Please note that this event has been cancelled and is to be rescheduled in 2022.

A talk by Teren Sevea (Harvard Divinity School) on his new book, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya

Discussant:  Verena Hanna Meyer, Early Career Fellow, Department of Religion

Co-sponsored by: the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies; the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life; and the Middle East Institute

Abstract: In this new study, Teren Sevea reveals the economic, environmental, and religious significance of Islamic miracle workers in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Malay world. Through close textual analysis of hitherto overlooked manuscripts and personal interaction with contemporary miracle workers, he introduces readers to a universe of miracle workers that existed both in the past and in the present, uncovering connections between miracles and material life. Teren Sevea demonstrates how societies in which the production and extraction of natural resources, as well as the uses of technology, were intertwined with the knowledge of charismatic religious figures and Sufi masters.  He locates the role of the miracle workers in the spiritual economy of the Indian Ocean world, across maritime connections and Sufi networks, and on the frontier of the British Empire.

Teren Sevea is the  Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the Harvard Divinity School.  He is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, and received his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining HDS, he served as Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-editedIslamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2009). He is currently working on a forthcoming book entitled Singapore Islam: The Prophet's Port and Sufism across the Oceans.

Verena Meyer received her PhD at the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she is now a Early Career Fellow. Trained in Islamic Studies and specializing in Islam in Indonesia, her research focuses on the ways in which traditionalist and modernist Javanese Muslims construct and maintain their group identities through memory practices of authoritative founding figures and by appropriating canonical texts in Arabic, Indonesian, and Javanese. In addition to her ethnographic work on contemporary Islam, she has also explored themes of coherence and paradox as modes of theological articulation in classical Malay and Javanese poetry and their reception of Arabic philosophical traditions.