The ʿAlawis are adherents of an Islamic sect, the origin of which can be traced back to 9th-century Iraq. They are an offshoot of early Shiah Islam with ancient Iranian, Christian, and Gnostic influences. Outsiders often call them “Nusayri,” after the sect’s founder Ibn Nusayr. Practically all ʿAlawis are Arabs. Their total number is about four million, among which some 2.5 million reside in Syria, where they constitute roughly 12 percent of the population. Many ʿAlawi beliefs and rites are still kept secret by the community, being revealed only to initiate male members. One key element in their faith is the belief in a divine triad that has manifested itself to the ʿAlawi community in seven cycles. Other characteristics are an extraordinary veneration for Muhammad’s son-in-law ʿAli, the belief in the transmigration of the soul, and a very large number of holy shrines, which are frequent in all regions settled by ʿAlawis. Because of the esoteric nature of the ʿAlawi religion and the scarcity of authentic written sources, many details of their creed are subjects of vigorous public and scholarly discussion.
For many centuries, the ʿAlawis were an economically weak, socially marginalized, and persecuted group whose heartland was western Syria. The public rise of the community began with the establishment of the French mandate over Syria after World War I and reached its zenith when the ʿAlawi Hafiz al-Assad became president of Syria in 1971. Since then, the disproportionate political and economic influence of the ʿAlawis in Syria has fueled confessional conflicts with the Sunni majority, which culminated in the civil war that began in 2011.
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The Alawis
Stephan Procházka
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Terrorism and Violence in North America
Atiya Husain
Even among those most invested in defining “terrorism,” there is an inability to agree on a shared definition. This suggests the political nature of the concept. Terrorism is best understood in relation to other social phenomena, particularly colonialism and capitalism. This essay discusses several questions on the topic of terrorism and violence: What is at stake in the definition of terrorism? What is the relationship of Muslims and Islam to terrorism? What is the scope of counterterrorism? In addressing these questions, the article discusses a range of topics including Black Power, paper terrorism, “Barbary” pirates, the Christian Identity Movement, black identity extremism, racially motivated violent extremism, and the permeation of terrorism concerns into sectors, including education and natural disaster management.
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Islamophobia in North America
Sana Patel
Islamophobia is widely known as the fear of Muslims and Islam. However, there is more to this terminology than just its literal translation. The term Islamophobia itself has been widely debated by scholars over its definitions and use. While many scholars agree that Islamophobia refers to the negative treatment of Muslims and the misrepresentation of Islam, notions of anti-Muslimness are debated. Islamophobia also effects non-Muslim communities and individuals who are perceived to resemble Muslims, such as non-Muslim Arabs, Sikhs, Latine, and other minority religious and ethnic groups. So, what exactly constitutes Islamophobia? Is Islamophobia different than anti-Muslimness or anti-Muslim bigotry? Does Islamophobia refer to the fear/hate of Muslims as people or is it directed toward Islam as a religion? Where does Islamophobia stem from? Understanding Islamophobia, along with its roots and causes, is significant to further explore its impacts on Muslim communities where research is lacking in North America such as in Latin America or the Caribbean. Studying Islamophobia also benefits those who aim to combat the discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry that Muslim communities and individuals face whether they are challenging anti-Muslim laws or campaigning for anti-Islamophobia education. Factors that contribute to advocacy of anti-Muslim hate and fear include politicians with anti-Muslim rhetoric such as in the 2016 American elections, media that depict Muslims as evil and oppressed like the film True Lies, and/or bills and policies that aim to restrict Muslim women like Bill 21 in Quebec, Canada. Islamophobic sentiments and actions often increase after events such as 9/11 when Muslims have to defend themselves to disassociate with allegations of terrorism and are directly affected by mass shootings like in Quebec, Canada, in 2017 and in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Muslims around the world suffer from Islamophobia be it through genocide, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Uyghurs in China, or being restricted from practicing their religious beliefs like wearing the hijab or niqab in France.
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Islamic Bioethics: Nanotechnology
Nidhal Guessoum
What ethical issues that nanotechnology raise – in its present state of development and in future, projected breakthroughs? Are those ethical issues to be addressed from a utilitarian perspective (pros and cons to humans) or from higher principles, perhaps religious ones? Does Islam address those issues from a theological perspective or from juristic (“Fiqhi”, i.e. harmful/prohibited vs. beneficial/permissible) angle? What viewpoints and stands have ethicists and religious scholars (Muslim and other) advanced on nanotechnology?
