This book explores the diversity and dynamism of Islam in Southeast Asia through the concept of adab, or beautiful behavior. Amid the complexity of Islamic civilization, adab provides Muslims with a shared sense of sacred history, identity, and morality. In the context of Islamic ethics, adab defines the rules of personal and public etiquette: good manners, proper conduct, civility and humaneness. Featuring the interdisciplinary research of nine prominent scholars of Islam, the book offers new perspectives on adab's multiple meanings and myriad applications for Muslim communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The chapters examine a wide range of texts, spotlighting the writings of prominent Muslim thinkers, and contexts, focusing on the everyday experiences of lay Muslims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses, the essays reveal how beautiful behavior impacts local institutions, cultural practices, and religious imaginations via politics and law, spirituality and piety, ethics and experience. With its careful textual analysis, detailed case studies, and attention to historical continuities and disjunctures, Piety, Politics and Everyday Ethics in Southeast Asian Islam is essential reading for students and scholars interested in global Islam and the lived, local dynamics of Muslim Southeast Asia.

This book explores the diversity and dynamism of Islam in Southeast Asia through the concept of adab, or beautiful behavior. Amid the complexity of Islamic civilization, adab provides Muslims with a shared sense of sacred history, identity, and morality. In the context of Islamic ethics, adab defines the rules of personal and public etiquette: good manners, proper conduct, civility and humaneness. Featuring the interdisciplinary research of nine prominent scholars of Islam, the book offers new perspectives on adab's multiple meanings and myriad applications for Muslim communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The chapters examine a wide range of texts, spotlighting the writings of prominent Muslim thinkers, and contexts, focusing on the everyday experiences of lay Muslims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses, the essays reveal how beautiful behavior impacts local institutions, cultural practices, and religious imaginations via politics and law, spirituality and piety, ethics and experience. With its careful textual analysis, detailed case studies, and attention to historical continuities and disjunctures, Piety, Politics and Everyday Ethics in Southeast Asian Islam is essential reading for students and scholars interested in global Islam and the lived, local dynamics of Muslim Southeast Asia.

This book explores Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the integration of Islamic culture with the diverse ethnic cultures of the region, offering a look at the practice of cultural and religious coexistence in various realms. The volume traces the origins and processes of adoption, transmission, and adaptation of Islam by diverse ethnic communities such as the Malay, Acehnese, Javanese, Sundanese, the Bugis, Batak, Betawi, and Madurese communities, among others. It examines the integration of Islam within local politics, cultural networks, law, rituals, education, art, and architecture, which engendered unique regional Muslim identities. Additionally, the book illuminates distinctive examples of cultural pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and syncretism that persisted in Islamic religious practices in the region owing to its maritime economy and reputation as a marketplace for goods, languages, cultures, and ideas. As part of the Global Islamic Cultures series that investigates integrated and indigenized Islam, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of theology and religion, Islamic studies, religious history, political Islam, cultural studies, and Southeast Asian studies. It also offers an engaging read for general audiences interested in world religions and cultures.

How do ordinary Muslims deal with and influence the increasingly pervasive Islamic norms set by institutions of the state and religion? Becoming Better Muslims offers an innovative account of the dynamic interactions between individual Muslims, religious authorities, and the state in Aceh, Indonesia. Relying on extensive historical and ethnographic research, David Kloos offers a detailed analysis of religious life in Aceh and an investigation into today’s personal processes of ethical formation. Aceh is known for its history of rebellion and its recent implementation of Islamic law. Debunking the stereotypical image of the Acehnese as inherently pious or fanatical, Kloos shows how Acehnese Muslims reflect consciously on their faith and often frame their religious lives in terms of gradual ethical improvement. Revealing that most Muslims view their lives through the prism of uncertainty, doubt, and imperfection, he argues that these senses of failure contribute strongly to how individuals try to become better Muslims. He also demonstrates that while religious authorities have encroached on believers and local communities, constraining them in their beliefs and practices, the same process has enabled ordinary Muslims to reflect on moral choices and dilemmas, and to shape the ways religious norms are enforced. Arguing that Islamic norms are carried out through daily negotiations and contestations rather than blind conformity, Becoming Better Muslims examines how ordinary people develop and exercise their religious agency.

Cosmopolitan ideals and pluralist tendencies have been employed creatively and adapted carefully by Muslim individuals, societies and institutions in modern Southeast Asia to produce the necessary contexts for mutual tolerance and shared respect between and within different groups in society. Organised around six key themes that interweave the connected histories of three countries in Southeast Asia - Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - this book shows the ways in which historical actors have promoted better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the region. Case studies from across these countries of the Malay world take in the rise of the network society in the region in the 1970s up until the early 21st century, providing a panoramic view of Muslim cosmopolitan practices, outlook and visions in the region.

An accessible, transregional exploration of how Islam and Asia have shaped each other's histories, societies and cultures from the seventh century to today.

Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what happened to their property. Drawing from legal, literary, and religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese, and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, state and local communities produced laws and morality codes limiting women’s participation in social life. Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic and political turmoil led the three competing states—the Mac, Trinh, and Nguyen—to increase their military service demands, producing labor shortages in the fields and markets of the countryside. Women filled the vacuum left by their brothers, husbands, and fathers, and as they worked the lands and tended the markets, they accumulated monetary capital. To protect that capital, they circumvented local practice and state law guaranteeing patrilineal inheritance rights by soliciting the cooperation of male leaders. In exchange for monetary and landed donations to the local community, these women were elected to become spiritual patrons of the community whose souls would be forever preserved by collective offering. By tracing how the women, local leaders, and court elites negotiated gender models to demarcate their authority, Tran demonstrates that despite the Confucian ethos of the times, survival strategies were able to subvert gender norms and create new cultural models. Gender, thus, as a signifier of power relations, was central to the relationship between state and local communities in early modern Vietnam. Rich and detailed in its use of documentary evidence from a range of archives, this work will be of great interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and the comparative study of gender.