5 DOI: 10.4312/as.2018.6.1.5-8
Guest Editor’s Foreword: Islamic Cultures in 
East and South Asia
Maja VESELIČ
*1
The world is home to 1.6 billion Muslims, the vast majority of whom reside in 
Asia. Not only is Indonesia with its 210 million Muslims the largest Muslim 
country in the world, but the combined Muslim populations of India, Pakistan 
and Bangladesh far outweigh those of the Arab world. What’s more, China’s 
Hui––the so called Chinese Muslims (discussed in this issue by Yamazaki-Unno), 
who remain relatively unknown even among their coreligionists, are approximate-
ly as numerous as Tunisians. The rich history as well as the great geographic and 
ethnolinguistic diversity of the Asian continent fostered a myriad of traditions 
and practices as various communities adopted Islam. Yet Asian Muslims with 
their distinct lifestyles are usually not the first to spring to mind as the represent-
atives of Islam and the Muslim world. 
This special issue explores the intricate histories and realities of Islamic thought 
and Muslim lives in East and South Asia from religious, social, political and artis-
tic perspectives. It demonstrates that development of Islam––in religious, cultural 
and political terms––has been a complex process shaped by distinctive regional, 
local or even personal (see Petek’s article) considerations and responses to Islam’s 
universalist teachings. 
South Asia is culturally and intellectually one of the centres of Muslim world in terms 
of influence and importance. For centuries it has presented one of the fountainheads 
of Islamic learning, often visited by Muslim scholars from afar who stopped and 
studied there on their years-long pilgrimages, including to Mecca. That this signif-
icance is not waning today is exemplified by the fact that the largest contemporary 
Islamic lay movement, Tablighi Jamaat, which commands dozens of millions of fol-
lowers worldwide (including in China), originated in early twentieth century India. 
Culturally, South Asian Islam is characterised by practices alien to large parts of the 
Middle East, such as music, dance and figurative art (for the latter, see Petek in this 
volume), and it is precisely such syncretism that time and again evokes attempts to 
restore “pure” Islam, thus leading to establishment of new religious schools.
* Maja VESELIČ, PhD,  Lecturer, Department of Asian Studies,  
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. 
 maja.veselic@ff.uni-lj.si

6 Maja Veselič: Guest Editor’s Foreword
East Asia, on the other hand, is considered peripheral to the Muslim world, if 
that at all. The presence of above mentioned Chinese Muslims––descendants of 
foreign Muslim merchants who settled in China from the seventh through the 
fourteenth centuries and became Sinicized in language and much of the culture 
due to assimilation pressures and intermarriage with Han––may seem exotic to 
Muslims from Islam’s core regions, or a demonstration of the greatness of Islam, 
boasting historically established, thriving communities in the heart of this grand 
civilization and global superpower. Yet as the growing scholarship on Islam in 
China shows, despite (or perhaps because of) life at the margins and the ac-
commodation to Chinese society and culture, Chinese Muslims have persistently 
been concerned with their own orthodoxy and orthopraxy. They have maintained 
contact with and sought knowledge from what they called the Western regions, 
and all the significant currents in Islamic thought and practice found their way to 
China. Chinese Muslims (much like their counterparts in Southeast Asia) are also 
a good example of the importance of commerce for the spread and development 
of Islam. More recent in origin and much smaller in number are Muslim commu-
nities in Japan, which are mostly comprised of Indonesian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi 
and Iranian immigrants and their Japanese wives who converted upon marriage. 
Japanese intellectual and academic engagement with Islam and Muslims, howev-
er, is far from negligible, offering new perspectives and valuable insights into Is-
lamic thoughts and practices (see Al-Daghistani’s and Unno-Yamazaki’s articles).
Islam, then, is not monolithic nor are Muslim lives uniform. As local cultures and 
practices significantly influence the practice of Islam, this may beg the question: 
what is Islam and who is Muslim? Arguing against the essentialising, reifying and 
totalising constructions of Islam, an anthropologist might answer with Talal Asad 
that it is a discursive tradition, where the discussion of a certain present (Islamic) 
practice is tied to its past (and future), and where any definition of being Muslim 
is bound up with the relations of power, with contestation and conflict; in other 
words, Islam as a struggle over Islamic normativity. Another anthropologist, Ga-
briele Marranaci, however, suggests that we should proceed from studying people 
who feel Muslim and treat Islam only as map of discourses which rationalise, 
symbolise and ritualise this feeling. As the authors of this special volume come 
from a variety of disciplines, they adopt a range of approaches.
The issue is divided into two thematic sections. The first examines the influence 
Islam as an ideology may exert on social action, demonstrating how reference to 
Islamic teachings may serve to justify different, sometimes even opposing practic-
es. The article “Cutting off the Queue for Faith, Preserving the Queue for Face: 
Chinese Muslims’ Queue-Cutting Movements in North China during the Xinhai 
Revolution Period”, by Noriko Unno-Yamazaki, is a fine-grained study of the very 

