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for those who are studying the contemporary mix (local and international)
of religious institutions with politics and economics.

Mohammad Talib
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Oxford Centre for
Islamic Studies
E-mail: mohammad.talib@anthro.ox.ac.uk
doi:10.1093/jis/etn052

This book, introduced as a successor to Espositos Islam in Asia: Religion,

Politics and Society (Oxford University Press, 1987), comprises a collection of
essays originally produced for a series of conferences held in Kuala Lumpur,
Bangkok, Singapore and Hawaii as part of a project to place the long-term
impacts of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) into broader
global contexts. Most of the volume is focused squarely on issues of religion
and politics with a pronounced emphasis on party-based electoral developments,
governmental institutions and ethnic tensions, rather than on other social and
cultural dynamics of these diverse Muslim societies in the era of globalization.
The book is divided into two sections dealing with the Religion and Politics
of Muslim majority and minority populations, respectively. The bulk of both
sections is dedicated to chapters discussing developments in the various nationstates of South and Southeast Asia, with the notable exception to this in the first
section being Hakan Yavuz excellent chapter on the role of Turkey in the Central
Asian Islamic revival. Yavuz calls attention to the impact of Soviet Islamic studies
and government policies on the shaping of religious and ethnic politics in Central
Asia as an important backdrop to his discussion of the role of Turkey as the most
influential country in the reconstruction of Islamic knowledge in contemporary
Central Asia. The chapter thus provides a striking example of how a focus on
Asia and the complexity of its relations with other regions of the Muslim world
can point us toward more nuanced and accurate understandings of important
contemporary dynamics in global Islam.
For South Asia, Mumtaz Ahmads chapter on Bangladesh presents a picture of
the evolution of Islamic political and religious movements over the course of the
countrys history with an eye toward contextualizing the rapid transformation
from an early near-total exclusion of Islam from national politics to the ascendancy of Islamists in the public sphere over recent decades. Pakistan is the only
country to be treated with more than one chapter in this volume. In the first, Vali
Nasr presents a broad overview of the permutations of Islamism in the contexts
of shifting configurations of state and military power over the past three decades,
concluding with a discussion of the rise of the Muttahida Majlis-i Amal (MMA).

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Asian Islam in the 21st Century

Edited by John L. Esposito, John O. Voll and Osman Bakar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiv, 306 pp. Price HB 45.00.
EAN 9780195333022.

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This subject is treated in still greater detail in Anita Weiss chapter, which follows
the development of MMAs programmes of Islamization in the Northwest
Frontier Province since 2002.
The chapters on Muslim majority nations in Southeast Asia do rather more
than those on South Asia to treat the broader social contexts of recent political
developments. Fred von der Mehdens chapter on Indonesia summarizes broad
trends over the past decade, with particular emphasis on the transitions of postSuharto Reformation and the impact of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the
country. Osman Bakars chapter on Malaysia attempts to trace the shifting configurations of religion and ethnic politics in neighbouring Malaysia over this same
period. Unfortunately, however, the persuasiveness of his analysis is significantly
compromised by the overstatement of points such as Malaysias towering profile
in the contemporary Muslim world and the homogeneity that has characterized
Malay Islam for centuries. Both these claims are arguable at best, but in this
chapter they (and others like them) are deployed to support an argument about
Malaysias relatively successful management of ethnic pluralism that will likely
sound unconvincing to most observers both in the region and beyond.
The second section of the book begins with Steven Wilkinsons treatment of
the worlds largest minority Muslim population of 130-plus million believers in
India. His chapter provides an overview of inter-religious tensions and their
political manifestations, while arguing for a revision of dominant understandings
of the Congress Era as a Golden Age for Indias Muslims. This serves to provide
a deeper context for more recent issues involving HinduMuslim communal
tensions in the country, while also helping to frame his views on emerging and
more hopeful trends for the future of Muslim communities in this dynamic
nation. Following this, Jacqueline Armijos contribution on Islam in China provides a very helpful introduction to important developments in one of the worlds
most rapidly developing countries that are nevertheless little discussedand even
less understoodin international scholarship on Islam. In particular, she raises
important, and generally under-acknowledged, demographic and social factors
that are having a differential influence on current trends within Chinas diverse
Muslim communities.
The chapters on Southeast Asian Muslim minority populations are considerably less insightful and, unfortunately, do not expand significantly on already
existing summaries of the situations in the countries concerned. In fact, in many
cases, they even neglect important works of recent scholarship on the populations they treat. Eliseo Mercados chapter on the Philippines presents little more
than a recap of government measures on autonomy over the last decades of the
twentieth century, with discussions of post-9/11 developments appearing only in
the last three pages. The chapter on Thai and Cambodian Muslims by Imtiyaz
Yusuf deals more with these recent events, but its presentation is hampered by
both glaring omissions (e.g. no treatment of important issues in southern
Thailand) and confusing misstatements such as, for example, that of
Southeast Asian Muslims having developed within a democratic environmentsomething which is obviously not true in cases such as that of the
Cambodian community discussed in this chapter.

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R. Michael Feener
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E-mail: arifm@nus.edu.sg
doi:10.1093/jis/etn034

Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia: From the 16th to the
21st Century.
By Thomas Gibson (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 253 pp. Price HB 42.50. ISBN 1403979834.
In the academic realm of Southeast Asian Studies in its Cold War-era infancy,
Islam was mere putty in the hands of anthropologists, historians, and political
scientists keen to construct coherent and compelling understandings of the distinctiveness of their region. Most notable in this regard were the early writings

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The volume concludes with an essay by John Voll that does more than any of
the individual country studies in the volume to address broader thematic and
comparative issues. His essay includes not only a series of well-informed critical
reflections on trends cutting across the various Asian Muslim societies treated in
the preceding chapters, but also insightful suggestions for directions in future
studies of Asian Islam in the fields of politics, education, mass media, pop
culture, and gender issues. Given the thoughtfulness of this concluding chapter,
readers might be left wishing that more were done in the rest of the volume
systematically to address such issues in more conceptually nuanced ways. This
might have included, for example, a conscious attempt to develop new parameters for comparative conversations through some shared working definitions
for the terms used to construct typologies of various movements and political
parties. As it is there is considerable difference between each chapter in the
usages of terms like: fundamentalist, radical, extremist, orthodox, Sufi, revivalist,
reformist, moderate, liberal, and postmodern Islam.
Bringing together a range of scholars specializing on diverse Muslim communities of Asia could also have been an opportunity to inject more data-rich
presentations on specific countries into broader conversations in global Islamic
studies. Unfortunately however, all save Yavuz chapter on Central Asia appear
to be largely based on available secondary studies written almost exclusively in
English. Issues of language also present themselves in the area of transliteration.
This is, of course, an intractable problem when working across the diversity of
Asian Muslim languages. However, it appears that not even an attempt was made
toward standardization for the chapters appearing in the volume, even when two
of them treat exactly the same topic, such as is evident in the discrepancy
between transliterations of the full name of the MMA in Nasr and Weiss chapters on Pakistan. More attention to points such as these could have done much to
aid the book as whole in making a more effective contribution toward bringing
discussion and analyses of developments in Asia to the centre of current scholarly
debates on Islam in the contemporary world.