R M Feener
Biographic Data
| ID | 44628 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R M Feener |
| GIVEN NAMES | R M |
| FAMILY NAME | Feener |
| SIGNATURE | FEENER R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1222-6766 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Beauty and Majesty
Religious entanglements with the politics of infrastructure in the Maldives
In this article, we explore the material and discursive spaces around the Sinamale' Bridge, which at the time of its construction was the sole infrastructure project financed by foreign investment in the Maldives archipelago-a distinction it held until recently with the start of the new Thilamale' Bridge project funded by India. We look at the ways in which this Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project produces, both socially and sym…
Islamisation and the formation of vernacular Muslim material culture in 15th-century northern Sumatra
10.1080/13639811.2021.1873564
The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam
In an effort to enliven the review section of the AHR, we have been experimenting with new ways of evaluating scholarship of all kinds. In a number of instances, we have asked several scholars to review a single book or film, in order to bring a variety of critical views to bear on issues of historical importance. Our April 2019 issue, for example, presented four distinctive reviews of Michael A. Gomez’s African Dominion; in the April 2020 AHR, f…
Engineering transformations in the 'religion-development nexus
This article presents an exploration of the ways in which law, education, and religious propagation have been deployed as mutually reinforcing means for engineering social transformation in the Indonesian province of Aceh, and how these agendas were dramatically accelerated in the context of humanitarian and development interventions in post-conflict/post-disaster reconstruction. In doing so, it demonstrates and critically analyzes the ways in wh…
The Maldives Heritage Survey
The Maldives Heritage Survey was established to document cultural heritage vulnerable to human and environmental threats in the Maldives. An open-access online database is being produced to inform academic studies, support heritage-management plans and create a permanent archive of digital heritage resources
The ethics of religious giving in Asia
The ethical evaluation of religious giving involves multiple metrics of theological references, everyday ethics, ritual correctness, and materialist self-interest. Understanding how these categories are constantly re-made and experienced in the lives of individuals and the broader history of religious traditions is vital to understandings of the ethics of religious giving. The salience of this 'value pluralism' is particularly amplified in contem…
Abraham’s Luggage
In this pioneering exploration of the material culture of the Indian Ocean world, Elizabeth Lambourn presents us with a unique view through the lens of a rare surviving document: a list of luggage covering both sides of a narrow slip of paper written in Judeo-Arabic that was preserved among the scraps of text from the Cairo Genizah. It is, in fact, the only surviving source documenting the luggage and travel provisions of a medieval merchant invo…
The impact of Ming and Qing dynasty maritime bans on trade ceramics recovered from coastal settlements in northern Sumatra, Indonesia
We review published literature and historical texts to propose that three periods of official Chinese maritime bans impacted the composition and circulation of trade ceramics along Asian trade routes: Ming Ban 1 (1371 – 1509), Ming Ban 2 (1521 – 1529), and Qing Ban (1654 – 1684). We use ceramics collected during a landscape archaeology survey along 40km of coast in Aceh, Indonesia to show how the three ban periods manifest in the ceramic record o…
Translating religion and development
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has …
Imperial Muslims
Scott Reese’s new book presents a complex and compelling story of the creation of a local community in a rapidly expanding hub of global inter-connections, and the lived experience of Muslims there ‘shaped by the pervasive colonial state’ (p. 1). He opens this history with a sketch of Aden as a town built upon symbolically rich foundations of an ‘enchanted’ medieval topography, which subsequently was transformed to become an urban centre of moder…
Monsoon Islam
Sebastian Prange’s new book traces interrelated strands of connection across Muslim communities of the medieval Indian Ocean in developing a model of what he refers to as ‘Monsoon Islam’. He characterizes this dense world of interaction and shared dynamics as comprising a distinct model of Muslim society, in which ‘traditions, ideologies, and customs primarily reflect the values of merchants rather than the interests of a state, political elite, …
Sharīʿa Scripts
In this monumental work, Brinkley Messick presents a richly detailed explication of a ground-breaking approach to the study of the textual traditions of shariʿa, combining nuanced ethnography of locally contextualized practices of writing and reading with a sharp critical engagement with the work of philologists and historians of Islamic law and society. The result is a stimulating and insightful opening of new lines of discussion on the engageme…
Challenging Cosmopolitanism
Featuring new historical and ethnographic research on China and Southeast Asia, this book explores how power and violence have shaped the experiences of Sufis and state-builders, as well as refugees and rebels, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of Islamic cosmopolitanism
