Studies On Islam And Society In Southeast Asia

William R. Roff has spent more than forty years studying and writing about the modern history of Islam and Muslims, with special reference to Southeast Asia. With interests primarily in social and intellectual history he has contributed essays during this period to a wide range of learned journals and other publications. The present collection reprints a selection of the most notable of these, from historiographical and methodological studies to the development of Islamic educational and other institutions, the nature of the Arab presence in Southeast Asia, and the social significance of the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. The author has been a formative influence on two generations of students and other scholars, and this reissue in accessible form of seminal but scattered essays will be widely welcomed.

Recent years have witnessed a remarkable growth in scholarship on Islam within Southeast Asia. Underlying this scholarship is a desire to resolve pressing social and political problems facing Muslim communities, an awareness of the significance of pluralism and cultural hybridity within Southeast Asian societies, and the rapidly growing interaction between Southeast Asian Muslims and the outside world. The chapters in this book represent some of the exciting new directions young scholars in Southeast Asia universities are taking Islamic Studies. Themes covered include Islam and liberalism, the diverse streams of contemporary Islamic thought, “neo-Sufi” movements, Islam and human rights, the growing influence of Islamic law, Islam and democratic politics, Islamic education, and the relationship between Islam and ethnic identity.

This volume of selected readings on Islam is a portrait of the Southeast Asian Islamic mosaic, with emphasis on the contemporary period. The collection of articles also serves to reflect the broad thematic interest of scholars — not only indigenous and foreign, but also Muslim and non-Muslim — who have contributed to an understanding of Islam in Southeast Asia.

Examines the role, relevance and challenges, as well as the political and strategic dimensions of Islam in contemporary Southeast Asia.

In an era when Islam ostensibly lies at the heart of a volatile nexus of a global campaign of war on terrorism, simplistic notions and dangerous misunderstandings about the cultures and nature of Southeast Asian Islam, in all its variants, are used to inform and justify policies.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In Islamic studies, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Islamic Studies, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

The Islamic world, often regarded as an anathema to civil society, in fact has rich traditions of associational life pursuing “common good”. These religious resources have been reinterpreted for the enhancement of civic virtues and participatory politics in contemporary context, that is, democratization. Such pioneering efforts have been clearly observable in Muslim Southeast Asia. In November 1999, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation invited ten Muslim activists and scholars from the region to Japan for exchanging views and experiences among themselves and with Japanese participants. Here their papers and discussions are compiled into a book, Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia.