Culture, Religion and Conflict in Muslim Southeast Asia

Negotiating Tense Pluralisms

Joseph Camilleri, Sven Schottmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415625265
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136163432
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By examining the sometimes surprising and unexpected roles that culture and religion have played in mitigating or exacerbating conflicts, this book explores the cultural repertoires from which Southeast Asian political actors have drawn to negotiate the pluralism that has so long been characteristic of the region.

Focusing on the dynamics of identity politics and the range of responses to the socio-political challenges of religious and ethnic pluralism, the authors assembled in this book illuminate the principal regional discourses that attempt to make sense of conflict and tensions. They examine local notions of "dialogue," "reconciliation," "civility" and "conflict resolution" and show how varying interpretations of these terms have informed the responses of different social actors across Southeast Asia to the challenges of conflict, culture and religion. The book demonstrates how stumbling blocks to dialogue and reconciliation can and have been overcome in different parts of Southeast Asia and identifies a range of actors who might be well placed to make useful contributions, propose remedies, and initiate action towards negotiating the region's pluralism.

This book provides a much needed regional and comparative analysis that makes a significant contribution to a better understanding of the interfaces between region and politics in Southeast Asia.

1 Culture, religion and the Southeast Asian state

Sven Schottmann and Joseph Camilleri

For much of the Cold War, religion and culture did not feature prominently in the study of politics. In the industrialized societies of the West, sacred beliefs and religious sensibilities were thought to have been successfully relegated to the private sphere through the process of secularization that was the inexorable attribute of the modern nation-state. Confrontation with the Soviet bloc notwithstanding, the very movement of history itself pointed towards a global convergence towards the secular, capitalist, liberal democratic model. Any difficulties in applying this model to the newly independent states of Asia and Africa or even Latin America were explained as stemming from the persistence of pre-modern culture in these societies. Social commentators were virtually at one in arguing that the rise of the modern state in the Third World, coupled with material progress, would eventually give rise to more recognizably ‘modern’ forms of politics there as well. Scientific rationalism and advances in technology would help transform even such stubbornly religious backwaters as the Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe, or the ‘Muslim world’.¹ Although not peculiar to the formal study of societies, the singular conception of modernity led to widespread assumptions that economic progress would help replicate the socio-cultural formations and political conditions it had produced in most of the world's industrialized societies. As had happened in the West, religious beliefs and practices would inevitably fade under the pressures of urbanization, bureaucratization and the market.

Culture and religion might be the concern of anthropologists and historians, but not of political scientists or international relations scholars, at least not during the greater part of the Cold War period. Operating within the dominant paradigm of modernization theory, political science departments were focused on the design and function of parliaments, electoral mechanisms or legal frameworks – not on threadbare relics of the feudal age fated to be swept away sooner rather than later. Even Iran's Islamic Revolution or the pivotal role played by the Catholic Church in the dissolution of the Soviet empire were routinely explained away as vestiges of the old order in societies that had not fully completed the processes of modernization, or they were presented as responses to be expected in particularly repressive regimes, where religion oftentimes provided the only possible vocabulary of dissent. Obvious exceptions to this conscious marginalization of religion and culture were the still influential works of Robert Bellah, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Jose Casanova. But for the most part, Cold War era scholarship refused to countenance a serious place for religion in studies of politics and the functioning of modern industrialized societies.

It has become a cliché to say that many things changed on 11 September 2001, but what transpired that autumn day served to accelerate a reassessment of the role of religion and culture that was already under way. Even when religion and culture were, albeit reluctantly, considered relevant to domestic and international politics, they were seldom viewed as distinct fields of analysis. More or often than not they were said to reflect or obscure the somehow more real material or ideological divides within or between states and societies. The persistent hesitation to recognize religion and culture, which overlap but are not coterminous, as a valid and legitimate field of political analysis has been strikingly evident in the coverage of what is often referred to as the ‘Arab Spring’. While conservative commentators warned of an ominous Islamist tide usurping the democratic upheavals of the Arab world, many progressive voices hailed the young revolutionaries as ‘secularists’. The possibility that the critiques to the old discredited order could be simultaneously democratic and religious was seldom entertained.

