| M O N D A Y, 2 3 J U N E 2 0 1 4 | |
| 09:45 – 10:00 | REGISTRATION |
| 10:00 – 11:00 | WELCOME REMARKS & CONFERENCE OPENING |
| Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Mr Muhammad Alagil, CEO of Jarir Investment, and Chairman of Jarir Group, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, President of National University of Singapore Professor Engseng Ho, Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor in Arabia Asia Studies at |
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| 11:00 – 11:30 | MORNING TEA |
| 11:30 – 13:30 | PANEL 1: ARABIA-ASIA PORTS AND TRADE, OLD AND NEW |
| CHAIRPERSON | Sumit K. Mandal, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia | |
| 11:30 | In Search of China Dream?: Chinese Developmental Model, Yemeni Diaspora and the Future Development of Yemen Wai-Yip Ho, Hong Kong Institute of Education (via Skype) |
| 12:10 | Dubai and Singapore: Indian Ocean Port Cities Then and Now Engseng Ho, National University of Singapore , and Duke University, USA |
| 12:50 | Mobility, Commodity Cultures and the Remaking of an Historical Geography of Commerce in the Indian Ocean Nisha Mathew, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (via Skype) |
| 13:30 – 14:30 | LUNCH |
| 14:30 – 16:00 | PANEL 2: ARABIANS IN ASIAN CITIES, AGAIN |
| CHAIRPERSON | Adrian Vickers, National University of Singapore | |
| 14:30 | Arabs in the Urban Social Landscapes of Malaysia: Historical Connections and Belonging Sumit K. Mandal, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia |
| 15:15 | Arabs Saints and Sufi Bikers: Urban Circulatory Forms of a New Islamic Movement in Indonesia Aryo Danusiri, Harvard University, USA |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | AFTERNOON TEA |
| 16:30 – 18:30 | PANEL 3: ASIA-ARABIA INTELLECTUAL JOURNEYS, ORGANIZATIONAL MOVEMENTS |
| CHAIRPERSON | Joshua Gedacht, National University of Singapore | |
| 16:30 | The Yemeni Years of a Sumatran Shaykh R. Michael Feener, National University of Singapore |
| 17:10 | A Letter for the King: A Missive and Mission from Java to Hejaz in 1928 Dadi Darmadi, Harvard University, USA, and Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, Indonesia |
| 17:50 | Chinese Muslims in the Contact Zones: Mobile Actors beyond the Nation Hyeju Janice Jeong, Duke University, USA |
| 18:30 | END OF DAY ONE |
| 18:40 | BUS TRANSFER TO DINNER VENUE |
| 19:00 | CONFERENCE DINNER (FOR SPEAKERS, CHAIRPERSONS, AND INVITED GUESTS ONLY) |
| T U E S D A Y, 2 4 J U N E 2 0 1 4 | |
| 10:00 – 11:30 | PANEL 4: THE VIEW FROM ARABIA, LOOKING OUTWARDS نظرة من شبه الجزيرة العربية في إتجاه الخارج(Session in Arabic with no simultaneous translation) |
| CHAIRPERSON | Abd al-Rahman Ali Bilfaqih, Tarim Centre for Research and Publishing, Yemen | |
| 10:00
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Trade between Oman and the Outside World 1888-1913
التبادل التجاري بين عمان والعالم الخارجي |
| 10:30
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Cultural Relations between the Arabian Peninsula and the Malay World in Modern History العلاقات الثقافية بين شبه الجزيرة العربية والعالم الملاوي في التاريخ الحديثMohamed Sbitli, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia |
| 11:00 | Role of the Hadramis in Propagating the Arabic-Islamic Heritage in the Eastern Diaspora دور الحضارم في نشر التراث العربي الاسلامي في المهجر الشرقيMuhammad Abu Bakr Ba Dhib, Furqan Institute for Islamic Heritage, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia |
| 11:30 – 12:30 | PANEL 5: TARIM CENTRE FOR STUDIES AND PUBLISHING AND AL-KAFF FOR STUDIES AND PUBLISHING, AND THEIR COLLABORATION IN PUBLISHING AND DOCUMENTING THE HADRAMI HERITAGE
مركز تريم للدراسات والنشر ومركز الكاف للدراسات ومساهمتهم في نشر وتوثيق التراث الحضرمي (Session in Arabic with no simultaneous translation) |
| CHAIRPERSON | Engseng Ho, National University of Singapore, and Duke University, USA | |
| 11:30 | Documentary Archive Project between Southern Arabia, Southeast Asia, India and East Africa, Employing Personal Documents in Hadramawt and Its Diaspora
مشروع الارشيف الوثائقي بين جنوب الجزيرة العربية وجنوب شرق آسيا والهند وشرق افريقيا من خلال الوثائق الشخصية في حضرموت والمهجر Abd al-Rahman Ali Bilfaqih, Tarim Centre for Studies and Publishing, Yemen and |
| 12:30 – 14:00 | LUNCH |
| 14:00 – 15:30 | PANEL 6: HADRAMAWT-INDIA-INDONESIA: PILGRIMS AND NETWORKS |
| CHAIRPERSON | Armando Salvatore, National University of Singapore | |
| 14:00 | Producing Pilgrimage: Poetics of Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt Ismail Alatas, University of Michigan, USA |
| 14:45 | Sufi Networks of Arab Migrants in the Indian Ocean: Sheikh Jifry and Tariqa Alawiyya in Malabar Abdul Jaleel PKM, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | AFTERNOON TEA |
| T U E S D A Y, 2 4 J U N E 2 0 1 4 | |
| 16:00 – 17:30 | PANEL 7: ARABIA-ASIA DIASPORAS AND STATES |
| CHAIRPERSON | Arun Bala, National University of Singapore | |
| 16:00 | Diasporas and the Hajj Muhammad Arafat, National University of Singapore |
| 16:45 | A Question of Relative Need: British Colonial Legal Limitations of the Islamic Concept of Charity in Southeast Asia Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Washington University in St. Louis, USA |
| 17:30 – 19:00 | CLOSING DISCUSSION |
| 19:00 | END OF CONFERENCE |
| 19:05 | CONFERENCE DINNER (FOR SPEAKERS, CHAIRPERSONS, AND INVITED GUESTS ONLY) |
ABSTRACTS
In Search of China Dream?: Chinese Developmental Model, Yemeni Diaspora and the Future Development of Yemen
HO WAI-YIP
Department of Social Sciences,
Hong Kong Institute of Education
waiyip.ho@gmail.com
This paper highlights that China’s growing presence to Yemen and the newly Yemeni diasporic community to China are dual important factors shaping the future development of Yemen. Since 2009, China’s unprecedented naval deployment in the counter-privacy activities in the Gulf of Aden and its geo-strategic presence has been transforming the dynamics of Yemen and Beijing foreign policy. This paper firstly explores China’s ongoing investment and plan of constructing a container port as well as an electric plant in the port city Aden will transform Aden as China’s frontier landmark in future Yemen and the Gulf. At the same time, the expanding counter-flow of Yemeni migrant community to China has been serving as a crucial middleman of inter-Asian connections between China and the Arab world. Based on interviewing Yemeni merchants’ experience sojourning in the Far East Asia and their critical perception of the Chinese developmental path, so-called ‘China Model’, this paper argues the Yemeni diasporic community in China may potentially provide a powerful alternative imagination, gradually turning Yemenis away from the Washington Consensus and thus reorient the future path of Yemen towards the direction of ‘Going East’.
