Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

This article examines the paradoxical impact of emerging communication technologies on social cohesion by investigating the struggle to standardize Ramadan observance among Chinese Hui Muslim communities in the early twentieth century. Reform-minded Hui intellectuals hoped that modern media, such as print periodicals and the telegraph, would disseminate moon-sighting news and unify the diverse temporal practices of Hui Muslims across China, thereby forging a modern, unified Hui identity. However, this article argues that these technologies did not lead to seamless temporal homogenization. Instead, they amplified local divisions and precipitated a crisis of authority by forcing Hui communities to confront a new and divisive question: who and what to trust in a new information landscape? Drawing on case studies of disputes in Guangzhou, Xi’an, Beijing, and Chengdu between 1931 and 1934, the article demonstrates that Hui Muslims’ trust was not monolithic but fragmented along lines of faith in the communication technology, the messenger, and the information itself, which in turn prevented the implementation of a standard Ramadan temporality. By centring the analysis on the social dynamics of trust, this article contributes to the history of technology and media studies, revealing that the adoption of technology is fundamentally a process of building, challenging, and negotiating authority through the fragile and fragmented medium of trust.

This article explores the global imagining of China as a site of Islamization at the turn of the twentieth century. While previous scholarship examined this fantasy-making among European Orientalists and Christian missionaries, we put the writings of the latter in dialogue with other (Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) discursive nodes and networks in the Middle East, as well as those of Chinese Muslims, highlighting the production and co-constitution of this narrative on a global scale. We argue that by the late nineteenth century the birth and spread of this narrative was tied to the growing acceptance of a particular conception of religion as a classificatory framework wherein ‘world religions’, as bywords for separate civilizations, were locked in intense Darwinian competition with one another. Entangled with narrational processes like the invention of global religions and the construction of the Muslim world, the vision of an Islamized China became a fertile (and long-lived) battleground for a wide range of imperial anxieties, anti-colonial aspirations, and minority counterclaims, many of which we explore in this article.

This article analyses multiple visions and perspectives offered by Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals during the Republican era (1912–1949) concerning their status as a Muslim community by looking into their debates on the modernization and secularization of the Turkish Republic under the Kemalist regime. The transformation of the multi-ethnic and religious Qing empire into a Republican Chinese nation-state presented new challenges to the ruling elite, intellectuals, and minority communities. This article explores how Chinese Muslims navigated the complex intellectual landscape as alternative visions and ideologies concerning nation-building, ethnic autonomy, religion, and modernity emerged in China. The article focuses on how Han Chinese intellectuals, the Kuomintang (KMT) elite, and Chinese Muslims selectively interpreted Turkish modernization in different ways to promote their socio-political cause. It analyses the overlaps and the complex, nuanced differences between Chinese Muslim interpretations of Turkey as a success story of the awakened modern Muslim and the KMT ruling elites’ view of Turkey in the 1930s as a model of developmental authoritarianism, highlighting Turkey’s success in establishing a homogenous nation-state that superseded religion with a sanctified state ideology. The article thus demonstrates how Chinese Muslim intellectuals responded to the KMT state’s increasingly authoritarian rule in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion and the subsequent era of the Civil War when the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a powerful alternative to KMT rule and ideology.

The Korean Peninsula is often neglected in investigations on Islam in East Asia. The region already occupies the conceptual peripheries of studies on Muslim societies. During the two decades after the Korean War (1950–1953), however, Seoul hosted a small yet active community of Korean Muslim converts and visitors from places such as Malaysia/Singapore, Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The early Korean Muslim leaders, some of whom first encountered Islam in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, attempted to plug themselves into transnational Islamic networks and politics in the transformed context of the Cold War. Internally, Korean Muslim leaders advocated for the utility of Islam as a diplomatic resource for the South Korean government in the struggle against communism, thereby reformulating pre-war articulations of Islam policy that had circulated across China and Japan, as well as narratives on unified Islamic civilization with an inherent cultural essence. Externally, they forged educational and philanthropic networks by connecting with Muslim diasporic figures in the East and Southeast Asian sphere, such as Ibrahim Omar al-Saqqāf, the Hadrami Arab consul of the Saudi consulate in Singapore and an agent of the World Muslim League in Mecca. By situating the emergent Korean Muslim community in Seoul within a regional and trans-regional religio-political nexus, this article repositions it as having formed through encounters with modern state(s) and power, and through interactions with Muslim diasporic agents who (re-)directed post-war mobility channels.

East Asia is rarely identified as a distinctly Muslim space. This article sheds light on the hitherto neglected history of modern East Asia as a site of Muslim activity and encounters. Mobile Muslims, who travelled and migrated to the East Asian space in the course of imperial globalization, often suffered discrimination as colonized subjects, but in other instances benefitted from imperial privileges and protection. The Tatars of Harbin, who came to Manchuria as Russian subjects, are emblematic, but understudied, actors in this regard. The city of Harbin, administered by the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a rapidly growing transport hub and colonial settlement in Manchuria. Similar to colonial port cities, Harbin simultaneously exhibited characteristics of both the metropolis and the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of the empire. This situation created many opportunities for Tatars to seek their fortunes, especially in trade. Zooming in on the Harbin Tatars, this article discusses, first, the place of Tatar Muslims and their institutions in Harbin’s colonial society; second, the intertwining of notions of (economic) competition in the colonial space with ideas of progress and decline; and third, the potential for Muslim encounters across colonial boundaries. Taking into account the Muslim side of modern East Asian history is not only an essential part of understanding the development of global connections, it also helps us to rethink the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, and focus our attention on the ambitions of Muslim actors in shaping their futures across the colonial space.

