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Workshop Directors

Christophe Jaffrelot
Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po
jaffrelot@ceri-sciences-po.org

Mirjam Künkler
Princeton University
kuenkler@princeton.edu

Workshop Participants

Anya Bernstein, (in absentia) Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, and as of fall 2012, Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Social Studies, Harvard University
“Gendered Cosmopolitanisms: Networks Of Buddhist Learning In Postsocialist Eurasia”

Thomas Borchert, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, University of Vermont
“Transnational Monastic Education and Buddhist Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Asia”

Elvire Corboz, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
“Localising Transnational Connections of Learning: Abu al-Qasim Khu’i’s Knowledge Promotion across the Shi’i World”

Faried Fachruddin Saenong, Ph.D. Student Anthropology, Australian National University
“UPHOLDING SANAD: Indonesian Islam and Egyptian al-Azhar”

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, Ph.D. Candidate, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
“This is not Khāliṣtān: The legacy of Muḥammad al-Khāliṣī’s scientific reading of Shīism in South Asia”

Radhika Gupta, D.Phil, University of Oxford, Institute for Social & Cultural Anthropology
“Experiments with Khomeini’s revolution in Kargil: Contemporary Shi’a networks between India and West Asia”

Wai-Yip Ho, Department of Social Sciences, Hong Kong Institute of Education
“The Rise of Inter-Asian Madrasah Networks: From British Raj to China’s Hong Kong”

Nur Amali Ibrahim, Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
“The Indonesian Trinity: Islam, Youths, and the Nation-State”

Eva F. Nisa, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, The Australian National University
“Insights into the Lives of Indonesian Female Tablighi Jamā’at in Traditional Muslim Boarding School”

Call for Workshop Papers

Networks of religious learning make up an important part of inter-Asian connections. They account for significant flows of educational migration, and play a considerable role in defining and re-defining the relations between countries and their people.

In this workshop, we trace the connections of religious learning across Asia, including West Asia and the Gulf. While well-developed bodies of literatures exist on institutions of religious learning within certain countries, very few studies thus far take account of the role religious education plays in structuring transnational connections between and within Asia. In addition, most extant studies on international education, in particular at the university level, focus on “secular” education, whereas little is known about educational migration between institutions of religious learning. Finally, the fact that networks of religious learning often feature prominently in countries’ cultural foreign policy is yet to be reflected in scholarship – we know very little about the organization and finances states provide to attract foreign students to their institutions of religious learning, and conversely, to facilitate or limit the emigration of students to institutions of religious learning outside their purview.

We invite papers that focus on the transnational travel of people and religious ideas both with a contemporary or historical focus. Principally, proposals on any topic relating to the themes outlined above are welcome. Specific paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

  • women in transnational religious education
  • the diffusion of the Jami’at al-Tabligh and its recruitment methods across Asia
  • transnational Shi‘a networks of religious learning
  • Aligarh Muslim University and Al-Azhar, two transnational learning centers?
  • the role of the Pakistani madrassas in the making of the Taliban movement
  • the revival of Najaf and Karbala as international centers of religious learning
  • the Sangh Parivar’s attempts at re-Hinduising the children of the Indian diaspora in South East Asia
  • Buddhist educational networks across Asia – the case of Dalit converts studying in South East and East Asia
  • Qum: reaching out to Central Asia?
  • the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism in India
  • the seminar of Deoband, a pan-Islamic seminar?
  • comparisons between different state approaches to facilitating or constraining transnational religious education.

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