Research
At the Arabia Asia Studies Programme, our research identifies, elaborates and interrogates major historical and contemporary themes and processes that extend beyond nations and regions. The spread of people from the Hadramaut in Yemen across the Indian Ocean is an area of focus that has given considerable momentum to this work since the 1990s to the 2000s. However, our research ventures beyond the Hadrami diaspora and the Indian Ocean to consider wider themes and processes, including those lying on the land routes connecting Arabia and Asia.
Our conferences are framed by the lens of transregional research lens and have included “Exploring the Sacred: People, Place and Power in the Islamic Indian Ocean” in 2025. This meeting considered the sacred as a domain of analysis that offers fresh perspectives on Islam in the Indian Ocean through a common framing of what are often understood as disparate elements of the faith. The sacred has informed scholarship in this area but seldom has it been the object of the scholarship itself. The conference proposed that a focus on the sacred gives shape to novel transregional sacred geographies, interconnectedness, shared sites, and disruptions.
Our lecture series brings to the scholarly community and the wider public innovative research in transregional studies and includes Ismail Fajrie Alatas’s “The Sacred is in Relatedness: Arabia-Asia as a Geography of Friendship” delivered in 2025. Alatas spoke on transregional relationships of affect and kinship over and above the flow of goods, people, and ideas. Framed around the Bā-‘Alawī, whose beginnings lie in Yemen, Alatas put forth an Arabia Asia Studies agenda that moves geographies of friendship from the periphery to the centre of our attention.
The Arabia Asia Archives is an important part of our research because the collection not only narrates transregional intellectual and social histories but is a significant repository of knowledge that has yet to be properly studied and highlighted. Besides strengthening the resources for local and global collaborative research in the field, the emerging conceptual and empirical findings have the potential of shifting our understandings of Arabia Asia and the world.
Current Projects
Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean
Begun in 2022, this research project examines the dynamic and enduring influence of Sufism across the Indian Ocean since the fourteenth century. Focusing on the ‘Alawi Sufi tradition that emerged from the Hadramaut, Yemen, the project explores how Sufi networks, texts, and institutions shaped interconnected Muslim communities along the coasts through shared spiritual, intellectual, and legal frameworks. The research approaches Sufism not as an isolated mystical phenomenon, but as a formative force in the making of Islam’s cosmopolitan character across the region. Drawing on archival research, multilingual sources, and ethnographic fieldwork in South India, Southeast Asia, and Southern Arabia, the study presents the Indian Ocean as a vibrant world where religious, commercial, and cultural arenas were closely intertwined.
Saints of the Southern Indian Ocean: Hidden Geographies of Islam from Jakarta to Cape Town
Keramat, or the gravesite-shrines of Muslim saints in the Malay world, are markers in the landscape of a cosmology and history that have been hidden by national narratives. Besides the ubiquity of these shrines, the evidence is rich in Malay manuscripts of the importance of the sacred geography centuries before the emergence of independent nation-states in the twentieth century. The charismatic Muslim figures commemorated by keramat constitute a productive built archive for reimagining geographies and histories as these shrines are found across strikingly diverse and disconnected contexts: amid the pinnacles of glass and concrete of Singapore’s financial district, on the sinking shoreline of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, or in the still-contested landscapes of post-Apartheid Cape Town. This research proposes that an exploration of the hidden geographies of keramat offers retellings of the past that matter in their respective contexts, highlights illuminating cases of inter-cultural interaction, and reframes the Malay world within the history of Islam and the southern Indian Ocean.