Ho Wai-Yip is Assistant Professor of Department of Social Sciences, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, China. He was awarded Endeavour Research Fellow at Australian National University, Visiting Research Fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) at Berlin, Visiting Scholar at Centre of Muslim-Christian Studies at Oxford, Visiting researcher at Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies at Sana’a, Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Center of Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies, University of Wollongong; Junior Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen, Germany. He has been the Sir Edward Youde Fellow and was the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, where he earned his MA in Islamic Studies. He specializes in Islamic Studies, Christian-Muslim relations and sociology of Muslim societies. He recently turned to work on topics in New Media and China’s Islam, Gulf-China relations and China’s Christian-Muslim relations. He is the author of Islam and China’s Hong Kong: Ethnic Identity, Muslim Networks and the new Silk Road (Routledge: London, 2013). His work also appeared in the Comparative Islamic Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, The Maghreb Review, Asian Ethnicity, Contemporary Islam, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Modern Asian Studies, Asian Profile, Social Identities, etc.
Dubai and Singapore:
Indian Ocean Port Cities Then and Now
ENGSENG HO
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and
Departments of History and Anthropology, Duke University, USA
engseng.ho@duke.edu
Dubai and Singapore are emblematic of the contemporary global moment, embodying dizzying success, frenetic excess, spectacular crash. Are they global cities or port-states? Are they Asian nations or corporations descended from the English EIC and Dutch VOC? Their iconic status today as global cities is not simply a function of globalization, but can be understood in terms of dynamic currents that shape and reshape places in the Indian Ocean, the original Asian venue of an international economy. Dubai and Singapore are two tiny places that have been successful because they have understood those currents, and acted in accordance with changes in their dynamics. What are these dynamics – their constants over the long term, and their recent shifts?
Engseng Ho is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Duke University, USA. He is currently the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He is a specialist on Arab/Muslim diasporas across the Indian Ocean, and their relations with western empires, past and present. His writings include The Graves of Tarim, Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, and “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2), 2004.
Mobility, Commodity Cultures and the Remaking of
an Historical Geography of Commerce in the Indian Ocean
NISHA MATHEW
Centre for Indian Studies in Africa,
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
nishamat@gmail.com
Much scholarly attention has focused on Indian labour migration as an integral feature of oil and post-oil economic development in the Persian Gulf. However, the significance of this phenomenon in producing consumers and traders negotiating and mapping the region’s transnational geographies of commerce seems to have been largely overlooked. The paper makes an intervention along these lines taking the particular case of migration from Kerala, India to Dubai in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s and analyzing the social and cultural contexts of consumption that played a crucial role in shaping what I call the mobility complex of the Malayalis. Private trading and consumption of gold and other foreign goods was prohibited by the developmental state in India and had to be undertaken in clandestine, often illegal ways. Migration to Dubai which for the average Indian and particularly the Malayali, was the only access to gold and foreign goods facilitated both of these via ingenious methods of smuggling.
The paper foregrounds smuggling and other informal practices of trade linking Dubai and India as having predominantly constituted the transnational urban economy of the city-state during the latter decades of the 20th century. Smuggling is addressed here not entirely as migrant transgressions of India’s economic and political borders. What is attempted rather is a textured account of the phenomenon as I brocaded in a circuit of movements and mobilities involving migrants, gold, electronics, textiles and other consumer goods and defined by the complex intersections of the legal and the illegal. Dubai’s economy of smuggling embodied complex and stratified processes consolidated and managed by different categories of Indian migrants and traders. An ethnography of smuggling as it was undertaken by labourers and illegal migrants from Kerala in cohorts with the capitalist classes of diasporic Sindhis and Gujaratis in Dubai reveals the nature and texture of this economy and it’s multiple geographical bases.
Nisha Mathew is a Mellon Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), Wits University, Johannesburg. Her research examines Dubai’s commercial and urban history against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf’s old world ties and ethno-religious networks in the Indian Ocean. Her story of Dubai reveals it as a historical space created by the intersections of empire, capital, trade and tribal constellations of power in the 19th century and inflected by the post-war global developments of the 20th century. Oil, dynasty, migration, trade, smuggling, counterfeiting and consumption and the multiple geographical contexts that embedded these within Dubai are all woven into its urban narrative as a city with a past as against a future that is global.
Arabs in the Urban Social Landscapes of Malaysia: Historical Connections and Belonging
SUMIT K. MANDAL
Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS),
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
mandal.mail@gmail.com
The urban landscapes of Malaysia have witnessed a marked increase in the number of non-citizens with the influx of foreign workers to satisfy the needs of a rapidly expanding economy. This paper examines how notions of belonging might have changed through the subsequent interaction between citizens and non-citizens in the Klang Valley, the political and economic centre of the country. It focuses specifically on Arab migrants who find themselves in a region – the Malay world – with which they have had historical connections. Arabs, primarily from the Hadramaut in Yemen, have long formed creole communities in the region. Recent Arab migrants have arrived at a time of two noteworthy developments. Firstly, there is a rediscovery of Arabness underway among creoles. Secondly, Malaysia’s ethnically diverse citizenry has seen renewed and heightened challenges, based on historical arguments, to its sense of belonging. By focusing on novel migrants with historical connections, this paper relates the question of belonging to history, and asks a number of questions. How are Arabs shaping the social landscape? How do the historical connections between Arabs and the Malay world matter? What are the implications of the new Arab presence for Malaysian society as a whole?
