Asian Muslim Research Articles

KlingMuslims in Sixteenth-Century Ayutthaya: Towards Aggregating the Fragments

AbstractThis article reconstructs the history ofKlingMuslims’ contribution to the religious and ethnic cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century Ayutthaya. This study's argument is constructed based on an aggregate of written fragments about theKlingin both Portuguese primary sources and the wider academic literature. We reveal that, amongst the many ways in which Siam benefited from the Iberian invasion of Melaka in 1511, the dramatic geopolitical rupture of the invasion re-routed trade across the Bay of Bengal. As a result,Klingmerchants began arriving in Ayutthaya in greater numbers via the new network of Siamese-controlled ports and portages. Moreover, this study demonstrates the utility of greater synergy among South Asian, Southeast Asian, Thai, and Malay Studies through focusing on the exonyms employed in primary and secondary sources. Finally, this article contends that Ayutthaya's ethnic and religious cosmopolitanism was impacted by the arrival of South Asian Muslims, referred to asKlingin the Malay World andKhaekin Siam, approximately one century before Persians arrived in greater numbers. This, among others, was an unintended result of Portugal's sixteenth-century interventions into, and alliances with, the Siamese.

The Fashioning of Southeast Asian Muslim Women’s Clothing from the Perspective of Social Phenomena and Global Market Changes

Religions are among the most universal and influential social institutions, and they exert significant impacts on the attitudes, values, and behaviors of individuals and societies. Previously quite closed, Muslim women’s fashion has become trendy—a phenomenon most evident among young generations of women in Indonesia and Malaysia. This study examines the background and significance of the dynamic changes in fashioning that have occurred in the clothing of Southeast Asian Muslim women. Simultaneously, it investigates the emergence of Southeast Asian Muslim women consumers as an essential force in the global fashion market and the influencers that exert tremendous power over them. Finally, the study analyzes fashion trends in Southeast Asian Muslim countries. As an expression of individual fashion desires, the fashioning of Southeast Asian Muslim women helps elucidate trends in the current social environment. At the same time, in the midst of a rapidly changing international trade environment, Southeast Asia is attracting global attention as a fashion market.

State containment and closure of gendered possibilities among a millennial generation: On not knowing Muslim young men

Within a British context, the South Asian Muslim community is currently a significant media spectacle with a millennial generation of British-born young men inhabiting public personae that officially are perceived as being a ‘suspect community’. An epistemological assumption of this perception appears to be that religion is the dominant and exclusive social category shaping their behaviour. Using qualitative research that synthesizes postcolonial and critical men’s studies, this article explores how Muslim millennial men are ‘categorically’ contained with accompanying forms of (de)gendering. The article is based upon research with Birmingham-born millennial young men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, aged 18–25. The research found that a major effect over the last few years of establishing a securitized regime involving ascribed values, reviled violent bodies and designated locations has been to circumscribe the spaces within which Muslim young men are able to perform masculinities in public spheres. The ‘no-go’ spaces of hard physical borders and the increasing complexity of imagined (post-Brexit) borders have imposed racially intensified patterns of stratification in austerity Britain. We conclude by arguing that young men are subjectively negotiating the discursive construction of Muslim identities. This negotiation engages with dynamic dissonances that are (re)constituting their remembering of the past and the living and doing of the present and their imagined futures.

Qur'an Translations into Central Asian Languages: Exegetical Standards and Translation Processes

One of the most important issues when studying Qur’an translation is the question of the extent to which the translation process is informed by a specific hermeneutical strategy. By analysing three translations published by one of the most active international actors in this area, the King Fahd Qur’an Printing Complex in Medina, the current study is an exploratory attempt to systematise common features of Qur’an translations produced for Central Asian Muslim communities (in this case, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik). By comparing selected verses and supplementary materials, the analysis undertaken in this article suggests the existence of a specific dynamic in exegetical strategy, according to which both typical ‘Salafi’ visions of the text (mostly in terms of theological issues) are combined with ‘domestic’ interpretations of the Qur’an that are popular in Central Asian Islamic milieux. Despite a predominantly ‘static’ Salafi trend in exegetics, the translations addressed in this study show some level of variation, which appears in the way the overall exegetical framing of the translation is made relevant to the local Muslim context.