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Islamic Bioethics: Environmental Ethics
Sayed Sikandar Shah Haneef
Environmental ethics has emerged as one of the most topical issues in modern studies. Islamic ethical foundations and their specific guidelines aim to inspire and sensitize Muslims to become active participants in humanity’s efforts toward curbing the problem of environmental degradation, climate change, and global warming. The Islamic outlook strives for equilibrium between moral and spiritual responsibility and an equilibrated approach to nature and its exploitation. The guiding ethical norms about the significance of the different components of the environment integrate secular concern with spiritual aspects. Islam encourages Muslims to participate and collaborate with others in engineering technical measures to rectify the inflicted damages to the well-being of the ecosystem.
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The Virtual Latinx-Muslim Community
Arely Medina
The forms of interaction mediated by the internet brings society closer to the transformations of distinct forms of socialization and the contemporary idea of community. There exists a construction of an imagined community with ethnic and religious borders located in the United States and on the internet. Islamic on one side and Latino on the other side are characteristics expressed in that imagined community that in virtual space can take the form of a cyberenvironment of Islam Latino.
Latinx Muslims sought to be represented in front of other Muslims and civil society itself, such as the Latino community in the United States. The internet allows the creation of an extensive community based on the universal ummah and Islamic discourse. However, while the internet allows Islam to reach to minorities such as Latinos, it also enables the creation of cyberspaces where Latinx Muslims can express their needs as a community and claim their Muslim identity; what could form a flexible and changeable cyberenvironment according to their needs. Therefore, the margins that shape the cyberenvironment are a hybridization between Islamic and ethnic aspects.
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Islam in Tijuana, Mexico
Britt Dawson
While the first Muslims in northern Mexico were migrants from the Levant in the early 20th century, since 2010 the number of Muslims living in northern Mexico, particularly the borderlands, has grown rapidly. This is especially true in northern Baja California, where Mexican converts to Islam aid Muslim migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia who make their way to the city of Tijuana in hopes of claiming asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The first musallas (places of prayer) were built in the border cities of Tijuana and Rosarito in the 2010s, and they serve diverse communities of Muslims. As Muslim migrants continue to make their way to northern Baja California, the forces of the U.S.-Mexico border shape the emergence of this religious community in a variety of ways. In striving to live a coherent Muslim life, Muslims in this region of Mexico navigate life in a country where few people know about Islam in addition to multiple layers of border security and surveillance developed as part of the U.S. war on terror. While Muslims in the greater Tijuana area come from all over the world, they have recourse to the Islamic discursive tradition in building community together and as a way of making sense of life in a border zone.
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Palestinian Muslim Communities in Colombia
Felipe Medina Gutiérrez and Odette Yidi David
Arabic-speaking peoples, including Palestinians mostly Christian from Ottoman-controlled lands and later living under European mandates in greater Syria, migrated to the Americas, during the last quarter of the 19th century and until the end of the World War II. The creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 meant the expulsion and forced migration of yet more Palestinians, some settling in refugee camps in the region and others moving to distant countries, such as Colombia. This new wave of Palestinian immigrants was overwhelmingly Muslim. The Palestinian diaspora in the 21st century comprises about ten million people around the world and is highly diverse in terms of religious identity. Some communities have organized around supporting the development of their host countries and homeland; nonetheless, not many people are aware of these stories. Also, it is common in the “West” to witness accusations that Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs in general are violent by nature, as a result of a series of orientalist misconceptions about a people and a religion that, despite exceeding 1,600 billion believers around the world, remains misunderstood. Something similar happens with the Palestinian diaspora in Colombia, where little research has been undertaken to historicize their presence and interactions. Primary and secondary sources illustrate how the Palestinian Muslim immigrant community in Colombia has integrated into the local society and strengthened its ties on a social level beyond the political and economic issues, with consideration of its religious identity and minority condition.