Mediating Islam
In this timely new book, Janet Steele examines issues of journalism, ‘challenges to authority’ and Islam through comparative ethnographies and content analyses of five different newspapers and magazines published in the neighbouring countries of Indonesia and Malaysia. Though these two modern nation-states share a common language and cultural heritage, their trajectories of development have unfolded rather differently, due in considerable part to…
Islamisation
This weighty tome marks the first major work attempting the comparative study of historical Islamization processes since Nehemia Levtzion’s landmark volume on Conversion to Islam in 1979. Over the nearly four intervening decades, however, the field has made some significant advances in terms of specialized studies of particular Muslim societies—and Peacock’s new volume includes new essays by some of the leading scholars who have contributed to th…
Religion in the Age of Development
Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which 'religion' and 'development' interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia.…
Configuring Catholicism in the anthropology of Christianity
In order to better understand diverse configurations of Catholicism in relation to the contemporary anthropology of Christianity, we need to develop more dynamic models to interpret the interaction between the material of particular ethnographic accounts and the continual recalibration of broader cultural and theological paradigms involved in their framing and analysis. Building upon the growing body of work that has been produced in both the eth…
Navigating a world of religious NGO s
Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, there has been a prodigious production of typological studies seeking to “map” religious NGOs. In this paper, our intention is not to construct yet another new map of religious NGOs, or even to map these earlier mappings. Rather we would like to open up here some new conversations about the ways in which we might better understand, appreciate, and build upon work that has been done to date on NGOs at th…
Religion and Reconstruction in the Wake of Disaster
Whether they are one-off, or part of cycles, disasters have exerted profound long-term cultural impacts on societies around the world. The verses quoted above, excerpted from a Malay poem written just after the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatau in 1883, comprise part of one cultural artifact produced in response to natural disaster. More specifically, these lines open a window onto the roles that religion, and debates about religious interpretatio…
Religion and the Politics of Development
We live in a world where extreme disparities challenge notions of basic morality and human rights — in Singapore today, the ultra rich can sip on $26,000 cocktails, while globally 18,000 people die every year of hunger and poverty-related causes; 1,020 million people are chronically undernourished; 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water; and 2,500 million lack access to basic sanitation. In his impassioned moral critique, Politics …
Religious Actors in Disaster Relief
The neglected intersection between religion and disaster relief should be given much greater attention. This emerging field is an intellectually compelling area for study, though much work stills needs to be done to explore the processes that take place on the ground in different settings. It is also important for practitioners and policy makers involved in disaster response to have a nuanced understanding of the work that religious actors undert…
Abd al-Samad in Arabia
This paper provides an in-depth exploration of a previously under-utilized Arabic source for the history of Islam in Southeast Asia. This text, Al-Nafas al-Yamani was compiled in the Yemen by 'Abd al-Rahman b. Sulayman al-Ahdal (d. 1250 H./1835 C. E.), and includes a biographical sketch of the Sumatran scholar 'Abd al-Samad b. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jawi al-Palimbani. Through a close, annotated reading of that text this article develops new insights i…
Shiʻism in Southeast Asia
Shi‘ism in Southeast Asia
Shariʿa and Social Engineering
This book presents a richly-textured critical examination of the day-to-day workings of one of the contemporary world's most complex experiments with the state implementation of Islamic law in the context of massive post-disaster/post-conflict projects for social reconstruction. It argues for new attention to be paid to the ways in which contemporary projects for the implementation of Islamic law are future-oriented, and thus argues for revising …
Sufi Scents Across the Indian Ocean
al-Jawi. Partant de son patronyme et de références éparses dans le Mir'at al-jinan de al-Yafi' i, les auteurs suggèrent sa possible relation à un commerce des épices en plein essor dans l'océan Indien, avant d'examiner sa place dans les réseaux sufi yéménites en tant que maître de al-Yafi'i, dont les ouvrages sur les miracles de 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani sont connus pour être d'une importance primordiale dans l'histoire de l'islam en Asie du Sud-Es…
A re-examination of the place of al-Hallaj in the development of Southeast Asian Islam
