Pitches

These are pieces I'd like to write but haven't yet placed. Some are sketches I've been turning over for months; others are still at the idea stage. I'm publishing the list openly because the alternative (querying each one cold and hoping the right editor happens to be reading) has obvious inefficiencies. And also because making the list visible sometimes draws out the right reader.

The through-line of most of these is a longer research project on how physical spaces, material objects, and market forces have shaped Muslim perception and practice in the Indonesian archipelago across its pre-Islamic, colonial, and post-independence periods. A few sit at the edge of that project, and others wander off entirely.

Highlighted Pitches

Pitch: Waqf, Workshops, and Women’s Labor in Batik Communities

Reported essay pitch to explore the central role of female-founded waqf (Islamic charitable foundation endowments) founded by wealthy batik artisans from Indonesia’s northern coastal cities as Islamic legal-economic institutions.

Matthew Joseph "Majo" Martin“Majo” Martin

Other Ideas

• From Moral Economy to Market Absolutism
  How capitalism displaced older Islamic economic norms that treated markets as morally bounded institutions rather than autonomous systems.
• Inequality as a System Feature, Not a Bug
  Zakat and redistribution as structural justice—not charity—and why capitalism treats inequality as a necessary engine rather than a failure.
• Financialization and the Detachment from the Real Economy
  Why Islamic economics insists on tangible assets and productive activity, and what happens when finance floats free of both.
• Environmental Degradation & the Capitalist Growth Imperative
  Khilafah (stewardship) versus extractive economies: how the growth mandate conflicts with Islamic obligations to the land.
• Commodifying Everything: Why Islam Resists Total Market Logic
  What cannot be bought or sold under Islamic ethics—and why the boundary matters more now than ever.
• Labor Without Dignity: Exploitation & the Islamic Concept of Fair Work:
  Wages, contracts, and human worth: the gap between Islamic labor ethics and the realities of global supply chains.
• From Use Value to Endless Growth: Islam's Critique of Overproduction
  Consumption limits versus capitalist expansion logic, and the Islamic case for sufficiency over surplus.
• Speculation vs. Stewardship: Gharar in Contemporary Markets
  Why excessive uncertainty and abstraction violate Islamic principles—and what that means for derivatives, crypto, and venture speculation.
• Riba and the Debt Economy: Why Modern Finance Conflicts with Islamic Law
  Interest-based systems versus risk-sharing ethics, and the structural impossibility of reconciling the two.
• When Profit Becomes Absolute: Capitalism and the Islamic Limits on Accumulation
  How Islam places moral ceilings on wealth concentration that capitalism not only ignores but actively rewards bypassing.
• Pilgrimage, Port Cities, and Pattern Exchange
  How hajj routes and port cities influenced batik motifs, colors, and techniques—trade as a vehicle for aesthetic transmission.
• From Hand to Factory: The Moral Economy of Batik Today
  How industrialization challenges Islamic ethical frameworks around labor and value in an art form defined by human touch.
• The Mosque, the Market, and the Batik Workshop
  Spatial proximity between religious, commercial, and domestic spaces in batik towns—and why that clustering wasn't accidental.
• Batik as Resistance: Subtle Politics in Cloth
  How Muslim artisans encoded identity and resistance under colonial surveillance through pattern, color, and production method.
• Batik Kampungs: How Neighborhoods Became Economic Machines
  Physical clustering of workshops as both economic and religious ecosystems where production, prayer, and community were inseparable.
• Colonial Control of Batik Production and Dye Supply
  How Dutch policies reshaped who could produce batik and at what scale, severing artisans from their own supply chains.
• Court Batik vs. Market Batik: Competing Economic Systems
  The contrast between palace-controlled production and independent Muslim artisan economies—two moral worlds in one cloth tradition.
• Patterns of Belief: Islamic Aesthetics in Batik Motifs
  How aniconism, geometry, and cosmology shaped batik design in Muslim societies, embedding theology in textile.
• Batik as Trade Cloth: Java's Place in the Indian Ocean Economy
  How batik functioned as a commodity within Muslim trade networks linking Java, Arabia, India, and Africa.
• From Colonial Center to Heritage Zone: Who Owns Kota Tua Today?
  Tourism, preservation, and the tension between economic revival and cultural memory in a Muslim-majority city built on colonial extraction.
• Post-Colonial Ruins and Informal Economies in Kota Tua
  How abandoned colonial infrastructure became sites of informal trade, religious life, and survival for communities the state forgot.