Sumit K. Mandal is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. He works on transnational and transregional histories with an interest in cultural geographies of the Malay world. He is concerned with the ways in which cultural diversity and notions of insider/outsider are constituted. Mandal views the Malay world in terms of its connectedness to the Indian Ocean. His explorations of Malay texts, Muslim shrines (keramat), and creole Hadramis reveal sites of interaction that are meaningful from the transregional to the local scale. He develops cultural geographies that depart from the familiar ethno-national terms to offer a complex and transregional vocabulary of belonging. His interests extend to contemporary cultural politics where he studies sites of interaction in ethnicised contexts such as Malaysia and Indonesia. He has published recently in the following journals: Indonesia and the Malay World (2013), Modern Asian Studies (2012), Cultural Dynamics (2012) and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2011).
Arab Saints and Sufi Bikers: Urban Circulatory Forms of a New Islamic Movement in Indonesia
ARYO DANUSIRI
Department of Anthropology, and The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Harvard University, USA
danusiri@fas.harvard.edu
Mawlid has been one of pivotal events in Sufi mystical practices, including the ‘Alawì tarìqa or ‘Alawi way, the dominant Sufi path of Hadrami sayyids. The path is uniquely a “malleable discourse” as it does not require formal allegiance (bay’a) for their members and inducts their membership by prophetic genealogical relationship and complex practices of “a canon of saints, texts, rituals, special places and genealogies” (Ho 2006). A form of voluntary study group (majelis ta’lim), is suitable to the malleability of ‘Alawi way. According to the Indonesian Department of Religion (2006), currently around 153,000 majelis with various religious orientations are active in Indonesia, typically groups of middle age women. In contrast, the Jakarta Hadrami sayyids’ majelis that started to emerge around 2000 are dominated by male working-class youth. How does the malleability of the ‘Alawi way amalgamate with contemporary Jakarta’s social and political networks and its infrastructural worlds?
The cases are the interruption of two area development projects located respectively at the harbor and the downtown area of the city by the discovery of two Hadrami-saint tombs in those areas. It was April 14, 2010; since morning, all TV stations repeatedly broadcast breaking news on a bloody clash in Jakarta’s planned International harbor area over the removal of Habib Hasan Al-Hadad’s tomb. The clash occurred between public order officers (Satpol PP) who wanted to remove the tomb from the site and the followers who defended it. Three people died and hundreds more were injured. In a split second, the tomb received national attention and the president proposed granting it a national heritage status. The number of visitors to the saint’s tomb multiplied overnight. Four months after the event, however, the council of Indonesian Muslim Scholars (MUI) presented their investigation on the clash and the tomb’s history with the conclusion that the tomb was actually a fraud, and declared Habib Hasan not to be a saint. The second case involves the renewal of an area in a wealthy central Jakarta neighborhood, which is targeted for a luxurious apartment building. Located in the exact center of the area, the tomb of Habib Abdurahman bin Abdullah Al-Habsy had been prepared for relocation somewhere else when water suddenly began gushing out from beneath. Instantly, hundreds of people visited the spot not to pay homage but to collect the water that they believed sacred. Soon afterwards, a group of the saint’s extended family claimed the space and gradually transformed the area into a proper place for tomb pilgrimage. Eight months later, a mob paid by the apartment’s developer raided the site. Several people were injured and the raiders and the defenders are now in court. The raid has brought the process of negotiation between the developer and the tomb’s defender down to a halt.
Aryo Danusiri is a video artist and PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practices at Harvard University. At Harvard, he was an Indonesian Fulbright scholar (2007-2010) and also a Graduate Student Associate at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His ethnographic films, documentaries and short films about human rights and multicultural problems in Indonesia have been screened at various festivals. In 2011, Danusiri finished “On Broadway”/”The Fold”, a video about a mosque in downtown manhattan and it has been selected to join several group exhibitions, including at HKW and NGBK (Berlin) as well as Etnographic Terminalia (Toronto). His article on Indonesia NGO Workes has been published in the edited volume “Figures of Modernity in Southeast Asia” (eds Barker, Harms, Lindquist, Hawaii Press, 2013).
The Yemeni Years of a Sumatran Shaykh
MICHAEL FEENER
Asia Research Institute, and Department of History,
National University of Singapore
arifm@nus.edu.sg
This paper provides an in-depth exploration of a previously under-utilised Arabic source for the history of Islam in Southeast Asia. This text, Al-Nafas al-Yamani was compiled in the Yemen by ʿAbd al-Rahman b. Sulayman al-Ahdal (d. 1250 H./1835 CE), and includes a biographical sketch of the Sumatran scholar ʿAbd al-Samad b. ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jawi al-Palimbani. Through a close, annotated reading of that text, this article develops new insights into the configuration of people and ideas populating specific nodes of trans-regional networks in Sumatra and Arabia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, it also brings to light important dimensions of Sufi belief and ritual practice during this important transitional period of Islamic history in Southeast Asia. This material is then further explored through a discussion of some ways in which documents of this type might be approached by historians working on the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Southeast Asia more broadly.
Michael Feener is Research Leader of the Religion and Globalization Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, and Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. Previously he taught at Reed College, and the University of California, Riverside. He has also held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Harvard, Kyoto University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Copenhagen, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Honolulu), and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he was trained in Islamic Studies and foreign languages at Boston University as well as in Indonesia, Egypt, and the Yemen. His books include Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia, Shiism and Beyond: Alid Piety in Muslim Southeast Asia (with Chiara Formichi), Proselytizing and the Limits of Pluralism in Contemporary Asia (with Juliana Finucane), From the Ground Up: Perspectives on Post-Tsunami and Post-Conflict Aceh (with Patrick Daly & Anthony Reid), Mapping the Acehnese Past (with Patrick Daly & Anthony Reid), Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies of South and Southeast Asia (with Terenjit Sevea), Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia: Ideas and Institutions (with Mark Cammack), and Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives.
