Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia

When students from a Muslim boarding school were convicted for the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali, Islamic schools in Southeast Asia became the focus of intense international scrutiny. Some analysts have warned that these schools are being turned into platforms for violent jihadism. Making Modern Muslims is the first book to look comparatively at Islamic education and politics in Southeast Asia. Based on a two-year research project by leading scholars of Southeast Asian Islam, the book examines Islamic schooling in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and the southern Philippines. The studies demonstrate that the great majority of schools have nothing to do with violence but are undergoing changes that have far-reaching implications for democracy, gender relations, pluralism, and citizenship.

Making Modern Muslims offers an important reassessment of Muslim culture and politics in Southeast Asia and provides insights into the changing nature of state-society relations from the late colonial period to the present. It allows us to better appreciate the astonishing dynamism of Islamization in Southeast Asia and the struggle for Muslim hearts and minds taking place today. Timely and readable, this volume will be of great interest to teachers and specialists of Islam and Southeast Asia as well as the general reader seeking to understand the great transformations at work in the Muslim world.

Contributors: Esmael A. Abdula, Bjørn Atle Blengsli, Joseph Chinyong Liow, Robert W. Hefner, Richard G. Kraince, Thomas M. McKenna.

• Robert W. Hefner, Editor

• This is an up to the moment overview of Islamic schools in Southeast Asia, with special attention to the roles played by states in shaping schooling. It is timely, informative, well organized, and bears on important and policy-relevant issues.
  —John Bowen
• This is a timely, well-conceived, and extremely well-crafted volume that addresses topics of the utmost importance in today’s increasingly globalized—and dangerously fraught—world. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and to general readers with vastly different levels of knowledge about the peoples and cultures of modern Asia and the culture and politics of contemporary Islam.
  —Michael G. Peletz