International Conference on Islamic Arts in Intercultural Perspective in conjunction with Workshop on Ethnographies of Islam in China

Over the centuries, Islamic artistic traditions have been shaped by the transnational movement of Muslims, and their engagement with the societies and cultures that Islam penetrated as it spread from one region to the next. In turn, local arts assimilated and were adapted to suit and communicate the basic religious values of Islam, and to represent new forms of Islamic society and polity. The scholarship presented and discussed at the conference will both catalogue and analyse artistic practices and traditions from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, to offer insight into how arts help us document historical processes in the growth of Islamic civilization, understand contemporary developments, and perhaps forecast future changes, within and beyond the global Muslim community.

On the other hand, in recent years, the topic of Islam in China has become of greater interest to policy makers and academics. While transnational Islamic movements may have been slow to penetrate China, there is now little doubt of the rising global connectedness of Muslims in China, nor of the changes that are occurring in Islamic religious beliefs and practices, nor the challenges which they pose for the state. These developments are occurring against a backdrop of great diversity in local histories of transmission, socio-economic factors, language and life-ways. Many of these diverse local practices are currently under pressure from the forces of change. What insights can ethnographic research bring to the nature and ideology of this changing religious practice? What new perspectives can be gained from fieldwork-based approaches to religious experience and meaning? A growing body of work in the Anthropology of Islam brings these perspectives and methods to bear on Islam in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The “Workshop on Ethnographies of Islam in China” seeks to bring these new theoretical and methodological developments into productive dialogue with current work on Islam in China.

This forthcoming joint-symposium aims to facilitate the dialogue and future collaboration between scholars researching into in these two related areas with their respective approaches.

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