For decades, the academic study of Islam in Southeast Asia has been dominated by a preoccupation with the role of mysticism in the region. From the earliest descriptions in Raffles' History of Java of 1817 to the anthropological writings of Clifford Geertz (Geertz I960, 1968), the mystical orientation of Southeast Asian Islam has been assumed a priori. Such an orientation has dominated the contents of several Leiden dissertations, and eventually …
Social Engineering through Sharī'a
This study of the contemporary Islamic legal system in Aceh, Indonesia argues for new attention to be paid to the ways in which contemporary Muslim agendas for the implementation of Islamic law can be read as projects for future-oriented social transformation—rather than as a series of reactive measures to perceived 'crises of modernity' and/or the political machinations of rival elites in contesting control of state power. In doing so it highlig…
The impact of Ming and Qing dynasty maritime bans on trade ceramics recovered from coastal settlements in northern Sumatra, Indonesia
We review published literature and historical texts to propose that three periods of official Chinese maritime bans impacted the composition and circulation of trade ceramics along Asian trade routes: Ming Ban 1 (1371 – 1509), Ming Ban 2 (1521 – 1529), and Qing Ban (1654 – 1684). We use ceramics collected during a landscape archaeology survey along 40km of coast in Aceh, Indonesia to show how the three ban periods manifest in the ceramic record o…
Tabut
Tabut is the name given to the commemoration of Muharram as it is observed in Bengkulu, Indonesia. The basic traditions connected with its observance have their origins in Muslim India. However the Tabut has, over the course of its development in Bengkulu, absorbed and incorporated various local elements. Recently the "Tabut Festival" has come to be seen as a symbol of 'local Bengkulu culture', this reinterpretation facilitating the easy absorpti…
Translating religion and development
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has …
Religion in the Age of Development
Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which 'religion' and 'development' interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia.…
Cross-Cultural Contexts of Modern Muslim Intellectualism
Attempts at understanding the development of Islam in the modern period through its intellectual history demand new analytical frameworks to be brought to bear on both Muslim religious thought and the academic study of religion. There is a need for innovative approaches to modern Muslim intellectualism that can build upon the traditional strengths of Islamic Studies while also taking into account contemporary realities which add new dimensions of…
Indonesian Movements for the Creation of a 'National Madhhab
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Indonesian Muslim scholars participated in a movement for the creation of a new "national madhhab." These unprecedented developments took place within contexts of modernity in which the epistemological structures of traditional Islamic jurisprudence, as known and practiced in Indonesia, were faced with challenges by both "Western" and Islamic reformist thought. This essay presents an overview of…
The ethics of religious giving in Asia
The ethical evaluation of religious giving involves multiple metrics of theological references, everyday ethics, ritual correctness, and materialist self-interest. Understanding how these categories are constantly re-made and experienced in the lives of individuals and the broader history of religious traditions is vital to understandings of the ethics of religious giving. The salience of this 'value pluralism' is particularly amplified in contem…
Muslim Religious Authority in Modern Asia
The social, economic, and political transformations of the past two centuries have been rapid and dramatic, resulting in complex reconfigurations of religious authority in many Muslim societies. These changes have involved not only the emergence of distinctly new profiles of leadership, but also the persistence and adaptation of the models established by the ulama of the classical period. The challenges of modernizing reform at the turn of the tw…
The Maldives Heritage Survey
The Maldives Heritage Survey was established to document cultural heritage vulnerable to human and environmental threats in the Maldives. An open-access online database is being produced to inform academic studies, support heritage-management plans and create a permanent archive of digital heritage resources
Navigating a world of religious NGO s
Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, there has been a prodigious production of typological studies seeking to “map” religious NGOs. In this paper, our intention is not to construct yet another new map of religious NGOs, or even to map these earlier mappings. Rather we would like to open up here some new conversations about the ways in which we might better understand, appreciate, and build upon work that has been done to date on NGOs at th…
Religion and Reconstruction in the Wake of Disaster
Whether they are one-off, or part of cycles, disasters have exerted profound long-term cultural impacts on societies around the world. The verses quoted above, excerpted from a Malay poem written just after the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatau in 1883, comprise part of one cultural artifact produced in response to natural disaster. More specifically, these lines open a window onto the roles that religion, and debates about religious interpretatio…
Hand, heart and handphone
Hybridity and the "Hadhrami Diaspora" in the Indian Ocean Muslim Networks
Notes Towards the History of Qur'anic Exegesis in Southeast Asia
