8 ms·
How Did Indonesia and Malaysia Become Majority-Muslim?
- forkLding 8y agoSummarization: - South East Asian Royalty adopted Islam due to being likely swayed by rich Muslim merchants + missionaries and then gradually became popular. - South East Asian Peasant populations without strong Buddhist/Hindu religious influences adopted it to fill void of previous Animist religions or even just Animist traditions.
- cf498 8y ago>TL;DR: Shit was complicated. >Actual TL;DR: Rulers converted for economic, political, and personal reasons. Not much work has been done on popular conversion, but so far it seems that the government and Sufis both helped spread Islam on a popular level. The new religion was perceived as magic, provided solace in a changing world, and finally became just a part of life.
- Tycho 8y agoDoes anyone have a plot showing % of population that is Muslim over time for different countries?
- thisrod 8y agoI doubt that there's enough data to plot. For early modern South East Asia, only a couple of records per century survive for the total populations of the main cities, and those are pretty dodgy. There might not be any quantitative records of religious beliefs. When our ancestors encountered people of a different religion, it was more about chopping heads off than about counting them.
- Tycho 8y agoMaybe there could be some good proxies though.
- z2210558 8y agoThis image [1] comes from "Converson to Islam in the Medieval Period" by Richard Bulliet [2]. The percentages inferred by Bulliet roughly track a sigmoidal curve. He makes an argument in analogy to the spread of a disease through a social network. It should be noted that the deta is from Iran, but presumably the same arguments apply for Southeast Asia. [1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-69BqAL9ARKg/T1WBF0NwxeI/AAAAAAAAABo/IRxr3nIjSIo/s1600/Bulliet-Iran.gif http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-69BqAL9ARKg/T1WBF0NwxeI/AAAAAAAAAB... [2] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674732810 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674732810
- captainperl 8y agoJava used to be Hindu, as evidenced by Borobudur and other monuments. If you're working in Indonesia and your boss is Muslim and you're not, the fastest way to get ahead is to convert. That plus other one-way traps reinforces Islam as a dominant religion.
- forapurpose 8y agoAre you Indonesian?
- kakaorka 8y agoDo you have a source for this? Or is this just personal experience?
- throwaway2048 8y agoBorobudur is a Buddhist temple though?
- bodhiandphysics 8y agoWhile Borobodur is many things, it is not Hindu. The friezes on the site are stories from the life of the Buddha (and his past lives) and the monument itself is capped by a large number of Buddhist stupas.
- johnsavage 8y ago> While Borobodur is many things, it is not Hindu. The friezes on the site are stories from the life of the Buddha Technically, the term "Hindu" as defined by the British just meant non-Muslim. In fact, it was the British who popularized the term Hindu in the first place since prior to British influence, there was no such religion, just a broad set of different religions such as Shivaism, Buddhism, Vishnuism and numerous others. In many places such as Assam, Buddha is revered by people who are labeled as Hindu.
- Hasknewbie 8y agoYou are correct, GP might be mistaking it with Prambanan [1] a nearby hindu temple that, like Borobudur, is located next to the city of Yogyakarta. [1] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/642 https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/642
- forapurpose 8y agoWho is the author? Is this accurate? Is it one guy's theory, a fringe theory, one of competing mainstream theories, or consensus? Certainly Reddit and the comment's length are not indicators of accuracy. They are indicators of an author with a lot of time and motivation, which could be good or bad.
- Analemma_ 8y agoIn general this is true, but /r/AskHistorians (along with /r/AskScience) is an exception. It has very high standards for answers (as you can see several times a day when a the mods nuke an entire thread for not being good enough): all answers have to cite reliable sources and they have many “verified” posters who the mods have confirmed are actual historians in their field. I’m sure misinformation sneaks in on occasion, but overall the posts are reliable and you can consider them, including this one, to be reliable.
- throwaway2048 8y agoI find that /r/AskHistorians values length of answers and the formation of a narrative there within to be valued above pretty much any other concern. Citations are rare, and its even rarer that anyone checks out of they match up. Stuff isn't really vetted, although occasionally really outrageous stuff gets called out. I would not classify it as reliable, even if accurate and knowledgeable people post there.
- AlotOfReading 8y agoAskHistorians is definitely not about the length of answers, except in that it takes a fair bit of writing to communicate complicated histories. The format does encourage a narrative, but that's reflective of the fact that most of the people reading are laypeople, not scholarly peers who can be expected to know unstated background. If you personally find it easy to teach laypeople the breadth of a field of discourse without narrative simplification, you have a very rare skill. That said, I think many people misunderstand the discourse that's happening there. It's not academic, but instead a touchpoint between academics(-ish) and laypeople. The kinds of questions being asked are decidedly not the sorts of questions discussed in literature. Flairs in turn have to give an educated answer that actually communicates with the asker. Citations don't really fit well into what's happening for either side. They're time consuming to produce and no one reads or even understands them, nor do they provide particularly relevant information. You can't usually cite a consensus, after all.
- mikaeluman 8y agoReally shows the power of poor culture and civilization. Compare these places to Thailand for example. The latter is a very peaceful and harmonious society. But as soon as you get to the southern tip of Thailand, or any of these Islam based societies, things get very nasty very quickly.
- azifali 8y agoI did not realize that YC News had religious trolls making random assertions on how a certain region is harmonious and another is not simply because they follow another religion.
- yters 8y agoThere does seem to be a correlation between certain religious beliefs and a society's propensity for violence.
- azifali 8y agoDon't exactly agree on that assertion. History shows that one can make that argument about a lot of religions. It is more so to do with the geopolitical ambitions of nation states at respective times. In the modern era - many nation states have fallen behind on a lot of indicators - human development index, scientific innovation, education etc., and all of them directly / indirectly contribute to instability.
- yters 8y agoYou are saying if we normalize across indicators the correlation disappears?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- danharaj 8y agoGeography is the most obvious confounding factor ツ