Event

This two-day workshop explores the modern textual, visual, material, and somatic traditions of Muslim communities in the Tamil world, a linguistic sphere of shared social, cultural, and intellectual practices stretching from South India to Southeast Asia and South Africa. With a temporal focus on the modern period, the workshop hopes to appraise and map the archives available for the study of Islam in the Tamil world. The workshop will respond to important intellectual themes such as transnationalism and print culture in the Indian Ocean littoral, "vernacular" and "classical" encounters in poetic and prose forms (Islamic, Arabic, Tamil, religious, secular literatures or any combination thereof), epistemologies of religiosity (ritual life, shrine culture, music, pilgrimage), and Islamic life in colonial modernity (theological reform, histories of colonial labor, diasporic culture). Participants must pre-register for this event.

Day 1: Friday April 18th  

9:30am-10:00am Breakfast  

10:00am-10:30am Welcome and Introductory Remarks by Davesh Soneji (University of Pennsylvania)  

10:30am-12:30 pm SESSION 1  

• Lived Islam: Ritual Life and Shrine Cultures  
  • Chair: Lisa Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania)  
• Saintly Shrines and Ruptures of Temporalities: Sufi Pasts and Futures in Post-War Sri Lanka  
  • Shobhana Xavier, Queen’s University  
• Sufi Journeys in South India: Connected Histories and Routes  
  • Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania  
• Ancestral Artisanship and Devotional Labor in Nagapattinam: A Profile of Kudu-maker V. A. Abdul Khader  
  • Harini Kumar, Yale University  

12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch  

1:30pm-3:00pm SESSION II  

• Being Tamil, Being Muslim: Negotiations and Contestations  
  • Chair: Daud Ali (University of Pennsylvania)  
• Moors and Marakkayars: Muslim Cousins across the Palk Strait  
  • Dennis B. McGilvray, University of Colorado, Boulder  
• The Making of the Dravidian Muslims  
  • Kombai S. Anwar, Independent Researcher  

3:00pm-3:30pm Coffee Break  

3:30pm-5:00pm SESSION III  

• The Nation and Beyond: Regional and Transregional Muslim Belongings  
  • Chair: Davesh Soneji (University of Pennsylvania)  
• Anxieties of Being Indian, Tamil, and Muslim: Politics of Recognition in the Anti-CAA Protests  
  • Ashir Mohamed, University of Chicago  
• On the Shores of Learning: The Emergence of a Muslim Intellectual Network in Sri Lanka  
  • Arun Rasiah, California State University, East Bay 

Day 2: Saturday April 19th  

10:00am-10:30am Breakfast  

10:30am-12:30pm SESSION IV  

• Religious Knowledge, Authority, and Modernity  
  • Chair: Megan Robb (University of Pennsylvania)  
• Processing Mercury in the Tamil Siddha Tradition with Special Reference to the Literature of Siddhar Yākōpu  
  • Ilona Kedzia-Warych, Jagiellonian University  
• Making a Fatwā in Tamil: Sām Ṣihāputtīṉ as a Kind of Muftī in Early Modern Tamil Nadu  
  • Aditya Harchand, University of Chicago  
• If All the Seas Were Ink: Between Textuality and Self-Cultivation in Modern Muslim Print  
  • Shrinidhi Narasimhan, University of Pennsylvania  

12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch  

1:30pm-3:00pm SESSION V  

• Muslim Literatures in Tamil between History and Music  
  • Chair: Joseph Lowry (University of Pennsylvania)  
• “So Very Tightfisted the Moors are with their Books”: Connecting Literature and History in the Study of Islam in the Tamil World  
  • Torsten Tschacher, Heidelberg University  
• Toward a Historical Accoustemology of Islamic Music in Tamil  
  • Davesh Soneji, University of Pennsylvania  

3:00pm-3:30pm FILM SCREENING  

My Only Bride: Tamil Islamic Mysticism Excerpts from a work-in-progress by Kombai Anwar (Coffee and Pastries will be served)  

3:30pm-4:30pm SESSION VI Concluding Discussion