Event

This presentation focuses on demolished or
disintegrating burial grounds, graves and relics of Islamic
miracle workers (keramat) that persist in the cities and
islands of the Malay Peninsula. At these 'ruins'

, caretakers,
biographers and storytellers enlighten pilgrims about
Islamic pasts, the charismatic religious authority of
keramat, the materiality of their miracles, and the
cosmopolitan spaces molded by oceanic circulations.
These caretakers, storytellers and other devotees do so
while mediating bureaucratic interventions and state
suppression of ‘illegal’ activities and evictions from burial
grounds and shrines. Moreover, they persist in 'ruins'
,
collecting miracle stories, chronicles, poems, fatwas, as
well as notices and summons from land authorities,
demonstrating how ruins and ruination can be an
extremely prolific. Overall, this is a story of miraculous
narratives, devotional cultures, social memories, and
sacral centers of the Islamic world that are often pushed
to the peripheries of academic studies and official
histories but refuse to be marginalized and forgotten.