Bayerisches Orient-Kolloquium der Universitäten Bamberg und Erlangen-Nürnberg

Ahmad Khatib originated from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, where he was born in 1860. After he had settled in the Holy City of Mecca for study purposes at a young age, he remained there until the end of his life in 1916. In Mecca he became prayer leader (imam) in the Masjid al-Haram and grew into a well-known scholar in Islamic sciences. His written work, educational and other activities have played a vital part in the exchange of religious ideas between Mecca and the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and make him an important person in the history of Islam in Southeast. In his written work he has dealt with the issue of male circumcision on various occasions. In my lecture I will study these passages, some of which have a specific Indonesian background. 

Nico J.G. Kaptein Ph.D. (1989) is Professor Emeritus of Islam in Southeast Asia at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He has held research fellowships at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore; the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. 

Among his publications are: Muhammad’s Birthday Festival, Leiden: Brill, 1993 (Indonesian translation INIS Materials 22, Jakarta 1994); The Muhimmât al-nafâ'is: a bilingual Meccan fatwa collection for Indonesian Muslims from the end of the nineteenth century, Jakarta: INIS, 1997; Transcending borders: Arabs, politics, trade and Islam in Southeast Asia, ed. with Huub de Jonge, Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002; and Islam, Colonialism and the Modern Age in the Netherlands East Indies: A Biography of Sayyid `Uthman (1822-1914), Leiden: Brill, 2014 (Indonesian translation 2017; UMY Press/Suara Muhammadiyyah). 

He is interested in the religious relations between the Middle East and South-East Asia and is currently working on a biography of Ahmad Khatib.

Traditional Javanese literature has a special genre dealing with santri lĕlana or wandering students of Islam. Such stories of adventure typically consist of recurring episodes in various arrangements. We always find a “wandering episode,” involving descriptions of the protagonist’s journey, but also a “discussion of esoteric knowledge episode,” in which religious knowledge is discussed during nightly sessions, mostly on esoteric matters. Erotic romances and “bedroom episodes” further spice the plot. This lecture will look into one particular version, namely the Sĕrat Asmarasupi which is known in various versions, telling about a crown prince from a (fictitious) Arab country who secretly leaves the palace in search of religious knowledge, going on an adventurous road for religious education, finding love along the way.

Edwin P. Wieringa is Professor of Indonesian Philology with Special Reference to Islamic Cultures at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Islamicate World, University of Cologne, Germany. Trained in Indonesian philology at the University of Leiden, where he was awarded a PhD with highest honours in 1994 on a corpus of traditional Javanese historiographical texts, he has published widely in the fields of traditional and modern Indonesian literatures. 

Hikayat Faridah Hanom, published in 1926 in the British Crown Colony of Penang, is known as one of the first Malay novels in the modern sense. The author Sayyid Shaykh al-Hadi was an Arab-Malay entrepreneur who had grown up at the court of the Riau Lingga Sultanate and had co-founded an Islamic reform magazine in 1906 based on the ideas of Muhammad Abduh. Al-Hadi's novel is set in Cairo at the end of the 19th century and tells the story of the young Egyptian lovers Faridah Hanom and Shafik Efendi, who both hail from aristocratic families and have sworn eternal fidelity to each other. The relationship is soon interrupted, however, because Faridah Hanom is to be forcibly married off to a cousin by her father. In the end, she manages to dissolve the marriage with her cousin and marry her lover Shafik. The author used the story to highlight the dubious nature of forced marriages, to demonstrate the need for women's education and women's rights and to popularise his ideas of nationalism and a progressive Islam. A particularly curious feature of the novel is that it contains several erotic passages that stand in stark contrast to traditional Islamic notions of modesty. While the eroticism of the novel has previously been interpreted as a mere teaser with which the author wanted to attract his male target audience, the presentation argues that the author inserted the erotic passages primarily to publicise his novel understanding of Islamic sexual ethics that would allow for premarital love relationships and turn women into ‘life partners’ of their prospective husbands. This ethic, which also included a strict code of conduct for men when they associate with women, has not played a major role in the reception of the novel so far and shall be examined in the presentation more closely.

