Islam - Southeast Asia - Literature And Philosophy, Law, Islam And The State
local century
The Muslim population of Southeast Asia is in excess of 250 million. It is the religion of the majority in Indonesia and Malaysia, with significant minorities in Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Islam has a five-hundred-year history in this region. Importantly, it was not imposed by conquest but freely adopted, initially by royal and upper classes and then percolating down to the masses. Of course its progress has been uneven, despite organized missionary efforts that began in the seventeenth century and continue into the early twenty-first century. However, the result has been that Islam in Southeast Asia is expressed in local idioms reflecting local cultural norms. These variations do not mean that the basics of revelation are or have been abandoned but that localized expressions incorporating indigenous philosophies are primary. To "know Islam" is thus to know the local forms.
Additional Topics
The tradition of writing on these subjects dates from the seventeenth century. It is firmly within the Islamic tradition and consists of translation and commentary on the fundamentals of doctrine, accounts of the life of the Prophet, and, most important, speculative work on the outer limits of the permissible in doctrine—sometimes subsumed under the rubric of "Sufi" texts. Thi…
Before the establishment of Dutch and British rule (from about 1800), the Muslims of Southeast Asia had sophisticated polities based on Muslim state practice in the Middle East. From thence were derived theories and practices of sovereignty, legitimacy of rule, public order and duty, and the distribution and exercise of power. However, the European powers replaced this tradition with colonial (&#x…
With the ending of colonial repression in the 1950s, it became possible once more for Islam to have a public face in Indonesia and Malaysia. As well as establishing the religious courts and statutes of shari'a, both states introduced ministries or departments of religion and councils of muftis or ulema (authorities in Islamic law) and, most importantly, permitted political parties that prom…
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