Columbia University
april, 2024
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Time: 4:10 – 6:00 PM
Location: 207 Knox Hall (606 W 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027)
This workshop focuses on Singapore’s first king and karamat, and heir of the pre-Qur’anic prophet and king Iskandar Dhu al-Qarnayn. As the island’s first Islamic king, Iskandar Sahib marks the beginnings of Singaporean Islamic history in the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Alexandrian-Abrahamic dynasty memorialized in Malay court chronicles (hikayat) and manuscripts. Hikayats and orally transmitted histories have guided Islamic communities as they strive to reclaim histories of Iskandar Sahib and Persianate conceptions of divinely sanctioned kingship, along with accounts of peripatetic saints in Alexandrian Singapore, within a society wherein Islamic pasts have been marginalized and obliterated. Histories of Singapore’s first king, Iskandar Sahib and his Alexandrian dynasty, remain disputed by academic historians but have been upheld by chroniclers, genealogists and storytellers, as well as Tamil and Malay poets. Moreover, Iskandar Sahib has narrated Singapore’s Islamic past amidst urban redevelopment, protecting his grave as a sign of the city’s ineradicable Islamic history, while appearing to muwarrikhs (from the 1820s to 1990s) to educate the community about Singapore’s Islamic past and present.