Alexander Wain

Teaching Fellow

  • School of Divinity

Contact details

Address

Street

New College
The Mound

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH1 2LX

Availability

  • Wednesday 12pm-1pm or Thursday 10am-11am (Tower Room 3.01)

Biography

Background

Alexander Wain is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, having previously taught at Liverpool John Moores University (2007-2010) and the University of St Andrews (2021-2025). From 2015 to 2021, he was a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He continues to edit the Islam section of the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, an evolving online academic resource that aims to be world leading.

Qualifications

DPhil (Oxford)

MA (Manchester)

BA(hons) (Manchester)

Undergraduate teaching

Studying Religions

Theories of Religion

Science, Sorcery, and Wonder in Islam

Postgraduate teaching

Theory and Method in the Study of Religion

Research summary

My primary research interests lie in tracing the origins and intellectual development of Islam in Southeast Asia, notably modern-day Indonesia and Malaysia, with an ancillary focus on China’s hui-hui Muslim ethnic grouping. 

Current research interests

My ongoing research explores the rich contours of Malay Muslim intellectual history, from the 15th century down to the present. Concerned with both elite forms of knowledge (notably kalam and philosophical Sufism) and the popular religiosities (including magic and sorcery) that often overlapped with those disciplines, I attempt to demonstrate how Malay Muslims were not merely passive recipients of a barely understood Islamicity (as is often assumed), but active participants in the formation of a unique Muslim tradition whose historical normativity is often overshadowed by more modern, essentialised notions of Islam.

Past research interests

My previous research was concerned with the dynamics of Islamisation across both the Malay and Javanese worlds, from the seventh down to the seventeenth centuries. By interrogating the historical narratives, emerging archaeologies, and religious cultural forms of 21 early Islamic kingdoms, I successfully recreated the complex and multivalent commercial, intellectual, and cultural networks that, stretching from the Middle East across the Indian Ocean towards China, allowed Muslims of Arab, Persian, Indian, Malay, and Chinese descent to initiate a religious revolution that continues to define much of Southeast Asia today.
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