Cross-Boundary Knwoledge in Early Ibadism: Exchanges Religious Authority and Knowledge Transmission

The Ibadi ethno-religious identities are produced through political and social processes, which come to have power through their spatiality, through the ways in which identities become territorialized in the linking between state power and boundaries. Migrations, transnational flows, land and seafaring routes, which connected the centers of Ibadism in North Africa and Oman to places in Subsaharan Africa, East Africa and in the Indian subcontinent facilitated a cross-boundary knowledge transmission over the centuries. In this article I will explore: a. The “chain of transmissions” in the Ibadi tradition b. Rules and methods of knowledge transmission c. Ibadi merchants, travellers, pilgrims d. Travel, trade and exchanges as tool of knowledge transmission