ASIAR

The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity
2021-03-01 10:00 - 11:00 (Asia/Hong_Kong) | Via Zoom (Registration required)
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity

ABSTRACT
No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.
Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERDarryl Li is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member of the Law School at the University of Chicago.

ORGANIZERThe event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

Religion as Infrastructure: Congolese Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Networks
2021-01-25 17:00 - 18:00 | Via Zoom (Registration required)
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
Religion as Infrastructure: Congolese Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Networks
ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, African charismatic and (neo)-Pentecostal communities have arisen in many metropolises globally. Questioning a traditional notion of infrastructure that focuses solely on architectures and utilities, Dr. Heck will show in her presentation, how revival churches have become powerful infrastructural actors, of which Congolese migrants, make use on their migratory routes and beyond. Dr. Heck’s presentation is based on findings from a multi-sited ethnography on the role of (neo) Pentecostal churches on the migration routes of Congolese migrants, which she carried out since 2010.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERGerda Heck has a shared position as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology and the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) at The American University in Cairo. Her academic work and research focus on migration and border regimes, urban studies, transnational migration, migrant networks and self-organizing, religion, and new concepts of citizenship. She has conducted research in Germany, Brazil, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Morocco, Turkey and the USA. Apart from her own research projects, she has participated in various international research projects. From 2010 to 2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the international and interdisciplinary research project, Global Prayers – Redemption and Liberation in the City. In 2016, she conducted research in Turkey within the scope of the international research project, Transit Migration 2: A Research Project on the De-and Re-Stabilizations of the European Border Regime. Beyond her research and teaching, she frequently develops media or art projects in which she combines science, art and film. Together with the artist Christian Hanussek, she produced an artistic mapping on African traders in Guangzhou (China), which has among others been shown at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture (UABB) in Shenzhen, China as well as the Chinafrika project in Leipzig.

ORGANIZERThe event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

Supporting the Faith, Building the Empire: Imperial Japan’s Islamic Policies in World War II
2020-12-03 20:00 - 21:00 | Via Zoom (Registration required)
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
Supporting the Faith, Building the Empire: Imperial Japan’s Islamic Policies in World War II

ABSTRACT

This talk will examine some of the ways that the Japanese Empire curried favors to Muslims in China, and later throughout East Asia, in the lead up to and throughout World War II. Drawing on examples from my recent book, China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II, the talk will present viewers with concrete policies and explore some of the ways that the Japanese Government envisioned themselves as the benevolent protectors of Islam while at the same time advancing their imperial, expansionist visions. For their part, Muslims from around the colonial world found the anti-western and anti-Soviet rhetoric expounded by the Japanese Empire appealing to a certain extent. By placing Muslims at the center of Japan’s imperial ambitions, it becomes clear that their visions for empire went far beyond what we would now consider to be the geographic boundaries of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere into predominantly Islamic spaces like Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERDr. Kelly Hammond is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Dr. Hammond received her Ph.D. in East Asian history from Georgetown University in July 2015. Her work specializes in the history of Islam in East Asia, particularly focusing on the political, social, and cultural history of Chinese Muslims from the Qing Dynasty through into the People’s Republic of China. Her current project argues that Chinese Muslims living under occupation who collaborated with the Japanese imperial project were actively involved in creating an on-going dialogue between the Japanese Empire and the Chinese Nationalists about strategies for managing minority populations. While Dr. Hammond’s work focuses on the history of Islam in East Asia, her general research interests include the broader study of imperialism and nationalism in Asia, minority populations in China’s borderlands, World War II in the Pacific, espionage history, as well as the history of the relationship between nomads and settled peoples in East Asian history. Her recent work has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS China Studies postdoctoral fellowship, the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan, the American Philosophical Association, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, where she is currently a fellow-in-residence. Dr. Hammond also serves on the editorial board of Twentieth-Century China.

