The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Southeast Asia

Islam is represented in almost all of the modern nation-states that make up Southeast Asia, whether as the hegemonic faith in Indonesia, Malaysia, or Brunei, or as that of a noticeable, often marginalized minority in such entities as Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.

Though Islam perhaps was known to some of the peoples traversing the waters between China and India in the first centuries after the death of Muhammad, there is no firm evidence of it being taken up as the religion of state in Southeast Asia until the 13th century, when North Sumatran ports such as Perlak and Pasai, in the present-day Indonesian province of Aceh, adopted Islam, followed by numerous polities along both sides of the Strait of Malacca. Of these, Malacca, a Ming vassal that seems to have formally adopted Islam at the opening of the 15th century and emerged as the primary entrepôt in the straits, played a pronounced role in the further dissemination of Islam in the western reaches of the archipelago. The north coast ports of Java, Islamized around the same time, ensured that Islam penetrated the still-Indianized hinterland of that island and the spice-rich eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago.

Wherever Islam spread, the Arabic script was adopted, and Malay (often known as Jawi) emerged as the primary vehicle of regional scholarship. Scholars would travel as far afield as Mecca, supported by rulers eager to connect their lineages to that of the Prophet. By the beginning of the 17th century, these same rulers sought official titles from the Sharifs of Mecca, and in keeping with international trends, they also invested in connections with specific Sufi orders. Thus the Shattari order, often associated in Southeast Asia with the teachings of the Gujarati Muhammad b. Fadl Allah al-Burhanpuri (d. 1620), attained official favor in many parts of Sumatra and Java, particularly after the return to Aceh from Arabia of the Acehnese ‘Abd al-Ra’uf al-Sinkili (1615–93) in the latter part of the 17th century.

Esoteric Sufi teachings were not necessarily encouraged for the broader population, however. Legal codes such as the Undang-undang Melaka (The laws of Malacca) often urged commoners to abstain from deliberate emulation of their rulers’ dress and rituals and sometimes royally endorsed campaigns attempted to limit Sufi practices, especially those deemed to stray from Islamic norms. Allegedly antinomian preachers were repeatedly condemned for revealing the secrets of Sufism to the masses, as was the case with a campaign led by Nur al-Din al-Raniri (d. 1658) in Aceh in the 1630s.

As such campaigns were supported by an increasing number of local rulers, such as those of Gowa, South Sulawesi (Islamized ca. 1605), ever more Southeast Asians took to the study of fiqh (almost uniformly that of the Shafi‘i madhhab [school of law]), which encouraged the ongoing dialogue with visiting scholars from the holy cities, Gujarat, the Hadhramaut, and Ottoman Cairo. Southeast Asia is remarkable for following a single madhhab and, until the Iranian Revolution, for having practically no Shi‘i communities. This uniformity notwithstanding, the increasing penetration of the Europeans in the region from the early 16th century was not met by unified political action. After their conquest of the Muslim port of Manila in 1570, the Spanish effectively pushed back the frontiers of politically autonomous Islam to the southern reaches of the Philippines, while their Portuguese and later also Dutch competitors engaged in a long series of conquests and conversion, leaving the Southern Moluccas a patchwork of Muslim and Christian settlements.

Meanwhile, in the Malay lands and Java, sultans such as Iskandar Muda of Aceh (r. 1607–36) and his contemporary Agung of Mataram, Java (r. 1613–45), expanded their territories at the expense of Muslim rivals rather than the Western interlopers. In subsequent centuries their own domains and authority would be eaten away by the Dutch East India Company in the 18th century or Great Britain and the Netherlands in the 19th century. By the 1770s, however, the independent entrepôt of Palembang in South Sumatra had become a center of the Sammani Sufi order, said to have been at the heart of the resistance to both English and Dutch attacks in the distant wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

The rise of the Sammanis at Palembang had been inspired in part by one of that port’s most famous sons, ‘Abd al-Samad al-Falimbani (1719–89), who was composing Malay glosses of Ghazali’s works in Mecca in the 1770s and also sending letters to Javanese rulers urging active jihad against the Dutch. While the latter intercepted these letters and grew more wary of Islam’s political force, they were nonetheless taken aback by the religious rhetoric and effective resistance launched during the Java War of 1825–30 and by the Padri War that ravaged West Sumatra in the early 1800s before turning into an anticolonial conflict in the 1830s. In the case of Java in particular, it was apparent that the forces of the leading rebel Prince Dipanagara (1785–1855) included many people connected to the large, and relatively recent, network of Islamic schools (pesantren).

