This publication resulted from the workshop “Networks of Religious Learning and the Dissemination of Religious Knowledge across Asia,” which convened at Inter-Asian Connections III: Hong Kong in 2012. 

Students of transnational flows, while pertinently highlighting the growing assertion of ‘sovereign free actors’ at the expense of ‘sovereign bound actors’ in what they call postinternational politics, have almost completely ignored the transnationalization of religions, except from the point of view of fundamentalisms and related terrorist networks. Sociologists have paid more attention to this development. But these studies, which have mostly focused on the impact of migrations, have tended to under estimate the resilience of state boundaries and have often neglected the circulation of ideas, especially from the point of view of the learning networks—the very object of this Special Issue which concentrates on one particular creed: Islam.