A Letter for the King: A Missive and Mission from Java to Hejaz in 1928.
DADI DARMADI
Harvard University, USA, and
Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM), UIN Jakarta, Indonesia
dadi.darmadi@uinjkt.ac.id
Many studies on Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s biggest Islamic group, have often linked the early rise of the organization with a series of meetings, culminating in the formation of Hejaz Committee in Surabaya, East Java on January 31, 1926. Responding to the changing geopolitics of Hejaz, some respected Javanese Muslim scholars decided to send a missive and mission to Arabia. However, much of the stories behind the journey of NU delegate to Hejaz in 1928 (a young Javanese scholar Wahab Chasbullah, accompanied by Sheikh Ahmad Ghana’im al-Amir of Egypt) remain unclear. What is the mission? What does the Hejaz Committee really tell us about Java-Hejaz connections and perhaps Arabia-Asia relations in the 1920s? In this paper, I seek to examine a Javanese narrative of the Hejaz Committee, written in Arabic pegon-style, to discuss the travel stories of those NU emissaries and uncover the exchange of diplomatic correspondence between Hasjim Asj’arie, perhaps the most respected Javanese scholar at the time, and King Abdulaziz (Ibn Saud), the new ruler of Arabia. While the letters were never officially documented in the Saudi archival records, the British and Dutch colonial records, the story of behind these letters reveals candid religious and political concerns of Muslims in Java and Arabia, the importance of religious freedom and pilgrimage administration, especially after the downfall of Sharif Hussain of Mecca from power in 1926. In this study, following the NU emissary’s travel stories, I also seek to explore the Muslim networks and patterns of religious mobilization among Javanese scholars along the port cities of Surabaya, Tandjong Priok, Singapore and Jidda—places they visit on transit— en route to Mecca before they’re able to meet and greet Ibn Saud, and finally hand over the letter to the King.
Dadi Darmadi is Researcher at the Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM), Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, Indonesia; and editor of Studia Islamika, Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies. He is also a doctoral student at Harvard University, USA.
Chinese Muslims in the Contact Zones:
Mobile Actors beyond the Nation
HYEJU JANICE JEONG
Department of History,
Duke University, USA
janice.h.jeong@gmail.com
In the first half of the twentieth century, elites of multiple Muslim communities forged interconnected networks across China and beyond, while maintaining fragile relations with the political core. These included members of the Chinese Islamic Progressive Association, Islamic Delegations to the South China Seas and the Middle East, and ‘Ma’ Muslim warlords in the northwestern provinces. This paper is an attempt to place these seemingly disparate leaders of Chinese Muslim communities on the same plane, so as to trace networks that they forged and utilized across national and regional boundaries. The paper demonstrates processes through which certain Muslims, who carried with them a history of maneuvering collaborative relations with the state and modifying society’s dominant beliefs and practices, utilized diffuse Islamic networks to promote their local and transnational bases, in addition to status of Muslim communities in China. As the regime in which they were invested collapsed, they chose to settle in nodal points of Islamic networks outside both the Republican and Communist Chinese nation-states. The space created in the first half of the twentieth century, therefore, later served as exterior physical arena in which mobile Chinese actors could maintain their status as middlemen between China and different parts of the Islamic world.
Hyeju Janice Jeong is a Doctoral Student at the history department of Duke University, USA. Her project, in its initial stages, is a study of Chinese Muslim diaspora and migration in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which utilized pan-Chinese and pan-Islamic networks across national and regional borderlines. She hopes to expand her sites of research to Mecca, Jeddah, and Cairo, as well as Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Lucknow. Her broad interests include transnational history, Islamic history, inter-Asian history, race and ethnicity, and anthropology and history. She is excited by promises and challenges of interdisciplinary, multi-sited research.
Trade between Oman and the Outside World 1888-1913
التبادل التجاري بين عمان والعالم الخارجي
ISMAIL AHMED HAROON AL-ZADJALI
Diwan of the Royal Court, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman
ismzadjali@yahoo.com
إرتبطت عمان بحكم موقعها الجغرافي بعلاقات تجارية مع العديد من شعوب وحضارات العالم مما أتاح الفرصة للعمانيين للقيام بدور الوسيط التجاري بين المواني المطلة على المحيط الهندي ومواني الخليج العربي منذ فترة تاريخية مبكرة تعود إلى فترة ماقبل ميلاد المسيح عليه السلام، وساعدت تلك العلاقات العمانيون للمساهمة في نشر الإسلام والحضارة العربية الإسلامية في العديد من المناطق التي إرتادوها خاصة منطقة شرق أفريقيا ومنطقة شبه القارة الهندية .
نشط التبادل التجاري بين عمان والعالم الخارجي مع مطلع العصور الحديثة نتيجة لحالة الأمن والإستقرار التي شهدتها عمان بعد نجاح اليعاربة في طرد البرتغاليين من عمان والخليج العربي وتعقبهم في منطقة المحيط الهندي، فازدادت العلاقات بين عمان وتلك المناطق الأمر الذي إنعكس على رواج نشاط التبادل التجاري الذي واصل إزدهاره في عهد الدولة البوسعيدية التي أقام حكامها علاقات تجارية مع العديد من دول العالم ووقعوا معاهدات صداقة وتجارة وثقت نشاط التبادل التجاري بين عمان وتلك الدول .
إتخذ البحث نشاط التبادل التجاري بين عمان والعالم الخارجي في عهد السلطان فيصل بن تركي 1888 ــ 1913م، كنموذجا للدور العماني في حركة التبادل التجاري عبر التاريخ، وانبثقت أهمية هذه الفترة فيما شهدته من أحداث محلية أدت إلى قيام الثورة في عمان عام 1913م إضافة إلى الأحداث العالمية التي شهدتها الساحة الدولية وأدت إلى قيام الحرب العالمية الأولى عام 1914م .
