Dominik Müller named Leader of Junior Research Group for the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation

Dominik M. Müller was accepted into the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in order to establish a junior research group on the topic “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia”.

Social anthropologist Dominik M. Müller was accepted into the renowned Emmy Noether Programme of the DFG. Starting on 1 October 2016, in cooperation with the Department ‘Law & Anthropology’, he will establish a junior research group on the topic “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia”. The project will be funded with 1.1m Euro over the next five years.

What happens when states attempt to standardize certain versions of Islam and to model bureaucratic norms and procedures in its likeness? Which social and judicial dynamics are influenced by state actors aiming to shape Islamic discourses through bureaucratization strategies to further their political interests? Lastly, how do the inner workings of state Islamic institutions function? Together with three PhD candidates, Dominik Müller will tackle these research questions in Southeast Asia – particularly Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore – from a social anthropological perspective.

The project approaches the bureaucratization of Islam as a social phenomenon, which reaches far beyond its institutional boundaries. The common analytical focus of all projects is the state exerting “classificatory power”, its negotiation on the micro-level, and the manifold reactions of social actors to any attempted exertion of power. Cooperating closely with the Department ‘Law & Anthropology’, the project also intends to develop a transregional approach considering especially the course of the relationship between state and Islam in Europe.

Dominik Müller earned his PhD degree with summa cum laude from the Excellence Cluster “The Formation of Normative Orders” at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In addition to his post-doctoral work at the Excellence Cluster in Frankfurt (2012–2016), he held fellowships and visiting positions at Stanford University (2013), University of Brunei Darussalam (2014), University of Oxford (2015), and National University of Singapore (2016). He lectured at the universities of Frankfurt, Mainz, and Heidelberg.

Müller’s dissertation on the emergence of “Pop-Islamism” in Malaysia was awarded the Research Award of the Frobenius Society in 2012 and was published by Routledge in 2014. Müller was named a member of the Young Academy of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz in 2016. His research on Islam, sharia law, and social change in southeast Asia was published in notable journals such as Globalizations, Asian Survey, South East Asia Research, Indonesia and the Malay World, Paideuma, and Internationales Asienforum.