Aktivitas penulisan tafsir di Dunia Melayu atau Asia Tenggara telah dimulai sejak beberapa abad lalu. Meskipun masih dalam bentuk elementer, sejak abad 17 wilayah ini telah memproduksi tafsir. Sebuah manuskrip melayu asal Aceh yang tersimpan di Universitas Cambridge menunjukkan bahwa teknik penulisan dan metode penafsiran yang diterapkan saat itu masih tergolong sederhana. Manuskrip ini yang merupakan tafsir surat al-Kahfi ditulis dengan tinta me…
Tabut
Tabut is the name given to the commemoration of Muharram as it is observed in Bengkulu, Indonesia. The basic traditions connected with its observance have their origins in Muslim India. However the Tabut has, over the course of its development in Bengkulu, absorbed and incorporated various local elements. Recently the "Tabut Festival" has come to be seen as a symbol of 'local Bengkulu culture', this reinterpretation facilitating the easy absorpti…
A re-examination of the place of al-Hallaj in the development of Southeast Asian Islam
For decades, the academic study of Islam in Southeast Asia has been dominated by a preoccupation with the role of mysticism in the region. From the earliest descriptions in Raffles' History of Java of 1817 to the anthropological writings of Clifford Geertz (Geertz I960, 1968), the mystical orientation of Southeast Asian Islam has been assumed a priori. Such an orientation has dominated the contents of several Leiden dissertations, and eventually …
New networks and new knowledge
Albert Hourani called the 'long' nineteenth century (c. 1798–1939) 'the Liberal Age' in Arabic thought, a period of 'modernity' among the intellectual elite of the Middle East first evidenced in the work of thinkers exposed to European thought such as Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73). In such a view the nineteenth century and what is considered to be the 'modern' period of Middle Eastern history more generally is seen as starting with Napoleon's invas…
The New Cambridge History of Islam
This volume traces the second great expansion of the Islamic world eastwards from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. As the faith crossed cultural boundaries, the trader and the mystic became as important as the soldier and the administrator. Distinctive Islamic idioms began to emerge from other great linguistic traditions apart from Arabic, especially in Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Swahili, Malay and Chinese. The Islamic world transformed and a…
Indonesian Movements for the Creation of a 'National Madhhab
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Indonesian Muslim scholars participated in a movement for the creation of a new "national madhhab." These unprecedented developments took place within contexts of modernity in which the epistemological structures of traditional Islamic jurisprudence, as known and practiced in Indonesia, were faced with challenges by both "Western" and Islamic reformist thought. This essay presents an overview of…
Hybridity and the "Hadhrami Diaspora" in the Indian Ocean Muslim Networks
Sufi Scents Across the Indian Ocean
al-Jawi. Partant de son patronyme et de références éparses dans le Mir'at al-jinan de al-Yafi' i, les auteurs suggèrent sa possible relation à un commerce des épices en plein essor dans l'océan Indien, avant d'examiner sa place dans les réseaux sufi yéménites en tant que maître de al-Yafi'i, dont les ouvrages sur les miracles de 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani sont connus pour être d'une importance primordiale dans l'histoire de l'islam en Asie du Sud-Es…
Cross-Cultural Contexts of Modern Muslim Intellectualism
Attempts at understanding the development of Islam in the modern period through its intellectual history demand new analytical frameworks to be brought to bear on both Muslim religious thought and the academic study of religion. There is a need for innovative approaches to modern Muslim intellectualism that can build upon the traditional strengths of Islamic Studies while also taking into account contemporary realities which add new dimensions of…
Asian Islam in the 21st Century * Edited by John L. Esposito, John O. Voll and Osman Bakar
From the Ground Up
The tsunami that struck a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004 evoked international sympathy on a scale beyond any previous natural disaster. The international relief effort broke all records both in scale and diversity, with seven billion U.S. dollars donated from all over the world through public and private agencies for Sumatra alone. Simply as a reconstruction effort, therefore, the disbursement of those funds and the r…
Social Engineering through Sharī'a
This study of the contemporary Islamic legal system in Aceh, Indonesia argues for new attention to be paid to the ways in which contemporary Muslim agendas for the implementation of Islamic law can be read as projects for future-oriented social transformation—rather than as a series of reactive measures to perceived 'crises of modernity' and/or the political machinations of rival elites in contesting control of state power. In doing so it highlig…
Shariʿa and Social Engineering
This final chapter builds on the empirical data presented in the chapters that precede it to develop a more sustained discussion of the idea of Shariʿa as a tool of social engineering in contemporary Aceh. In doing so it traces the various lines of influence that have shaped this forward-oriented, instrumentalist vision of Islamic law in society — including strains of twentieth-century American sociological jurisprudence, daʿwa-inspired Islamic a…
