Events

This workshop is jointly organized by the Asia Center, and the Alaweed Islamic Studies Program at the Harvard University; and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

The important role Southeast Asian reformers played in formulating twentieth-century Islamic and Islamist discourse remains largely unacknowledged. This workshop re-emphasizes the significance of an early twentieth-century ideological network which emerged from Southeast Asia, propagating what amounted to an Islam-informed Third Worldism across the globe. In particular, Southeast Asian cities including Jakarta and Singapore emerged as nodes of global networks of reform-minded Islamic scholars, Sufis, ideologues and Islamists who were striving to implement a socio-political ideological incarnation of Islam. This workshop pays particular attention to the content of multilingual publications (and self-avowed ‘propaganda organs’) that disseminated a corpus of ideas we might gloss as “Islamic Third Worldism”. Through articles on the need for an authentic Islamic modernity, the urgency for legitimate Islamic authority and the need for Islamic self-assertion, these publications claimed to promote a vision of a ‘real’ Islam that was distinguishable from the ‘nominal’ Islam performed by Muslims past and present. Calling upon audiences to practise real Islam, Islamic Third Worldists condemned secular ideologies for constraining Islamic self-assertion and promoting capitalist exploitation, class warfare, dictatorship, fascism, despotism, imperialism and nationalism. Southeast Asia’s Islamic Third Worldists also promoted what amounted to an ‘Islamic International’, going beyond a loose sense of co-membership in the ummah. They advocated for scholars, jurists, theologians, Sufis, Islamic modernists, Islamists, even across the Sunni and Shi‘a confessional divide, to transcend their theological divisions and unite as a bloc. The purpose of said bloc was to propagate real Islam as the universal ideology for modernity, one that could rival the globe-straddling allure of Eurocentric ideologies like capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and communism.  

CONVENORS

Dr Lin Hongxuan | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Dr Teren Sevea | Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA

REGISTRATION

Participation in this workshop is limited and by invitation only.