يستعرض البحث الصادرات العمانية إلى العالم الخارجي من حيث أصنافها والمناطق المصدرة إليها والمبالغ المحصلة منها مع تناول صادرات التمور والليمون والأسماك بالتفصيل لأنها كانت تأتي في مقدمة الصادرات العمانية إلى العالم الخارجي خلال تلك الفترة، كما تم إستعراض البضائع الواردة للموانيء العمانية وأصنافها والمناطق الواردة منها والمبالغ المصروف عليها مع تناول واردات الأرز والقمح بالتفصيل ، وتطرق البحث إلى دور حركة الملاحة البخارية في تدويل تجارة مسقط حيث نقلت السفن البخارية البضائع العمانية إلى الأسواق العالمية وجلبت البضائع المختلفة للعديد من البلدان إلى السوق العمانية، واختتم البحث بالدور الذي اضطلع به التجار الهنود في تفعيل التبادل التجاري بين عمان وغيرها من الدول .
Cultural Relations between the Arabian Peninsula
and the Malay World in Modern History
العلاقات الثقافية بين شبه الجزيرة العربية والعالم الملاوي في التاريخ الحديث
MOHAMED SBITLI
King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
msbitli@yahoo.fr
تعود العلاقات بين شبه الجزيرة العربية والعالم الملاوي إلى ما قبل ظهور الإسلام. إلا أن العلاقات الاجتماعية والثقففية تاكدت مع دخول الإسلام إلى الأرخبيل الملاوي. ثم تكثفت علاقتات التبادل الثقافي مع ازدياد اعداد الحجيج إلى مكة من جهة، وتطور التجارة . ولعل هذا الأمر حدث بوضوح في نهاية القرن التاسع عشر وبداية القرن العشرين بفعل التطور التكنولوجي في مجال المواصلات والطباعة.
وقد ظهر ت عملية التثاقف التدريجي مع العالم الملاوي ليس فقط في المجال الديني وإنما أيضا في المجال اللغوي والأدبي والفني… وتركز الورقة على محاور ثلاث، وهي : أولا : تشكل مجتمع ملاوي في مكّة. ثانيا: تأثير مجلّة المنار في الفكر الإصلاحي الملاوي الحديث، وثالثا: الطباعة وتأثيرها في الثقافة الملاوية الدينية الحديثة.
فمن جهة هاجر العديد من العلماء وطلاب العلم إلى مكة حيث استقروا وأسسوا عائلات اندمجت بالتدرّج في مجتمع مكة، وأصبحت جزء من النسيج الاجتماعي. وبرز الكثير منهم في مجالات مختلفة مثل العلم، واستقبال وفود الحجيج، وبعض المهن. في المقابل قام بعض العلماء بزيارة الأرخبيل الملاوي. هذا إلى جانب ظاهرة استقرار الحضارم في العديد من جزر الأرخبيل منذ القرون الأولى لظهور الإسلام.
إلى جانب ذلك – مع ظهور المطبعة في مكة وبعض البلاد العربية الأخرى – ظهر تبادل وتلاقح ثقافي عبر انتشار الكتب والصحف التي كانت تنقل عبر البريد والحجيج والتجار إلى جزر الأرخبيل الملاوي. كما قام بعض العلماء الأندونيسسين بدور سياسي واضع ضد الاستعمار الهولندي انطلاقا من مكّة.
لقد تميزت العلاقات التاريخية بين جنوب شرق آىسيا والعالم العربي بطابعها الإنساني السلمي الذي تمثل في هذا التبادل التجاري والثقافي العام، دون حدوث حروب أو عمليات توسعية استعمارية، مثل ما كان الأمر مع الغرب في مختلف الحقب التاريخية الحديثة. مما يؤهلها اليوم إلى مزيد من التطور والثراء في عالم أكثر انفتاحا وتعاونا بين الثقافات والشعوب.
Mohamed Sbitli is a Researcher at the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, where he is also Deputy Editor of the Journal of Islam and the Contemporary World. He was previously Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Sana`a University, Yemen, and Head of the Department of Social Studies, College of Education, Sana`a University. He has also served as Researcher in the French Center for Archeology and Social Sciences in Sana`a. He has authored numerous articles and books in Arabic and French on modern and contemporary Arab history, and translated 3 books from French into Arabic. He received his PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Paris VII, France.
Role of the Hadramis in Propagating the Arabic-Islamic Heritage
in the Eastern Diaspora
دور الحضارم في نشر التراث العربي الاسلامي في المهجر الشرقي
MUHUMMAD ABU BAKR BA DHIB
Furqan Institute for Islamic Heritage, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
maasbatheeb@gmail.com
المؤهلات الدراسية:
- بكلاريوس شريعة قانون، كلية الشريعة والقانون، جامعة الأحقاف، اليمن.
- ماجستير في الدراسات إسلامية، كلية الشريعة (دار الفتوى)، جامعة بيروت الإسلامية، لبنان.
- دكتوراة في أصول الدين، فرع تاريخ أديان وعقائد، كلية اللاهوت (أصول الدين) السني، جامعة عليكرة الإسلامية، الهند.
الوظائف والمهام:
- مشرفاً على قسم التحقيق العلمي والمطبوعات في مؤسسة دار الفقيه للنشر، جدة، 2001-2002م.
- مساعداً لمدير العلاقات الثقافية في جامعة الأحقاف، بمكتب رئيس مجلس أمناء الجامعة، معالي الوزير د. محمد عبده يماني رحمه الله، جدة: 2002-2005م.
- باحثاً في مركز خدمة السنة، التابع لمؤسسة دلة البركة، بجدة والقاهرة: 2006-2008م.
- أستاذاً زائراً في كلية العلوم الإسلامية، جامعة السلطان محمد الفاتح الوقفية، مدرساً لمادة العقيدة الإسلامية، واللغة العربية، إسطنبول: 2012-2013م.
- باحثاً في مؤسسة الفرقان للتراث الإسلامي، فرع موسوعة مكة المكرمة والمدينة المنورة، مكتب جدة: 2010م، وحتى الآن.
الأعمال العلمية:
اتصل بعالم التراث والتأليف منذ سنة 1417هـ/ 1997م، وصدر له حتى هذه السنة 1434هـ/ 2013م، ما يقارب خمسين) 50 (عنواناً، بين تحقيق وتأليف وإشراف وتصحيح.
