About the speaker: Achin Vanaik, fellow and board member of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam is one of the most important analysts of contemporary Indian politics. The author of The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (1990), The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (1997) and Globalization and South Asia (2004.)

Vanaik has served on the board of directors of GreenPeace (India), and as an assistant editor for The Times of India. He writes regularly for the Economic and Political Weekly, The Times and The Telegraph and has written extensively on the nuclear question in south Asia.

Dr. Vanaik's lecture is co-sponsored with the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.

Cosponsored with the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford

Daulah Islamiyya (Islamic sovereignty, or an Islamic state) is a declared objective of the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyya. In Malaysia, where parliamentary elections are expected to be held in April, both the Muslim-Malay party (UMNO) in the ruling coalition and the Islamist party (PAS) opposed to UMNO have offered rival visions of Malaysia as an Islamic state. Radical groups in Indonesia have proposed replacing the "Pancasila state" in their country with an Islamic state. So what exactly is an "Islamic state"? And why does it matter so much for politics -- radical or democratic -- in Muslim Southeast Asia? Dr. Martinez will review and explore the contexts, in theory and in practice, that can help us understand what this debate is about. Patricia Martinez, a Malaysian, is among the most highly regarded and widely published scholars working on Islam in Southeast Asia. She is based at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, where she is senior research fellow for Religion and Culture and Head of Intercultural Studies at the Asia-Europe Institute. Her writings relevant to her talk include "Islam, Constitutionalism and the Islamic State" (2004) and "The Islamic State or the State of Islam in Malaysia"(2001). A 2003 essay, "Deconstructing Jihad; Southeast Asian Contexts," is available at http://www.ntu.edu.sg/idss/new-publi.asp. Dr. Martinez has just returned to Stanford from speaking engagements in Australia.

In the United States since 9/11, there has been a tendency to reduce Southeast Asia's connections to the Middle East to religion: that is, to the Muslim faith shared by majori-ties east of the Mediterranean and south of the South China Sea, not to mention the Muslim minorities elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While addressing the changing nature and importance of this overlap, Professor von der Mehden will also analyze how and why these two regions, spatially so far apart, have been interacting on a range of economic, security, and political issues, including the question of Palestine. He will argue that there is more interaction today between the two regions than ever before. Each region has become more involved in the affairs of the other. But these burgeoning connections are not what they were expected to be. Nor are they all benign.

Fred von der Mehden is internationally known for his extensive scholarship on politics, religion, and development in Southeast Asia. His talk will update and expand on his 1993 book, Two Worlds of Islam: Interaction between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. A senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995), Professor von der Mehden's many other books include Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia (1986); Southeast Asia 1930-1970 (1974); Comparative Political Violence (1973); and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (1963). He has just returned from Southeast Asia, where he has lectured or done research almost every year since the 1950s. He is California-trained, having earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley; an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School; and a B.A. from the University of the Pacific.

Educational achievement in Malaysia is racially skewed across its three main cultural groups: The Malay-Muslim majority lags behind the country's Chinese and Indian minorities. This poses a dilemma. Should the state give the majority preferential access to education in the name of group equality? Or permit such access to be decided by merit alone, in the name of fairness among individuals? Malaysia has chosen to expand opportunities for schooling while maintaining a strict policy of affirmative action for Malays, all within a centrally controlled and standardized system of national education that relies on the Malay language and includes emphasis religion and morality. After showing how this pattern evolved from the secular, English-language format adopted by the British when they ruled Malaysia, Dr. Bakri Musa will assess the costs and benefits of affirmative educational action in the country today. Bakri Musa has written extensively on Malaysia. His latest book, An Education System Worthy of Malaysia (2003), has been described as "a severe critique" and "a comprehensive proposal for reform." Earlier titles include Malaysia in the Era of Globalization (2002), and The Malay Dilemma Revisited (1999). Shorter commentaries have appeared in Asiaweek, Education Quarterly, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and The International Herald Tribune, among other print media, and been aired by National Public Radio on its program, "Marketplace." A surgeon in private practice in Silicon Valley, Dr. Musa earned his medical and graduate degrees at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Over the last two years in Southeast Asia, acts of terror done in the name of Islam have divided analysts into two broad camps. Academic specialists on Islam in Southeast Asia have tended to emphasize the moderation of the vast majority of Muslims in the region and the local roots of so-called jihadist violence there. While not denying the moderation of most Muslims, Western journalists and officials have relied more on intelligence reports and detainee confessions to situate Southeast Asian jihadists within a global terrorist network organized and inspired by Al Qaeda. Compared with Western journalists and officials, scholars have also tended to portray Islam as a basically tolerant religion and to seek nonreligious explanations and motivations for seemingly Islamist violence. If the scholars have had faith in explanatory contexts--distinctively local, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and political--their counterparts in media and policy circles have been more inclined to showcase conspiratorial texts: interrogation transcripts, recordings of clandestine conversations, and the selectively Koranic rhetoric of militant Islamists urging global jihad. Which of these contrasting perspectives is superior, analytically and as a basis for counter-terror policy? Are the perpetrators of apparently Islamist terror in Southeast Asia thinking and acting locally? Or globally? Is there a demonstrably Al Qaeda network in the region? If so, what sort of a structure is it? How does it operate? Can a "war" against it succeed? If not, what might be a better approach? Zachary Abuza is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Simmons College. His most recent book is Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001). Foreign-affairs journals that have published his work include Asian Survey and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He has spoken on Southeast Asian subjects before Congress, at the State Department, on Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour," and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Time, among other media. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1998. In 1995-96 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Hanoi.