The bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia: Transdisciplinary perspectives

Abstract

Special Issue on this topic. In their specific local contexts, state- and non-state projects of bureaucratising Islam are driven by very different socio-political motivations and conditioned by equally different (albeit often interconnected and overlapping) historical trajectories and their discursive substrates. In this special issue, we examine this transnationally and transregionally observable phenomenon in the context of Southeast Asia, where the quest for “order” – no matter how messy or even entirely failed in its outcomes – is particularly strong. In this regional setting, the institutional trajectories of the “nation-state-ization” of Islam date back to colonial times, which have continued to cast a long shadow that informs the particular manifestations of bureaucratised Islam in each country.