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. Islamic Belief Made Visual. This essay looks at Islam's influence on the arts of Southeast Asia.
Shahnama: The Book of Kings. Learn about the political and social changes under Iran's Safavid Dynasty by examining the Book of Kings. Religion in the Philippines. The Philippines boasts to be the only Christian nation in Asia. Learn about its religious diversity and history.
Islamic Calligraphy and the Illustrated Manuscript. The calligraphic tradition, which grew out of the demand for illuminated Qur'ans, became an important art form worldwide. An essay about the spread of Islam into Southeast Asia and how religion and expression fit within societal contexts.
Introduction to Southeast Asia. Cite this Article Format. Szczepanski, Kallie. Uthman dan Fodio and the Sokoto Caliphate. The Role of Islam in Slavery in Africa.
Islamic Civilization: Timeline and Definition. Biography of Tamerlane, 14th Century Conqueror of Asia. Twelver Shiites and the Cult of Martyrdom. Sunni Versus Shiite Conflict Explained. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for ThoughtCo. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. They were now faced with modern transformation over a relatively short time and mainly under pressure from the European powers. Unlike Europe and North America, Muslim territories did not get the opportunity to evolve into modern states over time. Once their authority was firmly established, the Europeans governed with an iron fist, with the help of elites trained by the colonial masters.
The earliest western idea borrowed by Muslim modernizers especially in the nineteenth century was enlightened absolutism. Administrative and military reform within the decaying Ottoman Empire, for example, depended largely on the enlightened despotic model.
Muslims responded to the challenge of the technologically and militarily superior west in one of two ways. One segment of the population accepted western education and adopted the western way of life, excluding religion from their discourse almost entirely.
Others started defining politics in religious idiom, insisting that Islam offered a complete way of life distinct from that offered by the colonial powers and their modern ideas. The beginning of the modern era thus marked the beginning of ideological conflicts within the Muslim world about politics and governance. Until then, traditional Islamic scholarship had focused on the divine message Tafseer and Hadith , philosophy and reasoning Kalam and jurisprudence Fiqh.
With notable exceptions, Muslims had paid little attention to political and economic theory. But the alternative explanation is that Muslim politics were and remain plural and changing, which renders redundant any monolithic interpretations of fourteen centuries of history by historians or by religious ideologues.
In case of Pakistan which included Bangladesh until , there was another phenomenon at work. Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in It felt threatened by a much larger India that did not willingly accept partition and its elite was insecure about the future of the newly independent, multi-ethnic country. 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.
As historian Jean Taylor has noted, mosques were a meeting place for communities that identified themselves as Islamic. The mosques served as places where Muslim men gathered to pray together on Fridays; they also served as boarding houses for traveling students, scholars, and traders. People and ideas passed through these Islamic spaces, leaving their imprint on the landscape. Since Islam discourages the depiction of the human body, many mosques are decorated with geometric designs and letters from Arabic or an Arabic derived script.
To foster communities of believers, all mosques have a place for washing hands and feet before praying and a clear orientation toward the holy city of Mecca. In Malay languages, direction toward Mecca is called the kiblat, from the Arabic word for the same thing. This is the direction toward which Muslims should turn to pray.
The first mosques on Java are found on the north coast where Chinese traders and scholars would stop on their way to other parts of the trading and religious world of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.
The Chinese communities were important for attracting people and resources to these north coast cities. Starting in the seventh century there is evidence that Chinese scholars stopped in south Sumatra, the larger island to the north and west of Java, to spend a few years studying at large Buddhist monasteries before moving on to Buddhist monasteries in India.
Chinese travelers and traders may have been among the first of the various travelers from Arabia, India, and East Asia who brought Islam to Java. The Islamic rulers on Java who first took Islam as their state religion in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries combined features from the Islamic courts of Mughal India, from local traditions and from Chinese-Buddhist and Confucian traditions.
The earliest mosques in Java were built in Demak, Cirebon, and Kudus in the sixteenth century. They have been restored in recent times and still retain many of their earlier features.
The mosques that we see today in Southeast Asia only began to adopt the Middle Eastern features of minarets, domes, and arched windows in the late nineteenth century. The mythological characters credited with bringing Islam to Java are the nine wali, or saints. The stories suggest that several of the Islamic saints came from Arabia, and almost all of them are associated with the founding of Islamic kingdoms on the north coast of Java in Demak, Banten, Cirebon, Kudus, and Gresik.
The conversions to Islam that followed in the wake of these saints were the result of mysticism or warfare. Sunan Kalijaga, the most famous of the nine wali, is a transition saint who links the older Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit kingdom with the first Muslim state of Demak.
The stories say he performed a miracle in helping to build the mosque of Demak by collapsing the distance between the mosque in Demak and the main mosque in Mecca. By doing that, he was able to align the kiblat of the two mosques.
In this process, both the mosque in Mecca and the mosque in Demak had to shift, representing the localization of Islam in Java and the impact of Islam in other parts of the world on the traditions in the region of Mecca.
Sunan Kalijaga is also credited with bringing music, dance, and puppet theater to Java, thus claiming for Islam the Javanese performing arts that preceded it.
Scholars of Javanese traditions have suggested that stories and theatrical repertoires began to absorb Islamic influences in the wake of Islamic travelers, traders, and teachers entering into the South China Sea area. These new stories were created to meet the tastes of the rising Islamic commercial elites inhabiting the new Islamic city-states that had arisen on the north coast of Java in the course of the sixteenth century.
It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and perhaps even earlier, that Islamic and Hindu-Buddhist stories blended in the South and Southeast Asian worlds. What is notable in this mixing of tales and stories is the persistence of older story repertoires and characters. The Ramayana and Mahabharata stories from India remain to this day the most popular stories on the islands of Java and Bali.
While specifically Islamic elements are difficult to see in what has long been considered the Hindu-Javanese literatures of Java, we must first ask what would make an Islamic tale different from a Hindu or Buddhist one. The Islamic elements that we find in much of the literature—both oral and written—of Java include several Islamic elements: a stress on genealogy, the appearance of wahyu, a sign of divine grace usually in the form of a ball of light, and the prohibition of disseminating mystical knowledge to the uninitiated.
Kings and commoners are often singled out for greatness through the visible light that is seen to descend upon them at some significant turning point in their lives. The Serat Kandha [Books of Tales] texts that recorded these eclectic stories are filled with such signs of divine grace. Wahyu stories remain among the most popular stories in the shadow theater repertories that continue to be performed on Java today.
In the Serat Kandha texts, genealogies link the historical kings of Java to the mythological gods and heroes of Indic stories and also to Adam, the founding figure of Islam and the Judeo-Christian traditions of the Old Testament as well. The stress on genealogy in Javanese story-worlds evokes the Islamic sense of transmission of the second most sacred texts of Islam, the collections of hadith or stories of the life and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
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