Events

CHAIRPERSON

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

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!

The second roundtable will focus on the book, What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia, by Ismail Alatas. His book redirects anthropological and historical questions on Islam as a locally embedded yet universal reality into Muslim authority and community. Pursuing prominent Bā ʿAlawis in Indonesia, Alatas explicates how religious authority and community are cultivated and how such processes serve as the sites for realization of the Prophetic traditions while remaining irreducibly local in concrete contexts.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Guangtian Ha is the author of The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia 2022). He is also the co-editor of The Contest of the Fruits (MIT 2021) and Ethnographies of Islam in China (U. Hawai’i 2020). While his earlier work deals with the multilingual and transnational histories of Chinese Islam, his current work turns to the global voyage of medieval Muslim merchants who plied the waters of the Indian Ocean, linking Africa, Arabia, Persia and Asia. His main interest lies in uncovering hitherto untold stories of the dark-skinned labourers — sailors and slaves — who formed the essential human infrastructure of this premodern global connectivity.

Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at University of California, Los Angeles. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the editor of seven books and author of nine monographs, most recently Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2020) and How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale, 2022). He is a regular contributor to Los Angeles Review of Books and hosts the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.

Rian Thum is Senior Lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Manchester. His work focuses on the history and ethnography of Muslims in China and their connections to Central and South Asia. He is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, and has written on pilgrimage, technologies of the word, and money in Eurasia from the 18^th century to the present.

Sumit Mandal is a historian at the University of Nottingham Malaysia whose research concerns the outcome of inter-cultural and inter-religious interaction in the Malay world, understood as a flexible and expansive cultural geography. He is currently working on Muslim shrines (keramat) as the built archives of transregional interactions across the Indian Ocean. This project is titled “Saints of the Southern Indian Ocean: Sacred Geographies, Popular Faith Practices, and the Politics of Islam from Jakarta to Cape Town”. His book Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

Ismail Fajrie Alatas is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and History at New York University. He is an associate editor of Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and a fellow of The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Jordan. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic communities in Indonesia (Princeton, 2021). He is currently working on a new project that explores the relationship between religion, spatiality, and geography by looking at a transoceanic moral geography that links Southeast Asia to South Arabia.

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.