Anthony Reid and Michael Gilsenan offer essays challenging contemporary Islamist claims to exclusive political authority and cultural preeminence in Asian countries stressed by the forces of globalization, political instability, and sectarian confrontation and violence. The volume argues for the continuing relevance of historical Asian tolerance and religious pluralism for building the peaceful, democratic consensus and legitimate institutions needed in societies from Pakistan to Malaysia to Indonesia.

In his introduction, Reid summarizes that a precolonial “Asian” pattern of religious tolerance emerged historically over regions and centuries as pragmatic state builders valued social stability and economic integration over theological hegemony. Reid traces Asian religious pluralism to the realities experienced by rulers managing great land empires of diverse peoples and faiths as well as cosmopolitan port trading communities. In addition, an “Indic tradition” of heterogeneous devotional rituals and sites exemplified millennia of pluralism only challenged in recent centuries by the orthodoxies of Islam and Christianity. Historically, personalized political rule, as in China, valued the emperor-ruler over institutionalized political processes or religious ideologies, leaving space only for subordinated devotional practices making no claims to political authority.

From India to Java, Reid argues that a history of religious integration and accommodation characterized the interaction of Buddhist and Hindu polities and societies. From the seventh century, Muslims also often operated and competed within established patterns of trade and cultural relations. After 1500, European traders and imperialists, from the Portuguese onward, learned the value of tolerance. Early European political aggression and violence motivated by theological exclusivities were subordinated to older patterns promoting social diversity and commercial prosperity.

The volume's essays are organized in three loose groupings. Three chapters “highlight the global factors at the cutting edge of the confrontation” (p. 1) between Islamists and an increasingly unifying, liberalizing world. Three essays then explore religious policies and identities in the colonial period, when “Asian realities” and trading pragmatism meant that all European powers “learned the formula” of allowing religious freedoms in territories under their control (p. 9). A final set of four essays details the complicated dynamics of Islamist sensibilities, state authority, and social order in postcolonial Asian countries. Religious identities were now increasingly defined and mobilized for party and electoral purposes, often to divisive, polarizing effect.

In his essay, Abdullah Saeed rejects Islamist notions that Muslims in Asian countries under non-Muslim rule are somehow diminished or that Asian states need to be defined in binary opposition as either dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) or dar al-harb (abode of war). Saeed's scholarship reveals the long history of Muslim settlement under non-Muslim rulers and the complex analyses of Islamist jurists more concerned over time with the abilities of Muslims in such circumstances to freely practice their faith.

Bassam Tibi argues with clarity, precision, and logic that “religious and cultural pluralism is to be understood as acknowledging the legitimate existence of the other under conditions of equality” (p. 28). Doctrines formalizing hierarchy, including subordinating non-Muslims to dhimmi status, must be rethought to participate in a cultural modernity valuing democracy and equality. Indonesia, with its pancasila concept of equity between faiths (notably Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism), has already gestured toward the ideal of “relating diversity to pluralism” (p. 32). But the problem remains of “educating in democratic pluralism” in the face of recent histories of Indonesian authoritarian politics and “political Islam imported from the Middle East” (p. 46).

Bryan Turner's essay traces how “modernity” in new forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century education, information, and technology fragmented traditional religious authority and undermined leadership invested in accommodating practice. Advocates of politicized Islam now recruited individuals able to read, and more recently electronically access, texts and polemics unmediated by elders and local interpretations. Modern dynamics, including the Internet, created “individual subjectivity” across cultures and faiths and produced highly individualized Islamist identities.

In the colonial period, governments, religion leaders, and party factions justified policies and opinions through pluralist interpretations of the role of Islam in Asia. At a strategic nineteenth-century moment, Azmi Ozcan details how the British highlighted their friendly ties to the Ottoman caliph, a figure of great legitimacy for many Muslims in British India. Barbara Metcalf discusses how a nominally traditionalist Islamic scholar, Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, offered a pluralistic vision of Islamic political and social roles in his support for the goals of the Indian National Congress Party demand for a democratic nation-state that respected all religious communities. In Dutch Indonesia circa 1913, Nico Kaptein, explains how Sayyid ‘Uthman and the Sarekat Islam movement recognized the legitimacy of the colonial regime, one that did not restrict or interfere in devotional practices or religious institutions.

In postcolonial Asia, new electoral opportunities and party interests appealing to religious exclusiveness threatened visions of secularly imagined representative nation-states. Imran Ali traces the enduring nonreligious, modernist framings that survived in a Pakistani state intended for a Muslim majority population but challenged by ethnic and sectarian advocacy. The tension between politicized Islamic discourses, often speaking of transnational loyalties, and tolerant regional heritages generated differential political effects across Asia. How might Muslim parties and institutions and Islamist polemicists appeal to citizens of demographically complex nation-states? In Malaysia, Joseph Chinyong Liow describes how movements competed to present to voters with the most legitimate Islamic party identity and options. In Indonesia, R. Michael Feener studies the complex “modern reconceptualisations” of Islamist thought presented by key religious institutions and leaders. Greg Fealy follows the evolution of the reform-minded Indonesian Nahdlaul Ulama movement as it adapted to political constraints, became “an important voice for moderation in Indonesian Islam” and, in the end, did not become “a major force for reform or religious and social liberalization” in the contemporary period.

This volume convinces readers that Asian histories of religious pluralism and tolerance of diversity offer enduring legacies upon which religiously and ethically complex postcolonial Asian states might build prosperous, democratic, and equal societies.