R. Michael Feener
Dr R. Michael Feener is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and an Islamic Centre lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He is also the head of the Maldives Heritage Survey. Feener was formerly associated with the Asia Research Institute and the National University of Singapore. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history, as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion and development. Muslim Cultures of a Maritime World: Art and architecture of the Indian Ocean
Within the first century of Islamic history Muslims, already active in expanding networks of maritime commerce across the Indian Ocean, were establishing settlements of sojourning merchants on the western coast of India, and opening up sea routes further east to southern China. This presentation presents an introduction of the art and architecture of the maritime Muslim world of the Indian Ocean – with examples drawn from Southern Arabia to the Maldives, India, and the Indonesian archipelago. In the process, it will explore some of the complex processes through which Islam took root in diverse societies across this interconnected region, as they simultaneously came to be integrated within an expanding Muslim world over the medieval and early modern periods.