SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Islam, Trade and Politics Across the Indian Ocean photographic exhibition

Islam, Trade and Politics Across the Indian Ocean, a new photographic exhibition produced by the British Library for ASEASUK and BIAA funded by the British Academy is at SOAS Library from the 14th June.

Southeast Asia has long been connected by trade, religion and political links to the wider world across the Indian Ocean, and especially to the Middle East through the faith of Islam. However, little attention has been paid to the ties between Muslim Southeast Asia – encompassing the modern nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and the southern parts of Thailand and the Philippines – and the greatest Middle Eastern power, the Ottoman empire.  

The exhibition explores interactions between these two regions, from political, religious, literary and commercial exchanges to mutual influences in material culture.  

Highlights include documents recently discovered in archives in Istanbul, which shed new light on links between the lands of the Ottoman empire and early republican Turkey, and the Muslim peoples of Southeast Asia.  

Images of maps, drawings, books and letters, dating from the 16th to 20th centuries, are displayed in ten panels:

• Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean
• The Indian Ocean World: Trade and Warfare
• Imagining the Other: Rum and Southeast Asia
• Intellectual Networks
• Artistic Connections
• Aceh: Eastern Frontier of the Ottoman World?
• Ottomans in the Philippines
• Southeast Asian Origins of Ottoman Pan-Islamism?  
• Arab Go-Betweens: Sayyids from Hadhramaut
• Modern Turkey and Southeast Asia