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

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.

A Study of Human Resources Planning at a Private Madrasah School in Lampung

“…Efforts to understand Islamic education (madrasa) in the national education system are faced with debates from various sides. Even among Iconais Muslim thinkers, there are still many debates that are marked by the many variations in the forms of Islamic educational institutions that run each (Maltese, 2021). The many variations in the form of these institutions give rise to unfair competition and make a large number of Islamic educational institutions disproportionate to the increasing quality of Islamic education.…”