Southeast Asian Muslims in the Era of Globalization ed. by Ken Miichi and Omar Farouk (review)

This book presents the results of a research project led by Omar Farouk and Ken Miichi, and sponsored by the Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute. The main goal of the project is to further our understanding of Southeast Asian Islam by investigating the ways in which Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines “are responding to” (p. xi) the social and economic changes brought about by globalization. This is an ambitious goal, given both the size and internal diversity of Southeast Asia’s Muslim population. Nevertheless, it is an extremely important one.

The volume’s contributors are almost all scholars working in universities in Southeast Asia, Japan and the Netherlands. In addition to the editors’ introduction and conclusion, Chapter Two on education by Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid and Chapter Eleven on “gaps across religions” by Satoru Mikami are broadly comparative. While mostly taking the form of single-country studies, the remaining chapters nevertheless also address to a greater or lesser extent the volume’s general themes of globalization, education, the role of religion in politics, communal violence and peace-making.

The authors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Chapter Seven by Ken Miichi and Chapter Eleven by Satoru Mikami are quantitatively oriented studies that analyse data from large-scale opinion surveys. These chapters attempt to find out how political and religious attitudes and affiliations map on to differences in income and educational levels. The contributions to the volume of Michael Mastura and Carmen Abu Bakar on the Philippines and that by Chaiwat Satha-Anand on Thailand come out of peace and conflict studies. Those on the globalization of Islamic education, the political participation of Muslims in Cambodia and the escalation of the conflict between Muslim separatists and the Thai state in Thailand’s Deep South are the work of students of political science and international relations. The volume also features a contribution from an anthropologist about Muslim students from the Philippines in Cairo and three chapters by scholars in the field of Islamic studies. These latter include the always insightful Martin van Bruinessen, who contributes a very interesting account of debates over the Arabization of Indonesian Islam.

This diversity — of cases, approaches and methodologies — is both the volume’s greatest strength and its main weakness. Analyses of Islam in a number of different national contexts — above all contexts outside the Middle East — can only lead to richer and more subtle understanding. While religious globalization may lead to varying degrees of religio-political homogeneity across the Muslim world, this volume shows that global Islam has also been filtered through and inflected by distinctively regional, national and local settings.

Similarly, the variety of approaches and methodologies in the service of the volume’s main themes is also very useful. For example, anthropologists conducting ethnographic research will find it illuminating to situate their findings in a broader intellectual context. The results of qualitative research will be important to those trying to interpret statistical data. Such complementarities will benefit students and researchers who usually approach issues from within their individual disciplinary traditions.

At the same time, such a diversity of approaches, perspectives and case studies is also problematic. As is always the case for anthologies of this sort, not every chapter will be of interest to every reader. This is the result not only of the usual unevenness among individual contributions, but also of their very diversity. For example, some readers will struggle to understand chapters written by specialists in disciplines not their own; in at least one case, the terminology was so specialized that I found the argument almost impossible to follow.

This diversity is especially problematic because of the absence of a unifying “voice”. Some 240 million Muslims — about forty per cent of the population of the region as a whole — live in Southeast Asia. This population is almost as great as those of North Africa and the Middle...