Muslim Asia: Cultures, Contexts, and Connections

One in every five persons in the world is Muslim.  Most of them live, not, as is generally thought, in the Middle East, but in Asia, especially in South, Southeast, and East Asia.  Since September 11, the urgency for understanding contemporary Muslim thinking, especially in Asia, has now reached critical mass.  Current world events demonstrate the side global appeal of Islam, even as misperceptions and misrepresentations about Muslims continue to dominate Western discourse.  Understanding the appeal of Muslim groups such as the Taliban in South Asia might reveal much about the broader Muslim Word today.

PDF Flyer of Events

Lecture by Dru Gladney:
“Islam in China and Beyond: Connecting Asia with the U.S. and the Middle East”

Wednesday, September 19
Muslims in China pray facing Mecca, but they bow toward the West, not East. This lecture will illustrate the important role China's Muslims play as mediators between East and West, Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures, global and local Islam. The rising importance of Islam in Asia and China's growing influence in the region suggest greater attention must be paid to this important population of China.

Lecture by Shamsul A.B.:
“The Islam Embedded Thesis: Religion and Plurality in Southeast Asia and the Occident”

Wednesday, October 17
Professor Shamsul A.B. director of the Institute of Occidental Studies (IKON) Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, will present a brief introductory survey of some fundamental aspects of Islam in southeast Asia, particularly within the maritime Malay-Muslim World. This presentation intents to offer an analytical tool or a way of viewing and understanding the heterogeneous nature of the cultural practice of Islam by Muslims in Asia and elsewhere. View video of Professor Shamsul's lecture...

Lecture by Hussain Haqqani, guest speaker of Pomona College's Annual R. Stanton Avery Lecture
“Muslim Politics in South Asia: Challenges, Threats, and Changes”

Thursday, November 15, 2007, Oldenborg Center
South Asia --stretching from Afghanistan to Bangladesh--is home to the world's largest concentration of Muslims in any single region. The presence of Al-Qaeda and Taliban, the possession of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and India, their conflict over Kashmir and the rising tide of Islamist sentiment in Bangladesh contribute to South Asia's volatility. Husain Haqqari is Director of the Center for International Relations and Professor of Boston University. He is a leading journalist, diplomat, and former advisor to Pakistani prime ministers.  View Hussain Haqqani's Lecture and the Question and Answer session.

Friday, November 16, 2007, Oldenborg Center
A follow-up lunch and conversation with Professor Hussan Haqqani.  All students are welcome 12 noon -1:00 p.m.  Student use meal cards, others sign in at door. 

Past Events - Spring 2007

PBI ASIAN DIASPORA LECTURE SERIES
Asian Diasporas: Neither East Nor West
Through a lecture series, film festival, student video training and research program, and other coordinated activities, PBI will examine the connections between and across the Pacific basin region, emphasizing the movements of peoples, ideas, and commodities that link and sometimes divide the multi-dimensional cultures of the region.

This lecture series is made possible in part with assistance from the Bernard Chan Asian Visiting Scholars fund.

Guang Pan, Topic: “Jews in China: Legends, History, and Perspectives”
Wednesday, January 31 at 4:15 – 5:30 p.m. (followed by reception)
Hahn 101 (420 Harvard Ave., Claremont)
Director, Shanghai Institute of European and Asian Studies, the Center for International Studies; Director, Shanghai Cooperation Organization Studies Center; Affiliated Professor, Fudan University. Specialist on Jews in China, Northeast Asia Energy Security, Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Dr. Pan is Walter & Seena Fair Professor of Jewish Studies, Dean of Center of Jewish Studies Shanghai (CJSS) and Director of the Institute of European and Asian Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Professor Pan will elaborate on the origins of the Jews of China, the assimilation of Jews in China, Jews in modern China, sanctuary for Jews in Shanghai, Chinese views on anti-Semitism as well as the subject “Jews from China” vs. Jewish communities in today’s China.

Prasenjit Duara, Topic: “China and India since Decolonization”
Thursday, February 15 at 4:15 – 5:30 p.m. (followed by reception)
Hahn 101
Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Prasenjit Duara is author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995), and Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003).

