Anwar Ibrahim Lecture Series | Ismail Alatas - Destination Jāwa

This talk will explore the relationship between religion and spatiality through a study of the emergence of a transoceanic religious geography that links Southeast Asia and South Arabia. This geographic imaginary links two regions commonly regarded as “peripheral” in the study of Islam and Islamic history. Muslims from these so-called “peripheral” regions, however, have for long, presented their respective homelands as spatial realizations of Islamic cosmology and as privileged sites for moral education and ethical becoming. Tracing how this transoceanic religious geography came about allows us to rethink established center-periphery models that have continued to shape our understanding of the history and geography of Islam. Instead of a Muslim world made up of unchanging centers and peripheries, the talk uncovers the existence of competing religious geographies, shifting centers of Islam, and forms of devotional mobility with multiple directionalities. Understanding how a “peripheral” region like Southeast Asia becomes religiously central to people elsewhere (South Arabia and the Swahili coast of Africa, for example), in turn, helps us to think about comparable processes that have sustained the religious significance of other regions. Ismail Fajrie Alatas is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and History at New York University and associate editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is the author of What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic communities in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2021). His research explores the intersections of religious authority and social formation, spatiality and mobility, semiotics and communicative practice with a focus on Southeast Asia and its historical and contemporary connection to the Middle East. This event was organized by the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies on November 10, 2022. If you would like to be informed about the Center programs, please subscribe to the ACGIS mailing list at the following link: http://eepurl.com/gJYjWH