The Inaugural Tony and Yohanni Johns lecture

Lecture title: Restoring religious and cultural complexity to the study of Southeast Asian Islam

This is an an in-person event only. Drinks reception at 4:30 pm for a 5pm start.

In recent decades, scholarship on Southeast Asian Islam - as with Islam elsewhere - has become dominated by the fields of politics, international relations or security studies. These studies often characterise faith as something delineated, measurable and susceptible to state-directed change. Much of these analyses overlook the subtle variations in Islamic life, and the disjunctions between formal orthodoxy and everyday religious experience. How Muslims comprehend and express their faith ranges widely, crosses typological boundaries, and confounds many of the accepted categories applied to Islam.

Our speaker Greg Fealy is emeritus professor in the Department of Political and Social Change. He specialises in the study of Islamic politics and history, primarily in Indonesia, but also other Muslim-majority regions in Southeast Asia.

Hosted by the ANU Indonesia Institute, this annual lecture series honours both Tony and Yohanni's enduring legacy at ANU, focussing on humanities studies across Nusantara and the Malay and Islamic worlds, as well as the examination of Austronesian identity.