100 Years of Progressive Islam:
A Symposium in Honor of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
(1909-2009)
Ohio University
January 17-18, 2009

This symposium is in honor of the 100th birth anniversary of the Sudanese religious reformer, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. The symposium begins Saturday, January 17 at 5:00 PM with a dinner and evening entertainment. The dinner is open to all. The symposium will continue on Sunday, January 18 at the Baker University Center with panel sessions and keynote address by Cornel West.

Sermon-filled soap operas, rock music played by veiled women, Muslim magazines, newspapers, and portals, consumption of special Ramadan foods at McDonald’s, and the rippling effects of Prophet cartoons saturate the mediascape of the contemporary Malay world. Home to approximately one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population, Indonesia and Malaysia are often overlooked or misrepresented in media discourses about Islam. Ideas, sounds, images, gestures, and meanings about Islam abound in contemporary popular cultural forms including film, music, television, radio, comics, fashion, magazines, and cyberculture. In the last two decades, mass-mediated forms of Islam, targeted largely to urbanized youth, have played a key role in the Islamisation of Indonesia and Malaysia. This conference will address the relationship between Islam and popular culture in the Malay world. These forms and accompanying practices of production, circulation, marketing, and consumption of Islam will be the focus of analysis.

This interdisciplinary conference will address the following questions: Under what historical and social conditions have popular culture and Islam become mutually constitutive as sites for defining Islam in the Malay world? What forms does Islam take in popular culture? What meanings about Islam do audiences derive from popular culture? Central to these questions are the role of mass media in (1) constituting Muslim identities, especially among youth; (2) defining publics according to gender and class; (3) promoting certain kinds of Islamic practices and values while submerging others; (4) creating alternative media spaces; (5) shaping perceptions of Islam, both within and outside the Malay world, among non-Muslims.

This conference is being sponsored by: the Center for Southeast Asian Studies
at Ohio University, Indo-Pacific Council, the University of Pittsburgh, the
Consortium for Education Resources on Islamic Studies (CERIS), and Falcon
Interactive (Indonesia). For more information, please visit the international
conference website here.

Progressive Islam in Africa and Southeast Asia: a Media Project to Honor the Life of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, 1909-2009

Imagining and Realizing Progressive Islam: A Framework and Call to Action

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im has become one of the world's leading spokespersons for a Muslim progressive perspective. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor at the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta and author or editor of 10 books including the most recent, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia (Harvard University Press, 2008). Dr. Abdullahi was Professor of Law at the University of Khartoum, was a political prisoner in Sudan in the 1980s and later served as Director of Human Rights Watch Africa. He has received numerous awards and honors for his writing and human rights work in Africa and across the Muslim world.

Dr. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im
Emory University
27 May 2008
Bentley 140
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Sponsored by: The Center for African Studies and The Center for South East Asian Studies
With support from: The Social Science Research Council, New York