Who are the Khōjā? This edited volume invites you to discover a medieval Indic Muslim merchant caste whose religious creativity and commercial networks stretched from the Indus valley to Zanzibar. Drawing on papers from the first academic Khōjā Studies conference, held at the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud in Paris, Rāhē Najāt challenges the Near Eastern bias of Islamic Studies by centering vernacular Islam, material culture, and diasporic identity in the Indian Ocean. Contributors examine how trade, colonialism, and modernity shaped Shia communities from Gujarat to Madagascar to South Africa. This festschrift honors the pioneering South Asianist Françoise Mallison, whose scholarship on western Indic vernacular cultures opened the field that this volume continues.