by Johan Fischer
Nias-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2008

The West has seen the rise of the organic movement. In the Muslim world, a similar halal movement is rapidly spreading. Exploring consumption practices in urban Malaysia, this book shows how diverse forms of Malay middle-class consumption (of food, clothing and cars, for example) are understood, practised and contested as a particular mode of modern Islamic practice. It illustrates ways in which the issue of ‘proper Islamic consumption’ for consumers, the marketplace and the state in contemporary Malaysia evokes a whole range of contradictory Islamic visions, lifestyles and debates articulating what Islam is or ought to be. Its rich empirical material on everyday consumption in a local context will reinvigorate theoretical discussions about the nature of religion, ritual, the sacred and capitalism in the new millennium.

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by Johan Fischer
Big Table Publishing Company, 2012

Halal: Arabic,literally “permissible” or “lawful.” Johan Fischer’s illuminating studyproves that in the modern world, halal is no longer an expression of esoteric forms of production, trade, and consumption, but part of a huge and expanding globalized market. Exploring contemporary forms of halal understanding and practice among Malay Muslims in London – that is, halal consumption by middle-class Malays on “the frontier” – evokes important and pressing questions on both Islamic thought and how we live our lives today. The Halal Frontier gives us fresh insight into the religious dimensions of food consumption in an era of globalized mass production.

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by Abdullahi Ayan
CreateSpace, 2013

This book presents a wealth of information and ideas on Halal trade and commerce that cannot be found anywhere else. It answers many of the questions that business enterprises may have about accessing the global halal market and addresses the challenges they may expect. These questions include the following: 1. What is halal and how can it be utilised to gain maximum access to the global halal market? 2. What is a halal standard and how can it be applied to the production, processing and sale of halal goods and services. 3. What is halal certification and how can it be obtained? 4. Who are Halal consumers and how can they be identified and defined? 5. What kind of problems can business enterprises anticipate and how can they be overcome? 6. How can a new halal brand be created and how can an existing brand become halal compliant? Even though some of the examples are drawn from Australian experiences, the scope of the book, its ideas and their application are global. It offers a rare insight into how business can use halal as a platform to transform and expand their commercial activity in order to capture a much larger share of the global marketplace than they currently do. Mindful of the shortcoming of current halal practices, it also offers pathways to halal reform and development. Halal is fundamental to Islamic thought and practice. It gives insight into how Muslims see the world and act in it. Deeply rooted in Islamic law it can be part of the study of history, politics, sociology, culture and communication as well the study of economics and finance. However it is most manifest in its application as set of standards to the production, sale and rendering of goods and services in the marketplace which is the focus of this book.

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by Paul Temporal
Universal Publishers, 2011

Islamic Branding and Marketing: Creating A Global Islamic Business provides a complete guide to building brands in the largest consumer market in the world. The global Muslim market is now approximately 23 percent of the world’s population, and is projected to grow by about 35 percent in the next 20 years. If current trends continue, there are expected to be 2.2 billion Muslims in 2030 that will make up 26.4 percent of the world’s total projected population of 8.3 billion.
As companies currently compete for the markets of China and India, few have realized the global Muslim market represents potentially larger opportunities. Author Paul Temporal explains how to develop and manage brands and businesses for the fast-growing Muslim market through sophisticated strategies that will ensure sustainable value, and addresses issues such as:

How is the global Muslim market structured?

What opportunities are there in Islamic brand categories, including the digital world?
What strategies should non-Muslim companies adopt in Muslim countries?
More than 30 case studies illustrate practical applications of the topics covered, including Brunei Halal Brand, Godiva Chocolatier, Johor Corporations, Nestle, Unilever, Fulla, Muxlim Inc, and more.

Whether you are in control of an established company, starting up a new one, or have responsibility for a brand within an Islamic country looking for growth, Islamic Branding and Marketing is an indispensable resource that will help build, improve and secure brand equity and value for your company.