Book review: Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiv + 395 pp. Figures, tables, glossary, bibliography, index. ₹1495 (hardback)

Seaming Sisterhood/Seaming Seams: South Asian Muslim Women in London-- Community among Precarity

Seaming Sisterhood/Seaming Seams: South Asian Muslim Women in London-- Community among Precarity

Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge. By Usha Sanyal

<i>Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge</i>. By <scp>Usha Sanyal</scp>

Courting agency: gender and divorce in an English sharia council

ABSTRACT Sharia councils have been in existence in England since the 1980s, providing advice and guidance in matters of Islamic family law. The vast majority of their users are women applying for Islamic divorces. The ulamā (scholars) at the councils encourage reconciliation and only grant divorces where this is deemed impossible. This paper, based on observations at a large sharia council in East London, supplements earlier institutional analyses by focusing not on what the ulamā are doing, but on what women are doing at the council. The paper identifies a spectrum of compliance with the council and its procedures, ranging between those who say they just want what the sharia wants, to foot-dragging, actively contesting the ulamā and exiting the council. Further, these forms of engagement may change over time. Overall, the paper contributes by illustrating the complexity of British South Asian Muslim women’s identities and affiliations and engaging with questions of gendered agency. It is clear that even when women petitioners contest, confront or exit the council, they may inscribe their moves within, rather than in opposition to, Islamic norms and values. The paper draws out the wider political implications of this non-opposition between Islamic subject positions and agency.

Promoting Health Literacy About Cancer Screening Among Muslim Immigrants in Canada: Perspectives of Imams on the Role They Can Play in Community.

Purpose: Immigrants tend to have lower rates of cancer screening than non-immigrants in Canada. Inequity in screening rates may stem from religious factors, which religious leaders can influence. This study aimed to explore the knowledge and attitudes held by Muslim religious leaders about cancer screening, as well as the role religious leaders perceive they can play in improving cancer screening health literacy among South Asian Muslim immigrant women. Methods: We conducted interviews with 8 Muslim religious leaders in Calgary, Canada. Participants’ knowledge and attitudes were inductively summarized using descriptive analysis, while practices were deductively thematically analyzed using the Socioecological Model and the Communication for Development approaches. Results: We found participants mostly had some knowledge of cancer, but lesser knowledge of different screening tests and of low screening rates among immigrants. Participants proposed that their role as a speaker, access to facilities and community networks, and collaboration with universities and healthcare professionals could help overcome religious misinterpretations and promote cancer screening among South Asian Muslim immigrant women. Conclusion: Religious leaders were highly supportive of incorporating health messaging into faith-based messaging. Future work should focus on implementing the practices recommended in this study with South Asian Muslim immigrant women’s voices at their center.

Intergenerational Exchanges In Aging South Asian Muslim Families: An Intersectional Lifecourse Perspective

International migration flows are increasing at a rapid pace and are often accompanied by emergent global realities, (re)negotiation of identities and familial bonds, anticipated challenges, and unforeseen exigencies. Concomitantly, advances in public health have resulted in longer lives with an increasing proportion of the global population now 65 years and older. While these demographic shifts have received considerable research attention, little is known about aging South Asian Muslim families in the US and the ways in which they adjust and adapt to shifting social realities. To address this gap, this qualitative study explores the intersections of faith, culture, gender, age, and immigrant status, and how these seminal life course events shape intergenerational care and support exchanges in South Asian Muslim families. Building on findings from 30 in-depth narrative interviews with three generations of immigrant South Asian Muslim women, and using an intersectional lifecourse perspective, this study explores the (re)negotiation of familial bonds and the enactment of religious beliefs and practices such as those around filial expectations in a transnational Islamic context. It shows how, for the grandmothers, daughters, and granddaughters in the study, their Islamic faith was a part of both the public sphere and a collective ideology, as well as a deeply personal and intimate attachment that provided structure and continuity in their everyday lives. Finally, the implications of these findings in the broader context of Islamophobia and salient structural barriers to accessing available health and social support services for aging South Asian Muslim families are discussed.

Breaking barriers for Bangladeshi female solo travelers

Asian Muslim women's travel habits are sorely under-researched. In response to various calls for research in this area, this study utilizes Hofstede's five cultural dimensions to determine how Bangladeshi cultural values inhibit and/or enhance travel constraints for solo Muslim female travelers and the subsequent effects on solo travel behavior. We propose solo travel as a strategic tourism development tool to achieve mobility rights and gender equality particularly for destinations that are highly populated with more women than men. Introducing an interpretivist qualitative approach, the study extracted both survey and open-ended responses from 307 frequent Bangladeshi solo travelers that were recruited from a women-only English-speaking Facebook Bangladeshi travel group. The findings reveal that this group is constrained by a unique combination of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural factors. Power-distance, masculinity, and uncertainty-avoidance also play key roles. Sustainable and practical applications are outlined for destination management organizations, travel planners, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and for-profit tour companies that benefit both Bangladeshi solo female travelers and those with whom they interact.

