Islam in Asia and Christians

Almost two-thirds of the Muslims in the world today live in Asia. If one were to include the number of Muslims living in Arabic, Persian and Turkish speaking nations of the Middle East as part of the total number of Muslims in Asia, the percentage would be much higher.

This special does not directly treat Middle Eastern countries but considers only the countries of South Asia, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Even so, Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any single nation in the world, and over half the Muslims in the world live in one of four Asian countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. By contrast, even though many people consider Islam to be mainly an Arab religion, less than 20% of the Muslims in the world live in Arabic-speaking countries.

Complicated relations

Christian-Muslim relations in Asia are complicated by many contrasting and often contradictory elements. Demographic, political, economic, social and ethnic factors affect the ways in which Christians and Muslims relate, in both positive and negative ways. Imbalances in relationships of power can be a particular source of tension and even conflict. The group that lacks power feels vulnerable and at the mercy of the good will of those in positions of power.

One of the most obvious imbalances is that of demography. In Asia, Christians and Muslims relate in a variety of majority-minority relations.

1) Muslim majority, Christian minority (Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Central Asian republics).

2) Christian majority, Muslim minority (Philippines).

3) Both minorities (India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Singapore, China).

4) No clear majority (Malaysia).

Other imbalances arise from access to political power or economic strength. These two things do not always go together. In some countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and many Central Asia republics, Muslims control the political system, but Christians are generally in a much stronger economic position. While Christians may feel uneasy because of the political strength of Muslims, Muslims can often have negative feelings toward Christians whom they perceive to be controlling their lives by dominating the economic sphere.

Ethnic factors

Ethnic factors can play an important role in Christian-Muslim relations, particularly when one group identifies their Islamic or Christian faith as part of their ethnic identity. Malays throughout Southeast Asia or Maranao, Maguindanao and Tausug peoples of the Philippines often see Islam as part of what makes one belong to those ethnic groups, while Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilongo peoples of the Philippines, or Florinese and Timorese peoples of Indonesia consider themselves Christian peoples. In those instances where the same ethnic group includes both Muslims and Protestant and Catholic Christians, relations are generally easier. Examples of this would be Batak or Javanese people of Indonesia or the Subanon in the Philippines.

In some places, such as in Pakistan, remnants of caste mentality can create problems for the Christian minority. Evidence that it is power relationships in the political, economic and social fields that underlie many of the tensions that sometimes arise between Christians and Muslims is the fact that wherever both communities are minorities in a region dominated by a third dominant group, relations between Muslims and Christians is always without problem, always at least correct and often cordial. This would be the case of the beleaguered Christian and Muslim communities in Hindu India, in Buddhist Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, or in Confucian Singapore. In some cases, the common experience of marginalization and occasionally persecution brings the two communities together (as in Myanmar, India, and communist China).

Traditionally, Islam in Asia has had a pietist, interior, family-oriented orientation. This is largely the result of the early preachers of Islam, who were strongly influenced by a mystical Sufi interpretation of the religion. However, in more recent times, an aggressive, militant form of Islam has emerged with which Christians find relations more tense. Militant Muslims are everywhere a small but articulate minority among Muslims, and their societal and religious programs are not shared by the majority of Muslims in Asia. To understand militant Islam in Asia today, one must recognize both the distant and proximate roots of this militant understanding of Islam.<WM

Copyright©2003 World Mission Magazine

ISLAM IN ASIA

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Radical Roots

by Thomas Michel SJ

WHERE DOES ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM COME FROM?

Understanding what is happening among Asian Muslims today requires a look backwards, to the long history of Islam and its ongoing search for authenticity, purity – and power.

One must remember that in Asia, Islam has a very long history, going back almost to the birth of the religion in the first century after the death of Muhammad. One might divide this history into four general periods of unequal length and discover the distant roots of Islamic revival in the particular nature of Islamic presence in Asia.

