Political Islam in Southeast Asia.

• Author: Liow, Joseph Chinyong
• Position: Book review

Political Islam in Southeast Asia. By Gordon E Means. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009. Softcover: 293pp.

Given today's heightened interest in Islam in Southeast Asia, the appearance in recent years of several well-written and researched books on aspects of the topic ranging from Islamic education, Islamic finance and individual country studies--mostly on Indonesia but also on Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines--should not be surprising. The daunting challenge for scholars in the field, however, is to produce a coherent, single-authored comparative study of the region that makes developments in each Southeast Asian country speak to one another. It is in this regard that Gordon Means book is received with great anticipation.

To be sure, Means's discussions on the rise and demise of political Islam in Indonesia during the Sukarno and Soeharto administrations, the evolution of the Islamization race between the United Malays National Organization and Patti Islam Se-Malaysia in Malaysia, and the origins of Muslim-based insurgencies in the southern Philippines as well as Thailand's restive southern border provinces, while well informed and eloquently written, covers a fair amount of old ground. Nevertheless, the book stands out for the author's ability to harness, digest and compare much of what we already know has been taking place in these Southeast Asian settings. This comes across, for instance, in the pithy comparison of colonial policies towards Islam, as well as the author's informed ruminations in the concluding chapter, aptly titled "Southeast Asian Islam in Transition".

One of the overarching themes of the book is the fact that Southeast Asia's narratives of Islam drew much from rich and varied religious and cultural traditions, including indigenous ones. Again, while this is hardly a novel observation, there remains little in the existing literature that deals substantively with the origins and impact of external ideas and practices on Southeast Asian Muslims, particular in the post-colonial era. In this regard, the author's attempt (Chapter Eight) to locate what has been taking place within Muslim communities in Southeast Asia in broader trends of transnational Islam through a discussion on transnational ideologies and networks warrants scrutiny. For Means, one of the clearest manifestations of the impact of transnational Islam lies in the emergence of radical ideas and networks that eventually paved the way for...