Islam in Visions of Aceh’s Past (and Future)
This chapter presents a critical overview of the ways in which ideas of Islam as a definitive element of Acehnese identity have taken shape in the region’s history. This material serves to contextualize the ways in which both the Indonesian central government and local Islamic leaders appeal to Islam in policy discussions and public debates over the implementation of Islamic law in contemporary Aceh. Particular attention is paid to the emergence …
Sanctions and Socialization
This chapter treats the mechanisms for the monitoring and enforcement of Shariʿa norms in contemporary Aceh with a focus on the institution known locally as the ‘Shariʿa Police’ (Wilayatul Hisbah/WH). This examination of the work and the experience of WH officers calls particular attention to the fundamental importance of conceptions of public pedagogy at work in this new institution for the enforcement of Islamic law, and its intended contributi…
The Legislation of Islam
This chapter discusses the development of Islamic legislation in Aceh over the past half-century, as well as the form and content of the laws currently in force. Tracing the successive development of earlier attempts at legislating aspects of Islamic law in Aceh, it demonstrates the extent to which the particular concerns and goals of the current Shariʿa system are not unprecedented impositions by the Indonesian central government, but actually r…
State-directed Daʿwa and the Shariʿa Bureaucracy
This chapter discusses the establishment of a new governmental body created at the turn of the twenty-first century and tasked with the job of coordinating the work of the other state institutions involved with the implementation of Islamic law in Aceh. After an overview of the structure and operations of the State Shariʿa Agency (Dinas Syariat Islam/DSI), it presents a critical examination of the underlying vision of Islamic law that animates th…
The Jurisdiction and Jurisprudence of Shariʿa Courts
This chapter traces the developments of Islamic religious courts in Aceh. In addition to a discussion of the jurisprudence of the courts in their actual handling of both family law and penal cases, particular attention is paid to the ways in which Aceh’s Islamic courts are integrated within Indonesia’s national legal system. As a concrete example of both of these aspects of the structure and functioning of Aceh’s religious courts, the chapter inc…
Reconfigurations of Religious Education and Authority
This chapter examines the ways in which understandings of Islam central to the development of Aceh’s contemporary Shariʿa system were developed and transmitted through Islamic educational institutions in Aceh. After tracing the outlines of major developments in both Traditionalist and Modernist-style schools in twentieth-century Aceh, it focuses on the pivotal role of the Banda Aceh campus of the State Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN) in the …
Institutionalizing the Ulama
This chapter discusses the processes by which Aceh’s ulama have been organized by the Indonesian state both as a means of social control in a politically troubled region, and as an instrument for the promotion of particular governmental policies of ‘development’. It also addresses the extent to which the ulama have attempted to use this institutional foundation and its resources to advance their own agendas for social change. These discussions be…
Hand, heart and handphone
Shariʿa and Social Engineering
This book presents a richly-textured critical examination of the day-to-day workings of one of the contemporary world's most complex experiments with the state implementation of Islamic law in the context of massive post-disaster/post-conflict projects for social reconstruction. It argues for new attention to be paid to the ways in which contemporary projects for the implementation of Islamic law are future-oriented, and thus argues for revising …
Muslim Religious Authority in Modern Asia
The social, economic, and political transformations of the past two centuries have been rapid and dramatic, resulting in complex reconfigurations of religious authority in many Muslim societies. These changes have involved not only the emergence of distinctly new profiles of leadership, but also the persistence and adaptation of the models established by the ulama of the classical period. The challenges of modernizing reform at the turn of the tw…
A Wall in the Woods
This short note presents a preliminary report on a recently discovered site in North Aceh. It presents some initial information and illustrations of an usual stone formation, and communicates some potential readings of it drawing on perspectives from geography, vulcanology, and the broader archaeological and historical contexts of northern Sumatra
Religion and the Politics of Development
We live in a world where extreme disparities challenge notions of basic morality and human rights — in Singapore today, the ultra rich can sip on $26,000 cocktails, while globally 18,000 people die every year of hunger and poverty-related causes; 1,020 million people are chronically undernourished; 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water; and 2,500 million lack access to basic sanitation. In his impassioned moral critique, Politics …
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Islam (27 works) · Asian Studies and History (26 works) · Law (24 works) · History (22 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · History (15 works) · Politics (14 works)