Abstract The Korean Peninsula is often neglected in investigations on Islam in East Asia. The region already occupies the conceptual peripheries of studies on Muslim societies. During the two decades after the Korean War (1950–1953), however, Seoul hosted a small yet active community of Korean Muslim converts and visitors from places such as Malaysia/Singapore, Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The early Korean Muslim leaders, some of whom first encountered Islam in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, attempted to plug themselves into transnational Islamic networks and politics in the transformed context of the Cold War. Internally, Korean Muslim leaders advocated for the utility of Islam as a diplomatic resource for the South Korean government in the struggle against communism, thereby reformulating pre-war articulations of Islam policy that had circulated across China and Japan, as well as narratives on unified Islamic civilization with an inherent cultural essence. Externally, they forged educational and philanthropic networks by connecting with Muslim diasporic figures in the East and Southeast Asian sphere, such as Ibrahim Omar al-Saqqāf, the Hadrami Arab consul of the Saudi consulate in Singapore and an agent of the World Muslim League in Mecca. By situating the emergent Korean Muslim community in Seoul within a regional and trans-regional religio-political nexus, this article repositions it as having formed through encounters with modern state(s) and power, and through interactions with Muslim diasporic agents who (re-)directed post-war mobility channels.
Janice Hyeju Jeong (Tue,) studied this question.