This will allow them to make sense of more advanced works concerning the formal rules laid out in Islamic law defining social interaction, as well as those pertaining to the inculcation of moral values akhlaq. At all stages a teacher ensures that the individual student has properly mastered a text before advancing to any higher stage of learning. Still, even in these traditional schools—which may be found throughout Southeast Asia and which allow the movement of individuals across national borders— there is a blurring between global religious practice and indigenous cultural expressions.
Even when they are in Arabic, many of the songs learned or the texts mastered are related to a specifically Southeast Asian source of inspiration, either from a creator born in the region who assumed a place of importance in Mecca, such as Nawawi of Banten , or at the hands of a foreigner who once sojourned through its mosques and fields, such as Nur al-Din al-Raniri d.
Furthermore, in recent times students have begun to popularize and rephrase many of the popular poems sung in praise of the Prophet. Some musical groups have reached wide audiences by incorporating Arabic lyrics, and Arabic songs have been composed and sung in Southeast Asia with the aim of propagating certain messages among a broader community of Muslims—ranging from gender equity to jihad. Many still feel themselves to be full members of the Muslim community umma , though.
For, while they may not fully understand the literal rules of the provisions of Islamic law, they feel that the texts in which it is explained are part of their own Muslim cultural heritage, with which they might connect at rites of passage such as birth, marriage, and the commemoration of death.
Just as the colonial regimes sought to monitor and regulate the pilgrimage and Islamic schools, the modern state often attempts to play a role in defining religious and cultural practices at both the level of religious obligation and as officially-sanctioned cultural expression. The most obvious interventions may be seen in the specifically national mobilizations for the Hajj. Each year, for example, Indonesia supplies one of the largest contingents of pilgrims over , people for the annual series of ceremonies that take place in Mecca and its surroundings.
To get there on such a massive scale necessitates a large degree of national coordination, including the provision of financial support.
Beyond finance and coordination though, states also play a proactive role in determining what variants of religious practice may be tolerated, particularly when those variants seem inimical to the government itself or which contest, sometimes violently, the depth of religious commitment of their fellow countrymen. Less tangible, but no less important, than contesting expressions of Islam framed in political terms or in alternative dress and practice, is the role of the state in presenting the style of religiosity felt to represent best the genius of its peoples.
Sometimes the gaze is directed outward, sometimes inward. But while the illuminations of Aceh have a distinct pedigree, many of the others are modern inventions designed to help Indonesians to think of the history of their country and its artistic expressions as an inevitable and natural process of combination given added meaning by Islam. This is not to say, however, that this has always been the case, or that such increasingly Islamic views of history are universally accepted.
Both Indonesia and Malaysia include substantial non-Muslim minorities, minorities that at times have become scapegoats during periods of economic uncertainty or because of the taint of imagined collaboration with colonial forces or even as fifth columnists for international communism. Its best-known author, the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer, even downplayed the role of Islam in the making of Indonesia and focussed instead on the powerful ideas of unity engendered by resistance to Dutch colonialism across the archipelago.
Here we might think of the many popular groups that fuse the musical styles of the Middle East and Southeast Asia with a presentation owing something to western music videos, or the instructional literature for children now replete with illustrations drawn in the style of Japanese manga. And, again, there is a sphere of personal reflection and reaction that can seem outside the control of the state or that strives to take more from within the Southeast Asian artistic tradition than what lies beyond, whether in poetic musings on experiences in the mosque, or A.
Certainly one gains a more intimate view of the inner spirituality of Southeast Asian Muslims in such expressions. Even so, while Muslims are joined to each other by the medium of a religious inheritance in their archipelagic homelands, as well as to the broader Muslim community, in the expression of that identity they are undeniably drawing at all times from the images and sounds of the wider, shared world.
Unsupported Browser Detected. Islam in Southeast Asia. The Study Circle and Its Absence Whereas Arabic has long been studied by Muslims in Southeast Asia, due to its elevated status as the language of revelation and its importance for connection with the Middle East as the source of Islam, and even though it has made its contribution to the oral and written cultures of the region, the fact remains that Southeast Asians require the aid of teachers and glossaries to make the texts of Islam comprehensible and applicable in daily life.
Religio-Cultural Intersections and the Modern State Just as the colonial regimes sought to monitor and regulate the pilgrimage and Islamic schools, the modern state often attempts to play a role in defining religious and cultural practices at both the level of religious obligation and as officially-sanctioned cultural expression.
Additional Background Reading. Unlike other parts of the world, Islam spread in Southeast Asia without a major conquest. It came on ships and boats. It travelled with spices and silk.
Swords remained in the scabbards, there was hardly any bloodshed. The benefit of aligning with rising Muslim powers was obvious, but sufis played an important role too.
