Islam in Southeast Asia: Country, Area & Regional Profiles/Data

Home to approximately one-fifth of the world's Muslim population, Indonesia and Malaysia are often overlooked or misrepresented in media discourses about Islam. Islam is a religion but there is also a popular culture, or popular cultures of Islam that are mass mediated, commercialized, pleasure-filled, humorous, and representative of large segments of society. During the last forty years, popular forms of Islam, targeted largely towards urbanized youth, have played a key role in the Islamisation of Indonesia and Malaysia. This book focuses on these forms and the accompanying practices of production, circulation, marketing, and consumption of Islam. Dispelling the notion that Islam is monolithic, militaristic, and primarily Middle Eastern, the book emphasizes its dynamic, contested, and performative nature in contemporary South East Asia. Written by leading scholars alongside media figures, such as Rhoma Irama and Ishadi SK, the case studies although not focused on theology per se, illuminate how Muslims (and non-Muslims) in Indonesia and Malaysia make sense of their lives within an increasingly pervasive culture of Islamic images, texts, film, songs, and narratives.

This study focuses on Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. It is intended as the beginning of a knowledge base for policy makers and analysts. The author was Dean of the School of Intelligence Studies at the National Defense Intelligence College and Professor of Intelligence (Middle East). The material here is organized thematically around countries and five questions: (1) How did Islam come to the country? Or how did the country come to be predominately Islamic? (2) How central has Islam (as opposed to other political ideologies) been in the political history of the country? (3) What is the offi cial policy of the current government of the country toward Islam? (4) What principal Islamist movements exist within the country (or in exile)? (5) What is the prognosis concerning the future of contemporary Islamic movements in the country? The current volume is a projected Volume One of a multi-volume study.

Southeast Asia has the world's largest Muslim population - Indonesia alone is home to more Muslims than the entire Middle East - yet nowhere in the region has a theocratic government emerged. Instead, Southeast Asian Islam is characterized by heterodox local traditions. Muslim societies today are torn between radical Islamist reformers calling for Shari'ah law and secular governments using law to contain and co-opt it. The result is a tension between state laws and institutions and Islamic alternatives. These three volumes provide an up-to-date, expert account of this complex contest across contemporary Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei in a comprehensive form not attempted for decades, including coverage on a range of areas including legal doctrine, substantive laws, judicial decision-making, the administration of religion, intellectual debate, and state policy developments.

In a novel approach to the field of Islamic politics, this provocative new study compares the evolution of Islamic populism in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, to the Middle East. Utilising approaches from historical sociology and political economy, Vedi R. Hadiz argues that competing strands of Islamic politics can be understood as the product of contemporary struggles over power, material resources and the result of conflict across a variety of social and historical contexts. Drawing from detailed case studies across the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the book engages with broader theoretical questions about political change in the context of socio-economic transformations and presents an innovative, comparative framework to shed new light on the diverse trajectories of Islamic politics in the modern world.