Between the 1880s and 1960s an industry for the production of Islamic books in the Malay language and its adaptation of the Arabic script, so-called kitab jawi, developed in the Middle East. It was the result of collaboration by Malay authors and editors, Arab and Ottoman state presses and private publishers, and local booksellers, many of whom were of Indian descent. This study identifies the key actors in kitab jawi publishing in the Hejaz, Cairo and, to a lesser extent, Istanbul. Thereby it sheds light on the role played by Middle Eastern kitab jawi printing for community formation among Southeast Asian Muslims and on how its function contrasted with that of periodicals in this regard. Furthermore, it shows how the legacy of Middle Eastern kitab jawi editions, as an instructive testimony to transregional Islamic connections and cross-cultural cooperation, lives on until the present day.

Dr. Philipp Bruckmayr has studied Arabic and Islamic Studies, Turkish Studies and History at the University of Vienna. He has served as research fellow and lecturer at the University of Vienna, the International Research Center Cultural Studies (Vienna), University of Passau, National University of Malaysia and University of Exeter, and as Visiting Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Freiburg. Presently he is Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat) in Islamic Studies at the University of Bamberg. He was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Association of Middle Eastern Studies (DAVO) in 2015 and the Dr. Hermann Stieglecker-Scholarship for Christian-Islamic Studies of the Forum of World Religions (FWR) in 2017. He serves as a member of the editorial board of Die Welt des Islams: International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam. Much of his research has focused on Islam in Southeast Asia, the Māturīdī school of rational theology, and transnational aspects of modern Sunnī and Shiʿī Islam.

In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten hat das Interesse an historischen Fällen von Gender Diversität und sexueller Vielfalt in der Geschichte der MENA-Region zugenommen. Kultur- und Literaturhistoriker*innen haben gezeigt, wie mit dem Aufkommen der Moderne und der Auseinandersetzung mit den europäischen kolonialen Bestrebungen im 19. Jahrhundert einen Wandel der gesellschaftlichen Sitten eingeleitet wurde und viele frühere Praktiken als Hindernisse für die gesellschaftliche Modernisierung erachtet wurden. Die moderne und zeitgenössische Heteronormativität, die frühere fluide Praktiken der Vormoderne ersetzte, kann daher als direkte Folge der kolonialen Auseinandersetzung angesehen werden.

Für eine wachsende Zahl zeitgenössischer Künstler*innen der MENASA-Region bietet die historische Existenz von fluiden Geschlechtsidentitäten und gleichgeschlechtlichen Beziehungen in der Region eine Chance, zeitgenössische Queerness im Gefüge muslimischer Mehrheitsgesellschaften und der regionalen Kulturgeschichte zu verorten und sich für eine stärkere gesellschaftliche Akzeptanz non-konformer Gruppen einzusetzen. Durch Bezüge zu islamischen ästhetischen Traditionen und den Einsatz vielfältiger künstlerischer Medien, Techniken und Ausdrucksformen verweisen diese Künstler*innen auf indigene Formen nicht-normativer Ausdrucksformen und liefern ein Gegenargument zur häufigen Behauptung, alternative Geschlechtsidentitäten und sexuelle Vielfalt seien westliche „Importe“.

Im Vortrag werden ausgewählte Kunstwerke vorgestellt und die Frage diskutiert, inwiefern diese als mobilisierende Kraft wirken können, um einen Prozess des Umdenkens in ihrem gesellschaftlichen Umfeld anzustoßen.
 

Charlotte Bank ist Kunsthistorikerin und freie Kuratorin. Sie studierte Vorderasiatische Archäologie, Kunstgeschichte, Assyriologie, Semitistik und Arabistik in Heidelberg und Kopenhagen. 2017 promovierte sie in Arabistik an der Universität Genf mit einer Arbeit über die zeitgenössische Kunstszene in Syrien im lokalen und regionalen kunsthistorischen Kontext (publiziert 2020 als The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria: Social Critique and an Artistic Movement bei Routledge). In ihrer Forschung untersucht Charlotte Bank die künstlerische Produktion der islamischen Welt seit Anfang der Modernisierungsprozesse im 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, besonders die Möglichkeiten widerständiger und aktivistisch geprägter Kunstproduktion im Kontext von staatlichem Autoritarismus und eingeschränkter Meinungsfreiheit. Sie hatte wissenschaftliche Positionen und Fellowships an den Universität Genf, Orient Institut Beirut sowie am Museum für Islamische Kunst Berlin inne. Im Sommersemester 2019 war sie Gastprofessorin für Cultural Studies of the Middle East am Institut für Orientalistik in Bamberg. Von 2021 bis 2024 war sie wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Fachbereich Kunst und Gesellschaft an der Universität Kassel und am documenta Institut. Seit Oktober 2024 ist sie Vertretungsprofessorin für Islamische Kunstgeschichte an der LMU München.