This talk will consider Sino-Indian contacts and contours of power in the post-colonial period, examining national narratives of identity and politics.

View the Presentation (flash required)

Louise Levathes, Topic: “China’s Maritime Tradition: Origins through the Voyages of Zheng He and the Ming Treasure Fleet”
Wednesday, February 28 at 4:15:30 p.m. (followed by reception)
Hahn 101
Some 80 years before the voyages of Columbus, the celebrated Ming Dynasty Admiral commanded the largest fleet the world would know until World War I and extended China's trade and influence throughout the Indian Ocean Basin.

Levathes, a journalist and author of When China Ruled the Seas (Simon & Schuster, 1994), a best-selling New York Times Notable Book of the Year, will explore the origin and legacy of the seven epic Ming voyages and describe China's early relations with the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Mark Juergensmeyer, Topic: “Religious Violence in the Pacific Basin: The Global Connections”
Thursday, March 8 at 4:15 – 5:30 p.m. (followed by reception)
Hahn 101
Director, Global Studies Program, UC Santa Barbara, Member of United Nations Committee on International Terrorism, author of six books, including: Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (2003); The Next Cold War: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (1993). This lecture will examine the role of terrorism and religious violence among the Asian diaspora. Dr. Juergensmeyer asks why violence in this region takes place in the name of religion. How can it be understood, confronted, and perhaps avoided?

View the Presentation

Karen Yamashita, Topic: “Circle K Cycles: Samba and Matsuri”
Wednesday, April 25 at 4:15 – 5:30 p.m. (followed by reception)
Hahn 101
Author of widely acclaimed novels, including: Tropic of Orange (1997), Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), Professor Yamashita will examine the lives of Japanese Brazilians who return to Japan to work in burgeoning industries, experiencing displacement and dissonance in the East Asia diaspora.

Organized by PBI; co-sponsored with the Asian Studies Program.
Contact: 909/607-8065.

PBI’S OTHER EVENTS & SUPPORTED LECTURES

January 26, 2007
Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation
Friday, January 26 at 12:00 noon – 1:00 p.m. (students use meal cards; others sign in at door)
- A luncheon presentation by Veronica Chambers, Oldenborg Center (350 N. College Way)
Japanese women today are leading a sociocultural movement that is shaking Japan’s gender stereotypes to the core. If a geisha’s white features were once a familiar archetype, the women of today’s Japan wear many faces: girlish and sexy, traditional and trendy, sophisticated and punk. In Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation (Free Press, 2007), acclaimed journalist and author Veronica Chambers takes us inside the world of the boundary-busting new Japanese women – the kickboxing geishas – who are freely mixing East and West, burying stereotypes, and defining an electrifying new zeitgeist.

Chambers was an editor for the New York Times Magazine and a culture writer for Newsweek. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Glamour.

Organized by PBI; co-sponsored with the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages & International Relations. Contact: 909/607-8065 or 909/607-1159.

Distinguished Lecture Series in Anthropology: Beyond Machu Picchu: Life in Andean Communities
All lectures will be held on Mondays at 4:00 p.m. in Hahn 101 (420 Harvard Ave., Claremont)
Contact: 909/607-3027.

Co-sponsored by: The Department of Anthropology, The Latin American Studies Program, The Pacific Basin Institute, and The Public Events Committee of Pomona College.

February 5, 2007
"Nature, Spirit, Society: The Social Embeddedness of Power in the Native Andean State"
Alan Kolata, Neukom Family Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of
Social Sciences, University of Chicago

March 1, 2007
“Paintings on the Wheel of Rebirth in Buddhist Temples Along the Silk Road”
Stephen F. Teiser
Princeton University
Thursday, March 1 at 4:15 p.m., Pearsons 101
Reception after lecture
Karma and rebirth are now popular concepts in the West. But did you know that traditions of visually imagining karma and rebirth have a long history in Asia and have always been integral components of Buddhist societies, cultures, and practice in Asia? Stephen Teiser treats written and painted renditions of the wheel of rebirth in order to show how they have animated local architectural sites and religious rituals, informed concepts of time and reincarnation, and acted as an organizing principle in the cosmology and daily life of practicing Buddhists across Asia from India to Tibet, Central Asia, and China.

