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Islam in Contemporary Southeast Asia | 309 Chapter 10 Islam in Contemporary Southeast Asia HISTORY, COMMUNITY, MORALITY Barbara D. Metcalf The broad themes that resonate throughout this collection are ones shared by many societies in recent times. They reflect the extent to which religious symbols and issues have come to the fore in public life and provide a language for issues of citizenship, ethnicity, shared histories, and morality. Thus, even what might be thought to be intimate issues of family ceremony or dress may now be linked to corporate issues of community and political orientation. If we look for “Islam” in the late twentieth century , one arena of central importance turns out to be the institutions of the nation-state. The meaning of being “Muslim” in that sense, as the marker of a citizen or of a politicized ethnic group, is profoundly new. And just as many of the specifics of the debates described in this volume are much the same as those conducted by Muslims elsewhere, the kinds of issues engaged in these debates are ones shared by modern societies everywhere. This argument stands in marked contrast to what is perhaps the characteristic Western interpretation of Islam in public life. That interpretation insists above all on quintessential difference and continuity, failing to recognize what is new in the meaning and deployment of Islamic symbols and failing to recognize what is shared. In that regard, Dale Eickelman’s (1992) argument recognizing the modernity of the very concept of “the Islamic state” is particularly important. Europeans and Americans on the whole have a blind spot in relation to Islam and tend to posit it as a retrograde, oppressive, and anarchic threat. The essays in this volume belie that interpretation and, far from suggesting that Southeast Asia is unique (“not really Muslim”), should encourage us to rethink our approach to Islamic societies overall. In the American case, a distorted view of Islam continues to be a serious handicap to a rational Middle Eastern policy. Nor is this interpretation only Western: there are Indians who justify the virulent anti-Muslim behavior in their country in terms of the great danger of worldwide Islamic “fundamentalism” from Israel to India itself. The essays in this volume pro- 310 | Barbara D. Metcalf vide lines of analysis that challenge the interpretation of a frightening, monolithic Islam, ones that are relevant to Muslim societies generally, not only to Southeast Asia. They encourage us to ask two sets of questions: How and in what settings is an Islamic language deployed? And is “Islam” in fact different from other historic religious traditions? At first blush, the chapters seem to fit into the narrative of Islamic power and difference, many structured around themes of Islamic “resurgence ,” “reactualization,” “renewal,” and so forth. In each of the countries studied, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia—whether the Muslim population is 5 percent, 52 percent, or 90 percent of the whole—the story in the last two decades seems broadly the same. In each case, states or provinces have increasingly supported Islamic programs in such arenas as law and economics; individuals increasingly demonstrate public behavior marked as Islamic in behavior and dress; and Islamic organizations directed to politics , social welfare, and preaching seem to proliferate. One might well conclude that these changes demonstrate an Islamic identity and power long waiting to emerge. But by examining these changes in detail we learn, on the one hand, of the historical shallowness of politicized Islamic communities and, on the other, of the complexity and, indeed, often the familiarity of the social and ideological projects—not reducible to state terrorism or “jihad”—in which Islamic symbols find expression. Narrating Histories Nothing makes clearer the power of the historical myths that shape political loyalties than the fact that they are taken as natural and prima facie factual . Histories are at the core of nation-state identities and form a major strand in constructing, sustaining, and contesting those identities. Benedict Anderson has pointed to the essential irony in these stories: they are new in modern times but they must be told as if they were very old (Anderson 1983). In these stories a religion may even be equated with citizenship itself. To cite a comparative case, India is particularly striking in the extent to which a historical myth, its fundamental lines evolved during the colonial period, has come to the fore in public life. In that story, part of virtually everyone’s “common sense,” “Muslims” and “Hindus” are taken as the significant...

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