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Governance in Classical Islamic Thought
Ovamir Anjum
Governance in Islamic history has taken many different forms. The formative period saw most innovative deployment of the Arab tribal norms under the guidance of Islamic norms and the pressure of the rapid expansion. After the conquests, the ruling elite augmented their Arab tribal form of governance with numerous institutions and practices from the surrounding empires, particularly the Persian empire. The Umayyads ruled as Arab chiefs, whereas the Abbasids ruled as Persian emperors. Local influences further asserted themselves in governance after the Abbasids weakened and as Islamization took root. After the fragmentation of the Abbasid empire by the ah 4th century/10th century ce, a distinctively Islamic society emerged whose regional rulers upheld its law and institutions such as land-grants (iqṭāʿ), taxation (kharāj and jizya), education (legal madhhab, jāmiʿ and madrasah), and judiciary (qaḍāh). A triangle of governmental authority was established, with the caliph as the source of legitimacy, symbol of community unity, and leader of religious rites; the sultan as the territorial king who maintained the army and monopoly over violence; and the scholars (ulama’) as socioreligious leaders of their respective communities. The caliph or the sultan appointed the local qāḍīs from among the ulama’, who served not only as judges and mediators but also as moral guides and administers of endowments and jurisconsults and counselors, and thus played a key role in the self-governance of classical Islamic societies.
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Islamic Relics
Richard McGregor
Relics can be found in every era of Islamic history, throughout the Islamic world. In line with other religious traditions of the Near East, the Qur’an mentions several objects endowed with special power (e.g., Joseph’s coat, the Ark of the Covenant). The earliest Islamic literature, preserving the life and mission of Muḥammad, presents details of several revered objects. These include objects handed down from pre-Islamic prophets as well as the discards of Muḥammad’s person, including clothing, weapons, and hair. Saintly figures, descendants of the Prophet, and his companions have also been sources for relics. Relics are displayed and venerated in devotional contexts such as shrines, tombs, mosques, madrasas, and museums. Relics have been paraded on special occasions such as the festival days of the Muslim calendar, in medieval protest marches, as part of the rituals for relief from drought, and as talismans in battle. Despite the occasional objection from austere doctors of law, devotion to relics has remained commonplace. While a full inventory is impossible, five categories may be proposed for the Islamic relic: (a) Bodily relics include the blood of martyrs, hair, and fingernail parings. Shrines have been built over severed heads—the most famous being that of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680). (b) Contact relics, having collected the baraka (blessing) of their one-time owners, pass those blessings on to any pilgrim who touches them. Several staffs, lances, bows, shields, turbans, cloaks, and sandals attributed to the Prophet have been preserved, some of which were presented as symbols of authority in the early caliphate. (c) Impressions in stone made by feet, hands, fingers, posteriors, and even hooves are preserved. Muḥammad’s footprints saw a brisk trade in the medieval period, and his sandal inspired a minor tradition of devotional iconography first in manuscript copies and later in modern mass production. (d) Inanimate objects, miraculously endowed with speech or locomotion, constitute a fourth category. These animated relics could be speaking stones or moving trees, particularly in the sacred topographies of Medina and Mecca. (e) Many revered places which were the site of important events have been marked off and preserved. More than commemorations, these “stage relics” anchored sacred history and holy bodies in the landscape. The location of Muḥammad’s birthplace in Mecca was until recently a revered stage relic.
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Theology Issues in North America
Candace Mixon
Muslims have been present in North America long before the transatlantic slave trade; Western and North African Muslims were an (involuntary) part of “New World” expeditions as early as the 1500s. Muslims who arrived enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade were often prohibited from practicing, writing about, or discussing Islam. Later, immigration waves, new religious movements, and eventually dedicated centers for teaching about Muslims and Islam and centers of Muslim education and debate yielded sophisticated responses to the specific challenges and benefits of North American Muslim life. Authenticity and connection to Arabo-centric Islam have often characterized theological movements, while the variety of North American Muslim communities developed an ever-changing pallet of Islams and identity markers that still do not coalesce neatly into traditional theological schools.