Early period: the spread of Islam to Asia (800-1300)

Muslims arrived in Asia in the first century after the death of Muhammad. In some cases, it was Arab armies who brought Islamic rule through military conquest. This was the case among the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, in Sind in Pakistan and later on generally in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. More often, Islam was introduced to Asia peacefully by Arab and Persian merchants. Following established pre-Islamic commercial routes, these traders set up foreign merchant communities of Muslims in the port cities of the Indian Ocean and along the famous "Silk Road" between China and the Mediterranean.

Because the sea voyage in the Indian Ocean and the land trip across the Silk Road took between one and a half to two years, Muslim firms set up local offices to handle affairs. Some Muslims married local women and raised families, who were expected to adopt the Islamic faith. Local employees also frequently accepted Islam and in this way the local foreign communities began to include a limited number of local Muslims. In some places, these mixed communities of Muslim traders left the port cities to travel inland in small boats, along the canals of Myanmar and Thailand, and up the river system of modern-day Bangladesh.

Not all foreign Muslims remained in Asia by choice. Bankruptcies, confiscated vessels, shipwrecks, and the changeable policies of local rulers prevented some merchants and sailors from returning to the Middle East. Thus in the port cities of the Indian Ocean, the caravan stops along the overland routes, and along the inland waterways, small communities of local Muslims began to arise. In this early period, the instances of mass conversions of local inhabitants to Islam were few, although there were some notable exceptions, such as in Sind in modern Pakistan and among the Champa people of Cambodia.

The age of expansion: conversion of Asians to Islam (1300-1500)

In 1258, Baghdad, the religious, cultural, and political center of the Islamic world, was conquered and, destroyed by the Mongol armies.

Although the Calif and his whole family were killed, a distant relative escaped to Cairo and was set up as Calif. However, never again did the Calif wield any real power and he remained a figurehead until Ataturk's suppression of the Califate in the 1920s. For many Muslims, the existence of a Calif (khalifa, successor of Muhammad), was essential in Islam. Political awareness of Muslims in modern-day India and Pakistan grew sharply as a result of the Khalifa Movement, which sought to restore the Califate and resulted in the formation of the World Muslim Congress (the Mu'tamar).

To fill the vacuum created by the destruction in 1258 of the most important political and educational institutions in Islam, new movements arose. The most important were the Sufi Orders. Mystically-inclined Muslims had been present in the Islamic community since its beginnings, but in the 14^th century, they gathered into brotherhoods and became the most dynamic force in Islam. Dedicated to achieving a union of love and will with God and possessing great missionary zeal, the Sufis began to accompany the merchants on their commercial trips to Asia. Through their preaching, many in Asia were attracted to Islam. The fact that most Asian peoples accepted Islam strongly marked by the mystical, inner-oriented interpretation of the Sufi preachers had important consequences on its subsequent development and history in Asia.

Islam in the colonial period: the Sufi revival (1550-1800)

The early Sufis did not place great emphasis on doctrinal formulation or political questions, but emphasized interior piety and submission to traditional Asian spirituality, a pantheistic nature religiosity centered on cosmic and interior harmony. The Sufis focused on a few basic principles of Islam - the oneness of God, the necessity of prayer and fasting, and prohibitions against pork and alcohol - and accommodated many traditional practices related to the spirit world and the cult of holy persons and places.

Islam was implanted in Asian societies for a relatively short time when most predominantly Muslim regions came to be conquered and governed by non-Muslim powers. In South and Southeast Asia it was European Christian powers - first the Portuguese, then Dutch, British, Spaniards, Americans, and Russians who came to dominate Muslim regions. In the same period, Buddhist Chinese, Thai, and Burmese incorporated Muslim regions into their domains.

During the 17-18^th centuries, the early colonial period saw a reformist trend initiated by international Sufi brotherhoods, who sought to bring about a deeper Islamic awareness based on better religious education. While not forbidding the traditional rites, the Sufi reformers worked to instill authentic Islamic practice among Muslims.

Islamic revival and the struggle for independence (1800-1945)

When Muslims looked around the world at the beginning of the 19th century, many asked, "What went wrong?". From having, in previous centuries, the world's most powerful, advanced, and prosperous states in the Ottoman, Safavid and Moghul empires, they had almost everywhere succumbed to the rule of others. A radical response was provided by Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab in Arabia, who held that it was because they deviated from the true Islamic path that Muslim peoples arrived at their low state. He felt that nothing less than a return to the pure, original Islam would permit Muslims to achieve their past glory.

