Saints, Relics and Fragments: Remembering Malay-Islamic Histories in Ruins

This paper focuses on pilgrimage sites and the relics of Islamic miracle workers (karamat) from the Malay Peninsula. It places a significant emphasis on karamat graves and devotional rituals around karamat bodies and objects, while elaborating on historical traditions that serve to enlighten pilgrims about Islamic pasts, charismatic religious authority, the materiality of miracles, and the cosmopolitan spaces molded by oceanic networks and circulations. Special attention is also devoted to the examination of demolished or disintegrating burial grounds that persist as ‘ruins’ in the cities and islands of the Peninsula. Beginning from these tangible remnants, this paper traces the ongoing production and circulation of Islamic histories. Narratives pertaining to Southeast Asian Islamic materialities often tend to be marginalized in both academic and popular discourse. Nevertheless, the buried continue to resist the marginalization of their sites and material culture.

About the speaker: Teren Sevea is the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya, which won the 2022 Association for Asian Studies' Harry J. Benda Prize. He has also co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia and is currently working on a forthcoming book entitled Singapore Islam: The Prophet's Port and Sufism across the Oceans.

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