Even where religion and culture are acknowledged as politically significant factors, the often unspoken assumption across the intellectual and political spectrum was that they were at best transitory phenomena in the public sphere. The expectation remained that, along with the rise of an indigenous middle-class, education (and in particular that of women), foreign aid and assistance in institution-building would eventually help bring about change. This assumption is troublesome in that it ignores the extent to which religion continues to play an overt political role in many ‘modern’ Western states. It overlooks the fact that the secular, liberal modern state has absorbed a number of the functions and, indeed, some of the less tolerant traits of the confessional state and of religion itself. The position developed in this volume is that religion and culture matter in politics everywhere; in Europe, North America and Oceania as much as in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Although religion and culture are clearly not the only forces shaping history, our understanding of society is all the poorer when we ignore some of the dynamic factors influencing processes of nation-building, economic development, the evolution of regional and global institutions, as well as the growth of international law. While religion has often served as a powerful transmission belt for the intensification of political conflicts and, indeed, often sits astride tangible economic and political inequalities, religiously articulated political standpoints cannot be dismissed as manifestations of ‘irrational politics’ or false consciousness. The same applies more generally to the religious beliefs and practices, upheld in public and in private, that sustain congregations in churches, mosques and temples everywhere. This is not to overlook the instrumentalization of religion and the frequent cloaking of secular objectives in sacred language. Rather it is to take seriously the agency of religiously affiliated or religiously inspired actors in conflict and violence on the one hand and the construction of civility and the growth of dialogical discourse and practice on the other. We have seen this dual trend unfold in various domains, including national polities, regional formations and on the wider international stage.

International relations theorists are coming to the realization that religion must itself be made the subject of theorization (Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003; Thomas 2005; Hanson 2007; Heng and Liew 2010). Their calls, particularly in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, London and most recently Utøya, appear to have found greater resonance than the pleas of Bellah, Eisenstadt and Casanova did in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, the analysis often remains paper-thin. It is one thing to identify the factors that have led to the apparently unprecedented politicization of ethnicity, religion and culture over the past several decades, and quite another to articulate the complex interconnection of state, society and religion.

Three important clarifications may be in order here. The first concerns the use of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘religion’, two concepts that are quite distinct though inextricably entwined, hence the source of much confusion. Both religion and culture are all-encompassing concepts that cannot be easily or usefully categorized by making one the subset of the other, or by attempting to reduce one to the realm of the sacred and assigning the other to the realm of the profane. Nor is it satisfactory to characterize religion in terms of doctrinal or metaphysical claims on the one hand, and culture purely in relation to ethnicity or ‘primordial’ attachments on the other. Both culture and religion delineate in complex and interacting ways the boundaries that separate the insider from the outsider, the internal from the external, right from wrong or at least acceptable from reprehensible conduct.

There is nevertheless a distinctive quality to religion, which has to do with an enduring yearning for some form of transcendence, whether expressed by belief in God or more amorphous but no less potent cosmic notions that take the human being beyond the reality of the physical universe. Religion is inseparable from culture in that all religions, in different ways and to different degrees, entail stories, myths, rituals and ethical precepts, which are themselves important building blocks of culture. Yet the culture of any society is necessarily multi-layered, and seldom the pure reflection of the beliefs and practices of any one religion or even combination of religions. Culture, which includes language, technology, institutions and much else, is best understood as a complex mosaic to which different epochs and population movements contribute different ways of knowing, perceiving, feeling and living in the world as societies seek to adapt to the challenges of a ceaselessly changing environment.

The second has to do with the understanding of religion itself. It hardly need be said that the world's major religions, including the three Abrahamic faiths, are heterogeneous entities composed of a bewildering array of sects, schools, denominations, orthodoxies and heresies. If this sometimes makes it difficult to conceive of faith traditions in the singular, this is even more so in the case of abstract references to religion. There exists, as Talal Asad (2003) has argued, no universal definition of this term. Yet, religion as understood in dominant academic discourse derives largely from the distinct history of Western Europe. The narrow delineation of ‘religion’ as a separate sphere sits uncomfortably with the Muslim conception of din, or the metaphysical beliefs and spiritual practices of South and East Asia. Even though the Muslim world, at least from the Abbasids onwards, has known a de facto separation of powers, the idea that politics and religion constitute two discrete domains, or that the ‘sacred’ is separate from and independent of the ‘profane’, is a distinctly modern, European conception.

The third regards the understanding of culture that has also been elaborated many times before, but bears repeating here. We are not dealing with immutable, primordial essences but with malleable, highly dynamic and constantly transforming norms, values, customs and practices. Nowhere is this more so than in Southeast Asia, a region straddling one of the most ancient trading routes; open to the exchange of goods, ideas and speculations about the metaphysical. Not only have Southeast Asia's indigenous peoples themselves long participated in these networks of trade, scholarship and pilgrimage, but they have also long hosted a diverse range of diasporic communities. It is these intersecting currents of trade, conquest, migration and intellectual exchange that underlie the constant transformations of culture. To recognize the dynamism and evolutionary character of culture, however, is not to deny its centrality in formulations of the good, the right and the beautiful – even when these perceptions evolve over time or when citizens that share the same culture arrive at sharply different conclusions. And although each tradition, it is true, possesses distinctive ‘perspectives on ethical conduct and personal and social relationships’, the differences within groups are often no less significant than those between them (Camilleri 2011: 10).

Southeast Asian political cultures

Given the geographic, ethno-linguistic, religious and socio-cultural diversity of the region, generalizations about its political culture are as likely to obscure as to illuminate. Unlike the experience of pre-modern China or even India, the kingdoms located in what is considered Southeast Asia today did not reflect a common religious tradition, nor were the region's elites able to communicate through a shared high language, although by the fifteenth century Malay had emerged as the lingua franca – if not throughout continental Southeast Asia, then at least in most parts of the archipelago. At no stage was Southeast Asia brought effectively under the rule of a dominant power, with the result that the peoples of the region did not see themselves as inhabiting a shared political space. Before the imposition of the Western conception of time, the cultures of Southeast Asia did not possess a sense of shared secular time or shared calendar. The very term ‘Southeast Asia’ itself is an externally imposed label of relatively recent origin, invented during World War II by Allied military strategists to describe the theatre of war in the Japanese-occupied former European colonies between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Even the older geographical designations, including Nanyang, Jawah, or Further India, tend to reflect the outsider's view. There is no evidence of any pre-twentieth century, autochthonous conception of a regionally encompassing political identity.

Notwithstanding the significant diversity in cultures, customs and historical patterns that have traditionally militated against the emergence of a unified realm, a number of shared factors warrant characterizing Southeast Asia as a distinct space or ‘region’. Apart from similarities in climate and environment, the influence of geography (notably the sea) that had prevented the emergence of powerful, unified empires had also long facilitated regional and long-distance trade and other forms of human exchange. Ubiquitous waterways and a strategic location between the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal exposed regional states to outside influences. Even relatively minor polities such as the Sultanate of Kedah in modern-day Malaysia had extensive trading relations with the upstream forest-dwellers, with port towns on the littoral of the Malacca Straits as well as with those further afield in places like Java, Kalimantan or Sulawesi. Kedah is even known to have sent ships to southern India for several centuries before the arrival of the Europeans (Asmah 1979: 56). As inveterate seafarers, the coastal dwellers of Southeast Asia have long been active participants in the global trade of the maritime Silk Road. By virtue of its characteristic openness, Southeast Asia has also long hosted significant diasporic communities – both of peoples indigenous to the archipelago as well as those from beyond. Mediaeval polities such as Malacca presented a colourful kaleidoscope of cultures and creeds, precursors in many ways to the modern heterogeneity of such multicultural entrepôts as Penang, Singapore and Batavia.

