Events

This conference is organised by the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Professorship in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

This conference considers 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 proposes that a focus on the sacred gives shape to novel transregional sacred geographies, interconnectedness, shared sites, and disruptions.

To focus on the sacred is to take the worldview of the inhabitants of the Islamic Indian Ocean as the point of departure and to better frame the complexity and diversity of Muslim beliefs and practices. Salafi and Sufi, orthodox and popular, and mosque and shrine are dichotomies that persist even though they are not necessarily constitutive elements of people’s faith. All of these terms produce the sacred in their own ways and Muslims do not as a matter of course choose between one or the other. The constitution of Muslim belief is more complex, as David Kloos has shown in Becoming Better Muslims (2018).

Besides better framing complexity, scholarship has to be more inter-disciplinary because the Islamic sacred consists of many aspects of life and is not confined to the “religious” domain alone; it guides commercial interactions, travel, politics, social relations, and so forth. On the one hand, it has served as a means of organising individuals and societies. On the other, it has been mobilised in the interest of political power. Scholarship on the sacred is thus strengthened when religious studies, history, anthropology, geography, philology, political science, international relations, urban studies and other disciplines complement each other.

The conference focuses on the Islamic Indian Ocean because Islamic law and piety have long been integral to transregional economic interactions across the watery expanse, influencing people from diverse religious traditions for centuries. Since the eleventh century, with the emergence and expansion of legal literature from the Shafi‘i school on economic and social relations and the subsequent flourishing of Sufi networks, individuals from various backgrounds have been drawn to the sacred dimensions of legal discourses and the divine aspects they have conveyed. The Islamic in the naming of this cosmopolitan world is thus an overarching term rather than indicative of a single faith community.

Areas and Questions Considered

We consider together the different ways by which the nature of the sacred is shaped, its scope delimited, its spatial dimensions understood, and how it might be mobilised by different actors (from the individual to social groups, and the state). Ismail Alatas’s What is Religious Authority? (2021) and Vineeta Sinha’s Temple Tracks (2023) offer relevant points of departure as they draw from Islamic and Hindu traditions respectively to establish contrasting “soft” and “hard” infrastructures of the sacred, in each instance insisting on the labour involved in its making.

The consideration of Sufi infrastructures is an illustrative but not exclusive case of this conference’s exploration of the sacred. PKM Jaleel links sacred genealogies and ritual litanies in Malabar to the creation of a Sufi cosmopolis in his article “Sacred Immigrants and Travelling Rituals” (2025). Muslims and people of other faiths found succour in the shrines that emerged in conjunction with the spread of Sufism across the Indian Ocean; Islamic and local practices merged in these sites. Was there a correspondence or shared understanding of the sacred domain between Muslims and others? Could we link the sacred to cosmopolitanism in the Islamic Indian Ocean?

At the same time, Katherine Pratt Ewing and Rosemary Corbett in their edited volume Modern Sufis and the State (2020) scrutinise the representation of Sufis as a peaceful alternative to reformists to show how this pervasive dichotomy removes Sufis in unrealistic ways from the complex politics of their practice in South Asia. What might be the correspondence between the sacred and power—in its various forms—within different contexts?

Ours are historical and contemporary papers on the above and other areas that explore the sacred by grounding it in the archives, texts, material culture, and ethnographies of the Islamic Indian Ocean. The papers focus on local or transregional processes and themes but attempt to relate one scale to the other.

CONFERENCE CONVENORS

Dr Sumit MANDAL
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr P.K.M. Abdul Jaleel
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

REGISTRATION

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