Saints, Companions, and Sinners

February 5, 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Art Auditorium 132

This talk, "Saints, Companions, and Sinners: Interspecies Histories and Lessons from Islamic Asia," explores interspecies histories from Islamic Asia, learning from communities’ narratives about the entangled relationships among animals, humans, and trees. These accounts of religious and material life not only preserve invaluable ecological knowledge, but also, through multispecies histories, invite us to reconsider academic approaches to environment, care, and kinship, especially in times of climate crises, past and present. As these narratives from Islamic Asia remind us, our current moment of climate crisis calls for fostering a multispecies 'response-ability' for living with, and thinking through, our interconnected present. Speaker Bio: Teren Sevea is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the Harvard Divinity School, he served as Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2009). He is currently completing his second book entitled, Singapore Islam: The Prophet's Port and Sufism across the Oceans, and is working on his third monograph, provisionally entitled, Animal Saints and Sinners: Lessons on Islam and Multispeciesism from the East. Sevea has authored book chapters and journal articles that have been published in Third World Quarterly, Modern Asian Studies, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Journal of Sufi Studies. In addition, Sevea is a coordinator of a multimedia project entitled “The Lighthouses of God: Mapping Sanctity Across the Indian Ocean,” which investigates the evolving landscapes of Indian Ocean Islam through photography, film, and GIS technology.


Ticket Information
Free and open to the public

Event Sponsor
Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Dept. of Religion, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Teri L Skillman, 8089562676, skillman@hawaii.edu

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