South East Asian Muslims to promote "home-grown Islam"

As I have described in this previous post, the kind of Islam that was traditionally practised in South East Asia is mystical, tolerant, and heavily influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, animism, and other local religions. For the past several decades, this kind of Islam has been gradually replaced by more hardline strains of the religion from the Middle East.

Muslim clerics and scholars from SE Asia plan to fight this trend. From Reuters:

Muslim clerics and scholars from Southeast Asia endorsed on Friday a regional plan to promote and preach home-grown Islam to check the rising influence of radical teachings from the Middle East.

Three days of discussion in Manila on the state of Islamic preaching, education and law in Southeast Asia ended on Friday with a plan to formulate a local method of interpreting Islam, focusing on moderation and development.

[...]

Some Muslim leaders in SE Asia seem to have realised that it is not in the interest of their communities to be turned into pawns of foreign powers from the Middle East. However, their fight to preserve local religious attitudes and traditions against Middle Eastern influence will be an uphill battle, since their adversaries are both well-financed and can lay claim to being from the historic and geographic heart of the Islamic world.

The alternative, however, is to lose their culture, as the following story from The Wall Street Journal (via The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via Dhimmi Watch) illustrates:

Rohimah Zakaria, dressed in a fringed black tunic and matching pants, with a silver dagger tucked into the waist, rocked hypnotically on a wooden stage at the edge of this rural village. [...]

Mrs. Zakaria, who is a Muslim, is one of the last experts in Mak Yong, an endangered form of dance theater rooted in the animist and Hindu religions that held sway in Southeast Asia long before Islam arrived eight centuries ago. In more recent times, the dance has been deemed un-Islamic by Parti Islam, the political party ruling this lush, tropical seaside state of Kelantan on the South China Sea.

Since the local arbiters of taste banned Mak Yong 15 years ago, people like Mrs. Zakaria have performed it in secret. And because interest is waning, her troupe has been able to stage just a handful of shows in the past year.

The version Mrs. Zakaria did this recent night was just a 20-minute sketch, not the traditional three-hour performance. And there was no shaman to put in his traditional healing appearance at the end. The performance was put on mainly to give visitors from Kuala Lumpur a taste of the culture.

"It's not the same," Mrs. Zakaria sighed. "But at least people can see a little of what it's like."

[...]

For centuries, ancient traditions coexisted easily with Islam. In Malaysia, village girls learned dances like the Mak Yong, which is performed by an all-female cast. Village boys learned the Wayang Kulit, a shadow puppet theater that originated in Indonesia and Malaysia to tell Hindu epic tales.

No longer. A handful of senior citizens in Kelantan, the heartland of Malay culture, are the last to practice traditional theater.

"What you have is the gradual emergence of a new generation of Malaysian Muslims who will be completely cut off from their past," says Farish Ahmad Noor, a Malaysian political scientist at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. "They're losing their cultural compass."

Many Southeast Asian Muslims now navigate by guideposts from the Arab world. Young men in Indonesia are starting to wear turbans and grow beards. In Malaysia, Malays have adopted the Arab word for prayer, salat, to replace the Malay word, sembahyang, which literally means "offer homage to the primal ancestor."

[...]

Kelantan is also Parti Islam's stronghold. When the party won the state in 1990, its ultraconservative state leader, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, ordered grocery stores to provide separate lines for men and women, and told girls they could no longer take part in Quran reading competitions that are popular in schools. He banned Mak Yong and Wayang Kulit.

"We need to purify our local theater from those alien elements," says Mr. Aziz, a somber-looking man in a flowing white robe who has a thin gray beard on the point of his chin. Mak Yong and Islam co-existed peacefully for so long only because Malay Muslims didn't know any better, he says. [...]

I would like to know just how Mr. Aziz can justify his claim that the indigenous cultural traditions are more "alien" than Islam.

Rituals like this are now performed in secret by a handful of retirees like Mrs. Zakaria and Mek Jah binti Deris, 61, another Mak Yong dancer who grew up in a village in South Kelantan. Mrs. Mek Jah last performed in October for a neighbor who was feeling low. Mrs. Mek Jah knows Mak Yong is illegal, but she doesn't care. "We have to do this to balance nature," she says.

Mrs. Mek Jah's two sons-in-law are having none of that. They have forbidden their children to learn the dance. The two men used to pull Mrs. Mek Jah aside at family dinners and beg her to quit, says her brother, Muhammed Nor, 64. "It's terrible. Nowadays, you have young people who tell their parents 'Don't die and go to hell because of this.'"

"The younger generation is very narrow-minded," sighs Mrs. Mek Jah, a compact, feisty woman dressed in a tunic and a bright yellow Muslim headscarf.

Life is more black and white, argues Mr. Aziz. Things are either Islamic or they aren't. He recently lifted the ban on the Wayang Kulit, provided puppeteers substitute Islamic stories for the traditional Hindu epics. And shamans are out. "That kind of 'healing' is not in line with Islam," he says.

Although many moderate Malays worry that their culture is fading, few speak up. One of the most vocal champions of Malay culture in Kelantan is Eddin Khoo, who is of Chinese-Indian descent. He runs a foundation to keep Malay arts alive and has scrounged up funding to stage a few traditional shows each year and train youngsters in Kelantan in traditional Malay arts. No kids have signed on. [...]

It's noteworthy that even as Malay Muslims discard their indigenous culture, it is preserved by someone who is not of Malay descent. Non-Muslim minorities often become the guardians and preservers of the pre-Islamic cultures in Islamic societies. For example, the art of wine-making and traditional Persian music were safeguarded in Shi`ite Iran by Iranian Jews.

This tension is beginning to worry some in the capital of Kuala Lumpur. "The upsurge in Islamization is part of the process of searching for identity," says Culture Minister Rais Yatim. "If we don't guide that, it could well go off on a tangent, and it could be very difficult to revive culture."

His office staged Mrs. Zakaria's recent performance of a watered-down Mak Yong. Her bit was followed by a five-minute Wayang Kulit show. The event drew a few hundred villagers. At the back of the field, a group of women wearing headscarves sat on the grass, feeding their children rice and coconut curry. It was enough, however, to upset Parti Islam, which later described the show as "a sign of disrespect."

Why can't the Parti Islam respect the indigenous cultural traditions?

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