8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

— Bureaucratizing Islam in a Predominantly Buddhist Society: The Administration of Islam in Protectorate 
Cambodia 
Philipp Bruckmayr (University of Vienna)
French attempts at administering and bureaucratizing Islam in 20th century Cambodia focused on two fields of activ-
ity. Firstly, the institutionalization of a hierarchy of religious dignitaries with the so-called changvang or Chef des Mal-
ais at its top, a position strongly akin to that of Supreme Patriarch among the country’s dominant Buddhist popula-
tion. Moreover, Muslim affairs on a general level, including intra-religious strife, often appeared to be viewed through 
a Buddhist lens by French and Cambodian officials alike. This is particularly evident in archival references to pagodas 
and bonzes instead of mosques and imams. As the overwhelming majority of Cambodia’s Muslims were not Malays, 
already the name selected by the Protectorate for its highest official Muslim functionary is striking. Indeed, one of the 
effects of the colonially-directed bureaucratization in the country was to boost and provide quasi-official sanction to 
an already salient process of the gravitation of local Muslims towards Malay models of Islamic practice, scholarship 
and education. In this respect also the second prime field of activity for the colonial bureaucratization of Islam was of 
particular importance: Islamic education. In accordance with what was said above, state-accredited Islamic schools 
came to be labeled plainly as “Malay schools”, with prospective teachers at these schools being obliged to take exams 
in Malay language. In both areas, choices were obviously at least partly influenced by colonial knowledge production 
about Islam and its Muslim subjects as well as by preconceived notions of what was taken to constitute “true Islam”.
Another intriguing side-effect of the French bureaucratization of Islam was the practical desire to shield the function-
aries it had invested with authority from internal attacks. Thus, despite often expressed colonial resolution to keep 
aloof from all those internal Muslim conflicts deemed to be of an exclusively religious character, the French at times 
indeed felt compelled to act as referees in certain cases. Particularly so, when they unfolded close to home (i.e. near 
or in the capital and/or involving their delegate, the changvang) and whenever it was felt that the situation could pos-
sibly get out of hand and threaten social peace. Then it was, besides security considerations and an urge to keep the 
religious leaders invested by the king and themselves in place, again colonial assumptions about “true” Islam which 
came into the equation.
 The French bureaucratization of Islam was clearly indicative of their commitment to religious freedom also for mi-
nority religions within their colonial domains in Indochina. On the other hand, attempts to curtail the activities of 
Islamic schools perceived to impart tendentious teachings are representative of deliberate limitations to this commit-
ment for political considerations. Likewise, the mentioned privileging of the Malay-oriented currents within Cambo-
dian Islam as far as appointed religious functionaries and accredited religious teachers are concerned could be seen as 
having been conducive to a reduction of religious diversity and thus also religious freedom in the long run.
— Coming to Terms with the Ahmadis? The Role of Local Administration in Dealing with Religious Conflicts in 
Indonesia 
Dina Diana (University of Passau)
The right of religious freedom in Indonesia has often been contested. One example of the ongoing issue concerning 
religious freedom is the right to religious freedom of Ahmadiyah, an Islamic sect. Repeated attacks on Ahmadiyah 
followers, also known as Ahmadis, on the grounds that Ahmadiyah is a deviant sect, and as such its members do not 
have the right to call themselves to be Muslims, is in contradiction with the constitution since freedom of religion 
is guaranteed by the Indonesian Constitution. Despite the recognition of the religious freedom by the constitution, 
there are legal instruments that have been enforced to limit or restrict the activities of the Ahmadis, such as Law No. 
1/PNPS/1965 (the Blasphemy Law) and a Joint Ministerial Decree issued in 2008. Such legal instruments have led 
some local governments both in the provincial level and city/regency level to issue similar regulations restricting the 
activities of the Ahmadiyah community, others have gone even further to ban the Ahmadiyah community outright in 
their regions. Accordingly, the local administration plays a major role in issues relating to religious freedom. Most of 
the time the local administration resorts to legal instruments in their decision making process. It shall be shown that 
this attitude perpetuates conflict between the Ahmadiyah community and the local government, rather than resolve 
the issue.

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The proposed paper is based on the findings from field research conducted in Indonesia. The aim is to analyze the 
practice of local administration at the level of city government in addressing issues relating to the Ahmadiyah com-
munity. It will also investigate what strategies are used by the local administration when dealing with the conflicts and 
how that ruled-based policy making is delivered.
