Mar 4. (4pm)  Ismail Fajrie Alatas (NYU), What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2021). Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, tracing the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia, this Anthropologist’s account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building in Java shows how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. (The Mobility of Religion) Discussants: Dale Eickelman, Anne Blackburn, Simon Coleman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU Department of Religious Studies, and the NYU Center for Religion and Media.

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Ismail Fajrie Alatas is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and an associate editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research explores the intersections of religious authority, social formation, mobility, semiotics and communicative practice with a focus on Islamic Law, Sufism, and the Ḥaḍramī diaspora in Indonesia (that is, those who trace their origins to the Ḥaḍramawt valley of Southern Yemen). He has also published numerous articles, among others, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Islamic Law and Society, Indonesia and the Malay World, Journal of Islamic Studies, and Die Welt des Islams. 

Dale F. Eickelman is Research Professor of Anthropology and Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College. He is also President of Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM); ; and Executive Director, Dartmouth College-American University of Kuwait Program. His recent editorial work includes Higher Education Investment in the Arab States of the Gulf: Strategies for Excellence and Diversity, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2017), and Africa and the Gulf Region: Blurred Boundaries and Shifting Ties, ed. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf and Dale F. Eickelman (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2015)

Anne M. Blackburn is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University, and currently Chair of that department. She MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. She studies Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia at the intersection of literary studies, intellectual history, and political economy, with a particular interest in Buddhist circulations (intellectual, monastic institutional, political, and trade) involving locations now known as Sri Lanka, India, Burma, and Thailand. Her publications include Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton, 2001), Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago, 2010), “Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean” (JESHO, 2015), and “Buddhist Technologies of Statecraft and Millenial Moments,” (History and Theory, 2017). Her current book project is on Buddhist- inflected sovereignties in the Indian Ocean arena (1200-1550).

Simon Coleman is an anthropologist and Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He is a former President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (American Anthropological Association), and current co-editor of both the journal Religion and Society and the book series ‘Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism’. Simon has worked in Sweden, Nigeria and the UK, focusing on questions surrounding ritual, the globalization of religious forms, and the politics of religious infrastructures. His most recent book is Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Motion (New York University Press, 2022).

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