Knowledge without Borders: Epistemic Communities, Dialogically Engaged Discursive Tradition, and the Transmission of Islamic Scholarship in the Eastern Indian Ocean World: Connections between Southeast and Western Asia

Abstract

This article examines the dynamics of epistemic communities across the Eastern Indian Ocean, whose raison d’être is the cultivation and communication of Islamic scholarship. This body of Islamic knowledge, the formal basis for this epistemic community, is represented in a set of discourses that are the communicative medium transacted among its members. This transaction creates the shared discursive space that situates their relationships over the vast disjointed physical area of the Indian Ocean. After this theoretical discussion, the essay documents the transformation in the contemporary character of the historical relationships between the shared epistemic communities in the Indian Ocean basins of Southeast Asia and Western Asia. This transformation is illustrated by examining how the dissemination process of Islamic knowledge has changed in modern times. This study is based on ethnographic research in Indonesia, where students/scholars from this region were interviewed regarding their experiences of pursuing Islamic knowledge in the Middle East. The study will show that there was a shift in the structural relations of these epistemic communities, where the basis of interactions in colonial and pre-colonial times revolved around individual relationships and distinctive knowledge networks. In contrast, in the postcolonial period, the interactions centered more around knowledge institutions and amorphous associations.