7 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 5–8
different ways Chinese Muslims in the metropolitan areas of Beijing and Tianjin 
justified whether or not they and their coreligionists should join those of their 
Han compatriots who cut off the queue as a symbol of rebellion against the Man-
chu-ruled Qing dynasty and in support of the new Chinese nation state project. 
Unno-Yamazaki presents the arguments of several influential thinkers and imams, 
showing that––in the published writings of that period, at least––there was a con-
siderable consensus that wearing a queue is at least inappropriate if not forbidden 
in religious terms. The queue cutting among Chinese Muslims thus tended to be 
advocated on religious rather than on nationalist grounds. Yet her case study fur-
ther complicates the standard piety-and/or-patriotism explanations of Chinese 
Muslims’ activities in the first decades of the twentieth century. As she shows, 
many probably cut their queues simply to follow the ever-growing trend around 
them, and at least one important imam chose to refrain from cutting it in order to 
avoid internecine conflicts in his community, thus preserving the social standing 
of his position, in spite of his private belief that the queue was un-Islamic.
In the next article, “The Dynamics of Islamic Ideology with Regard to Gender 
and Women’s Education in South Asia”, Forkan Ali focuses on the discussions of 
Muslim intellectuals in the late colonial period on the education of women and 
women’s rights. Not unlike elsewhere, then, the raising of women’s educational 
levels was one of the central concerns of nationalist-cum-modernist and pietist 
movements among Muslims on the subcontinent. As Ali demonstrates with ref-
erence to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, this has largely remained an 
unfulfilled promise, even as countries gained their independence.
The second section examines various aspects of Islamic theory and philosophy 
in more or less explicitly comparative terms. It opens with Sami al-Daghistani’s 
article “The Time Factor – Toshihiko Izutsu and Islamic Economic Tradition”, 
in which the author draws on Izutsu’s semantic theory to offer new insights into 
the Islamic economic thought. Following this Japanese comparative philosopher, 
al-Daghistani argues that Islamic economic tradition is underpinned by a unique 
set of notions and values that derive from the worldview which is embodied in 
the key concepts of primary sources of Islam. He adopts key word analysis to the 
classical and contemporary Islamic economic thinkers and their views on the in-
terrelation of time and money, or the time value of money. He shows that while 
both conventional economics and Islamic economic thought agree on money’s 
basic usefulness for the exchange of commodities, the fact that in Islam money 
should be utilised to improve the human condition and has no value in itself (i.e. 
as a commodity) imbues all economic behaviour, especially that of interest and 
money utilization with moral considerations. We should thus speak of Islamic 
ethico-economic, rather than simply economic terms.

8 Maja Veselič: Guest Editor’s Foreword
The following article by Nina Petek, entitled “Aesthetics of the Classical Period of 
the Islamic Mughal Empire in India through the Portrait of Abū al-Fath ׅ Jalāl al-
Dīn Muh ׅ ammad Akbar”, examines the development of Mughal Art as a parallel 
process of Akbar’s personal development. The author traces the gradual transfor-
mation of this extraordinary ruler from a young, inquisitive boy who assumes the 
throne earlier than expected to a mature man who becomes not only a political 
unifier but also a great spiritual leader of his multicultural empire. The three-stage 
evolution is detailed through the changes in paintings created at Akbar’s court, 
the three phases of his quest for Oneness reflected in the choice of motifs and 
painting styles. For Akbar, Islam, particularly in its mystical interpretations, be-
comes the framework which is interwoven with many other traditions, especially 
Hinduism, and a rich, cosmopolitan tapestry emerges both from Akbar’s life and 
in Mughal paintings of his period.
Finally, this special issue concludes with a review by Jana S. Rošker of the 2016 
special volume of the journal Synthesis Philosophica on Islamic and Comparative 
Philosophy. Edited by Nevad Kahteran and Daniel Bučan it, too, endeavours to 
shed light on the versatile traditions of Islamic thought and Muslim practice.
Maja Veselič, Guest editor