— Bureaucratization of Islamic Courts and Religious Freedom in Religiously Divided Societies: The Case of 
Malaysia 
Kikue Hamayotsu  (Northern Illinois University)
The way in which Shari‘a (Islamic) courts and laws are developed and how those religious legal apparatuses shape the 
relations between various religious communities in religiously divided societies have been a common source of de-
bates among scholars. This paper analyses the growing institutional power and authority of Islamic courts and judges 
in Malaysia since the late 1980s until today to contribute to this theoretical debate. It specifically – and comparatively 
– looks into the two critical phases of institutional development of the Shari‘a courts in the country’s largely secular 
judicial system which it inherited from the British colonial regime after independence. Based on original data gath-
ered at the Department of Syariah Judiciary Malaysia (JKSM) and other government and legal agencies, fieldwork, and 
in-depth interviews with Islamic and civil court officials both at the federal and state levels, I argue that the bureaucra-
tization of Islamic courts can be better explained from a perspective of regime formation. Theoretically, my research 
emphasizes the interests and imperatives of Muslim ruling elites to fortify an ethnocentric Islamist party regime in 
accounting for a mutually beneficial loose alliance of monarchy, secular politicians and religious officials, and the 
state’s policy in building and expanding an independent and authoritative Islamic court apparatus. Bureaucratization 
of the Islamic courts, as a result, curtained not only social and political pluralism, but also religious freedom of both 
Muslim majority and non-Muslim minorities. Empirically, this research looks into the institutional expansion and 
administrative independence that the Islamic courts and judges have gained in relation to their civil counterparts in 
the late 1980s and after 2008 so as to highlight understudied aspects in the studies of Islamic laws and society and 
Shari‘a politics.
— Iron Cage in a Yellow Robe? Sangha, State, and Religious Freedom in Thailand
Tomas Larsson (University of Cambridge)
This paper explores the drivers and modalities of the politicisation and bureaucratisation of religion in Thailand, and 
reflects on their implications for religious freedom. It does so through a case study of a series of initiatives to “reform” 
the relationship between state and sangha (the Buddhist monastic order) that followed in the wake of the military 
coup on 22 May 2014. These include the drafting of a new constitution; the drafting of a law to “protect” Buddhism; 
and guidelines for the protection of Buddhism put forward by the National Reform Council. The paper also seeks to 
situate these religious ambitions of an authoritarian government in wider historic and political perspectives.
— The Legal and Constitutional Negotiation between Singapore’s Shi’a Community and Majlis Ugama Islam 
Singapura (MUIS) 
Peter Muruthi (National University of Singapore)
Multicultural Singapore possesses multiple religions, including a Muslim population amounting to 14.7%. Of this, 
10% of Singaporean Muslims are Shi’a, with the majority being Sunni of the Shafi’i madhab. MUIS is a statutory board 
that plays a quasi-governmental function in the bureaucratization of Islam and oversees all Muslim affairs, including 
that of the Shi’a minority. However, the existence of the Shi’a community and the Jaafari madhab has yet to have been 
reconciled with MUIS and the legal apparatus. This is reflected by the presumptions of homogeneity of Muslim iden-
tity that are reflected in the Constitution and the Administration of Muslim Law Act (“AMLA”), which is the statutory 
basis of MUIS’s undertakings. The presumptions embedded in AMLA and the Constitution imply that Muslims are 
Malay, Sunni and adherents of the Shafi’i madhab. The presumption of homogeneity leads to unease to the relation-
ship and negotiation between MUIS and the Shi’a community. MUIS’s reluctance to engage with the ‘other’ has led to 
misunderstandings and sectarian unease. Furthermore, the Shi’a community is not represented in the seven-strong 
governing committee of MUIS, which denies the opportunity to discuss issues of conjecture. Instead, MUIS is will-
fully blind to the reality of Muslim heterogeneity and ignores the pressing need to reform AMLA, especially with the 

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rise of takfiri interpretations. The bureaucratization of Islam through MUIS has restricted the religious freedom of 
the Shi’a community, as Sunni hegemony has been allowed to subjugate the ‘other.’ The focus of the state’s engagement 
with MUIS is to expunge terrorist ideology and promote inter-faith dialogue. However, simultaneously, sectarian 
takfiri ideology has been unimpeded and calls for intra-faith dialogue have been rejected. When unchecked, the appa-
ratus of Singapore’s authoritarian model of enforcing ‘religious harmony’ is susceptible to majoritarian intra-religious 
abuse, which is further legitimated by presumptions embedded in the Constitution and AMLA.
— The State and Bureaucratization of Muslim Marriage in Indonesia
Eva Nisa (State Islamic University Jakarta)
The phenomenon of unconventional Muslim marriage in Indonesia has become a hotly debated topic, especially after 
the birth of Muslim marriage agencies that organize unregistered, online, secret (sirri) marriages. In addition to un-
registered marriage, interfaith and child marriage have also become hotly contested issues between the state, women’s 
activists, religious leaders, and legal activists. In 2014, women’s activists and legal activists–supported by progressive 
Muslim scholars–filled a judicial review arguing for the minimum age of marriage to be raised from 16 to 18 years of 
age, and that interfaith marriage should be allowed based on religious freedom. This paper will focus on these three 
types of unconventional Muslim marriage–unregistered online marriage, child marriage and interfaith marriage–that 
have become a source of contestation between the state, religious leaders, women and legal activists. It will analyse the 
efforts of the state to regulate unconventional Muslim marriage and the responses of such regulations. This paper will 
also investigate who has entered the public debate about these unconventional types of marriage and how they have 
framed unconventional marriage as a social problem. This paper argues that unconventional Muslim marriage has 
been the real test of the bureaucratisation of religion in Indonesia.