Such schools were furthermore spreading throughout the region at large. Although they were divided somewhat between those of Malay lands and those of Java and satellite isles such as Madura, they all sent ever more aspiring scholars and pilgrims on the hajj and into the arms of Sufi teachers, particularly the Naqshbandis, who were reasserting their place in Ottoman society after the Wahhabi occupation of the holy cities in the first quarter of the century. Travels, whether between schools or to Mecca, also engendered networks of kinship that could foster connections between politically aware subjects of British, Dutch, Spanish, and even Thai regimes in the region at large. (The Thais were conquering territories down the Malay Peninsula at the time.) With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the increasing propagation of printed materials via Singapore, Mecca was rendered an ever more accessible refuge and fount of religious authority for Southeast Asian subjects. During the drawn-out Dutch attempt to annex the remains of Aceh in 1873, the local fighters, many bearing Sufi amulets, were the talk of the day in the holy city.

With the almost wholesale annexation of Southeast Asian territories and strong-armed incorporation of the last independent rulers of the Archipelago as clients, some Muslim activists linked themselves to Cairo and the rhetoric of religious reformism to seek political redress. Then, with the belated birth of Islamic periodicals at the opening of the 20th century, well-connected Muslims in the Dutch sphere began to establish welfare societies, schools, and associations. On Java this culminated in the establishment of the trade-oriented Sarekat Islam and the Cairo-oriented reformist movement Muhammadiyah in 1912, but there were like-minded activists elsewhere, too. They were countered by more conservative associations, such as the Nahdatul Ulama, founded in 1926 around a core of East Javanese ‘ulama’ with little liking for either the modernist pretensions to religious leadership or the disdain for Sufi orders that was gaining support in once-more Wahhabi Mecca.

Matters were somewhat different, however, in the British sphere, where local rulers were effectively made the final arbiters of Islamic law for their subjects after the Pangkor Treaty of 1874. Some encouraged the links to Cairo and the ongoing codification of Islamic law in their names, thereby winning a respect they retained under the Japanese occupation and the independence that followed in the decades after World War II.

By contrast, the Japanese occupation of 1942–45, which had radically reorganized Indonesian society and elevated such nationalists as Sukarno (1901–70) before the attempted return of the Dutch, left little formal political space for Islam. The assembly hurriedly convened in 1945 to debate the future of the state and ultimately decided not to declare it Islamic (causing this to be taken up as the aim of the Darul Islam insurgencies that broke out in West Java, Aceh, and Sulawesi in the 1950s). The Islamic parties, forcibly merged under the Japanese in the all-encompassing body known as Masyumi (an acronym for the Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia, or “Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims”), were divided on questions of strategy, with the Nahdatul Ulama withdrawing to contest the elections of 1955.

The final crushing of the Darul Islam by the early 1960s and the silencing of Masyumi’s leaders by President Sukarno seemingly heralded the last gasps of Islamist activism in Indonesia. Even with the active collaboration of Muslim youth organizations in the countercoup that toppled Sukarno in 1965–66, political Islam received little encouragement during the long reign of President Suharto (1921–2008), though he did encourage the de facto Islamization of the regime in the 1990s. Islamic political parties only reemerged in the wake of his downfall in 1998. Once again the spectrum of Islamic political offerings was widespread, ranging from accommodating parties allied to the older Muhammadiyah and Nahdatul Ulama to the more strident, globally oriented Hizb ut Tahrir and the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS), formed under the Suharto administration in emulation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The latter group in particular seemed poised to make major gains after a series of corruption scandals in 2000 brought down Abdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009), formerly the head of Nahdatul Ulama and all too briefly the first Muslim intellectual president of the republic.

In the meantime, growing interreligious conflict in the Moluccas saw other nonstate Islamic actors enter the fray to act in the name of Indonesian Islam, from the Salafi-inspired Laskar Jihad (disbanded in the wake of the Bali bombing of 2004) to the more opaque Jemaah Islamiyah, led by old hands from the Darul Islam and recruited from among their descendants. The actions of the latter grouping, which courted funding and support from international Islamists while prosecuting a series of deadly bombings (most spectacularly in Bali in 2004 and Jakarta in 2003 and 2009), seemed calculated to engage a constituency that went far beyond any national boundaries, linking members in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Southern Philippines.

With the effective neutralization of the main actors of the Jemaah Islamiyah network by the police and of a significant number of minority seats taken in parliament by such parties as PKS in recent years, it would be tempting to say that the problem of Muslim politics seems to have been resolved (for the moment) in Indonesia, with its open public sphere. In Malaysia, where an ascendant Malay majority is increasingly flexing its muscles either in support of the current paternalistic state ruled by the United Malays National Organization or as its most vocal opposition in the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS, Parti Islam Se-Malaysia), Islam and politics also remain inextricably but peacefully linked. By contrast the situation remains fraught for the populations of Southern Thailand and, to a lesser degree, the Southern Philippines, which have both witnessed insurgencies and repressions over the last decades. Indeed, the long-running violence in Southern Thailand in particular shows little sign of abating, though it may be seen less as a manifestation of global jihad than as a function of older Malay claims to sovereignty founded on Islam.

See also Indonesia; Malaysia