Coercing Mobility: Territory and Displacement in the Politics of Southeast Asian Muslim Movements

AbstractThis introductory article explores the recent turn in Asian history towards work that foregrounds mobility, circulation, and cosmopolitan connections, decentring colonial territoriality and postcolonial geo-bodies as the primary units of historical analysis. In it, and to frame our own special issue on Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, we point out that some of this mobility was coerced via projects of state territorialisation that actively displaced select, targeted Muslim actors whose presence in the polity was deemed problematic by states seeking to consolidate their power. Echoes of this displacement can be traced in the politics of the Muslim movements that these actors created, as we argue in this article and throughout the special issue.

Double Consciousness in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

This article throws light on the issue of identity and Double Consciousness which creates traumatic effects on the psyche, identity and culture of Shahid, the representative of South Asian Immigrants depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album in Britain. In The Black Album, Shahid is depicted as a South Asian British Muslim who looks at himself from the eyes of the White British and he finds two-ness in himself, which is similar to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of Double Consciousness that “is the sense of always looking at one’s self from the eyes of others” (2). So, the article reveals the double consciousness of Shahid, the protagonist who carries hybrid identity for having British White mother and Pakistani Muslim father. Because of being a South Asian Muslim immigrant living under the hegemony of White Supremacy in Britain, he experiences Double Consciousness, which causes his inferiority complex, lack of self-esteem, rootlessness, in-betweenness and fragmentation of identity. Thus, the article deals with the Double Consciousness within the binary opposition between the East and West, Islamic Fundamentalist and Western Liberalism, and Pakistani Identity and British Identity. According to the theorists Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, the colonized people who become immigrants in the postcolonial era suffer from identity crisis and double consciousness as they face segregation, racism, discrimination and various other forms of Othering.

‘We Only Smile’: A Study of Perceived Discrimination among Asian Female Muslim Tourists

This chapter examines how Asian female Muslim tourists encountered negative and discriminatory experiences when they interacted with the locals during holidays in Europe, particularly The Netherlands. This is especially the case for female Muslims who wear the veil. The negative and discriminatory experiences encountered by these female Muslim tourists include gazes from locals, treated unfairly, negative remarks, and fall under suspicions. However, in hardly any case, these female Muslims labelled the event as discrimination and associated it to their identity as a Muslim. These female Muslim tourists employed a variety of coping strategies that comprise direct confrontation, accepting & ignoring discrimination, apologizing, justifying discrimination & thinking positively, modifying behaviour. There is a general attitude among these tourists about negotiating the negatively and discriminatory experiences: that they want to deal with it in a subtle way, such as by smiling.

Islamic and local knowledge on social work in Malaysia and Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Professional social work emerged on the basis of secular and Eurocentric worldview in the West in the late 19th century. As emerging nations in the 1940s, Asian Muslims were not spared being colonized in ways more than just physical presence by foreign powers. This article describes briefly how professional social work entered Malaysia and Bangladesh. The focus is to show how Western-based social work knowledge influenced the respective curriculums in the two mentioned countries. Muslims, in terms of knowledge and their religion of Islam have not made an imprint on the body of knowledge in social work. With the current ongoing discourses on the definition of social work, this article presents how Islam and local knowledge can play a mainstream role in questioning the colonial assumptions inherent in much accepted social work knowledge. While there are similarities between Western and Islamic values in reference to helping, there are also differences in which the latter is more suitable for the local population. Therefore, this article is also an initiative to start a dialog and a determined effort toward putting Islamic and local knowledge as a part of social work curricula and practice in Malaysia and Bangladesh.

Meeting the Moral Markers of Success: Concerted Cultivation among Second‐Generation Muslim Parents*

Concerted cultivation describes how parents reproduce middle‐class status by preparing children for success through the organization of their family’s daily lives. Scholarship accounting for the potentially important role that minority religious identity plays in this process is warranted. The current study fills this theoretical and empirical niche by exploring the parenting practices of second‐generation, upper‐middle‐class Muslim Americans. I show how within the context of rising Islamophobia, members of this group defined success for their children using both socioeconomic markers and moral markers, in which Islam and excellent character traits are crucial. With this definition in mind, parents aimed to reproduce both class and religion in the third generation using concerted cultivation strategies. I utilize data from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 72 in‐depth interviews with second‐generation Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans in suburban Metro‐Detroit. I make contributions to sociology by presenting novel data on a little understood minority group and their institutions and by bringing religion into discussions of second‐generation parenting styles and class reproduction.