* من أهم الأعمال التي صدرت له:
- تحقيق كتاب (إدام القوت أو معجم بلدان حضرموت)، لمفتي حضرموت العلامة عبدالرحمن بن عبيدالله السقاف، نشرته دار المنهاج بجدة 1425هـ/ 2005م، في مجلد كبير.
- تحقيق فتاوى ابن مرزوع الشبامي (ت 913هـ)، ضمن سلسلة (ديوان الفتاوى)، صدرت عن دار الفتح، الأردن.
- جهود فقهاء حضرموت في خدمة المذهب الشافعي، رسالة ماجستير، نش===رت في مجلدين، صدرت عن دار الفتح بالأردن، 1429هـ/ 2009م.
- أضواء على حركة طباعة التراث الحضرمي في المهجر خلال ثلاثة قرون، صدر عن مكتبة الملك فهد الوطنية بالرياض، 1434هـ/ 2013م.
- إسهامات علماء حضرموت في نشر الإسلام وعلومه في الهند، رسالة دكتوراة، صدرت عن دار الفتح، الأردن، 2014م.
Documentary Archive Project between Southern Arabia, Southeast Asia, India and East Africa, Employing Personal Documents in Hadramawt and Its Diaspora مشروع الارشيف الوثائقي بين جنوب الجزيرة العربية وجنوب شرق آسيا والهند وشرق افريقيا من خلال
الوثائق الشخصية في حضرموت والمهجر
ABD AL-RAHMAN ALI BILFAQIH
Tarim Centre for Studies and Publishing, Yemen
maaa-belfaqih90@hotmail.com
ALI ANIS AL-KAF
al-Kaff for Studies and Publishing, Yemen
ali110hh@yahoo.com
البداية كانت في مركز تريم للدراسات والنشر في العام 2002م وتم تحديد الأهداف الرئيسة للتأسيس ووضع الخطط والمشاريع المستقبلية لتنفيذها ومن أبرز الانشطة :1) الكتاب الاول: بهدف تشجيع الباحثين والمهتمين اعتمد نظام طباعة الكتاب الأول في حياة المؤلف. 2) تحقيق المخطوطات. 3) الرسائل الجامعية والدراسات: للمركز مساهمة في هذا الجانب لمساعدة طلاب الدراسات العلياء عند اعداد رسائلهم بتوفير المراجع بالذات المتعلقة بحضرموت. 4) نشر تراث أعلام حضرموت. 5) المكتبة الحضرمية: وهي مشروع ثقافي توثيقي متخصص في حفظ وعرض كل ما وصل إلينا من تراث حضرموت الفكري المكتوب تحت سقف واحد. 6) المكتبة الوثائقية: وهي البداية للعمل المشترك مع مركز الكاف للدراسات والنشر والتوثيق بسيؤن إذ أن المادة الوثائقية التي امتلكها وجمعها كانت كبيرة جدا، وقد تم عقد اتفاق لصيغة عمل مشترك بين المركزين في إطار الاهتمام والعمل المشترك بينهما وخلال فترة ليست بالقصيرة تكون لدى المركزين أرشيف كبير من الوثائق الحضرمية المتنوعة 0 التي تكشف لنا عن جوانب متعددة للعلاقات الانسانية عبر المحيط الهندي في الجانب السياسي والاقتصادي والاجتماعي والثقافي وتكمن أهمية تلك الوثائق من أنها ستكون موضع دراسة لبحث جوانب متعددة من جوانب العلاقة بين جنوب الجزيرة العربية وجنوب شرق آسيا والهند وشرق إفريقيا
مراحل العمل المشترك للمركزين:1) مرحلة جمع الوثائق من خلال وضع برامج لزيارة الأشخاص المستهدفين وأماكنهم. 2) في هذه المرحلة استلام وحفظ الوثائق. 3) الأرشفة وتصنيفها0
ومن خلال عملنا الأولي وجدنا أن الوثائق الشخصية التي من الممكن الاستفادة منها في دراسة العلاقة بين جنوب الجزيرة العربية وجنوب شرق آسيا والهند وشرق افريقيا تتركز في الأنواع التالية: وثائق الملكية – وثائق النذر – وثائق الوقف – الوصايا – التوكيلات – المكاتبات – الرسائل التجارية وكشوفات الحسابات – العتق – الصحف والمجلات.
والهدف المنشود من هذا العمل المشترك تكوين أرشيف لخدمة الباحثين والمهتمين في ابراز عدد من الدراسات التي تتعلق بالوثائق المجمعة التي تخدم تاريخ العلاقة بين جنوب الجزيرة العربية عبر المحيط الهندي حيث تقدم لنا معلومات كبيرة جدا في الجانب السياسي والاقتصادي والاجتماعي والثقافي .
Abd al-Rahman Ali Bilfaqih is the Director of the Tarim Centre for Studies and Publishing. The Centre is building up extensive and comprehensive holdings of books and manuscripts relating to all aspects of Hadramawt, and has an active programme publishing books. For more on the Centre: https://ar-ar.facebook.com/pages/مركز-تريم-للدراسات-والنشر/195867653782539
Ali Anis al-Kaff is Director of al-Kaff for Studies and Publishing. He is a prolific author on Hadrami history, and is archiving a major collection of documents relating Hadramawt to Singapore and Indonesia.
Producing Pilgrimage: Poetics of Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt
ISMAIL FAJRIE ALATAS
Department of Anthropology and History,
University of Michigan, USA
ifalatas@umich.edu
This paper looks at the growing phenomenon of Indonesian pilgrimage to the Ḥaḍramawt Valley of Yemen. While Ḥaḍramawt has been the destination of diasporic return for the Ḥaḍramīs of Indonesia, it did not attract significant attention from Indonesians of non-Ḥaḍramī descent prior to the late 1990s. As such, this paper examines the ways in which the need for pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt has been dynamically fashioned and maintained and how the actual travel has been made possible. In doing so, the paper follows several actors involved in the production and consumption of the pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt. The different roles that these actors play illustrate the ways in which particular imaginations of Ḥaḍramawt are sustained with the help of infrastructures including Islamic publishing industry, travel agency, and majelis taklim (Islamic study-groups). All of these processes shape an understanding of travel to Ḥaḍramawt not as a diasporic return but as a spiritually meaningful journey, thereby positing the valley as a viable supererogatory pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims of non-Ḥaḍramī descent.
