Islamic Connections
Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
Cover
Front Matter
Acknowledgements
The Islamic Connections project was formally launched in Singapore in June 2007 with a conference entitled “Re-centering Islam: Islamic Linkages between South and Southeast Asia”, featuring international scholars of South and Southeast Asian Islam and Muslim linkages. The conference was made possible by the generous funding...
The Contributors
R. Michael Feener’s research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Islam in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he was trained in Islamic Studies and foreign languages at Boston University, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, as well as in Indonesia, Egypt...
Introduction: Issues and Ideologies in the Study of Regional Muslim Cultures
Over the past fourteen centuries the expansion of Islam has transformed societies all across Asia and Africa, producing a civilization of great complexity and internal diversity. Despite the demographic realities of the modern Muslim world, however, the academic study of Islam remains plagued by a resilient bias privileging...
1. CONNECTED HISTORIES? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact between Early South and Southeast Asia
This chapter will present a general overview of early South and Southeast Asian historiographies, with a particular reference to the problem of cultural interaction between the regions across the boundaries of the “classical” and “early modern” periods. It will attempt to trace the existing paradigms of interaction against...
2. LIKE BANNERS ON THE SEA: Muslim Trade Networks and Islamization in Malabar and Maritime Southeast Asia
While the antiquity and depth of the connection between southern India and coastal Southeast Asia are well attested, much of the existing literature — whether concerned with commercial interaction or cultural transmission — has concentrated on Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal. This chapter seeks...
3. CIRCULATING ISLAM: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar and Nusantara
When the Muslim scholar Sam Shihab al-Din b. Sulayman composed these lines in his native Tamil language sometime in the late seventeenth century, there was more than mere hyperbole to the list of countries where his father, the scholar and Sufi Sulayman b. Sadaq, was allegedly honoured. The coastal regions...
4. FROM JEWISH DISCIPLE TO MUSLIM GURU: On Literary and Religious Transformations in Late Nineteenth Century Java
When the shared histories of Muslims residing in South and Southeast Asia as well as the diverse and significant connections among them are considered, two regions stand out as being especially interconnected: Southeast India and the Indonesian Archipelago. The coasts of these regions were part of the Indian Ocean’s commercial...
5. WAYANG PARSI, BANGSAWAN AND PRINTING: Commercial Cultural Exchange between South Asia and the Malay World
The 1870s is an attractive vantage point from which to start a discussion about an intensification in the exchange of “modern” cultural expressions between South Asia and the Malay world. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had brought a host of new people and a variety of new products to the East, and the rapid development...
6. RELIGION AND THE UNDERMINING OF BRITISH RULE IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA DURING THE GREAT WAR
On 29 October 1914, a few months after the outbreak of World War I, Turkey joined in on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On 11 November, Sultan Mehmed V proclaimed a holy war. His action left no shadow of doubt that religion obliged all Muslims in the world to side with Turkey and its two...
7. THE AHMADIYYA PRINT JIHAD IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
On 13 July 1925, over two thousand people gathered at the Victoria Memorial Hall in Singapore to protest against the influx of Ahmadiyya influences into Malaya. The protestors asserted that under no circumstances should Muslims possess any books published by the Ahmadiyya, and called on the government to enforce a ban...
8. MAKING MEDINAS IN THE EAST: Islamist Connections and Progressive Islam
It was Mian Maqsood Ahmad who first drew my attention to a madrasa in the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, where Malay teachers “educated illiterate Pathans about true Islam”.1 Through a series of interviews with Islamists from bodies such as the Jama‘at-i Islami Pakistan (JIP) and the Deobandis at...
9. SHARI‘A-MINDEDNESS IN THE MALAY WORLD AND THE INDIAN CONNECTION: The Contributions of Nur al-Din al-Raniri and Nik Abdul Aziz Bin Haji Nik Mat
In a 2006 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Muhammad Ali wrote that “the patterns of networking between… ulama in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in ‘Indonesia’ and those in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Kelantan seem to be similar. Surau, mosques...
10. THE TABLIGHI JAMA‘AT AS VEHICLE OF (RE)DISCOVERY: Conversion Narratives and the Appropriation of India in the Southeast Asian Tablighi Movement
This chapter highlights one aspect of the Tablighi Jama‘at, which Masud, Metcalf, and Sikand have described as the biggest itinerant transnational Muslim missionary movement in the world today.2 The focus is on conversion narratives of Southeast Asian Muslims who have joined the Tabligh, and how these conversion...
11. FROM KARACHI TO KUALA LUMPUR: Charting Sufi Identity across the Indian Ocean
As a case study of transnational religious identity, this chapter charts how a distinctly South Asian Sufi order has taken root in twenty-first century Southeast Asia. The Chishti Sabiri silsila is grounded in a long and storied Indo-Muslim past, and now thrives in contemporary Pakistan. Recently, however, the order...
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E-ISBN-13: 9789812309242
Print-ISBN-13: 9789812309235
Page Count: 245
Publication Year: 2009
Edition: 1
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