The spread of Islam to Southeast Asia was similar in some respects, different in others. Malaysia and Indonesia were never part of the great Islamic empires of the Middle East. Th eir incorporation into the Islamic world came about rather through peaceful processes—by commerce, infl uence, and conversion. Certainly there were local confl icts at times between Islamized rulers and their non-Islamized neighbors, but in general, the Islamization of this region may be described as peaceful. In the early modern age, Southeast Asia suff ered the same fate as much of the rest of the non-Western world and was divided between the European empires, particularly the British and the Dutch. Th e departure of the Western imperial rulers left a number of Muslim states in the region, as well as Muslim minorities in some non-Muslim countries.
The spread of Islam in Africa followed a somewhat diff erent pattern, with different results. The first Arab conquerors and their Turkish successors showed litt le interest in invading tropical Africa, and there too the spread of Islam was mainly by commerce—especially the slave trade—and conversion. The Sahara Desert seems to have been a more formidable obstacle than the Mediterranean Sea, and to this day, Muslim North Africa, in many respects, has more in common with Christian southern Europe than with Muslim sub-Saharan Africa.
As these vast new lands were added to the Islamic realm, new languages evolved, derived from the ancient languages of these peoples, transformed by the impact of Islam, its scriptures and its classics, in the way that the languages of pagan Europe were transformed by the Christian and Greco-Roman heritages. Th ere are many such languages. Obvious examples are Swahili and Haussa in eastern and western Africa; Urdu in Pakistan and among the Muslim minority in India; Malay and Indonesian in Southeast Asia. Many of these Asian and African Muslim communities share a language with their non-Muslim compatriots, but they write it in the Arabic script with a signifi - cant vocabulary of Arabic loan words.
The largest Muslim populations at the present time are found in two areas, South Asia and Southeast Asia. In 1947, British India was partitioned into two states, one of them called Pakistan, a new term meaning “land of the pure,” a Muslim majority state consisting of two separated parts, one on the western, the other on the eastern side of the subcontinent. Later, East Pakistan , as it was then called, broke away and became a separate independent state named Bangladesh. Even after the separation of these two Muslim majority areas, a significant Muslim minority remained in India, now one of the largest Muslim communities in the world.
The Story of Tea the Black Magic of Asia