ORGANIZERThe event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

China’s Islamic Outreach to the Middle East
2020-11-25 13:00 - 14:00 | Via Zoom (Registration required)
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
China’s Islamic Outreach to the Middle East

ABSTRACTThroughout its existence, the People’s Republic of China has depended on Chinese Muslims to foster relationships in the Arab world. But Beijing’s strategies for engaging its Muslim population in foreign outreach have changed dramatically over time. This lecture will focus on the city of Yinchuan, the capital of China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, which was built up during the 2010s to be a locus for engagement with the Middle East. By tracing Yinchuan’s ups and downs over the past decade, this lecture will explain the evolution of China’s diplomacy toward the Middle East and examine the ways in which China continues to rely on Islam, even at a time when religiosity in China is more contentious than ever before.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERDr. Kyle Haddad-Fonda is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Association and a producer for its Great Decisions documentary series on American public television. He is also a frequent commentator on China’s relations with the Middle East and a lecturer in the History Department of the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

ORGANIZERThe event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal: National Imaginaries, Ethnographic Anxieties, and Geopolitical Power
2020-11-05 20:00 - 21:00 | Via Zoom (Registration required)
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal: National Imaginaries, Ethnographic Anxieties, and Geopolitical Power
ABSTRACTThis talk examines China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Nepal to argue that infrastructure is a symbolic project of national development imaginaries, a process and practice of state formation, and a vector for the spatial operations of geopolitical power. Contextualized by a five-year development trajectory and accentuated with agreements from the Second Belt and Road Forum in May 2019, I show how BRI programs in Nepal reflect a new phase of Sino-Nepali geopolitics which I conceptualize as ‘infrastructural relations.’ While these infrastructural relations between Beijing and Kathmandu are routinely framed at geopolitical scales, it is also evident that they operate at personal and bodily levels. That is, attention to BRI activities in Nepal’s borderland regions, where Tibetan religious and linguistic practices proliferate, reveals that ethnographic anxieties also motivate China’s international infrastructure development agenda. Highlighting the cultural dimensions often hidden within broader geopolitical discourse on the BRI in Nepal, I unpack how new configurations of bilateral energy, transport, and security collaboration between Nepal and China also index a new model of development with Chinese characteristics in the trans-Himalaya region.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERGalen Murton is Assistant Professor of Geographic Science at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. Trained in human geography, international relations, and comparative religion, he is broadly interested in the politics of the international development, and especially how power operates spatially through the material and social forms of infrastructure. In 2018 – 19, he was a Marie S. Curie Action Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and completed the project “Road Diplomacy: International Infrastructure and Ethnography of Geopolitics in 21st Century Asia”. He recently published special issues in Political Geography, Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS), and Roadsides and his co-edited volume Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean is forthcoming in 2021 from Amsterdam University Press.

ORGANIZERThe event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

Islamic Belongings to Chinese Society: Taboo, Tolerance and the Ban on Alcohol in a Chinese Hui Muslim Town
2020-09-28 11:00 - 12:00 | Via Zoom (Registration required)
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
Islamic Belongings to Chinese Society: Taboo, Tolerance and the Ban on Alcohol in a Chinese Hui Muslim Town

ABSTRACTThis talk will focus on how Chinese Hui Muslim men and women living in Southwest China think about haram prohibitions in Islam. When confronted with alcohol in the course of daily life with others, they resort to the practice of staying away from haram that seems to depend on the presence of alcohol just as on its prohibited status. This practice results in the formation of ethical distance that links haram with the cultivation of such basic human virtues as tolerance and patience. Thus, not only the acts of these Muslims unsettle the purity/pollution binary prevalent in the anthropological approaches to taboo, but they also demand to reconsider how we think about diversity and coexistence in our increasingly divided world today.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERSociocultural Anthropologist by training, Ruslan is especially interested in the problems of secularism and religion. For his Ph.D. degree which was completed in the Chinese University’s Anthropology Department, Ruslan did two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chinese Hui Muslim minority town in Yunnan province, investigating how local Muslim men and women go about responding to the pressures and predicaments of living Islam in contemporary China. Taking their effort at its focus, his dissertation offers an account of practices of mediation and ideas of collective living that undergird them.

