Michael Feener

Biography

The main focus of my work is in Islamic Studies, with a particular emphasis on the history of Muslim societies of Southeast Asia. Within that geographic area, my first two monographs dealt with the history of legal thought (Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia – Cambridge University Press, 2007), and the state implementation of Islamic law (Sharia and Social Engineering – Oxford University Press, 2013) in Indonesia. My research interests, however, extend beyond that country’s borders across the broader maritime world of Islam around the Indian Ocean littoral. In addition to the sub-fields of law and intellectual history I’ve worked in a number of other areas of Islamic history, producing articles and edited volumes on topics including Muslim networks, Qur’anic studies, Sufism, Shi’sim, trans-regional histories, and local histories (especially of Aceh).

From my background in Islamic Studies I have also expanded my research and publications over the years to include work on modern and contemporary dynamics of religion and development across diverse religious traditions as well as the role of religion in the complex social transformations accompanying projects of post-disaster and post-conflict reconstruction. My work in Aceh since the 2004 tsunami has led me to explore another new field of study as well – that of disasters, humanitarian and development responses, and their social consequences. My most recent book in this field is Rebuilding Asia Following Natural Disasters (with Patrick Daly – Cambridge University Press 2016). In this I have a particular interest in the ways in which conceptions of religion and the structures of religious institutions both inform and respond to the dramatic social transformations characteristic of such contexts.

My work on Islamic history in the medieval and early modern periods focuses on the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of Islam; with a primary focus on the maritime Muslim world stretching from the Red Sea across the Indian Ocean and through the Indonesian Archipelago to the South China Sea. My current book project explores the complex processes through which Islam took root in diverse societies across Southeast Asia, and how in turn this region came to form an integral part of an expanding Muslim world. It tells stories of the movement of diverse peoples, carrying their goods, cultures, and beliefs on shipboard, thereby shaping dynamics of Islamization and vernacularization that have come to define much of the Muslim world as we know it today. The narrative weaves together strands of diverse and sometimes distant origins, involving complex interactions with societies of the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Europe. These long term and shifting engagements with developments well beyond the region were important factors informing the specific ways in which Islam arrived and took root in Southeast Asia – where local communities then actively adopted and adapted select aspects of various traditions in forming their own understandings and experiences of Islam. This work draws on a wide range of sources from art history and Arabic epigraphy to vernacular-language manuscripts and European colonial archives. I am currently also collaborating with a team of seismologists, geologists, and archaeologists on a project tracing the long-term impact of natural disaster and climate change on early Muslim settlement patterns in the region that will contribute a further important environmental perspective to our understandings of this complex history. These diverse materials are brought together to trace narratives of Islamization and vernacularization from the earliest Muslim traders active in the region to the establishment of coastal sultanates, the conversion of local populations of the interior, the development of Islamicate vernacular literary and cultural traditions, the expansion of ulama networks, the formation of state and social institutions, and evolving forms of aesthetic and performative expression.

Before coming to Oxford I was Research Leader of the Religion and Globalisation Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. I have also taught at Reed College and the University of California, Riverside, and held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Harvard, Kyoto University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Copenhagen, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Honolulu), and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands.