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The Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) is the biggest opposition party in Malaysia and one of the most prominent Islamist parties in Southeast Asia. Tracing its development from 1951 to the present, this ambitious study explains how PAS acquired both local and international relevance. Farish A. Noor charts the party's rise alongside the different ideological postures - from anticolonialism to postrevolutionary Islamism - that it has adopted over the years. Exploring how PAS has continuously adapted to contemporary realities, he makes an important contribution to our understanding of Malaysia's Islamist movement, as well as the country's broader political history

Empire-building did not only involve the use of excessive violence against native communities, but also required the gathering of data about the native Other. This is a book about books, which looks at the writings of Western colonial administrators, company-men and map-makers who wrote about Southeast Asia in the 19th century. In the course of their information-gathering they had also framed the people of Southeast Asia in a manner that gave rise to Orientalist racial stereotypes that would be used again and again. This work revisits the era of colonial data-collecting to demonstrate the workings of the imperial echo chamber, and how in the discourse of 19th century colonial-capitalism data was effectively weaponized to serve the interests of Empire

A century before the Philippines came under American control, Americans were already travelling to Southeast Asia regularly. This book looks at the writings of American diplomats, adventurers, and scientists and chronicles how nineteenth-century Americans viewed and imagined Southeast Asia through their own cultural-political lenses. It argues that as Americans came to visit the region they also brought with them a train of cultural assumptions and biases that contributed to the development of American Orientalism in Southeast Asia

This paper aims to demonstrate that pluralism has always been part and parcel of ordinary human lives in Indonesia, and that is was the normmas far back as the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries when Muslim power was at its height in Java and the rest of the archipelago, long before themadvent of European colonial-capitalism and long before the decline ofmMuslim political-economic power. It hopes to provide a counterfactual argument that shows that cosmopolitanism and pluralism were indeed part of daily political-economic life then, and that Indonesian Muslims were in fact able to live in such a cosmopolitan environment where pluralism was not regarded as a threat or a reason for mass-scale moral panic. The opposite was the case that when Muslim economic-political power was at its height in Java, Javanese Muslims were at their most accommodating and welcoming towards foreigners of diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds. In order to highlight such pluralism evidence, our reference will be the work of the writer Johann Theodorus de Bry, whose work Icones Indiae Orientalis was published in 1601.Keywords: Pluralism, Cosmopolitanism, Banten, Theodorus de Bry, Seventeenth Century

This paper looks at the Malaysian General Election campaign of 2013, and focuses primarily on the 1Malaysia project that was foregrounded by the administration of Prime Minister Najib Razak. It compares the 1Malaysia project with other projects aimed at nation-building, such as the Wawasan 2020 project of former Prime Minister Mahathir and the Islam Hadari project of former Prime Minister Badawi; and asks if 1Malaysia was truly an attempt at building a sense of Malaysian nationhood based on universal citizenship regardless of race or religion; and it also considers the response to the 1Malaysia project that came from the opposition parties of the country. Malaysia has experienced a steady process of islamisation that dates back to the Mahathir era, and the question of whether the political domain of Malaysia has been overcome by religious-communitarian markers and values will be raised in the paper as well.

Much nuance and variability have been lost in the process of the reductivist analysis of Islam post 9/11 and, as this study amply demonstrates, we are all the poorer as a result. This exhaustive examination of the rise and spread of the Tablighi Jama't, arguably the world's largest Islamic missionary movement, locates it in the larger perspective of global Islam and developments in the Muslim societies. Combining an overview of the history and current socio-political perception of the Tablighi Jama'at with a more analytical and philosophical approach to fundamental questions of identity, subject-positioning and representation, the author creates a comprehensive resource of interest to all scholars and students of Islam. Drawing on exhaustive research and records of conversion narratives of the new members of Tablighi Jama'at, cited here at length, the author creates a unique perspective on this complex phenomenon from both an internal and external viewpoints. Ahmad-Noor locates the spiritual framework of the movement in the context of its perception in the eyes of the political and religious authorities of the countries where it has a following, as well as the Western 'securocrat' approach.

This paper will look at the process of transnational transfer of ideas, beliefs and value-systems, with a special emphasis on the transfer of Islamist ideas and ideals through the vector of student movements and organisations that were set up in Western Europe and North America as well as the rise of a new generation of Islamist intellectuals in Malaysia in the late 1960s for whom the idea of the 'West' was turned on its head and re-cast in negative terms. It begins by looking at how the 'West' was initially cast in positive terms as the ideal developmental model by the first generation of post-colonial elites in Malaysia, and how – as a result of the crisis of governance and the gradual decline in popularity of the ruling political coalition – the 'West' was subsequently re-cast in negative terms by the Islamists of the 1960s and 1970s who sought instead to turn Malaysia into an Islamic society from below. As a consequence of this dialectical confrontation between the ruling statist elite and the nascent Islamist opposition in Malaysia, the idea of the 'West' has remained as the central constitutive Other to Islam and Muslim identity, and this would suggest that the Islamist project of the1970s to the present remains locked in a mode of oppositional dialectics that nonetheless requires the presence of the 'West' as its constitutive Other, be it in positive or negative terms.