In some places perhaps more so than in others, the permeability of the region to the flows of people, goods, technologies, images, information and ideas has produced some of the world's most plural societies. With the flow of trade came the inevitable artistic, intellectual and philosophical intercourse that produced over time a quite unusual situation: Southeast Asia became home to virtually the entire range of humankind's religious and ethical traditions. The states of continental Southeast Asia are predominantly Theravada Buddhist – with the exception of Vietnam, with its mixture of Confucianism, Mahayana Buddhism and folk religious practices. Maritime Southeast Asia, the focus of the present study, is predominantly Sunni Muslim, with the exception of the predominantly Catholic Philippines. In the mountainous highlands or the remote interior of Kalimantan and Sulawesi, animism and tribal religions still prevail, while Daoism and Confucianism and in more recent centuries sundry Christian denominations, Judaism and all forms of New Age religions have flourished in Southeast Asia's urban areas. Even Hinduism, which had once helped inspire something akin to a classical culture in the region but subsequently declined as an indigenous presence save for the island of Bali, has re-established itself in many parts of maritime Southeast Asia, in large part through the presence of diasporic communities from the Indian subcontinent.

In the same way that European Christianity represents a syncretic amalgam of Hellenized Judaism and Germanic folk beliefs, the peoples of Southeast Asia incorporated the world's great religions into their way of life. Syncretism is not unique to Southeast Asia and what is found in the region is in most ways not particularly noteworthy – except for the fact that five of the world's major religious traditions have undergone such localizations in parallel within a shared, relatively contained space. While there is nothing automatically less orthodox or more syncretistic about southern Thai or rural Javanese forms of Islam compared to Indian or Egyptian varieties, in their aesthetics and sensibilities they are unmistakably Southeast Asian. Similar observations apply to the Theravada versions of Buddhism in Cambodia, Burma and Thailand, as well as to Filipino Catholicism, Balinese Hinduism and in some important ways even to Vietnam's elite Confucianism.

The diverse religious traditions present in Southeast Asia, sometimes on their own, sometimes as an amalgam, have considerably influenced how authority, legitimacy and rightful conduct are understood and practised. In the Southeast Asian experience religion was seldom understood as a privatized spirituality detached from the wider political context of society. While reductive references to the ‘Muslim mindset’ or some allegedly ‘timeless characteristics of Buddhism’ are no substitute for historically grounded explanations of political phenomena, the fact remains that religious currents have helped shape prevailing if constantly changing notions of rightfulness and legitimacy. The political cultures of Southeast Asia, it is true, are as plural, contested and dynamic as any found elsewhere. It is equally true, however, that for many in the region religious beliefs, rites and practices provide the moral framework of public order – even if not always in ways that privilege orthodoxy or scripturalism. The question therefore is not whether religion plays a central role in Southeast Asian societies and politics, but what kind of role it has played historically and in the more recent past, and what role it might play in the foreseeable future.

The nexus between culture, religion and politics is evident everywhere – even, as Bellah and Casanova have argued, in the ostensibly secular West. In the latter case, a complex web of intellectual and cultural influences dating back to the Renaissance and culminating in the Enlightenment has reinforced the pre-existing conception of the sacred and profane (clearly evident in Augustine's ‘City of God’ and ‘City of Man’) as distinct and even competing domains. This dualism is much less evident in Southeast Asian history. Taking the pre-modern Muslim world as an example, we do find a rather robust public sphere where ‘ulama, Sufi brotherhoods, merchant guilds, pious endowments and others often constrained the ruler's powers. However, they are not the functional equivalent of an ecclesiastical hierarchy that in any sense serves as an alternative or rival centre of power. While scholars and religious not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge contemporary Southeast Asia series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Notes on orthography and naming conventions
• Preface
• 1 Culture, religion and the Southeast Asian state
• PART I States, discourses and grandes idées
• PART II Conflict and reconciliation
• Index