Three Things You Must Know About Religion
In Sunni Islam, the Islam of most Asian Muslims (unless we include Iranians as Asians, as specialists of Islam sometimes do), the law has been discussed and developed since the eighth and ninth centuries through the conventions and authorities of four schools of law. Accordingly, the influence of the schools of law on the popular practice of Islam became greater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as more and more Muslims came to understand their religion through schooling and religious books. It is this influence that leads most modern Muslims to take exception to the idea of national versions of Islam and insist that there is just one Islam. In culture and practice, as opposed to in the normative ideal, the answer to the question as to whether there are Arab and Asian versions of Islam is a highly qualified “yes.” The strongest qualification concerns the religious law that developed in Asian and Arab Islam. There are two realms where Asian Muslim culture does look different from Middle Eastern Islam: in popular culture and in politics.
As much as Asian Muslims have always differed in their religious practice from their Middle Eastern brothers and sisters, they have differed almost as much among themselves. Most variants are quite orthodox in their profession of the faith, not deviating too much from the letter of religious law. A second commonality to popular Islam in both South and Southeast Asia is that, beginning in the early 19th century, both regions saw the rise of new and powerful movements of Islamic reform, most of which sought to abolish heterodox traditions and bring the profession of the faith into conformity with an Islam closer in spirit to that practiced in Arabia. Most of these new methods were in turn modeled on new patterns of printing and education that had been pioneered in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But they also reflected the diffusion of new methods of learning and schooling across the Asian Muslim world. On the contrary, the scholars of Islam in Asia all took the texts and methods of the schools of law developed in Iraq and Syria in the eighth and ninth centuries. In Shiism the scholars are more organized and even have some of the qualities of a Catholic hierarchy.
It is hard to exaggerate the impact of these reform movements on Asian Islam over the past two centuries, especially since these nations achieved independence in the 1940s and 1950s. They have pulled popular Islam in Asia into far greater conformity with the style and standards professed in the Middle East. The gender difference between Muslim Southeast Asia, on one hand, and South Asia and the Middle East, on the other, relates to an even more complex aspect of local culture. On the contrary, they worked in agriculture, operated most of the stalls found in local markets, and moved about quite freely in villages and the countryside. It was precisely in response to the acephalous and non-ecclesiastical nature of Islam and the threat of the religion’s dissolution into a disparate variety of local traditions that Islam’s religious scholars came to emphasize the unity of Islamic ritual and the unchanging finality of its holy word. Islam’s central rituals and canons emphasize unity and commonality, as in the insistence on the finished truth of the Quran, on the five pillars or ritual activities incumbent on Muslims, and on the implementation of God’s law as incumbent on all Muslims.
However, during the early centuries of Islam’s diffusion to South and Southeast Asia, a number of folk schools of Sufism developed that were deeply syncretic or heterodox. Buddhism also all but vanished in South Asia, as folk Buddhism was reabsorbed into Hinduism, with the Buddha being acknowledged as an avatar of the god Vishnu. But folk Sufism in Indonesia and Malaysia contained a number of sects that were vigorously syncretic. Of course, this has not prevented Muslim communities from dissolving into fractious sects or even falling into fratricidal warfare. A small part belong to other Islamic sects. In Indonesia and Malaysia today, the only surviving indigenous Hindus are those on Bali and in a small corner of neighboring Java. To this day in India, some of the shrines of great Sufi saints are also visited by Hindus and Sikhs, although this practice is in decline. There is a theme running through the terms of those who invest delivery the great bursts of labor that set things in motion, then seek to give their fruits away. The Muslim case is especially complex, because Islam does not have a formal ecclesiastical organization or Church to stabilize its development, as the main streams of Christianity did prior to the great splintering of the early modern period.