Events

Arabia and Asia have been linked by slender but supple threads for centuries. Ties of religion, learning, trade, travel, migration, work and family life have mutually shaped peoples in these regions in ways known and unknown. In consequence, travellers between Arabia and Asia experience resonances of the past in the present as they journey to the other region. Amidst cultural differences, they also recognize familiar things that may be subtle, surprising or even stunning. This conference brings together scholars working along a number of Arabia-Asia axes to explore those resonances by exchanging results of their researches along overlapping and complementary transregional routes. Their presentations and discussions will range across and connect the Hejaz, Hadramawt, Dubai, Oman, Malabar, Java, Kuala Lumpur, Pattani, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton and Qinghai. Some of the panels will be conducted in the Arabic language, as indicated on the programme.

The dynamism of inter-Asian relations today gives Arabia-Asia an extra fillip, tightening the threads and thickening them. A number of presentations explore these new developments. While Yemen is mired in intractable internal problems, Yemenis are busy abroad in Canton, China, not only trading but amassing ideas of political development, skills and money to bring home when the future is ripe. New Yemeni chefs partner with old creole Arab-Malaysian businessmen and women, making their mark in the culinary and cultural scene of Kuala Lumpur, while rediscovered Arab saints are disinterred, buried or disappeared as Jakarta undergoes uneven but unremitting pressures of urban redevelopment. Saints’ tombs near ports see riots as port cities boom, accompanied by new waves of diasporic Asians and Arabs carried along old routes between Dubai, Singapore and Canton, working for the family, multinational and government corporations that thrive together in such cities.

Underlying these dramatic resurgences are relations of longer duration that persist across the Indian Ocean. These deeper and more enduring ties are explored in a number of presentations that detail the networks of scholars, texts, pilgrims and families that have been in constant motion between distant shores over the centuries. These form the firm social basis of Arabia-Asia relations that at times explode onto the media while remaining tranquil otherwise.

In between the long past and the bubbly present, one panel focusses on the inter-war years of the twentieth century, when the international order is up for grabs. Distant relations turn out to be key for internal mobilizations. Indonesian `ulama’ discover each other as they journey around to influence the Saudi King in the Hejaz, patching together the largest Indonesian Muslim organization in the process, the Nahdatul Ulama. Chinese Muslims travel through Singapore to the Hejaz, learning to publish magazines and stitch together dispersed Muslim communities back in China through new schools, travelogues and shared discourses.

Whether dramatic or humdrum, Arabia-Asia relations have been shaped and documented by highly literate individuals over the long term. Be they magazines, poems, prayer litanies, genealogies, travelogues, or biographies, chronicles, legal manuals, digests and documents, a rich vein of records exists in family homes, libraries and other archives. The conference will discuss ways of collecting, conserving, curating and making accessible such material.

This conference is the inaugural meeting held under the auspices of the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Chair in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Centre, National University of Singapore. While Arabia-Asia relations are old, as a field of academic inquiry it is new. The Chair has been established to gather and generate knowledge on Arabia-Asia relations in the past and present, to cultivate scholars who can interpret their history and think about their future course, and to widen the imaginative horizons of the public about the possibilities contained in such old, transregional relations. This conference brings together scholars from present-day Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and the USA.

At the Asia Research Institute, Arabia Asia Studies partakes in deepening currents of scholarly and public interest in inter-Asian connections past, present and future.

CONTACT DETAILS

Convenor

Prof Engseng HO
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore,
and Duke University, USA
E| engseng.ho@duke.edu

Secretariat

Miss Sharon ONG
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E| arios@nus.edu.sg