Across the more-than-human landscapes of the Malay Peninsula, miracles and histories persist at sites of crumbling graves and the relics of saints whose karamat endure despite encroaching urban redevelopment. This talk traces the ongoing presence of these sacred remains and pilgrimage sites, attending not only to the material ruination of shrines, but also to the devotional worlds that continue to develop around them. 

It examines the historical narratives that illuminate for pilgrims the Islamic past, the charisma of religious authorities, the tangible presence of miracles, and the cosmopolitan spaces shaped by oceanic exchanges and connections. Special emphasis is placed on neglected or removed burial grounds—those ‘ruins’ that continue to survive as sites where Islamic histories are actively produced and circulated. The histories and material legacies of the deceased persist, resisting both physical erasure and marginalization into mere folklore.

Speaker

Teren Sevea 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. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which received the 2022 Harry J. Benda Prize, awarded by the Association of Asian Studies. Sevea also co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2009). 

Moderators

Marieke Bloembergen is a cultural historian and senior researcher at KITLV, and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the political dynamics of cultural knowledge production in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, in relation to objects, non-human species, heritage practices, art, and notions of (environmental) care, and in their local, inter-Asian and global dimensions. 

Verena Meyer is an Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. In her work, Verena draws on ethnographic field research, training in contemporary critical theory, and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. 

Image

Photo by Teren Sevea.

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