Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Sumit Mandal, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

The Arabia Asia Transregional Studies Roundtable 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 fourth roundtable will discuss the book, Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change, by Erin Pettigrew. In this innovative study, Pettigrew unravels how esoteric forms of knowledge and unseen forces of spirits have shaped social structures, religious norms and political power in the Saharan West. Drawing on ethnographic history in Mauritania, she traces the changing role of Muslim spiritual mediators throughout the region’s long-term history and demonstrates the enduring reliance of Saharan societies upon the Islamic esoteric sciences (known locally as l’ḥjāb) in their daily lives. Situating itself within the Arabia-Asia-Africa matrix, this roundtable will explore the scholarly implications of Invoking the Invisible, which calls for an advanced historical approach that takes the immaterial seriously.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Teren Sevea is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya, that won the 2022 Association for Asian Studies’ Harry J. Benda Prize. He has also co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia and is currently completing a book titled Singapore Islam: The Prophet’s Port and Sufism across the Oceans.

Sumit Mandal is Muhammad Alagil Chair in Arabia Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a transregional historian who researches the outcome of longstanding inter-cultural and inter-religious interaction in the Malay World—understood as a flexible and expansive cultural geography. His current research explores keramat (Muslim shrines) in the Indian Ocean as the built archives of a little-known past enmeshed in individual acts of intellectual and political leadership, inter-cultural interaction, transregional connections, piety, and miracles. This research has taken him to Java, Sumatra, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and Cape Peninsula (South Africa).

Erin Pettigrew is Associate Professor of History and Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of Africa specializing in West African colonial and postcolonial history with a focus on Muslim societies. Her research has focused on the cultural history of Islam, slavery, race, gender, and nation in what is today primarily the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. She is the author of Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

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 event.