ASIA OVER LUNCH LECTURE – Noon in 4130 Posvar. Please feel free to join us for this lecture – all are welcome to bring their lunch or a snack along if you wish and enjoy!

In the contemporary world where religious secularization is viewed as an inevitable process along with political and economic modernization, the phenomenon of religious resurgence of Islam has attracted many people’s concern. Many Western intellectuals argue that the revival of the Islamic world will eventually result in “the clash of civilizations” (Samuel P. Huntington) or “the new Cold War” (Mark Juergensmeyer), but these perspectives largely ignore local socio-historical contexts in understanding the Islamic revival. This talk will critically examine the roots of these perspectives by shedding the light of Malaysia to investigate why Islamic revival movements have resurged in the 1970s, who has participated in these movements, and how the Malaysian government and non-Malay ethnic groups have responded to the movements. Based on a post-colonial perspective, the speaker contends that the Islamic revival movements in Malaysia is a kind of cultural resistance initiated by Malay Muslims to rebuild their national identity and subjectivity in the post-independent Malaysia.