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The Veranda of Mecca: Faith, Peace, and the Remaking of Aceh after the Tsunami

For centuries, Aceh has been known as the Veranda of Mecca—a crossroads of Islamic...

What holds together the diverse Muslim societies of the Malay world across centuries of migration, trade, scholarship, and political transformation?

Of Salt and Tamarind explores...

Virtual ethnography is quietly becoming one of the most important research methods of our time. As more of human life migrates online, the communities, rituals, conflicts, and identities that once unfolded in villages, markets, and town squares now take shape in comment threads, group chats, gaming servers, and social media feeds. Virtual ethnography is the discipline of studying those digital worlds with the same seriousness, curiosity, and rigor that anthropologists have long brought to...

Introduction

We live in an age of two revolutions. The first is visible: the rise of artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and algorithmic civilization — a transformation so vast it reshapes how human beings think, communicate, and understand themselves. The second revolution is less visible, yet older and deeper: the rediscovery of the imaginal world (mundus imaginalis), a concept developed by the French philosopher and Islamologist Henry Corbin from his deep engagement with Islamic...

On June 15, 2026, during my journey from Songkhla to Kota Bharu, I stopped at a small bookstore named Pustaka Al-Azhar. The visit was not originally planned as an academic observation. However, sometimes the most meaningful encounters with knowledge happen in unexpected places.

I was accompanied by Abdul Rooya Panaemale, a writer from Patani who has a deep understanding of the cultural and intellectual traditions of Southern Thailand. Our journey took us from Patani toward the Sungai Kolok...