 
— Adding Values: Religious Revival, Economic Reform, and Faith-Based Development in Lao PDR 
Leah Brooke Zani (University of California, Irvine)
Recent years have seen have seen widespread recognition of the importance of linking faith and national develop-
ment in Lao PDR (Laos). And yet, faith-based development in Laos is occurring alongside official secular policies 
and socialist reforms.This paper addresses the current moment of increasing state-supported, faith-based (especially 
Buddhist) development programs, coupled with the uncertain status of faith and civil society in Laos. Under the 
control of the Lao socialist front, legally recognized religious practices are being broadened and re-oriented towards 
development and economic reform. This is not so much an increase in religious freedoms as a change in bureaucratic 
jurisdiction. Lao Buddhist monks (who traditionally do not handle money) may be asked to be accountants of faith-
based development projects. Monks and other faith actors are now often asked to demonstrate “faith’s added value” 
to development programs--value, here, carrying dual meanings as both moral value and monetary value. Following 
the lead of interlocutors, the article focuses on the ambiguities, risks, and uncertainties of faith-based development in 
Laos. Faith actors negotiate dual roles as both ‘mass educators’ in the socialist front and ‘social workers’ in a nascent 
civil society. The later role comes with its own risks, which some faith actors address by starting development projects 
in the business sector--serving to more closely tie together religious revival and economic reform.
Panel: Southeast Asian Religions on the Periphery 
conveners: Vivienne Angeles (La Salle University), Paul Rodell (Georgia Southern University)
discussant: Paul Rodell (Georgia Southern University)
panel abstract
Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam are major religions in Southeast Asia but, together with indigenous 
religions they are also minority religions in specific countries where they compete for space not only in the religious 
landscape but in the political and social areas as well. This panel will investigate the relationship between minority 
and alternative religious movements, and the dominant religions which have, in many ways, defined and shaped the 
social and political environments in countries where they constitute the majority. An example of a minority religion 

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would be Islam in countries such as the Philippines, Thailand or Myanmar. Meanwhile, Christianity is a minority reli-
gion in most countries of the region. Alternative religious movements within majority religious traditions is a broader 
category that encompasses movements such as the Catholic charismatic El Shaddai in the Philippines, the Cao Dai in 
Vietnam and similar movements within an Islamic tradition.
Panelists can explore such questions as the role these religions and movements played in the country’s history. What 
function(s) do these religions fulfill in the everyday lives of their adherents? What relationship do they have with the 
political leadership of the country? What is the relationship of these religions majority religious institutions? How do 
these peripheral religions and alternative religious movements define and express their religious identities?
This panel intends to bring together scholars from different disciplines and geographic focus within Southeast Asia to 
share theoretical orientations and findings and to foster comparative scholarship on minority and alternative religions 
in the region.
— From the Periphery to Center Stage: Islam and Muslims in the Philippines 
Vivienne Angeles (La Salle University)
Islam is the largest minority religion in the Philippines. Muslims constitute five percent of the Philippines’100 million 
population and is professed by members of thirteen ethnic groups as well as by converts who came to Islam around the 
1970s. Marginalized and discriminated against during the colonial and independence periods, Muslims are now very 
much in the public square, asserting their rights as citizens and at the moment, awaiting congressional action on the 
Bangsamoro Basic Law which provides for a new political entity with expanded autonomy for specified Muslim areas.
 This paper will examine the relationship between Muslims and the political leadership of the Philippines. I argue that 
Islamic resurgence in the Philippines was facilitated by government policies which were implemented as responses 
to the secessionist movements (launched by the Moro National Liberation Front and later, the Moro Islamic Libera-
tion Front), and by labor programs which sent Filipinos as overseas contract workers to the Middle East. The paper 
will also investigate how the political leadership justified the implementation of programs which touch on the issue 
of separation of church and state.
