re: Islam and Asia

quote:

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Can you answer my Indonesia question? Being surrounded by Papa New Guinea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Philipines, Australia...how did it explode into the Islamic haven?

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I can answer that, and here's the answer: trading.

Indonesia didn't convert until around the 16th century or so. It was also one of the few-ish areas of Islam that didn't convert by the sword: it was, by and large, through missionaries, diplomatic pressure, and so forth. Not too different than Christian empires at the time and a little later (Spanish and Portuguese excepted, obviously), actually. There's probably a bit of irony in a religion who converted almost entirely through the sword has, as its largest single country population, a country that was converted via trade and proselytism.

It's a very different version of Islam - the coastal Indian Ocean adherents tend to look quite a bit alike (a mostly Sunni, Shafi'i school of their faith), and that's no accident.