  • “Africa in Indian Ink: Urdu Articulations of Indian Settlement in East Africa”, Journal of African History 53, 2 (2012)
  • “Urdu as an African Language: A Survey of a Source Literature”, Islamic Africa 3, 2 (2012)
  • “Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Orientalism in the English Universities, 1800-1850”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, 3 (2012)
  • “The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian ‘Urdusphere’”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 3 (2011)
  • “The Trans-Colonial Opportunities of Bible Translation: Iranian Language-Workers between the Russian and British Empires”, in Michael Dodson & Brian Hatcher (eds), Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2012)
  • “The Road to Kabul: Automobiles and Afghan Internationalism, 1900-1940”, in Magnus Marsden & Benjamin Hopkins (eds), Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)
  • “The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the English Universities in the Early Nineteenth Century”, Iranian Studies 44, 6 (2011)
  • “Kebabs and Port Wine: The Culinary Cosmopolitanism of Anglo-Persian Dining, 1800-1835”, in Derryl Maclean & Sikeena Karmali (eds), Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)
  • “The Propriety of Poetry: Morality and Mysticism in the Nineteenth Century Urdu Religious Lyric”, Middle Eastern Literatures 13, 3 (2010)
  • “The Dilemmas of the Pious Biographer: Missionary Islam and the Oceanic Hagiography”, Journal of Religious History 34, 4 (2010)
  • “Stones from Bavaria: Iranian Lithography in its Global Contexts”, Iranian Studies 43, 3 (2010). [Persian translation published in Payam-e Baharestan tabestan 1391 (summer 2012)]
  • “Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution: Industrialization, Evangelicalism & the Birth of Printing in Early Qajar Iran”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, 3 (2010). [Persian translation published in Iran Nameh: A Persian Quarterly of Iranian Studies 26, 3-4 (2011)]
  • “The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge between Person and Paper”, Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010)
  • “Journeymen, Middlemen: Travel, Trans-Culture and Technology in the Origins of Muslim Printing”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, 2 (2009)
  • “Among the Dissenters: Reciprocal Ethnography in Nineteenth Century Inglistan”, Journal of Global History 4, 2 (2009)
  • “Defending the Sufis in Nineteenth Century Hyderabad”, Islamic Studies 47, 3 (2009)
  • “The Development of Arabic-Script Printing in Georgian Britain”, Printing History n.s. 5 (2009)
  • “In the Universe of Mirrors: An Urdu Mystical Poet of Nineteenth Century Hyderabad”, Journal of Deccan Studies 7, 2 (2009)
  • “Islam for the Indentured Indian: A Muslim Missionary in Colonial South Africa”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 71, 3 (2008)
  • “Tribe, Diaspora and Sainthood in Afghan History”, Journal of Asian Studies 67, 1 (2008)
  • “Jack Sepoy and the Dervishes: Islam and the Indian Soldier in Princely Hyderabad”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, 1 (2008). [Winner of the Sir George Staunton Prize, Royal Asiatic Society]
  • “Breathing in India, c.1890”, Modern Asian Studies 42, 2-3 (2008)
  • “Moral Competition and the Thrill of the Spectacular: Recounting Catastrophe in Colonial Bombay”, South Asia Research 28, 3 (2008)
  • “Paper Modernity? Notes on an Iranian Industrial Tour, 1818”, Iran: Journal of Persian Studies 46 (2008)
  • “Transgressions of a Holy Fool: A Majzub in Colonial India [Introduction & Translations from the Urdu]”, in Barbara D. Metcalf (ed.), Islam in South Asia in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
  • “Making Sense of ‘Sufism’ in the Indian Subcontinent: A Survey of Trends”, Religion Compass (Blackwell Online, 2008)
  • “Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbin’s Approaches to Mystical Islam”, in Mohammad-Reza Djalili, Alessandro Monsutti & Anna Neubauer (eds), Le Monde turco-iranien en question (Paris: Karthala, 2008)
  • “Idiom, Genre and the Politics of Self-Description on the Peripheries of Persian”, in Nile Green & Mary Searle-Chatterjee (eds), Religion, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008)
  • “Religion, Language and Power: An Introductory Essay” (with Mary Searle-Chatterjee), in Nile Green & Mary Searle-Chatterjee (eds), Religion, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008)
  • “Saints, Rebels and Booksellers: Sufis in the Cosmopolitan Western Indian Ocean, c.1850-1920”, in Kai Kresse & Edward Simpson (eds), Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia UP, 2007)
  • “The Faqir and the Subalterns: Mapping the Holy Man in Colonial South Asia”, Journal of Asian History 41, 1 (2007)
  • “Shi’ism, Sufism and Sacred Space in the Deccan: Counter-Narratives of Saintly Identity in the Cult of Shah Nur”, in Alessandro Monsutti, Silvia Naef & Farian Sabahi (eds), The Other Shi’ites: From the Mediterranean to Central Asia (Berne, Frankfurt & New York: Peter Lang, 2007)
  • “Blessed Men and Tribal Politics: Notes on Political Culture in the Indo-Afghan World”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, 3 (2006)
  • “Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange Between Christianity and Islam”, Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 18, 1 (2006), pp.27-66
  • “Making a ‘Muslim’ Saint: Writing Customary Religion in an Indian Princely State”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, 3 (2005)
  • “Mirza Hasan Safi ‘Ali Shah: A Persian Sufi in the Age of Printing [Introduction and Selected Translations]”, in Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Religion and Politics in Modern Iran (London: I.B Tauris, 2005)
  • “Mystical Missionaries in Hyderabad State: Mu’in Allah Shah and his Sufi Reform Movement”, Indian Economic and Social History Review 41, 2 (2005)
  • “Translating the Spoken Words of the Saints: Oral Literature and the Sufis of Awrangabad”, in Lynne Long (ed.), Religion and Translation: Holy Untranslatable? (Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2005)
  • “Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad”, Modern Asian Studies 38, 2 (2004)
  • “Geography, Empire and Sainthood in the Eighteenth Century Muslim Deccan”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 67, 2 (2004)
  • “Oral Competition Narratives of Muslim and Hindu Saints in the Deccan”, Asian Folklore Studies 63, 2 (2004)
  • “A Persian Sufi in British India: The Travels of Mirza Hasan Safi ‘Ali Shah (1835-1899)”, Iran: Journal of Persian Studies 42 (2004)
  • “Emerging Approaches to the Sufi Traditions of South Asia: Between Texts, Territories and the Transcendent”, South Asia Research 24, 2 (2004) [reprinted in L. Ridgeon (ed.), Sufism: Critical Concepts (London & New York: Routledge, 2008.)]
  • “Who’s the King of the Castle? Brahmins, Sufis and the Narrative Landscape of Daulatabad”, Contemporary South Asia 13, 3 (2004)
  • “Auspicious Foundations: The Patronage of Sufi Institutions in the Late Mughal and Early Asaf Jah Deccan”, South Asian Studies 20 (2004)
  • “The Religious and Cultural Roles of Dreams and Visions in Islam”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13, 3 (2003)
  • “Migrant Sufis and Sacred Space in South Asian Islam”, Contemporary South Asia 12, 4 (2003)
  • “The Survival of Zoroastrianism in Yazd”, Iran: Journal of Persian Studies 38 (2000)
  • “A New Translation of Suhrawardi’s The Crimson Archangel (‘Aql-e-Surkh)”, Sufi: Journal of Sufi Studies 36 (1998)

Awards & Grants

  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellow
  • Luce/ACLS Fellow in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs
  • Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award
  • Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Book Award
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