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by Mahmud bin Ahmad
Amazon Digital Services, 2012

Muslim countries are often thought of as culturally backward, authoritarian, misogynistic, and poor in economic performance. The teachings of Islam, however, prescribe democratic governance and free-market economics. While Muslims, as a whole, have tremendous economic potential, many Muslims are among the world’s poorest and least educated. Corrupt autocratic leaders have attempted to capitalize on the Muslim dream of building a grand society but owing to these manipulations and leaders’ insincerity, their efforts have yielded little fruitful results. This thesis discusses nation building by fusing Islam, pluralism, democracy, and modernity. It argues that Malaysia’s religious tolerance and adherence to western development models fostered economic growth since its independence. Clearly, practicing Islam, while pursuing social, economic, and political development, is a suitable model especially for heterogeneous societies. The thesis offers a model, Malaysia, as a unique example of the influence of Islamic universalism, multiculturalism, and Islamic modernism to improve economic growth. The thesis depicts the evolutionary transformation of Malay-Islam from its settlement to its status as a model for Muslims and the Third World countries. This thesis illustrates the compatibility of Islam and modernity in economic development.

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by John Onu Odihi
TraffordSG, 2012

In this new collection of poetry, Tribute to Brunei and Other Poems, the verses represent the synoptic capture of particular environments and incidents, as well as author John Onu Odihi’s reflection of them. Presented in a rich texture of imageries, the entries on Brunei, which form a major part of the book, portray a beautiful and peaceful country where modernity and tradition blend to form a harmonious socio-cultural environment. Odihi’s depiction of the serenity of Brunei’s pristine environment in an increasingly browning world and the vivacity of cultural life in the Abode of Peace can whet your appetite for a visit to the sultanate. Through poems such as “Programme Me” “Heed the Call” and “Let’s Help Each Other” Odihi gives cogent reasons for the celebration of human diversity and relinquishment of bigotry, prejudice, and such other vices that divide people. By extolling the virtues of hard work, unity, teamwork, sincerity, faithfulness, and commitment, Odihi’s Tribute to Brunei and Other Poems presents a strong voice in the ethics that are necessary for peace and human advancement. Bless You Always Brunei Darussalam Abode of Peace You are a jewel May the Sun of Righteousness Rise and shine upon you always Let there always be justice Let there always be goodness Within your borders let mercy flow May your inward beauty radiate Like diamond in the sun….

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by Burgess Needle
Big Table Publishing Company, 2012

Burgess Needle’s poetry collection distills the essence of his two-year sojourn in Thailand as a Peace Corps cultural exchanger. Readers travel with him when he meets his new headmaster, witnesses a school flogging, and feels like an idiot as he attempts to explain the conjugation of “to be.” As his Thai language skills evolve, likewise does his consciousness as he thinks in terms of earning merits for next lifetime. Beneath the ever-oppressive glaring sun, Needle gradually experiences more commonalities, but when he is assigned to teach baseball he discovers its incompatibility with Thai life, for “No one wanted to cover first base, die and return prematurely as a dog or peacock.” Thus is this collection peppered with pathos, humor and endless delight. ~ Rebecca Leo, The Flaws That Bind Burgess Needle is our guide through this thoughtful collection of poems recounting the sights, sounds, tastes, and aromas of Thailand in the late 1960s. He warns of the danger of landmines and cobras, yet lures us in with the scent of kerosene wicks, cigarettes and whiskey, and I found myself hearing the language of villagers, the lowing of buffalo, and the chattering monkeys as war is waged in the distance. Thai Comic Books is Needle examining his own misgivings and good intentions as he explores the hopes and fears of the people he meets. ~ Jonathan K. Rice, Iodine Poetry Journal Exotic but not alienating, memoir-like but musical and unpredictable, Thai Comic Books reminds us that good poetry is both timeless and borderless. ~ Jefferson Carter, Get Serious

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by Roy Jacobstein
Triquarterly, 2008

Suffused with tenderness and humor, the poems in this collection take readers on a journey through emotions, across national boundaries, and even along the geographic timeline. The quick mind of author Jacobstein creates fluid verse that can take on the singular geography of his native Michigan or the story of an immigrant cab driver with ease. His elegant rhyme and clever rhythm are suited equally to an ode to the stegosaurus and to his many poems for his adopted daughter. He moves readers from Washington, D.C., to Delhi, from adolescence to fatherhood, and between heaven and earth. With its immersive voice and sensitive examinations, this set of verses retains its sense of wonder at all the beautiful hellos and good-byes that humans come to know well in their too-short lifetimes.

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edited by Paul Hoover and Nguyen Do
Universal Publishers, 2008

The poems in Black Dog, Black Night highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previously unfamiliar to American readers: its remarkable contemporary voices. Celebrating Vietnam’s diverse and thriving literary culture, the poems collected here combine elements of French Romanticism, Russian Expressionism, American Modernism, and native folk stories into a Vietnamese poetic tradition marked by vivid imagery, powerful emotions, and inventive forms. Included here are 17 postmodern and experimental Vietnamese poets, including the founding editor of Skanky Possum magazine, as well as American poets of Vietnamese descent.

