I am trained as both an anthropologist and a historian. Broadly speaking, my primary research interest is in Islam in the Indian Ocean world particularly, the historical and contemporary connections between Southeast Asia and South Arabia. My work examines the intersections of religious authority, social formation, mobility, semiotics and communicative practice with a focus on Islamic Law, Sufism, and the Hadrami diaspora in Indonesia (that is, those who trace their origins to the Hadramawt valley of Southern Yemen). My teaching areas include History and Anthropology of Islam, Islamic Law and Society, Islam and Politics, Sufism, Islam in the Indian Ocean World and in Southeast Asia.
My current book project investigates the relationship between post-Prophetic Islamic religious authority and social formation in historical and contemporary Indonesia and Yemen by observing several Muslim scholars and saints, and their overlapping and often conflicting congregations. It focuses on historical and contemporary Muslim scholars who have succeeded in forming Islamic congregations (jama’as) that revolve around their authority as the articulators of the norms/way (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad. In this work, I explore various works of mediations that have enabled these actors to establish and project vertical connections to the Prophet — either through mastery of textual sources, lineal descent, spiritual genealogy, or spiritual visions and dreams — and assemble their congregations. My interest lies in tracing the various inter-personal and inter-objective associations, movements, linkages, brackets, and frictions that have enabled such social assemblages to take shape, endure, or fade.
Aside from my current project, I am also in the preliminary stage of developing another book-length project which studies the development of Islamic legal consciousness among ordinary traditionalist Muslims in Java. By ordinary traditionalist Muslims, I mean those who are not educated in the Islamic seminaries and are often condescendingly described by scholars and seminary graduates as the “orang awam” (from the Arabic ‘awam, meaning commoners) unlettered in Islamic law. Contrary to this common characterization, I seek to show how ordinary traditionalist Muslims in Central Java, in their attempt to act as ethical subjects in their daily life, actually think using Islamic legal categories, reproduce different legal rulings, and even critically evaluate Muslim scholars on the basis of their own understanding of Islamic law. As such, I want to explore the processes that have shaped and sustained the inculcation of Islamic legal consciousness among ordinary traditionalist Muslims in Java, and what differentiates it from the ways in which scholars and graduates of Islamic seminaries understand and use Islamic law.