The concept and translation of Islamic theology, or kalam, does not map onto its comparative Christian counterpart. Kalam has historically been employed to define modes of correct Muslim practice within Muslim communities while defending against questions, attacks, or degradations by other religious groups. Islamic theology can be considered from two directions: foundations of practicing Islam that form Muslims’ obligations derived from many Qur’anic interpretations and through the discipline of theology, focused on the rational and technical inquiry of doctrines and arguments to determine correct practice. Both approaches delve into intra-Muslim dialogues, which are vital to the outcome of believers’ performance in this world to prepare for the next. North American experiences inform Muslim approaches to theology, whether attributed to transcontinental migration or developed within the boundaries of North America. Such approaches may sometimes be disparate or even oppositional, accumulated through the lack of a singular religious authority. Numerous leadership groups, histories, informal leaders, and recognized pathfinders who could be considered leading the charge to promote particular theologically driven movements in North America can be pointed to. At the same time, many Muslims in North America do not belong to any particular Muslim organization; they may connect with ethnic or regional communities instead.
Tracing the history of Islam in North America is a framework for following North American approaches to theological debates that serve to create, police, or multiply the variety of Muslim experiences in North America. The decentralized development and diversification of Islam in North America contribute to a diversity of theological practices that are better embraced in their multiplicities rather than treated as a cohesive body.
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History of Muslims in Canada
Jennifer A. Selby
Diverse Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya, Sufi, and other Muslims have lived in Canada since before its Confederation in 1867. The first were likely slaves being moved along the country's Atlantic coast, but there is little historical record to date. Settlers to Alberta have been examined to a greater extent, in part because there are more records of their presence. The first Canadian census in 1871 documented eight Muslims in Northern Alberta who likely worked as merchants and fur traders. There were, however, surely more than eight; Canadian Muslim minorities have long had reason to not be counted. The first officially recognized mosque followed, also in Alberta, in 1938. Immigration policies have long shaped Canadian Muslim life. War Measures Acts in 1914 and 1939 and policies that overtly preferred British Protestant subjects (until 1952) sharply limited Canadian religious diversity, including for Muslims. Initially, most of the early Muslim community were of Middle Eastern origin, but post–World War II immigration policy shifts meant that, beginning in 1968, Muslim Canadians became the country’s most ethnically, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse religious group. The largest Muslim population growth to date in Canada came in the 1990s, with a 130-percent increase, the same period in which there was greater institutionalization of Muslim organizations across the country.
In 2021, Canadian Muslims made up approximately 4.8 percent of the national population. Most Muslim Canadians have settled in Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan urban regions in and surrounding Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. While statistical data show a growth in population, data on the different sectarian branches among the traditions of Islam have been largely inferred based on individual Muslims’ countries of origin. The largest group are Sunnis.
Notable Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism have been charted since 2001; the number of reported Islamophobic incidents escalated sharply beginning in 2015, when federal-level anti-niqab policies were introduced. In 2019, anti-niqab laws were established in the province of Quebec.
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News Coverage of Islam and Muslims in North America
Ahmed Al-Rawi
Many scholars cite Edward Said’s concepts of Orientalism and Othering that drew on West-East binaries that position the West as civilized and the East as barbaric. Such Othering is represented in various Western media through the association of Muslims and Islam with violence, fundamentalism, and terrorism. While such representations were being developed within public discourse through early mass media during the post–World War II period, such discriminatory and reductionist representations of Muslims were more clearly seen within the US media during the Iranian Hostage Crisis and Gulf War periods. Said effectively outlines the various ways in which news coverage presented Arabs and Muslims as an imagined Other, reduced to specters of “Islam”—a constructed idea of the religion as violently opposed to American rights, values, and democracy. There is no doubt that the largest shift in nuance in the public discourse and media representation of Muslims occurred after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with hate speech, violence, racism, and fear toward Muslim communities increasing across North America. The main discourses on the Muslim communities in North America continued to be Orientalist in nature but more obviously racialized regardless of the varied geographical regions and ethnic heterogeneity of the peoples that make up these various Muslim groups. As a result, Islam itself was racialized and generally used as a pretext to oppress Muslims. Other major themes that emerge from the news coverage of Islam in North America include Islam as being oppressive, and the gendered representations of Muslims, especially veiled women as needing to be rescued.
