Living Islamically in the periphery: Muslim discourse, institution, and intellectual tradition in Southeast Asia

摘要

Despite the rapid expansion of publications on Islam and Muslims in Southeast Asia, some problematic assumptions and characterisations persist. Within religious studies, Southeast Asian Islam has so often been cast as peripheral to the larger story of the spread of Islam in world history. Scholars working within such a paradigm argue that the religious practices of Southeast Asian Muslims are all too often mere imitations or derivatives of the pure version of Islam found in the Arab world. From this, it follows then that more attention therefore should be given to scrutinising how Islam has been appropriated rather than to pay close attention to how ideas about piety in Southeast Asia have informed the growth of Islamic thought elsewhere. If such assumptions about the seemingly 'inferior' character of Southeast Asian Islam are not enough to consign studies on Islam in the region to the periphery, there exists the widely held notion that Southeast Asian Islam had experienced little, if any, radical change and revolutionary transformation. Academics who subscribe to such reasoning pay particular emphasis to the peaceful, calm and tolerant nature of Southeast Asian Islam since its inception up until today. Episodes of conflict, contests and contentions, whenever and wherever they did occur, are studied as mere aberrations rather than the norm of what Southeast Asian Islam is supposed to be. Put differently, to be Muslim in the Southeast Asia is to be meek and mild and not belligerent, assertive and combative.