Pengaruh Inovasi Program Kemanusiaan terhadap Budaya Organisasi dan Kinerja Karyawan pada Asia Muslim Charity Foundation

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of humanitarian program innovation on organizational culture and employee performance at the Asia Muslim Charity Foundation. This study uses an explanatory survey method, namely the research method is carried out on large and small populations, but the data studied are data taken from samples from that population, so that descriptions and relationships between variables are found. In order for the sample in this study to be said to be representative, the method in this study uses the Slovin formula from the total population with a precision (error) level of 5% and obtained as many as 99 employees who are the object of research where all employees have the same opportunity to be used as samples of this study. . Data was collected through questionnaires as the main data collection, supported by interviews and literature study. The analysis technique used is path analysis. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that organizational culture has a significant effect on humanitarian program innovation, employee performance has no significant effect on humanitarian program innovation, and organizational culture does not have a significant influence on humanitarian program innovation through employee performance at the Asia Muslim Charity Foundation.

Da’wa in Islam: A Discursive Analysis of South Asian Muslim Scholarly Discourses

Da‘wa is one of the notable/substantial topic in Islam. Numerous works have been written on the subject, its modus operandi, philosophies, pedagogy, prominence, tactics, and other interconnected aspects in distinctive languages especially Arabic, Urdu and English. In South Asia, the enormous da‘wa literature produced by the scholars is in Urdu. A significant portion of literature, however, has been produced, both originally as well as through translations, in English to fulfill the needs of da‘uāt in South-Asia as well as global level. In this context, the study attempts to present an appraisal of three English works (produced in 1990s to 2000s) authored by the South Asian scholars. These books are: Syed Abul Hasan Nadwi, da‘wa in the West: The Qur’anic Paradigm (1992 [1991]); Abdus Salam, da‘wa Guide (1996); and Amin Ahsan Islahi, Da’wat-ī dīn Aur Uska Tāriqa-Ka’ar/Islamic Faith and the Mode of its Preaching (2005[1951]). The main themes, collectively, highlighted in these works, reveal both theoretical, and practical aspects; pedagogy and methodology of da‘wa in Quranic paradigm; practical aspect from Prophet’s life; modes and stages in dawat-ī dīn; qualities; language; principles and the style of articulation; wisdom and broadness of da‘i; da‘wa and its harmony with time and space (Modern age). The study, with a tri-fold aim, seeks to: (i) explore their approaches and methodology in their discussions on da‘wa (ii) evaluate critically their stance on modern-day challenges of da‘wa and (iii) highlight the relevance of their interpretation in providing solutions to the contemporary challenges vis-à-vis da‘wa . The major argument put forth in the article is that these selected books make a significant contribution in understanding the pros and cons of da‘wa through their contents; approach and style; construct a momentous contribution to da‘wa literature in the English language and thus accomplish the need of da‘uāt glocally.

Neo-Orientalist Gambits in South Asian Global Game in Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden

This study focuses on the great global game of chess of Neoimperialist played in South Asia. It explores that to fetch global capitalist designs, global forces have devised a global Neo-Orientalist game of chess in three perspectives, i.e. economic, cultural and political, for three-level players, i.e. great players, little players and domestic players. The economic ventures urge the need to divide the South Asian Muslims into good and bad categories through neo-orientalist cultural and political gambits, as is revealed from Nadeem Aslam's 'The Blind Man's Garden' (2013) that critiques the hegemony of Neo-imperialist global forces working purely for their global designs in the region. It exposes economic, political, cultural and strategic motives behind two basic goals: the establishment of neo-imperialism through the elimination of borders for neo-liberalist gains by homogenizing world culture; and the eradication of global terrorism for which war has already been launched there.

Emerging Islamic Representations in the Cambodian Muslim Social Media Scene: Complex Divides and Muted Debates

AbstractThis article explores the characteristics and structure of the Cambodian Muslim social media scene and considers what they tell us about the sociopolitical setting of the country's Muslim minority. It focuses on how the relationship between Islamic actors of the Cambodian Muslim minority, that is, groups, movements and institutions, and their offline environment shape their online representations and proselytization activities. It particularly considers the observation that theological debate is almost absent in this Islamic social media scene compared to that of other Southeast Asian Muslim societies and attempts to find answers to the question of why this is the case. The article particularly examines the Facebook pages of various Islamic groups and explains the sociopolitical factors and language politics that inform the ways in which they formulate the contents and style of their posts. It shows how the close connections between the political and the religious fields in an authoritarian setting, where the state strongly discourages social discord, have the effect of largely muting debates on social media.