— The Birth of the Kan Imam San: On the Recent Establishment of a New Islamic Congregation in Cambodia 
Philipp Bruckmayr (University of Vienna)
As far as the administration of Islam is concerned, overwhelmingly Buddhist Cambodia represents a unique case in 
Southeast Asia, due to its official recognition of two distinct Islamic religious communities, whose separate existence 
is entirely unrelated to the Sunni-Shia divide or to the discussions of the status of the Ahmadiyyah movement and its 
adherents prevailing in other parts of the region. Thus, whereas the great majority of the Cambodian Muslim com-
munity, which primarily consists of ethnic Chams, is represented by the Mufti of Cambodia, the latter now has an 
officially recognized counterpart in the figure of the Ong Gnur as leader of the so-called Islamic Community of Imam 
San (Kan Imam San) since 1998. The latter community, which regards itself as practicing a distinctively Cambodian 
Cham form of Islam, accounts for roughly 10 per cent of the country’s Muslim population. The present paper will shed 
light on the genesis of the community by elucidating its distinguishing features, defining practices, cultural icons, self-
perception, self-representation and selective approaches to history as well as the internal and external mechanisms 
behind its construction. Among the latter, historical factors such as Cambodian political history, an overall gravitation 
of large parts of Cambodian Muslims towards Malay models of Islamic religiosity and scholarship, and voluntary as 
well as involuntary settlement patterns of the last 150 years have featured prominently, just as have more recent de-
velopments, such as the reverberations of the Khmers Rouges genocide and the increasing influence of transnational 
Islamic movements.
— The Return of the Ancestors: The Revival of Animism in Timor Leste (Timor)
David Hicks (Stony Brook University)
From 1976 to 1999 the Republic of Indonesia occupied the former colony of Portuguese Timor, one half of an island 
to the north of Australia. In the latter year the colony then won its independence and today is a nation-state in its own 
right. Under the occupation customary institutions were subjected to considerable pressures from the occupying army 
and these included forced conversion to Catholicism. With the coming of independence, however, there has been a 

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revival of rituals that had seem to have been effaced and with their revival the “words of the ancestors” have again 
become a force in the daily lives of the Timorese. This revival is posing challenges to the authority of the Catholic 
Church, and among the issues explored in this paper is the manner in which the fidelity to ancestral traditions syn-
cretizes with Catholicism.
— Northeast Thai-Lao Theravada-Buddhism: Peripheral, Central, or Varietal? 
Leedom Lefferts (University of North Carolina)
The form of Theravada Buddhism as practiced in Thailand’s Northeast by tens of millions of Lao or Thai-Lao speakers 
is frequently considered peripheral by Thais in the country’s Center, including Bangkok. When considering Thailand’s 
Theravada Buddhism note must be made that numerous varieties existed when the Bangkok royals were creating the 
country. In fact, the royals saw religion as crucial to the formation of their realm and governing system. 
Meanwhile, people removed from the Center maintained crucial religious distinctions which may have “flown under 
the radar” of the Center. While Catherine Bowie has charted the crucial role of Khruba Siwichai in the North, no simi-
lar figure exists for the Northeastwhich is a much more dispersed and open space. But many ceremonies take place in 
the Northeast thatdifferdramaticallyfrom those of the other regions.
This paper examines the Bun Phra Wet festival that celebrates the pen-ultimate life of the karma that, in its next life 
became The Buddha. The paper considers various interpretations of this festival, while stressing its own analysis that 
includes the contexts of community and merit-making. This paper is at odds with center-peripheral statements and, 
rather, connotes the consideration of multiple variants of Theravada Buddhism, each of which should be considered 
in its own right.
— Religion, Cult, or the Truth? Yiguan Dao in Buddhist Thailand 
Yu-sheng Lin (Kyoto University)
In the past decade, Yiguan Dao (I-Kuan Tao, or Anuttaratham in Thai), has become a fast-growing‘Chinese religious 
group’ in Thailand. Different from other reform Buddhist groups in Thailand, Yiguan Dao is officially registered as a 
charity foundation but not a religious one, and is not prohibited by the Thai government. Unlike Yiguan Dao in other 
countries and other Chinese religious groups in Thailand, Yiguan Dao attracts many non-Chinese to become its mem-
bers in Thailand. Therefore, although Yiguan Dao is not prohibited by the Thai government, it still faces criticisms 
from some Buddhists, and needs more negotiations with Buddhism, which is the major religion in Thailand.
Some criticize the Yiguan Dao as distorting the teachings and the truth of Buddhism, and take it as a cult (lathiin Thai) 
which is still superstitious. Others attack its Chinese origin, and claim the superiority of the Thai Buddhism.
Yiguan Dao members in Thailand find themselves negotiating with the critics. On the one hand, Yiguan Dao mem-
bers claim their teachings constitute the truth (Dao, thamma in Thai) but it is not religion (Jiao, sasana in Thai). So 
the members do not need to change their ‘religion’, and still could attend Buddhist activities. On the other hand, they 
claim its specificity by showing its difference with Buddhism and in some cases note how some Buddhism monks 
become Yiguan Dao members.
In this study, I would like to take the example of Yiguan Dao in Buddhist Thailand to show how a ‘Chinese’ religious 
group negotiates its religious spaces to break ethnic and religious boundaries.