Asian and Middle Eastern Islam

By Robert W. Hefner - Spero News - USA
Tuesday, November 28, 2006

We in the West have long identified Islam with Arab culture. In one sense this is reasonable enough. After all, the Quran and the canonical accounts of the actions and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed (the Hadith) are all written in Arabic, and Muslim scholars insist that a proper study of these sacred works is possible only in Arabic.

The holy lands to which Muslims daily turn in prayer, and to which they are enjoined to make the pilgrimage at least once in their life if they have the means, are also located in Arab lands. And during the first century of their spectacular expansion from the Arabian peninsula north into Syria, westward to Spain, and eastward toward India beginning in the seventh century C.E., the armies that created one of the most cosmopolitan empires Eurasia has ever seen were Arab-led and Arab-staffed.

Beyond these early historical facts, however, the ethnic and civilizational complexity of the Muslim world becomes clear. Ethnic Arabs comprise only about 15-18 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. More than 60 percent of the Muslim population lives not in the Middle East, but in Asia. The single largest Muslim-majority society in the world is Indonesia, whose population of 230 million is 89 percent Muslim. The greatest single regional concentration of Muslims lies in the Indian subcontinent, with its almost 400 million Muslims.

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Even as we acknowledge these Asian influences on historical Islam, the question remains, Is there a difference between Asian and Arab Islam? Answering this question requires making an important distinction between Islam’s scriptures and normative commentaries, on the one hand, and Islam as a civilization or a set of “lived” cultures, on the other.
With regard to Islam in this first, “normative” sense, the simplest answer to the “is Asia different?” question is “no”—a “no” that can be qualified, but a “no” nonetheless.

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Popular Culture
As much as Asian Muslims have always differed in their religious practice from their Middle Eastern brothers and sisters, they have differed almost as much among themselves. When speaking of Asian Islam, it is helpful to distinguish between two primary Asian civilizational streams: a Central and South Asian tradition, on one hand, and a Southeast Asian tradition, on the other. Each of these has its own variants, but one can draw a broad South-Southeast Asian contrast.

First, some commonalities. South and Southeast Asian Islam have long had in common the tradition of mysticism, or Sufism. Asian Islam has always been deeply mystical. Sufism is actually a congeries of traditions. Most variants are quite orthodox in their profession of the faith, not deviating too much from the letter of religious law.

However, during the early centuries of Islam’s diffusion to South and Southeast Asia, a number of folk schools of Sufism developed that were deeply syncretic or heterodox. In South Asia, some of these blended Hindu concepts of divinity with Islamic concepts of sainthood. To this day in India, some of the shrines of great Sufi saints are also visited by Hindus and Sikhs, although this practice is in decline.

In the 14th century, when mass conversion to Islam began, Hinduism and Buddhism were the religions of state in much of island Southeast Asia. Unlike India, however, where most Hindus did not convert, the Hindu-Buddhist tradition in Southeast Asia suffered a near-total collapse. In Indonesia and Malaysia today, the only surviving indigenous Hindus are those on Bali and in a small corner of neighboring Java. But folk Sufism in Indonesia and Malaysia contained a number of sects that were vigorously syncretic. Their syncretism drew on indigenous tradition of ancestral veneration and pantheistic naturalism. These “heterodox” Sufisms survived well into the twentieth century, but are declining today.

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Conclusion
What conclusions can we draw, then, about the relationship of Arab and Asian Islam? The scholarly and normative tradition of Islam in both regions has always been more closely aligned than were the folk and populist Islamic traditions indigenous to each area. The fractious tribalism and honor-and-vengeance politics that is so much a part of politics in much of the Middle East has some counterpart in South Asia but very little in Southeast Asia.

The same applies to the patriarchal traditions of clanship and lineage that confined women. Although this tradition of gender and honor made its way to South Asia, it failed to make the passage to Southeast Asia. On gender matters, Southeast Asian Muslims remain among the most liberal in the Muslim world.

With the rise of Islamic reform movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, Islamic culture in both the Middle East and Asia has become more normative and somewhat more alike. But since the reformists themselves disagree on just what is required to be a good Muslim, we shouldn’t expect Islam in the Middle East and Asia to become drably unitarian any time soon.

The most significant influence on Muslim politics in both regions has been not Islam but the nation-state. Even as scholarly traditions of Islam have converged, most of what goes on in the national political arena shows the distinctive influence of country-specific state structures, alliances, and conflicts.

On Asian Islam’s political future, we will probably continue to see a cautious and generally democratic development of Muslim politics in India. Bangladesh is still a hopeful case, but much will depend there on the state’s ability to handle its enormous economic problems. In Pakistan, the situation is more serious. Although there is an intermittently effective system of national elections, the tradition of democratic Islam in this country is weak. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq may yet push the tradition over the edge. Pakistan’s future is also tethered to the outcome of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Malaysia and Indonesia look far more promising. Notwithstanding a conservative Islamist opposition in Malaysia and a tiny terrorist fringe in Indonesia, both of these countries have begun to develop an impressive system of democratic elections. Both also have established traditions of pluralist and democratic Islam. If they continue to develop economically and link market development to efforts to revitalize Islamic education, as the moderate leadership in both countries is attempting, these countries will jump to the front of the global struggle to forge a pluralist and democratic Islam.