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by Damien Sin
Angsana Books, 1998

This selection of 50 poems is thoroughly personal, culled from the experiences of the author’s life. Childhood memories are reflected in poems with a playful use of words. In other poems, you can hear the plaintive cry of the poor and outcast. Although dark and laced with despair, the verses in the collection always offer hope and salvation. The poems reflect a spectrum of the author’s experiences, including early childhood, National Service, the Oxford education, the heroin addiction and various spells of incarceration. Sin uses inspiration, colors and sounds to express nameless, complex emotions and breaks through the obstacles of culture and grammar to speak the secret language of the heart. The language of a Singapore that cries out from the margins.

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edited by Kennon Breazeale
Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1999

“This truly impressive volume has stood the test of time and relevance as scholars and others alike continue to discuss the transnational maritime connections across Asia. One of the major accomplishments of this volume, however, is that rather than place the focus of the narrative on the rise of the European trading companies in the region during the Early Modern period, readers are rather encouraged to refocus on the rise of Ayutthaya as “one of the most powerful polities in this part of the world.” (Preface) The volume bears relevance to scholars of Thailand and Southeast Asia alone as it neatly traces the development of the second major Thai state, or rather state-like polity (after Sukhothai), in the region during its four hundred and sixteen year long apogee from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, through an assertion of the evidence mounted in this volume it is possible to assert that Ayutthaya bears not only regional but also global significance as the well protected hinterland location of this up-river polity provided a comfortable location of exchange between the Oceanic networks stretching from the Mediterranean through the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the straights of Melaka outward to the Vietnamese Coast, the South China Sea and Eastern Asia.”

From a review by William Noseworthy

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by Michael Smithies
Silkworm Books, 2000

This long-forgotten tale of the shipwreck off the coast of Africa of a Siamese embassy to Lisbon in 1686 lay buried in the text of a French book printed 300 years ago. The author of the text was the intrepid and intriguing Jesuit Tachard, who published accounts of his first two journeys to Siam. In his second book, written when he was King Narai’s personal envoy to Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI, Tachard relates the account of the shipwreck as told by one of its survivors, Ok-khun Chamnan Chaicong, who was accompanying Tachard on his return to France. Ok-khun Chamnan, during his odyssey as part of the aborted embassy to Portugal, spent nearly a year in Goa, where he learned Portuguese; a month traveling overland from Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, to the Cape of Good Hope; four months at the Dutch settlement at the Cape; six months in Batavia; and several months at sea. On his return to Siam in 1687 he was ordered to greet the French envoys La Loubre and Szberet soon after their arrival. The adventures of this Siamese khunnang did not end with his unsuccessful journey to Lisbon. He went on to Europe in 1688, visited the Riviera and Rome in winter, met the pope, and then in 1689 had an audience with Louis XIV. He converted to Catholicism and returned from Europe in 1690, disembarking at Balassor in Bengal before returning to Ayutthaya overland from Mergui. This extraordinary account has been translated into English for the first time, and is accompanied by three contemporary texts by Choisy, Tachard, and La Loubre describing the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

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by Stefan Eklof
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2006

Southeast Asia contains some of the world’s busiest shipping waters, particularly the Indonesian archipelago, the Straits of Malacca and South China Sea. The natural geography and human ecology of maritime Southeast Asia makes the area particularly apt for piracy. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that these waters are also the world’s most pirate-infested, accounting for over a third of the total number of pirate attacks world-wide. The figures have increased in recent years, as transnationally organized crime syndicates have extended their activities in the area. Meanwhile, the capacity of the state authorities in the region to suppress piracy appears to have declined, fuelling suspicions that sections of the maritime authorities are colluding with some of the organized pirate gangs that they are supposed to be combating. Not surprisingly, piracy has a long history in the region, and in several instances during the last 250 years, pirates have disrupted peaceful trade and communications. This text traces the shifting character and development of Southeast Asian piracy from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how political, economic, social and technological factors have contributed to change – but have by no means exterminated – the phenomenon.

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by Kenneth R. Hall
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011

This comprehensive history provides a fresh interpretation of Southeast Asia from 100 to 1500, when major social and economic developments foundational to modern societies took place on the mainland (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and the island world (Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines). Kenneth Hall explores this dynamic era in detail, which was notable for growing external contacts, internal adaptations of nearby cultures, and progressions from hunter-gatherer and agricultural communities to inclusive hierarchical states. In the process, formerly local civilizations became major participants in period’s international trade networks.

