South-East Asian localisations of Islam and participation within a globalumma,c.1500–1800

Abstract

Situated as it is in geographic distance from the so-called ‘central lands’ of Islamicate civilisation in the Middle East, South-East Asia has often been regarded by modern scholarship as an ‘exceptional’ case, with discussions tending to focus on issues such as ‘syncretism’. While some of the forms that Islamic thought and practice take in various parts of the region may be distinctive, however, it would be mistaken to assume from this that somehow the religious texts and traditions of the region are necessarily ‘less Islamic’ than those of Muslim societies in the Middle East, or that Islam was merely a ‘thin, flaking veneer’ upon more solid foundations of Indic and local cultures. Often implicit in such views are ahistorical and essentialised understandings of ‘Islam’ conceptualised in relation to a rather limited range of modern reformist conceptions that persist across various academic fields, as well as in popular perceptions. There are rich traditions of Islamic religious thought and practice throughout South-East Asia, comprising a diverse array of local expressions. Mainland Muslim communities, including Cham, Malay and other ethnic minority populations in what are today the nation states of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines have complex histories in which the mutual interaction of Islamicate, Indic and indigenous cultural forms have been dynamically negotiated. However, due to constraints of space, this chapter will focus on developments in the Indonesian archipelago.

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