This handbook explores the ways in which Islam, as one of the fastest growing religions, has become a global faith for both Muslims and non-Muslims in Southeast Asia with its universality, inclusivity, and shared features with other Islamic expressions and manifestations. It offers an up-to-date, wide-ranging, comprehensive, concise, and readable introduction to the field of Islam in Southeast Asia. With specific themes of pertinent contemporary relevance, the contributions by experts in the field provide fresh insights into the roles of states, societies, scholars, social movements, political parties, economic institutions, sacred sites, and other forces that structured the faith over many centuries. The handbook is structured in three parts: Muslim Global Circulations Marginal Narratives Refashioning Pieties This handbook stands out as a single and synergistic reference work that explores the ebb and flow of Islam seeking to decenter many existing assumptions about it in Southeast Asia. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and policymakers working on Islam, Muslims, and their interactions with other communities in a plural setting.

The Routledge Handbook on Islam in Asia offers both new and established scholarship on Muslim societies and religious practices across Asia, from a variety of interdisciplinary angles, with chapters covering South, Central, East and Southeast Asia, as well as Africa–Asia connections. Presenting work grounded in archival, literary, and ethnographic inquiry, contributors to this handbook lend their expertise to paint a picture of Islam as deeply connected to and influenced by Asia, often by-passing or reversing relationships of power and authority that have placed ‘Arab’ Islam in a hierarchically superior position vis-à-vis Asia. This handbook is structured in four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry: Frames Authority and authorizing practices Muslim spatialities Imaginations of piety Dislodging ingrained assumptions that Asia is at the periphery of Islam – and that Islam is at the periphery of Asia’s cultural matrix – this handbook sets an agenda against the ‘center-periphery’ dichotomy, as well as the syncretism paradigm that has dominated conversations on Islam in Asia. It thus demonstrates possibilities for new scholarly approaches to the study of Islam within the ‘Asian context.’ This ground-breaking handbook is a valuable resource to students and scholars of Asian studies, religious studies, and cultural studies more broadly.

Islam is a major religion in Southeast Asia, with Indonesian Muslims comprising the largest Muslim population in the world. Events and developments since 11 September 2001 have added greater attention to Islam and its adherents in this part of the world. This general survey of Islam in Southeast Asia is intended to inform, explain and update readers about the more significant aspects of Islam in Southeast Asia, then and now. These include the following: the geographical origins and sources by which the faith spread in this region; the social, economic and political profiles of the Muslim communities; relations between Muslims and non-Muslims and between Muslims and the State; the strands and trends that shapes the role of Islam and the Muslims in the national body politic; and the challenges confronting Muslims in confronting the vicissitudes of their lives in this era of rapid change, characterized by modernization, capitalism, secularization and globalization. The discussion will begin with an overview of the broad picture of Islam and the Muslims in the region as a whole, covering both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. This will be followed by case-study analysis of Islam and the Muslims in individual countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Given the difficulty of writing on such a complex and contentious topic, this book attempts to present the subject matter in a manner that is sufficiently objective to scholars and yet simple and accessible enough to be readily understood by ordinary readers.

The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

"One of the largest Muslim populations in the world today resides in Southeast Asia. The region has also produced its own pedigree of reformers who have critiqued the limits of Islamic thought and propounded new lines of thinking in the road to construct a better ummah. This book captures the progressive and pluralistic nature of Islamic reformism in Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century onwards, a period can now be regarded as the age of networked Islam. Offering a fresh conceptualization that could be well applied in the parts of the Islamic world, the author shows how several influential Muslim intellectuals have given rise to an "Islamic reformist mosaic" in Southeast Asia. Representing different strands of reformist thinking, these shapers of Islam form a unified and coherent frame of thought that distinguishes itself from the ultra-traditionalist and ultra-secularist leanings. This fascinating study is indispensable to anyone interested in understanding the challenges facing Islam and other religions in the modern world"--

This volume of selected readings on Islam is a portrait of the Southeast Asian Islamic mosaic, with emphasis on the contemporary period. The collection of articles also serves to reflect the broad thematic interest of scholars — not only indigenous and foreign, but also Muslim and non-Muslim — who have contributed to an understanding of Islam in Southeast Asia.