Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Engseng Ho, National University of Singapore, and Duke University

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

The Arabia Asia Transregional Studies Roundtable Series, organized by the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Chair in Arabia Asia Studies, meets to discuss challenges and solutions in research and publishing on all aspects of Arabia Asia relations. While the potentially large spatial and temporal dimensions of such relations pose challenges in framing research and narrating findings, we now have a number of methodologically innovative books and projects creatively building this field with all manner of empirical materials. And there is more to be done!

In the first roundtable, we will be discussing Mahmood Kooria’s new book that presents a novel analysis of the development of the Shafi`i school of Islamic law across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. While the school is acknowledged to be dominant across this transregion, what that means has never been clearly spelt out. Kooria’s book now does exactly that, in an authoritative study coordinating the mobility of scholars with a diasporic canon of texts they read, write and recite.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Khairudin Aljunied (PhD SOAS, London) is Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and Senior Fellow. He was appointed as Professor and Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at the Alwaleed Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University and as a visiting professor at Columbia University, USA (Fulbright Program) in 2013 and University of Brunei Darussalam in 2022-2023. A recognized specialist in the field of intellectual history, his research focuses on the connections between Southeast Asia and Global Islam. Recent publications include Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Hamka and Islam: Cosmopolitan Reform in the Malay World (Cornell University Press, 2018), Islam in Malaysia: An Entwined History (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Shapers of Islam in Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Philipp Bruckmayr is Visiting Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Freiburg. He has held fellowships and lectureships at the International Research Center Cultural Studies (Vienna), Passau University, the National University of Malaysia, and the University of Exeter. He was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Association of Middle Eastern Studies (DAVO) in 2015 and the Dr. Hermann Stieglecker-Scholarship for Christian-Islamic Studies of the Forum of World Religions (FWR) in 2017. Much of his research has focused on Islam in Southeast Asia and its linkages to other regions of the Muslim world. His most recent publications include “Facing Mecca from Java: Two Treatises on the Establishment of the qibla, and Their Scholarly and Social Context” in Islamic Law and Society (2023).

Sukidi Mulyadi is a diversity thinker and columnist. He is a leading Indonesian Muslim intellectual, with a PhD from Harvard University for his dissertation ‘The Gradual Qu’ān: View of Early Muslim Commentators’.

Sanne Ravensbergen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is a cultural historian of law in colonial Indonesia and her interdisciplinary research connects the study of legal pluralism, materiality, and Dutch empire in the Indian Ocean world. She obtained her PhD in History from Leiden University in 2018. From 2018-2021, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on spatial and material encounters in law making tied to colonial commissions of inquiry in South- and Southeast Asia. Sanne is the co-editor, together with Mahmood Kooria, of Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Text, Ideas, and Practices (Routledge 2021) and has published articles and book chapters on colonial legal cultures in Indonesia and the postcolonial legacies of Dutch empire.

Julia Stephens is Associate Professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research focuses on how law has shaped religion, family, and economy in colonial and post-colonial South Asia and in the wider Indian diaspora. Her first book, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is currently spending a year as a Humanities Research Fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she is working on a book entitled Worldly Afterlives: Family and Legacy-Making in the Indian Ocean.

Mahmood Kooria holds research positions at Leiden University (Netherlands) and University of Bergen (Norway) and is a visiting faculty of History at Ashoka University (India). He read his PhD at the Leiden University Institute for History in 2016 and co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean: Texts, Ideas and Practices (Routledge, 2022). He was a visiting professor at the National Islamic University, Jakarta, Indonesia, and a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and African Studies Centre (ASC), Leiden; Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR), Rabat.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.