Incorporating the latest archeological evidence and international scholarship, Kenneth Hall enlarges upon prior histories of early Southeast Asia that did not venture beyond 1400, extending the study of the region to the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1511. Written for a wide audience of non-specialists, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in Asian and world history.

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by Shirley Fish
AuthorHouseUK, 2011

During the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the transpacific treasure galleons sailed annually from Manila to Acapulco. In Manila, the vessel was loaded with the scented spices of the East, luxurious silks from China, exquisite hand crafted lacquerware from Japan and a multitude of Oriental goods that the Spaniards of New Spain longed to own. The returning galleon from Acapulco to Manila, carried as much as 2.5 million silver pesos in payment of the goods sent to the New Spain in the previous year, as well as a yearly silver subsidy of 250,000 reales for the maintenance of the colonial government in the Philippines. But while the galleons mainly sailed alone and unaccompanied from Manila to Acapulco and vice versa, they were vulnerable to a host of calamities and misfortunes. A fire on board the vessel or a terrifying storm could end the voyage and the lives of every one on the ship even before the galleon was able to reach land. Additionally, the commanders of the galleons were always threatened by lurking pirates and privateers who preyed on the vessels and coveted the treasures they carried. The book describes in detail how the galleons were attacked at sea and how they fought against enemy vessels, as well as how many of the ships sank or were shipwrecked over the years. It also covers their management, construction, manning, weaponry, navigation, daily life on the ship, provisions, cargoes and voyages. The book contains an annotated list of the galleons sailing between the Philippines and Mexico from 1565 to 1815. This informative book is the first of its kind to cover such an expansive history of the Pacific galleons which up to this point had remained largely untold.

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by Lee Jones
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Drawing on the fields of political economy and historical sociology, Lee dispels the overwhelming consensus among scholars that members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) never interfere in the internal affairs of other states, and pioneers a new approach to the understanding of regional politics in Southeast Asia.

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by Lee Yoong Yoong
World Scientific Publishing Company, 2011

The initiative to establish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Community was adopted by the ten leaders at the 2003 Bali Summit in Indonesia. Since then, the concept of a community-building process in ASEAN has become an issue that attracts a great deal of attention from scholars and experts around the world.

ASEAN Matters! Reflecting on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations carries essays with different perspectives on critical issues relating to the three pillars in building the ASEAN Community, namely the ASEAN Political and Security Community; the ASEAN Economic Community; and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. In a nutshell, this book provides broad and invaluable insights into the role ASEAN plays in enhancing peace, prosperity, and stability in the Southeast Asian region.

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Edited by Michael G. Plummer and Chia Siow Yue
Insitute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009

The ASEAN Economic Community constitutes the most ambitious programme of economic cooperation in the developing world. Its goal is to create no less than a free flow of goods, services, foreign direct investment, and skilled labour, as well as a freer flow of capital, throughout the region. Implementing this agenda will be technically and politically difficult. Hence, understanding the potential economic “payoff” is of the essence. The goal of this book is to assess empirically the likely economic effects of the AEC on the ASEAN Member States and associated stakeholders. It mobilizes a number of techniques to do so, and finds that the likely effects will be large, even greater than the anticipated effects of the Single Market Program in Europe, for example. The AEC will help the region improve competitiveness, facilitate the creation of production networks, foster the diffusion of “best practices,” and help ASEAN project its interests more effectively in an increasingly integrated, global economy.

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by Jurgen Haacke
Routledge, 2005

Examines the origins of ASEAN’s diplomatic and security culture and goes on to assess whether it is likely to remain salient as the political, economic and security context in which regional leaderships operate is undergoing further change.

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by Amitav Acharya
Routledge, 2009 (2nd edition)

This second edition of Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia takes the excellent framework from Acharya’s first edition and brings it up-to-date, looking at ASEAN’s comprehensive and critical account of the evolution of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) norms and the viability of the ASEAN way of conflict management.

Key issues in determining the future stability of the Southeast Asian and Asia Pacific region are covered, including:

• intra-regional relations and the effect of membership expansion
• the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asian regionalism
• ASEAN’s response to terrorism and other transnational challenges
• debates over ASEAN’s non-interference doctrine
• the ‘ASEAN Security Community’ and the ASEAN Charter
• the impact of the rise of China and India and ASEAN’s relations with the US and Japan.

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