Ismail Fajrie Alatas is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology and History. He received his BA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne, Australia and his MA from the National University of Singapore. His latest book, Al-Rashafat: Percikan Cinta para Kekasih (Bentang 2013), is an Indonesian translation and commentary of an eighteenth century Arabic Sufi Poem. He has written two other books in Indonesian, and several articles and entries in Die Welt des Islams, Journal of Islamic Studies, Studia Islamika, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam. His current research explores the tumult of religious belief, looking at dialogic interrogations and critical negotiations that constitute the act of believing.
Sufi Networks of Arab Migrants in the Indian Ocean:
Sheikh Jifry and Tariqa Alawiyya in Malabar
ABDUL JALEEL PKM
Centre for West Asian Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
jalijnu@gmail.com
The centuries-old Sufi networks in the Indian Ocean are one of the prime tools to develop an imagination of cultural contours that pervaded the long-distance oceanic trade routes. Travelling with their sacred lineage and Sufi texts, the Hadrami Sayyid emigrants from Southern Arabia offer ample scope to examine this cultural aspect in the Indian Ocean trade. Looking Sheikh Jifry of Calicut, one of the early Hadrami migrants, this paper intends to place the region of Malabar in the wider religious networks that paralleled the sailing commercial lines. Two Sufi orders; ʿAiydarusi-Naqshabandī and Alawi-Qadiri coalesce together in Sheikh Jifry whose literary texts help us to trace the fellow Hadrami migrants in the network as well as the followers from the host Mappila society. In this way, this paper attempts not only at providing more insights into the realm of Ocean networks within the context of Southern Arabia and Malabar connections, that has been exchanging number of Sufi-scholarly religious persons for centuries, but also methodologically it looks beyond the conventional approach of studying oceanic connections as the exchange of mere goods and specie.
Abdul Jaleel PKM is pursuing PhD on ‘Hadrami Sayyid Diaspora of Kerala and Singapore: A Comparative Study’, at the Centre for West Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His work is a historical and sociological examination of the diasporic experiences of an immigrant community from same homeland but ended up within two diverse contexts in a comparative and inter-disciplinary perspective. He has done M Phil on “Role of Sayyid Lineage in the Social Network of Yemeni Hadhramis”. He is currently co-authoring a book entitled, ‘Travel and Transformations of a Hadrami Sayyid Scholar: Sayyid Fadl bin Alawi of Malabar’, with Dr. M.H. Ilias, accepted to be published by Brill, Leiden. Presently he is researcher at Kerala Arab Historical Documentation Initiative. He has worked as a Field Investigator in the Cheraman Trust of Malabar that funds to conserve, catalogue and digitalize Muslim Manuscripts in Malabar and also had worked as a team leader for cataloguing the Gulf Archival collections at National Archives of India under Qatar Unified Imagining Project funded jointly by Qatar Foundation and Exeter University.
Diasporas and the Hajj
MUHAMMAD ARAFAT
Department of Southeast Asian Studies,
National University of Singapore
seamam@nus.edu.sg
The hajj is one of the largest and oldest annual human gatherings. Each year, the millions of men dressed in the pilgrim’s white garb who arrive on the shores of Saudi Arabic produce a visual effect of uniformity that conceals the social complexity of this great event. As a social phenomenon, the hajj brings together people of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and social backgrounds. It is a fertile ground for the production of knowledge about human religious and social action and identification that has attracted the attention of students of society for centuries. Nevertheless, the involvement of Mecca’s diasporic residents in the hosting of the annual event has been largely neglected. In this paper, I argue that the diasporas in Mecca are critical to Saudi Arabia’s successful management of the hajj. Generations of living in the holy city and servicing pilgrims equip such communities with the necessary cultural, structural, and spatial knowledge to act as bridges between the Saudi hosts and their international pilgrim guests. So far, Saudi Arabia’s efforts to reduce reliance on its diasporic foreign residents have failed. In this regard, we observe that the hajj produces a situation that locks Saudi Arabia and Mecca’s diasporas in a mutually-dependent relationship. The kingdom’s success at hosting the hajj enhances its prominence among the ummah and economic benefit while Mecca’s diasporas thrive under the seasonal relaxation of Saudi Arabia’s enforcement of labor laws.
Muhammad Arafat is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 2013. His dissertation, which is entitled Be-longing: The Fatanis in Makkah and Jawi, is a study of the history of Fatani migration to Makkah as well as social issues that the community faces in the present day.
A Question of Relative Need:
British Colonial Legal Limitations of the Islamic Concept
of Charity in Southeast Asia
NURFADZILAH YAHAYA
Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
nyahaya@wustl.edu
This article examines the intersections of law, religion and commerce, from the perspective of legal disputes involving Islamic religious trusts or endowments known as ‘waqfs.’ Colonial administration of waqfs led to the narrowing of Islamic notions of charity in the British Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore due to restrictions imposed by English Common Law. Despite general British commitment to uphold religious laws throughout Empire, interventions in the management of waqfs was common since they usually consisted of landed property which were potentially valuable to colonial authorities. Yet, at the same time, Islamic law ironically became protected like a bubble within secular law which could explain why Muslims continued to establish waqfs in the Straits Settlements up till the end of the colonial period. Most of the waqfs were established by merchants of foreign origin. Indian and Arab merchants, although a numerical minority, were significantly wealthy in the colony. The merchants’ worth and contributions to the colony determined the attitudes of British judges towards them. In British legal courts, their waqfs were channeled towards public philanthropy instead of their families. Private charity in the form of family waqfs was frowned upon while public charity was exalted. In this way, Muslim subjects’ generosity was purposefully geared towards colonial society as a whole, directed for the general upkeep of colonial infrastructure such as the erection and maintenance of schools, hospitals, orphanages and mosques. Hence, the waqf became an instrument of colonial control through manipulation of the legal definition of charity.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a Legal Historian. She holds the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in September 2012. She is currently preparing her book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation on mobile Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean. The book, tentatively titled Fluid Jurisdictions, explores how members of the Arab diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial courts of Southeast Asia. She is also writing a study of maritime piracy in the Straits of Malacca during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her next project looks at French, Dutch and British regulation of ‘halal’ (lawful) animal slaughter in the Islamic world. Her research interests include law and religion, legal history, Islamic law and colonialism. She has received grants from Harvard Law School and Library of Congress for her research.