Those who took up these views were called Wahhabis. They wanted not only to purify Islam of all accretions and novelties that had wrongly been accepted as Islamic in the course of time, but they held that the Sufi preoccupation with Islam as a personal, spiritual path to God was in itself a distortion of the original intent of the religion. They claimed that Islam was meant to be a program for building a human society whose every aspect was to be lived in accord with the will of God. Islam was not simply, or even primarily, to be seen as a set of pious practices leading to mystical union. Many hajjis making the pilgrimage to Mecca encountered Wahhabi ideas in Arabia and brought these views back with them to their homelands in Asia.

The Wahhabi understanding of Islam had political implications. If God intended the Islamization of society in all its social, economic, and political aspects, it was felt that this could only be done if Muslims themselves were in control of the political systems. Their political theory held that the state existed to permit Muslims to foster the Islamization process and to forbid and punish wrongdoing. The Muslim revival linked religious and political concerns. To pursue their societal ends, they sought to create a state that would favor and implement these goals.

The first objective was to achieve liberation from non-Muslim rule. Revivalists began to work actively toward the overthrow of colonial regimes in order to create Islamic states, that would support the Islamization of society. Wahhabi ideas, although they developed in Arabia, spread quickly to Asia. In widely-spread parts of Asia, revolutionary Wahhabi views provoked both social reform movements and revolutions against colonial rule.

Islamic revival in the modern nation states (1945-1995)

In the years after World War II, when most Muslim regions achieved independence, two organizations emerged to articulate the concept of the Islamic state. In Egypt and other Arab countries, the Muslim Brotherhood, insisting that rule by Muslims did not ensure the creation of an Islamic state, worked to counter nationalist feelings that in their view divided rather than united the umma. On the Indian subcontinent, the Jamiati Islami held that Islam offered the world an Islamic solution to every modern problem.

As one predominately Muslim nation after another achieved independence after 1945, the revivalists hoped that Islamic states would be set up. The actual Muslim rule that replaced the colonial regimes was, however, far from their ideals of the Islamic state. The new ruling class throughout the Muslim world generally adopted the principles of nationalism and created nation states on a European model. Legal codes were based on those of Western nations and were usually mere revisions of colonial law. On the grounds that it was more egalitarian and would prevent the abuses of uncontrolled capitalism, many of the ruling élites adopted socialist policies of a one-party state, state ownership of industries, and centrally planned economies. Cultural mores as well as development concepts were taken from the West.

The creation of Pakistan

In the first decades after World War II, many Muslims were enthusiastic about the creation of Pakistan, which they considered a model for the modem Islamic democracy. However, as the years passed, it became clear that Pakistan's Islamic identity did not enable the country to overcome ethnic clashes, economic mismanagement and corruption, military takeovers, and equitable distribution of wealth. Many Muslims claimed that the Pakistan model was a failed experiment and that a truly Islamic state would have to undergo a more revolutionary societal restructuring.

The Palestinian struggle

Shortly after the creation of Pakistan, in 1949, the emergence of the state of Israel had great influence on the thinking of militant Muslims. Seen as a state for European Jews created in the Arab heartland by the Western powers to assuage their guilt for Europe's treatment of its Jews, Israel was felt to be a continuation of colonial policies of forced implantation and ruthless land-grabbing. Muslims were victims of injustice perpetrated by Western powers.

The disastrous defeat of the Arab alliance by Israel in 1967 was a watershed. Egypt, the most populous and powerful Arab nation and its cultural capital, led by the charismatic Gamal Abd al-Nasser, with the financial support of other Arab countries, went down to quick and humiliating defeat by tiny Israel. Hopes that the Western powers would provide necessary assistance were dashed when those states supported Israel both financially and in international diplomatic fora such as the United Nations. Many Muslims began to question the efficacy of nationalist thought and turned to religion to furnish more effective means to govern Muslim peoples.<WM

Women attending a Hamas fundamentalist organization rally in Palestine.