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| Image: Wiki Commons |
By Akhilesh Pillalamarri
The South Asian traditions of Islam offer a compelling alternative to the religion’s practice in the Middle East.
The Middle East and indeed much of the Islamic world is on fire, driven by the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and worsened by their politicization of Sunni and Shia communities. As Muslim communities come under increasingly radical influence, it sometimes seems to those from other regions that the Islam–at least as seen in the Middle East–is especially austere and harsh. In order to overcome this, one solution advocated by some is the “Turkish model,” which not only attempts to create a secular state but uses the state to intervene in and rework religion to suit the state’s purposes. Yet this too has deleterious effects.
But the world of Islam is not monolithic, nor is it limited to the Middle East, as is often pointed out. The largest population of Muslims in the world lives in South Asia. Per a 2009 survey, an estimated 484 million Muslims live in South Asia, mostly in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, more than the 315 million inhabitants of the Arab world. Over half of Muslims in the Asia-Pacific region and a third of all Muslims are South Asian. India and Pakistan together have as many or more Shia than Iran, and some of the largest Sunni populations in the world. Sunni-Shia tension was rare in South Asia until a few years ago and grew due to increased Saudi influence in mosques. Nonetheless, pluralism is highly valued by South Asian Muslims, 97 percent of whom believe it to be a good thing for there to be freedom of religion for different faiths. This is the greatest percentage of Muslims who believe this in any region of the world, including the West.
While Southeast Asian Islam, primarily represented by Indonesia, the largest majority-Muslim country in the world, is considered culturally and intellectually peripheral to the Muslim world, with few scholars or thinkers of influence and no major centers of Muslim world wide learning, South Asia is, on the other hand, along with the Middle East, the most important region of the Muslim world in terms of influence and importance. There is a very large corpus of religious literature in Urdu. The South Asian tradition of patronage and pilgrimage led to a large presence of Hindustanis, as the Persians called them, and Hindis, as the Arabs called them, in the port cities of the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Soon enough, these South Asian Muslims came to Mecca by the 19th century, where they constituted 20 percent of the population.
Because of these connections, the Islam of the subcontinent has global influence, and influence in the Arab world, which often sets the tone of Islamic life. South Asian Islam has a unique charm that could and should be influential in the greater Islamic world, both because it maintains practices that have declined elsewhere and due to its unique characteristics. One such practice is its interpretation of Sufism.
Read the full story at The Diplomat