Stephen F. Tesier, but he is the D. T. Suzuki Profess of Buddhist Studies in the Dept. of Religion, Princeton University. he has two award-winning books (The Ghost Festival in medieval China by Princeton University Press, 1988; The Scripture on the Ten Kings and Purgatory in Medieval China, University of Hawaii press, 1994). His third book, Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of the Wheel in Medieval Buddhist Temples (University of Washington, 2007) just came out.

Co-sponsored by Asian Studies and Pacific Basin Institute

March 5, 2007
"Andean Memories: Culture, War, and the Politics of Truth in Peru"
Orin Starn, Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Anthropology, Duke University

March 19, 2007
"Rocks, Saints and the Holy Spirit: 500 Years of Religious Transformation in the Andes"
Catherine Allen, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, The George Washington University

March 22, 2007
Guest speaker: Joshua D. Pilzer
Tentative Title: “Singing in the Lives of Korean Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery”
Time and place: Thursday, March 22, 2007, 11 am, Boone Recital Hall, Scripps College Performing Arts Center
Joshua Pilzer (UCSB; Ph. D., University of Chicago) will speak about his research among the surviving "Comfort Women" in South Korea and address how these women make music in acts of remembering, expressing, and recovering from their traumatic experiences.

Organized by Scripps College; co-sponsored with PBI
Contact: YouYoung Kang (ykang@scrippscollege.edu OR 7-8760)

March 26, 2007
"In Thin Air, On Thin Ice: Biocultural Perspectives on Life in the High Andes"
R. Brooke Thomas, Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, University of Massachusetts

April 2, 2007
Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills:
State and Non-State Spaces in Southeast Asian History
A lecture by James C. Scott
Monday, April 2, 2007 at 4:15 p.m., Rose Hills Theater
This talk will survey a history of conflict since the 13th century between mountain-dwelling nomads and settled rice-growing lowland people in Southeast Asia. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science with a joint appointment in anthropology, and is the author of several seminal works in the social sciences including: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed; Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcripts; and The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His lecture addresses his current research in Burma.

April 4, 2007
The Myth of the Opium Plague in China
Lecture by Frank Dikötter
Wednesday, April 4 at 4:15 – 5:30 p.m., Hahn 101

Frank Dikötter is Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of a series of micro-studies which trace the contingent ways in which ideas, objects and institutions acquire global dimensions and were selectively appropriated in the specific case of modern China.

China was turned into a nation of opium addicts by the pernicious forces of imperialist trade: this talk questions this image, showing that opium had few harmful effects on either health or longevity, that most smokers used it in moderate quantities without any fatal 'loss of control', and that the substance was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints on excessive use. Opium was also a medical panacea before the availability of modern medications such as aspirin and penicillin: it allowed ordinary people to relieve the symptoms of dysentery, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis and to cope with pain, fatigue, hunger and cold. If opium was medicine as much as recreation, the talk also shows that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a cure which was far worse than the disease. Prohibition spawned social exclusion and human misery, engendering, however inadvertently, the very problems it was designed to contain.

April 16, 2007
"Turning Lemons into Lemonade? The Cultural and Political Economy of Andean Market Women"
Linda Seligmann, Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in Anthropology, George Mason University

April 23, 2007
"From Peonage to Power: A Peruvian Venture in Development, 1952-2007"
Paul Doughty, Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, Emeritus, University of Florida

PBI ANNUAL FILM FESTIVAL
Asian Diasporas in Cinema: Migration, Globalization, and Diffusion

Thursdays at 7:00 p.m. in Hahn 101 (420 Harvard Ave., Claremont)

March 22
Eve and the Fire Horse (Canada; Drama; English; Dir. Julia Kwan; 92 min; 2005)

March 29
The Fall of Fujimori (USA; Documentary; English/Spanish/Japanese; Dir. Ellen Perry; 83 min; 2005)

April 5
Still Life (Sanxia Haoren; China; Drama; Mandarin w/English subtitles; Dir. Jia Zhangke; 108 min; 2006)

April 12
The Clay Bird (Matir Moina; France/Bangladesh; Drama; Bengali w/English subtitles; Dir. Tareque Masud; 98 min; 2002)