McAmis also gives attention to the history of their relationship with Christians - a history that is key to understanding the current state of religious and social life in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Since Muslims and Christians together comprise ninety-four percent of the Malay population, peaceful interaction and cooperation between mosque and church are crucial to realizing the economic and political goals of the entire region.".

The Malay population makes up Singapore's three largest ethnic groups. This book presents holistic and extensive analysis of the 'Malay Muslim story' in Singapore. Comprehensively and convincingly argued, the author examines their challenging circumstances in the fields of politics, education, social mobility, economy, leadership, and freedom of religious expression. The book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Muslims in Singapore, and the politics of a Malay-Muslim minority in a global city-state. It is of interest to researchers and students in the field of Singaporean studies, Southeast Asian Studies and Islam in Asia.

This book is an ethnography of the Malay Muslims of Guba, a pseudonymous village in Thailand’s Deep South, in the wake of the unrest that was primarily reinvigorated in 2004. It argues that the unrest is the effect of the way in which different forms of sovereignty converge around the residents of this region and the residents at the same time have cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. Rather than asking why the violence is increasing and who is behind it, like most scholarly works on the topic, it examines how different forms of sovereignty — ranging from the Thai state and the monarchy to Islamic religious movements, the insurgents and local strongmen — impose subjectivities on the residents, how they have converged in so doing and what tensions have followed, and how the residents have dealt with these tensions and cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. The phrase “We Love Mr King” or rao rak nay luang inscribed on the decorated, footed tray is one example of how the residents crafted themselves as royal subjects and enacted agency through the sovereign monarch. “This book represents one of the very few locally focussed anthropological studies to be undertaken in Thailand’s Muslim Malay border region since the upsurge in insurgent-driven violence since 2004. Just as noteworthy: the researcher is a Thai Buddhist who succeeded in establishing rapport with his Malay Muslim informants. Unlike most journalistic and academic research in this field based on hit-and-run interviews, Dr Anusorn’s work is founded on sustained in situ observation and participation with the local residents of the hamlet of Guba in Yala Province. Exploring a range of themes including local historical memory and place identification, Islamic practices, cultural rituals, complex local rivalries and violence, and interactions between villagers and military/state officials and projects, Anusorn skilfully highlights the co-existence and tensions between ‘different subjectivities’ in the context of the competing ‘sovereignties’ that inform the world of the villagers of Guba.” — Marc Askew (author of Performing Political Identity in Southern Thailand and Conspiracy, Politics and a Disorderly Border)

“A delightfully original take on…the prospects for liberal democracy in the broader Islamic Middle East.”—Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal As the Arab Spring threatens to give way to authoritarianism in Egypt and reports from Afghanistan detail widespread violence against U.S. troops and women, news from the Muslim world raises the question: Is Islam incompatible with freedom? In Islam without Extremes, Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol answers this question by revealing the little-understood roots of political Islam, which originally included both rationalist, flexible strains and more dogmatic, rigid ones. Though the rigid traditionalists won out, Akyol points to a flourishing of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique “Islamo-liberal synthesis” in present-day Turkey. As he powerfully asserts, only by accepting a secular state can Islamic societies thrive. Islam without Extremes offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and liberty.

This book surveys the growth and development of Islam in Malaysia from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, investigating how Islam has shaped the social lives, languages, cultures and politics of both Muslims and non-Muslims in one of the most populous Muslim regions in the world. Khairudin Aljunied shows how Muslims in Malaysia built upon the legacy of their pre-Islamic past while benefiting from Islamic ideas, values, and networks to found flourishing states and societies that have played an influential role in a globalizing world. He examines the movement of ideas, peoples, goods, technologies, arts, and cultures across into and out of Malaysia over the centuries. Interactions between Muslims and the local Malay population began as early as the eighth century, sustained by trade and the agency of Sufi as well as Arab, Indian, Persian, and Chinese scholars and missionaries. Aljunied looks at how Malay states and societies survived under colonial regimes that heightened racial and religious divisions, and how Muslims responded through violence as well as reformist movements. Although there have been tensions and skirmishes between Muslims and non-Muslims in Malaysia, they have learned in the main to co-exist harmoniously, creating a society comprising of a variety of distinct populations. This is the first book to provide a seamless account of the millennium-old venture of Islam in Malaysia.

"The Malay/Muslim community is an integral part of the formative years of modern Singapore. The Singapore Malay/Muslim community comprises approximately 13% of Singapore's population of about 5.5 million people. More than 90% of Singaporean Muslims are Malays while the remaining are Indians, Arabs, Chinese and members of other ethnic groups. This book highlights the progress of the community, its contributions, and also the challenges for the last 50 years since 1965"--

Since the early twentieth century, Muslim reformers have been campaigning for a total transformation of the ways in which Islam is imagined in the Malay world. One of the most influential is the author Haji Abdul Malik bin Abdul Karim Amrullah, commonly known as Hamka. In Hamka and Islam, Khairudin Aljunied employs the term "cosmopolitan reform" to describe Hamka's attempt to harmonize the many streams of Islamic and Western thought while posing solutions to the various challenges facing Muslims. Among the major themes Aljunied explores are reason and revelation, moderation and extremism, social justice, the state of women in society, and Sufism in the modern age, as well as the importance of history in reforming the minds of modern Muslims.Aljunied argues that Hamka demonstrated intellectual openness and inclusiveness toward a whole range of thoughts and philosophies to develop his own vocabulary of reform, attesting to Hamka's unique ability to function as a conduit for competing Islamic and secular groups. Hamka and Islam pushes the boundaries of the expanding literature on Muslim reformism and reformist thinkers by grounding its analysis within the Malay experience and by using the concept of cosmopolitan reform in a new context.