• Batavia's Walls: Who Was Kept In, Who Was Kept Out
  Urban fortifications as tools of economic and cultural segregation in a Muslim archipelago—and the communities that formed outside them.
• Warehouses, Waqf, and Wealth: Competing Economic Logics
  Comparing VOC storage architecture with Islamic endowment systems: how physical space encoded fundamentally different moral economies.
• Masjid Al-Alam: Islam at the Margins of the Colonial City
  Why one of Jakarta's oldest mosques emerged outside Batavia's walls—and what that says about Islamic space under colonial rule.
• Canals, Disease, and Islamic Burial Practices in Batavia
  How Dutch canal systems altered health, death, and religious responses in the early Muslim population of colonial Jakarta.
• Glodok and the Spatial Management of Trade Communities
  How Dutch policies concentrated Chinese merchants near Kota Tua and what that meant for Muslim trade networks and urban Islam.
• Sunda Kelapa: A Thriving Port That Preceded Colonial Jakarta
  How pre-Islamic and early Islamic trade networks shaped Sunda Kelapa long before Dutch Batavia—and why the port still matters culturally.
• The VOC's Batavia: A City Engineered for Extraction & Exploitation
  Kota Tua as a physical system designed for monopoly trade, segregation, and control—and how this reshaped indigenous Muslim life.
• Fatahillah Square and the Economics of Public Punishment
  Why the square functioned as a theater of power, commerce, and deterrence in a Muslim-majority society under colonial rule.
• From Caravanserai to Container Port: Continuities in Islamic Trade Space
  The architectural and economic logic connecting medieval Islamic rest-stops to modern shipping infrastructure—hospitality as commerce.
• Mapping Power: Who Controlled Space in Muslim Societies
  How sultans, scholars, merchants, and colonizers competed to define which spaces mattered and who could access them.
• Informal Economies and Religious Life in Post-Colonial Cities
  How street vendors, unlicensed markets, and makeshift mosques sustain both economic and spiritual life where formal systems fail.
• Place Memory: When Colonial Buildings Become Islamic Spaces
  What happens when Muslim communities repurpose colonial architecture—and whether the building's original violence can be overwritten.
• How Oil Urbanism Changed Religious Space in the Gulf
  Petrodollar-funded cities built from scratch and what was lost when mosque construction became a state project rather than a community one.
• Ports, Pilgrimage, and Profit: The Economics of Movement
  How the hajj created trade corridors, financed port cities, and shaped the economic geography of the Muslim world for centuries.
• Why Islamic Cities Look the Way They Do: Economy Over Aesthetics
  The functional logic behind narrow streets, interior courtyards, and cul-de-sacs—privacy, trade access, and resource sharing over visual order.
• The Afterlife of Colonial Infrastructure in Muslim Cities Today
  Railways, ports, and administrative buildings designed for extraction now serve (or constrain) post-colonial Muslim urban life.
• Madrasas, Markets, and Money Flows
  How Islamic schools were financed through adjacent commercial activity—and why separating education from economy is a modern invention.
• How Colonial Borders Disrupted Islamic Economic Regions
  Trade networks that followed religious and kinship ties were severed by European borders drawn for administrative convenience.
• The Pasar (Bazaar) as a Moral Economy in Islamic History
  The market as a space with ethical rules—price fairness, weight honesty, spatial organization—not just a site of exchange.
• Architecture as Economic Policy in Muslim Societies
  How building choices (materials, scale, placement) functioned as economic signals and policy tools in pre-colonial Muslim states.
• How Colonial Railways Reshaped Muslim Trade Networks
  Rail lines built for plantation exports cut across existing Muslim commercial routes, redirecting wealth and breaking old partnerships.
• Streets, Souks, and Social Order in Pre-Colonial Muslim Cities
  How physical urban layout both reflected and enforced social hierarchies, guild territories, and religious boundaries.
• Waqf, Land, and Power: The Spatial Economics of Islamic Charity
  How endowed land created permanent economic infrastructure, and why colonial powers targeted waqf as a threat to their own land regimes.
• Colonial Zoning and the Rewriting of Islamic Urban Life
  European spatial categories (residential, commercial, industrial) imposed on cities where those boundaries had never existed.
• Port Cities and Piety: Islam, Commerce, & the Indian Ocean
  How maritime trade and Islamic practice reinforced each other across a network of port cities from East Africa to Southeast Asia.
• How Markets Shape Faith: Urban Trade & Islamic Practice Before Colonial Rule
  The argument that commerce didn't just coexist with Islam but actively shaped its legal development, ritual timing, and spatial forms.