The Introduction sets out the main analytical framework to probe a transregional formation of Arabic learning. Building on a rich historiography of the Indian Ocean world and its various regions it formulates an approach to studying mobile manuscripts with a view to exploring the shared social and cultural histories of learned communities. It discusses ‘mobilities’ as the potential of manuscripts to move around and ‘histories of circulation’ as actualised or ‘enacted’ movement among scribes, readers, and owners of manuscripts. In particular, it engages with the concepts of ‘enactment’ to study social and cultural mobilities of manuscripts and ‘entanglement’ to plot these mobilities on a transoceanic field of Arabic learning. Arabic philology takes centre stage in this study and represents a diverse and many-sided field of Arabic learning. Manuscript collections which form the empirical basis of the research are delineated and discussed.

The concluding chapter synthesises the findings from the previous chapters to argue for a cultural integration of the western Indian Ocean through transoceanic mobilities of Arabic learning. It explores the many historical, social, and cultural aspects of Arabic learning based on those findings. Building on recent scholarship it reflects on how transoceanic histories of Arabic learning relate to histories of maritime trade in this period. It considers the importance of locating Arabic as a ‘cosmopolitan idiom of learning’ in early modern multilingual South Asia that shared many social, cultural, and political contexts with other languages.