 |
| Image: Flickr User - anupama kinagi |
By Mercy A. Kuo and Angelica O. Tang
Insights from Emile Nakhleh
The Rebalance authors Mercy Kuo and Angie Tang regularly engage subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. rebalance to Asia. This conversation with Dr. Emile Nakhleh – retired Senior Intelligence Service Officer and former director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at the Central Intelligence Agency, Research Professor and Coordinator of National Security Programs at the University of New Mexico, author of A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World (2009), among numerous other publications, and contributor to LobeLog on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, political Islam, radicalization, and terrorism – is the 25th in “The Rebalance Insight Series”.
Briefly compare and contrast political Islam in Asia and the Middle East.
Generally speaking, political Islam and Islamic activism in East and Northeast Asia tend be more tolerant and less dogmatic than Sunni Islam in the Arab heartland and the greater Middle East. As the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia’s brand of Islam over the centuries has tended to focus on commerce, education, and community service. Many Sunni Muslims in Asia adhere to the tolerant Shafi’i School of jurisprudence or mathhab, one of the four “Schools” in Sunni Islam. Unlike Middle Eastern Muslim majority countries, Muslims in Asia – especially in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines – have had the experience of living and interacting with large minorities or majorities of non-Muslim groups. Furthermore, the demands that some Asian Muslims have voiced in the past decade have focused on equality and autonomy but have not called for regime change or for the imposition of intolerant, radical Muslim ideologies. Nor has the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide been as divisive in Asia as it has been in the Islamic heartland in the Middle East.
Read the full story at The Diplomat