Looking back at the Islamic roots of the vast archipelago, which straddles the Indian and Pacific oceans, it has attained significance despite the ongoing debate about whether Indonesians are moving away from their so-called pluralistic version of Islam. What is interesting about how the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad spread in Southeast Asia, says historian Dr Carool Kersten, is that it did not involve a conquest, and that it happened gradually and surprisingly very late.
Muslim forces began venturing out of the Arab lands in the 8th century - they were in control of Spain by the s and the famed young military commander, Muhammad Bin Qasim, had just invaded Sindh and Multan, in what is now Pakistan, a few years earlier. A 13th century tombstone of a local ruler, Sultan Malik al Salih, found in Sumatra, is often cited as a historical marker for when Islam started to make inroads in the region.
Salih, who controlled a principality in the northernmost Indonesian island of Sumatra, had converted to Islam. What has really baffled historians and archeologists is his tombstone, which is designed with the motifs and patterns of what you can find in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Gujarat is known for risk-taking traders and businessmen who would not have hesitated in travelling to far-off regions to find a livelihood. Among them were many Muslims. Trade routes have been instrumental to the spread of Islam.
Muslims from China have also left an imprint. During the cold war, anti-Communist Muslim rulers and western policy-makers saw the Islamic revivalists or Islamists as potential allies. This alliance reached its peak during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, which we all now know played a significant role in polarizing Muslim communities and transforming political Islamists into militant Jihadists.
Invited by pro-western governments to assist Islamic education and charities, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states sent missionaries to Asian Muslim communities primarily to purify their understanding of Islam.
Strong Wahabi and neo-Wahabi groups now exist in all Asian Muslim countries, weakening the local traditions of pluralism. Current Trends: Islamist parties exist in all Asian Muslim countries with varying degrees of support.
Not all groups organized for politics in the name of Islam pose a threat to global security or the interests of the United States. But the sentiment, by all accounts, in Asian Muslim nations is clearly anti-American. Nearly half of the Pakistanis surveyed trusted Osama bin Laden to do the right thing as opposed to negligible percentage having that faith in President Bush. At the same time, most Muslims also support a prominent — and in some cases expanding — role for Islam and religious leaders in the political life of their countries.
Religious hardliners are obviously influencing the political agenda of others, non-fundamentalists, in Muslim countries and can create an environment conducive to even harsher, more puritanical and anti-American interpretations of religion. If ten percent of that one- percent decides to commit to a radical agenda, we are looking at the potential for a larger recruitment pool for groups like al-Qaeda. Several reasons are commonly identified for the rise of political and radical Islam throughout the Muslim world.
Anti-American sentiment among Muslims is often attributed to virtually unconditional U. The Middle East factors into Asian Muslim politics but there are other, more local, reasons for radicalization of Asian Muslim communities. The Afghan and Kashmir wars have created large cadres of Jihadists in Pakistan who have, until recently, been trained and supported by the state. Unresolved conflicts in southern Philippines and Indonesia feed radicalism in Southeast Asia in a manner similar to the role of the Kashmir issue in South Asia.
But in each case, the absence of ideological alternatives and the declining performance of the state in caring for its citizens is a major factor, which then can be exploited by well-funded and organized radical groups. That local factors rather than global U. In case of Bangladesh, the country has a functioning democracy with genuine competition for power.
Young Bangladeshis have secular political avenues to channel their energies. The fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami Islamic Party can openly contest elections and is currently part of the ruling coalition. The open political environment and absence of a major dispute that leads the state to encourage radical insurgents has contained the influence of the Islamists in Bangladesh.
The people of Bangladesh have no less empathy for the Palestinians than the Pakistanis but the momentum for radicalism found in Pakistan is not there in Bangladesh.
In Pakistan, on the other hand, the military and intelligence services tightly control political space. For years, the Pakistani State recruited and trained religious radicals in pursuit of its strategic ambitions in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Since then, they have pressed for Taliban-style Islamization in the Northwest Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, where they control the provincial administration.
Because of their ties to the military, the initials of the alliance of religious parties Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal — MMA—are often referred by critics to mean the Military Mullah Alliance.
Pakistan remains home to many extremist groups. What can the U. Do: Promoting a culture of non-violent dialogue and tolerance, and fostering acceptance of contemporary democratic ideas and norms must be an integral part of any U. The same surveys that showed declining support for the U. That is a sign that the U. Such moderate democratic Muslim allies would answer questions about the role of the state, political practices and institutions, education and knowledge acquisition, and the economy from a perspective contradictory to that of the anti-Western Islamists.
Instead of Islamist revivalism, which insists on rejection of western values and modern ideas, the core belief of moderate Muslims hinges on Muslim reformation.
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