Journal Article

Islam Is Not a \Religion\ - Global Religious History and Early Twentieth-Century Debates in British Malaya

Maltese, Giovanni

2021

Overview

Abstract Lately, Islamicists have called to discard \"religion\" as a conceptual tool and/or to use the \"Qurʾānic term\" dīn instead, arguing that \"religion\" entails Eurocentric bias. Analyzing how Fazl-ur-Rahman Ansari conceptualized Islam and religion in the late 1930s and early 1940s, this article presents a threefold argument. Firstly, I argue that a global history approach which examines in a poststructuralist framework how \"Islam\" and \"religion\" are used in concrete contexts is better suited to address the problem of Eurocentrism in both Religious Studies and Islamic Studies. Secondly, I challenge the scholarly thesis that twentieth-century Southeast Asian intellectual debates which referred to Islam as religion were mere emulators of debates conducted in the \"West.\" Instead of assuming isolated histories and ignoring Southeast Asian debates, I contend that the current use of and debates about conceptualizations of Islam as/and religion are the product of one and the same discourse - a result of global negotiation processes in which Europeans were as involved as Southeast Asia-based non-Europeans, even if they did not speak from the same position of power. Finally, I submit that the approach of global religious history opens new perspectives on contemporary Malaysian politics.

• Publisher: Brill