About the Chairpersons
Adrian Vickers holds a personal chair at the University of Sydney, and researches and publishes on the cultural history of Southeast Asia. His research utilises expertise in the Indonesian language as well as drawing on sources in Balinese, Kawi (Old and Middle Javanese) and Dutch. He has held a series of Australian Research Council grants, the most recent looking at Indonesian art, the Cold War, and labour and industry in Southeast Asia. As part of a linkage grant on the history of Balinese painting, he has created a virtual museum, continuing previous pioneering work in eResearch and teaching. His books include the highly popular Bali: A Paradise Created (new edition 2012), A History of Modern Indonesia (new edition 2013) and Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali, 1800-2010 (2012). He has supervised more than twenty PhD theses to completion, and has taught subjects on Southeast Asian history and culture from first year to Honours and Masters levels. Professor Vickers is frequently asked to comment on Indonesia and Australian-Indonesian relations for national and international media. At present, Professor Vickers is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, where he is researching Southeast Asian historiography with a particular focus on commodity relations.
Armando Salvatore is Senior Research Fellow with the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is a sociologist of religion, culture and communication who has taught at Humboldt University, Berlin and at the Oriental Studies University, Naples – L’Orientale. He earned his PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, in 1994 and his professorial habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin in 2006. He has held research fellowships at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, University of Leiden, the Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Duisburg-Essen, and the Humboldt Center for Social and Political Research, Humboldt University, Berlin. Salvatore’s work emphasizes theory, comparison and connectedness. His current project focuses on the notion of the “civilizing process” in inter-Asian and global perspectives, within the background of debates on axial civilizations and the underlying transformations and interactions of faith traditions. He is completing the book The Sociology of Islam. A Theoretical, Historical and Comparative Introduction, which is intended to be the first volume in a trilogy and will be published by Wiley-Blackwell. He is also editing the Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, a new reference work condensing historical, comparative and sociological perspectives in the study of Islam.
Arun Bala is Senior Research Fellow with the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is by training a physicist and a philosopher who taught history and philosophy of science at the National University of Singapore, and has also taught courses and served as Visiting Professor with the Department of Philosophy as well as Trinity College in the University of Toronto, Canada. In 2012 he was Visiting Professor with Rotman Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of the book The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and editor of Asia, Europe, and the Emergence of Modern Science: Knowledge Crossing Boundaries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is currently engaged in research examining the implications for philosophy of science of global histories of science, especially in relation to the contribution of Arabic, Chinese and Indian astronomical traditions to early modern astronomy.
Joshua Gedacht received his PhD in Southeast Asian History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His research examines the relationship between colonial era war-making, Islamic networks, and the reconfiguration of religious connections in Indonesia and the Philippines. Dr Gedacht’s dissertation, “Islamic-Imperial Encounters: Colonial Enclosure and Muslim Cosmopolitans in Island Southeast Asia, 1800-1940,” considers the ways in which colonial wars of conquest in Sumatra and Mindanao engendered paradoxical dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, disconnection and reconnection, that contributed to the remaking of Southeast Asian Islamic networks. Dr Gedacht has written a book chapter on colonial massacres and Muslims in the Southern Philippines, and will be publishing articles on discourses of perang sabil (holy war), the role of nodal port cities in colonial war-making, and the value of comparison to understanding Islamic-imperial encounters.
List of Speakers and Chairpersons
| NO | NAME | AFFILIATION / ORGANISATION | EMAIL ADDRESS |
| 1. | Abd al-Rahman Ali Bilfaqih | Tarim Centre for Studies and Publishing, Yemen | maaa-belfaqih90@hotmail.com |
| 2. | Abdul Jaleel PMK | Jawaharlal Nehru University, India | jalijnu@gmail.com |
| 3. | Adrian Vickers | National University of Singapore | ariahv@nus.edu.sg |
| 4. | Ali Anis al-Kaf | al-Kaff for Studies and Publishing, Yemen | ali110hh@yahoo.com |
| 5. | Armando Salvatore | National University of Singapore | ariars@nus.edu.sg |
| 6. | Arun Bala | National University of Singapore | ariab@nus.edu.sg |
| 7. | Aryo Danusiri | Harvard University, USA | danusiri@gmail.com |
| 8. | Chorh Chuan Tan | National University of Singapore | |
| 9. | Dadi Darmadi | Harvard University, USA, and Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, Indonesia | dadi.darmadi@uinjkt.ac.id |
| 10. | Engseng Ho | National University of Singapore, and Duke University, USA |
engseng.ho@duke.edu |
| 11. | Hyeju Janice Jeong | Duke University, USA | janice.h.jeong@gmail.com |
| 12. | Ismail Al Zadjali | Diwan of the Royal Court, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman |
ismzadjali@yahoo.com |
| 13. | Ismail Fajrie Alatas | University of Michigan, USA | ifalatas@gmail.com |
| 14. | Joshua Gedacht | National University of Singapore | arijsg@nus.edu.sg |
| 15. | Mohamed Sbitli | King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia |
msbitli@yahoo.fr |
| 16. | Muhammad Alagil | Jarir Investment, and Jarir Group, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia |
|
| 17. | Muhammad Arafat | National University of Singapore | seamam@nus.edu.sg |
| 18. | Muhummad Abu Bakr Ba Dhib |
Furqan Institute for Islamic Heritage, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia | maasbatheeb@gmail.com |
| 19. | Nisha Mathew | University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa | nishamat@gmail.com |
| 20. | Nurfadzilah Yahaya | Washington University in St. Louis, USA | fadzilah.yahaya@gmail.com |
| 21. | Prasenjit Duara | National University of Singapore | aridir@nus.edu.sg |
| 22. | R. Michael Feener | National University of Singapore | arifm@nus.edu.sg |
| 23. | Sumit K. Mandal | Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia | mandal.mail@gmail.com |
| 24. | Wai-Yip Ho | Hong Kong Institute of Education | waiyip.ho@gmail.com |