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Islamic Bioethics: Religion, Science, and Technology
Osman Bakar
Unlike views prevailing in certain cultures that insist on the separation of science and technology from religion, Islamic tradition argues for their interrelatedness, unity, and harmony. Islamic bioethics is both an old and a new field of academic inquiry. It is old in the sense that the practical concern with what are now considered bioethical issues has been present in Islam since its early history. But it is also new in the sense that its domain of inquiry now covers a much wider range of modern ethical issues that do not originate from the Muslim world. Rather, they largely originate from the modern West. It is also new with respect to the kind of philosophical challenges it has to grapple with in response to the competing theories of ethics that seek to best explain the meaning and significance of contemporary bioethics, as well as its relations—especially with its neighboring academic disciplines.
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Islamic Bioethics: Secular Bioethics in Muslim Countries
Anke Iman Bouzenita
Bioethical discourse in Western and Islamic societies needs to be viewed against the background of their different historical perspectives and the role secularism has played in their respective development. While the Islamic experience generally saw science and technology evolving out of the Islamic way of life with medical ethics embedded in, and not hindered by, the injunctions of Islamic law, the Western (European) experience emphasizes the a priori need for secularization so as to initiate scientific development. Secularism therefore seems ingrained in Western approaches to science. Against this background, Western bioethics tends to insist on a secular imprint on bioethics. Bioethicists in Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim-minority communities elsewhere work with different historical and cultural experiences. Islam and its sources are still considered to be an important reference framework in Muslim countries and among Muslim populations. The communication of bioethical standards to various recipients therefore requires Islamic justification for legitimacy and acceptance.
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Media Muslims and Telenovelas: El Clon
Silvia Montenegro
The analysis of representations of Islam and Muslims disseminated in the literature, academic papers, and mass media involves a large tradition of studies and discussions that have highlighted categories such as Orientalism, neo-Orientalism and post-Orientalism. The Brazilian telenovela El Clon, released in October 2001 by Rede Globo and recreated in a new version by the Telemundo network in 2010, conquered the audience not only in Latin America but worldwide. In the creation of the original project, leaders of Islamic institutions played a role as advisors, but the way in which the religion was portrayed satisfied only part of the Muslim audience. In the analysis of the fictionalization of Muslim identities presented in El Clon, it is possible to identify: (a) the earlier examples of telenovelas aimed at Latin American audiences portraying the Arab-Islamic culture, (b) the significance of its release in the context immediately following 9/11, (c) the way of presenting the “core” of Muslim culture, (d) the integration of the telenovela in the wider process of commoditization of Arab-Islamic exoticism, (e) the dissimilar impact on the Muslim audience, and (f) the search for visibility by Islamic communities through a depiction that would not juxtapose Islam and terrorism.
Exoticism, magic, and mystery as components of the soft Orientalism present in El Clon attracted the curiosity of a mass Latin American audience, becoming a milestone in the increasing visibility of Islam.
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Islam in the Caribbean
Ken Chitwood
It is difficult to speak of “Islam in the Caribbean” in any unified sense. Because the story of Islam and Muslims in the Caribbean is characterized by both a long, multifaceted history and modern miscellany, there is no past or present uniformity in progeny, perspectives, or practices. Nonetheless, the classification offers a geographically focused and categorically complex frame of reference to consider often overlooked aspects in the region and of global Islam. Stretching from the long 16th century to the present day, the narrative of Islam and Muslims in and of the Caribbean is one of colonial power and cosmopolitanization, contested history and concurrent heterogeneity, global connectedness, and local complexity.
Across the region, Muslim experience is significantly linked to the complex nexus of relationships and interactions between peoples and powers in the wider Atlantic world since the 16th century. Yet, because the Anglophone, Dutch, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbeans are each marked by colonial lineages and created certain networks by which Islam and Muslims arrived in the region, there are multiple assemblages that mark and make up the various socialities in the region. Thus, their stories are sufficiently diverse to warrant distinct recognition and treatment. At the same time, and thanks to this shared Atlantic world, there are shared themes and common concerns that can be identified across the Caribbean, including but not limited to: diaspora dynamics, migration, minoritization, transregional networks, debates over hybridity and purity, religious diversification, notions of space and place, class issues, questions of indigeneity, and the interstices of race and religion in colonial and postcolonial perspectives.