This article explores the condition of Indian indentured women labourers on the colonial plantations of Fiji and Natal (now in South Africa) in order to understand the complexities of life in a radically different society and production regime. Opposed to the sources used by scholars to document the women under indenture, such as colonial documents, official reports, and writings of reporters, which have limitations of objective portrayal, this article uses the labourers’ petitions, depositions, and letters written largely in Indian languages either by women or men, individually or collectively, to different authorities. This is a source that has rarely been used hitherto to understand the plantation regime in terms of gender violence, sexuality, and patriarchy. Through a close reading of these letters and petitions and an examination of the conditions of their production and their reception by the colonial authorities, the article argues that plantations, as a radically different space, became a site of the violent struggle between women’s agency and Indian patriarchy in the process of reproduction of cultural selves away from the ‘home’. It further argues that by facilitating both women’s agency and male control, rather than taking an outright side, the colonial state created a space where both freedom and oppression coexisted, often leading to violent outcomes.

This article traces how and why the ‘competition’ of marriage culminated in the rise of the matrimonial advertisement across early twentieth-century India. It examines how the matrimonial, as a systematized textual schema, became a constitutive component of a reforming marriage market and integral to how the gendered body was imagined within transforming familial norms. The article draws on the extensive scholarship on labour and marriage in colonial Bengal to argue for the development of an ‘All-India’ middle-class marital marketplace as new forms of networking and work emerged. It does this by undertaking a cross-regional comparative analysis of matrimonials between 1915 and 1950 across urban India—alongside memoirs, colonial ethnographies, and periodicals—to extrapolate strategies of status-making and explore how discourses on conjugality ceded into legislative debates around customary law and property. The article begins by considering the placement and composition of matrimonials before delving into how matches were assessed, arguing that they expressed shifting marital norms, conjugal capital, and caste consolidation which led to the commodification of an expansive marital marketplace. It then examines debates around monetary marriage exchanges (like dowry) as a form of capital accumulation, disentangling how requests were articulated within the matrimonial advertisement through the complex textual grammars of signalling wealth.

In this article, the ubiquitous visibility of Indian nationalist authors in the public sphere and academic scholarship is contrasted to the conspicuous invisibilization of authors in those domains who took critical and contrary stances on the Indian nationalist movement and ideology. S. Natarajan, also known as ‘Sarada’, was a Tamil migrant hotel worker who fashioned himself into a prodigious fiction writer in the Telugu public sphere during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even in a brutally exploitative condition, he managed to engage in literary activity. His singularly important realist novel was Manchi-Chedu (literal English translation Good-Evil, serialized in 1954). Written in Telugu, it narrates the entangled life journeys of three ordinary individuals. It also engages with the immensely violent and tragic dimensions of problematic aspects of modern societies, such as destitution and prostitution.

The tragedy of the protagonists indicates the exploitative conditions under which Sarada wrote and his disillusionment with the newly independent India. The novel articulates a brutally exploited worker’s perspective of a triumphant Indian nationalism at ‘the moment of arrival’ and its meaning for the dispossessed. While realist aesthetics is always associated with the concerns and anxieties of Indian nationalism in post-colonial critical discourse, Sarada’s realism proposes an ideological critique of Indian nationalist discourse. Manchi-Chedu is a 1950s novel that belongs to a period in which India was transitioning from a colony of the British empire to an independent nation-state. By portraying the aspirations, struggles, and travails of ordinary individuals, Manchi-Chedu interrogates the dominant representation of women in the Indian nationalist novel and discourse. The novel, which achieved spectacular success and reception in the Telugu public sphere, shows the different kinds of imagination (about the nation) in regional literature.

This article considers British early nineteenth century attempts to reclaim Sagar Island, at the southwestern extremity of the Bengal delta, by clearing the island of jungle and settling and cultivating it—a project led first by colonial authorities at Calcutta and then by a joint-stock company established for the purpose, the Sagar Island Society. It considers the motivations behind the reclamation attempts, what they involved, and why they failed. The consequences – economic, human, and ecological—of the reclamation attempts are examined. The article reconstructs the almost entirely unknown history of events on Sagar Island from 1810 to 1833 through extensive new archival research and the study of rarely consulted publications from the period, before exploring their implications. In doing so, it sheds new light on the nature of British colonial capitalism and the environmental impact of British colonial interventions in South Asia, contributing to our understanding of the economic and environmental history of colonial Bengal and of the wider British imperial world. The article contends that events on Sagar Island offer a cautionary lesson about public and private initiatives to extend the frontiers of revenue extraction, and about the hubris of human efforts to ‘improve’ natural environments through large-scale projects of transformation. New insights are offered into the collusion between government and capital in British Bengal between the East India Company charter acts of 1813 and 1833, and into the colonial and capitalist origins of the Anthropocene.