ORGANIZERThe event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

The Religiosity of Millennials and the Islamic Movement of Hijrah in Indonesia
2019-09-27 12:00 - 13:00 | HKU campus
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
The Religiosity of Millennials and the Islamic Movement of Hijrah in Indonesia

Speaker:

Dr. Samsul Maarif (Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS) Graduate School, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia)

Date/Time:

September 27, 2019, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm (HK time)

Language: English

Venue: Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT
The generation of the millennials has been an important subject of public and academic discourses in today’s Indonesia. The millennials have been the main target for involvement in socio-religious and political movements. They were targeted as a critical constituency in political communication and campaigns during the last election of 2019. They have been also the main target and played significant roles in socio-cultural and religious movements. Contents of socio political and religious campaigns have significantly taken account of the interests and aspirations of millennials.
This talk will address the trend among millennials of hijrah – turning away from a life of sin and adopting a life of religious piety, a widespread theme in current Islamic discourse. It will discuss the common framing of hijrah that attracts the millennials to engage in Islamic movements. In addition, it will explore their religiosities and show their own socio-religious subjectivities, beyond the expected outcomes of the setters of the hijrah frames.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERSamsul Maarif is a faculty member of the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Graduate School, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (crcs.ugm.ac.id). He has been working with youths for interreligious dialogues, peacebuilding and community development in the last three years. His main research interests include indigenous religions and everyday religions.

ORGANIZER The event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.

Muslim Traders in Yiwu (Zhejiang): Global Migrant Merchants and Local Markets
2019-09-23 12:00 - 13:00 | HKU campus
BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
Muslim Traders in Yiwu (Zhejiang): Global Migrant Merchants and Local Markets

Speaker:

Professor Fan Lizhu (Professor of Sociology and Director of Globalization and Religious Studies, Fudan University)Professor Chen Na (Research Fellow, Fudan Development Institute, Fudan University)

Date/Time:

September 23, 2019, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm (HK time)

Language: English

Venue: Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT
This research focuses on Yiwu City, located in southeast China. As an unexpected beneficiary of economic globalization, Yiwu has developed into the world’s largest wholesale consumer goods market. In the past two decades, Yiwu has attracted a large number of businessmen and traders from home and abroad, and also other people who are involved in small commodity trading business such as language translators, catering and so on. As an unintended consequence of the influx of a very large number of foreigners, Yiwu has changed from a city of no significant Muslim population to a large scale Muslim presence, with the establishment of Mosques and informal religious sites, and a great variety of halal restaurants.
This research on Muslim migration to Yiwu from China and abroad, will discuss how religion unintentionally developed in the process of a local market linked to the global economic system. Given the great diversity of global Islam, the case of Yiwu shows how Muslims from very different national and ethnic backgrounds are all held together by their belief in the wonders of the market. We will try to understand the “economic rationality” of Muslim traders through analyzing the multifaceted growth of Islam brought by Muslim migrants, and how they reconcile their religious teachings with economic necessity.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Fan Lizhu is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Globalization and Religious Studies at Fudan University. As a pioneer scholar in the sociology of religion in China, she has engaged in historical and ethnographic studies of Chinese folk religious beliefs, sociological theories of religion, and the study of the revival of Confucianism. She has published many academic publications both in Chinese and English. She has taught at many distinguished universities in the US and Europe on Chinese Culture and Society, and Religion in Chinese Society. Now she focuses on Globalization and Religious Transformation, and on the revival of Confucianism in the new era.
Chen Na is a Research Fellow at the Fudan Development Institute, Fudan University. He received his academic degrees from Peking University in China and the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University in the US. His research interests include the sociology of religion, the sociology of development and intercultural communication. He has published dozens of papers and book contributions, both in Chinese and in English. His recent research includes the study of “Confucian Congregations” in Southeast China, the revival of Confucianism and the reconstruction of Chinese identity, and dialogue and understanding between different civilizations and religions in the globalization era.

ORGANIZER The event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.
