Introduction: Religion in Transregional Connections: Indonesia and Malaysia

What connects the latest fashion item from Dubai with religious tourists travelling through Israel and Indonesia ’ s ambitions to export Islamic education abroad? This special section of TRaNS draws these themes together and proposes that a central common denominator of all three is their reflection of inten-sified transregional dynamics and mobilities. The articles feature a number of innovative perspectives on the cross-regional religious connectivities of Indonesia and Malaysia. 1 They mirror the increasing schol-arly attention paid to the international entanglements of these two countries ’ religious ecospheres and, more broadly, the transregional dynamics of Southeast Asia. Moreover, they attend to the growing turn toward conceiving of social, political, economic, and religious phenomena as able to transgress geo-graphical boundaries, thereby forming new ‘ regional ’ or spatial entities that are not necessarily defined by territorial or maritime space. These entities may consist of and/or become shaped by emotions, spiritual beliefs, and other forms and notions of belonging and connectivity (cf. Derichs 2017). They function at various scales, meaning the articles attend to local, translocal, national, transnational, regional, and transregional arenas. We subsume the scales addressed here in a rather pragmatic manner under the term transregional — bearing in mind that a region may, in the described sense, be conceptualised in diverse and encompassing ways. ’