Religious minorities often suffer discrimination, if not physical peril. We might assume that this is more likely to happen when majority populations, or regimes, feel themselves threatened or in decline. However, Muslim minorities in Asia have experienced declining fortunes during a period of general socio-economic improvement. In Modes of Engagement, this timely and intelligent new book, Rafiq Dossani and his contributors ask: Why? They devote separate analyses to the major cases of India, China, and the Philippines — whose differences make the question especially challenging — but recognize that the study could be extended to consider Muslims' declining fortunes in Myanmar and Thailand.

The framing of the question immediately calls up a central analytical issue, namely, when are Muslims treated like other minorities, and when are they treated as a special case? Here China is particularly useful because, as Dru Gladney points out, “Muslims” is not a very useful category for this line of questioning. To mention only the two largest Muslim populations: the Hui speak Chinese and see their main challenge as one of finding a place within the Chinese state system, whereas the Uyghurs speak a Turkic language and have worked to achieve autonomy.

Their respective histories developed from these distinct starting points. The Hui were centered on relatively isolated villages, which guarded their relative autonomy but weakened their potential to survive. Sufi networks provided the necessary cross-regional connections, but Hui Chinese today include disputing reformist and Sufi elements. These developments did not prevent them from siding with Chinese nationalists. Although a persecuted qua religious category during the Cultural Revolution, more recently they have benefited from loosened controls on religious practices and from state social and economic development policies.

By contrast, the Uyghurs have suffered from their past efforts to obtain autonomous status and the state's perception that they continue to threaten national security. They do not enjoy the relative freedom to practice Islam and to travel as the Hui. For both groups, the worldwide flow of Islamic information and the geo-strategic importance for China's international image of respecting Islam has made Islam a more salient element for each group's self-identity. However, the Hui have been able to capitalize on the demand for a positive image of “Muslim Chinese” while the Uyghurs have not.

As Dossani notes, in the Indian case, the Kashmiri Muslims stand to broader Indian society as the Uyghurs to the Chinese: as religious Others who also threaten national security through their demands for political autonomy. However, India is a much more decentralized country than is China. For the rest of India's Muslims, as examined in chapters by Wajahat Habibullah and Rakesh Basant, the story is about provincial politics and anti-Muslim discrimination. For each national law aimed at improving the lot of minorities, there are provincial authorities ready and able to make sure that Muslims do not benefit. In addition, anti-Muslim violence sometimes is tolerated or even sanctioned by provincial and local authorities, further hardening a perception of Hindus versus Muslims as the country's major dynamic. Hindu majorities are more likely to support policy implementation that aids other minorities, such as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes who are considered less threatening politically and geo-strategically than Muslims.

The Philippines presents a different variant of the story. Here, most Muslims live in part of the southern region of Mindanao, and, as with Uyghurs and Kashmiris, have struggled for autonomy or for independence. Their economic well-being is even more starkly below the rest of the country than for Muslims in China and India, in part because their regional concentration and removal from the political-economic center physically reduces access to social goods, even before figuring in mechanisms of discrimination or prejudice. In his analysis, Joseph Liow emphasizes the tension between two quite distinct ways of framing the struggle: as a struggle for religious recognition by Muslims, or as a struggle for autonomy by all those, Muslim and non-Muslim, living in the region.

These country-specific stories do not answer Dossani's initial questions concerning the causes of Muslims' relative decline in well-being and the role religion plays in that decline. Indeed, Dossani's task is made more difficult by the quite distinct foci of the contributions. Gladney offers an in-depth analysis of the historical shifts in categories and a mapping of different Muslim groups in China today. It is less a response to the editor's question than a dissection of the category of “Muslim minority” itself. Liow draws on work in social movement theory to examine the alternative ways that the Moro movement can be framed, and in particular, the consequences of framing in regional or religious terms. By contrast, the two India chapters present policy-oriented analyses of the dimensions on which Muslims suffer discrimination (Basant) and the political causes for such discrimination's continuation (Habibullah). As a result of these editorial choices, we learn much more about the historical genesis of categories in the Philippines and China than in India, and much more about discrimination and its political mechanisms in India than in the other cases.

This heterogeneity makes Dossani's task more difficult, but he does make a compelling argument that demography matters: that regional isolation makes possible forms of oppression, land seizures, and neglect that are politically less feasible when minorities — here, Muslims — live together with majority populations. The former case is more likely to lead to separatist violence, and the latter case to violence defined and encouraged along lines of ethnic or religious difference. In regional isolation cases, states will be more likely to employ tactics of encouraging in-migration by other populations and economic exploitation of natural resources, because minority residents are less capable of resisting short of military action.

One can go farther and argue that it is in cases of regional isolation where the framing issues Liow analyzes come into play. A spatially isolated population can be characterized as residents of a region or as members of a religious or ethnic group. In the first case, the group can gain support from a wider base, and be less vulnerable to central attacks as sectarian. However, in the second case, the group may appeal to a deeper well of resentments or loyalties — to a tribe, a language group, or a religion. Alongside the Moro case is that of Aceh in Indonesia (where I have worked), where precisely these framing shifts and trade-offs were in place. In 2000, when Jakarta attempted to undercut support for the Free Aceh Movement by offering Aceh the right to reshape its legal system around Islamic law, the Movement rejected it as a trick, and emphasized that its complaints had to do with lack of effective control over the province's resources. Yet the Movement also sought to cultivate allegiances based on Islam.

However, when minorities live in proximity to others, the logic of discrimination and conflict will tend to frame difference as a simple opposition between different religions or ethnic groups. This follows from an economy of mobilization: a simpler message of us versus them is effective in inducing people to discriminate or kill. But broader ambiguities and debates about framing also shape outcomes, as the Indian case reminds us. Are Muslims historic invaders and outside the indigenous Indian logic of caste, or are they equivalent to lower castes and thus the rightful beneficiaries of affirmative action policies?

Even if it does not offer the final answer to the question of Muslim minorities' relative decline in Asia, Rafiq Dossani and his contributors in Modes of Engagement usefully set out the major lines of contrast across these three major countries, and in doing so notably advances our understanding of the processes and mechanisms at work.