In addition, there have also been enough interactions at, across, and between the various “Caribbeans” to justify—indeed, necessitate—comparing them and putting them into conversation with one another. Aliyah Khan, in her literary study of the significance, influence, and changeability of Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean, emphasized both the need to decenter the U.S. in the study of Islam in the Americas and further globalize the study of global Islam by putting different regions into comparative perspective (e.g., the Anglophone Caribbean and the Hispanophone Caribbean). This requires putting connected, yet seemingly disparate, contexts such as Trinidad and Puerto Rico, Suriname and Haiti, the Bahamas and Cuba into comparative conversation. The result of such juxtapositions is not only a richer appreciation of the constitutive aspects of Caribbean history and contemporary culture but a more extensive and entangled understanding of global Islam’s constituent communities and representative sites.
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Ecology in Islam
Rosemary Hancock
Starting in the late 1960s, a small number of Muslim scholars turned their attention to how the Islamic scriptures and intellectual tradition might help Muslims understand and respond to climate change and environmental crisis. In building this Islamic approach to ecology, these scholars undertook close analysis of the Qur’an, the Sunnah (the collected traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), centuries of Islamic law, and the writings of Sufi mystics and scholars in order to construct Islamic environmental theologies and law. This Islamic ecology remained on the margins of mainstream Islamic discourse for decades, but the participation of Muslims in environmental movements is growing and with it, the need for an Islamic ecology. In developing environmental theologies, Muslim scholars focus upon the relationship of God to the natural world, positing that as God’s creation, the natural world is a sign through which humanity can experience God. Although the natural world is “made useful” to humanity, humans do not have absolute dominion over creation. Rather, humanity is Khalifah—God’s representative or steward on earth. The development of Islamic environmental law from within the shari’ah tradition is arguably just as—if not more—important as articulating an Islamic environmental theology. Some Muslim environmentalists argue for the revival of Islamic land management institutions and look to the many regulations regarding agriculture and water management found in shari’ah as avenues for implementing Islamic environmental law.
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The Caliphate
Carool Kersten
The caliphate as an institution for governing the Muslim community can be traced back to the time immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 ce. With its humble origins in the parochial settings of an Arabian desert oasis, the caliphate provided the structure for the shepherding of a community of believers organized around prophetic teachings calling for return to the true religion of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets, a religion that came to be known as Islam. Despite internal dissent and even civil war, the caliphate not only survived but even expanded far beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Between the 8th and 10th centuries the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates ruled an empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River. After that, the challenges of sustained political control proved too formidable to be exercised from a single center, leading to political fragmentation.
Although it functioned only for a few centuries as an effective form of Islamic governance, for many Sunni Muslims the caliphate’s political and symbolic significance has outlasted its administrative and institutional fragmentation. Its appeal even continued after its formal abolition in 1924 by the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938). Since then the caliphate has not just remained a nostalgic memory. Throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium, some proponents of political Islam continue to advocate the restoration of a caliphate as a rallying point for Muslims worldwide, in some instances making concrete efforts toward re-establishing the institution or even proclaiming a new caliph.
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Islam in Southeast Asia
Khairudin Aljunied
Islam has maintained its presence in Southeast Asia for more than a millennium, dating back to as early as the 7th century. By the 21st century, the estimated total of Muslims surpassed 240 million, making Southeast Asia a site that is populated by one of the largest Muslim communities on the planet. Muslims are majorities in 21st-century Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia. In other Southeast Asian countries, namely Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam, they remain as minorities, experiencing varying levels of integration and assimilation with the majority non-Muslim Buddhist or Christian populations. The massive though gradual spread of Islam in the region can be attributed to the generally peaceful, multifaceted, and creative ways by which Islam was infused into the everyday life of local societies. Traders, Sufi missionaries, scholars, rulers, and even non-Muslims have all contributed to the spread of Islam in Southeast Asia. Most Muslims in Southeast Asia are Sunnis, adhering to the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, Ash’ari theology, and Sufi ethics. Located within this cosmopolitan and diverse religious landscape are Muslims who belong to other schools of Islamic jurisprudence and theological leanings such as Hanafi, Ja’fari, Shi’ah, and Salafi. Viewed from the perspective of the longue durée (long duration), the venture of Islam in Southeast Asia can be divided into four successive phases: gradualist (7th–14th centuries), populist (15th–19th centuries), colonial-reformist (19th–mid-20th centuries), and assertive (mid-20th–21st centuries).
