SHARIA IN MOTION

ISLAM, LAW, AND MOBILITY IN ASIA

Yale University, 9-10 April 2016

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on Islam in Asia. It seeks to foster a dialogue between research on Islamic legal cultures in Asia and scholarship exploring themes of mobility, including travel, networks, and translation. The workshop builds on growing interest in studying how Islamic law travels across different jurisdictional, linguistic, and cultural spaces. Scholars working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have traced how new forms of global connection, including European imperialism and new modes of travel and communication, transformed Islamic legal cultures. These processes of circulation engendered certain forms of homogenization, as some legal forms gained global influence. Circulation though also nurtured new forms of heterogeneity by accelerating exchanges between competing interpretations of Islamic law and different loci of religious and political authority. Today these processes continue, as new circuits of global mobility, from internet fatwas to electoral politics, spur transformations of Islamic legal cultures. Papers will engage with different Asian geographies, from the Middle East, to Central, South, and Southeast Asia, and explore InterAsia connections that reach beyond areas-studies boundaries. The workshop is sponsored by the InterAsia Initiative and MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

For further information, please contact julia.stephens@yale.edu.