On October 15, 2012, Philippine president Benigno Aquino III and Al-Haj Murad Ibrahim, chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or MILF signed the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro at the Malacañang Palace in Manila. On January 25, 2014, representatives of the Philippine government and the MILF signed the last of the annexes to the Framework Agreement. With the annexes complete, the landmark Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) was signed on March 27, 2014. The signing of the Comprehensive Agreement was a remarkable achievement given how both parties have been locked in armed conflict for the better part of the last three decades, including the Philippines state's waging of an “All-Out-War” in 2000 under the presidency of Joseph Estrada. With this set of agreements, a Bangsamoro autonomous state, encapsulating parts of what had come to be known as the Moro lands in the southern Philippines, will finally be formed within the territory of the Philippines.

The Moro areas of southern Philippines have widely been defined as the territories of Mindanao as well as the surrounding islands in the Sulu Archipelago. It includes the five provinces where Muslims remain a majority of the population: Maguindanao, Basilan, Tawi-Tawi, Lanao Del Sur, and Sulu. Within the geopolitical body of the Philippines, these areas stand out on at least three counts. First, they are where the vast majority of Filipino Muslims, which according to most census figures number around four to five million, are concentrated, even though Muslims in actual fact form numerical majorities only in the five aforementioned provinces. Second, these are areas identified as among the poorest in the Philippines, if not the entire Southeast Asian region. Indeed, numerous studies have been produced that draw attention to how these areas lack basic infrastructural and institutional pillars necessary for the proper functioning of society, such as education, transport, healthcare, and sanitation services. Third, until relatively recently, large segments of the local population, known in the lexicon today collectively as Bangsamoro – a term that has come to be used synonymously with Moro despite significant definitional differences between them that speak to competing conceptions of national identity (not to mention the fact that in truth, Moro identity is itself a fragmented community), have been waging protracted armed rebellion against central authority since the time of Spanish attempts to colonize the region.

Thailand's southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, and the Malay-speaking districts of Songkhla have a combined population of between 1.8 and two million people, of whom more than 1.5 million are ethnic Malays who profess the Islamic faith. Once part of the independent kingdom of Patani (a historic kingdom not to be confused with the province of Pattani that exists today, although both are located in the same geographical area of the southern provinces), this distinctive ethnic-religious region has a history and identity that predate the imposition of centralized rule of the kingdom of Siam in the early 20th century.

The region is situated at the junction between predominantly Buddhist mainland and predominantly Muslim maritime regions of Southeast Asia. In cultural and linguistic terms, however, its occupants are at home in neither milieu. For instance, while Thai Malay-Muslims, known colloquially as “Nayu,” may share similar ethnic and cultural traits as their Malaysian-Malay counterparts, many who work across the border in northern Malaysia have in fact experienced alienation because of their association with the predominantly Buddhist Thai state, which they feel makes them less “Malay” in the eyes of their Malaysian neighbors. It is for this reason that anthropologists and sociologists have written extensively on Nayu as being in possession of dual (and duelling) identities. In part because of the geographic position of this region at the margins of the Thai geobody, Thailand's nation-state constructs, along with its historical narrative and the centralized structure of the Thai state, have vacillated between accommodation and alienation of the unique identity and historical narrative of the Malay south. Resonating with what was discussed in the foregoing chapter on the southern Philippines, relative economic underdevelopment of the region has added further to the sense of alienation that over the decades has exercised the Malay-Muslim cause.

It is against this backdrop that the long-standing Malay-Muslim struggle to define and defend a conception of nationhood distinct from Thailand's official discourse of nationalism has been summarized succinctly by the Thai political scientist Michael Connors, who poignantly surmised: “The history of the South may well be written as a history of differentiated cyclical patterns of Malay resistance and rebellion and state accommodation and pacification.”

In the conclusion to his 1963 study on religion and nationalism in Southeast Asia, the eminent political scientist Fred R. von der Mehden proposed that: “twentieth-century Southeast Asia is an excellent laboratory in which the relationship of religion to politics can be assessed against changing political and social backgrounds. The past fifty years have seen peoples lacking political, economic, and social cohesion assume nationhood and finally statehood.” Forty years later, in a quantitative article published in 2004 that collated data from the Minorities at Risk and State Failure datasets, Jonathan Fox found that since 1980, religious nationalist groups were responsible for more cases of conflict (specifically armed violence) than non-religious nationalist groups. These two observations may seem unrelated, but they provide important points of entry, as well as bookends, for this study as it draws to a conclusion.

In a sense, this book has picked up the Southeast Asian story where von der Mehden left off. It has done so by unpacking several conflicts in Southeast Asia that have commanded widespread popular attention recently, and that appear religious in nature by virtue of the frequent use of religious symbols, metaphors, and narratives to describe them on the part of media, academia, and, most significantly, conflict actors themselves. Rather than treading the beaten path to pinpoint whether or not these conflicts are “religious” in the strict sense of the term, this book has chosen to offer an alternative interpretation of religious conflicts in Southeast Asia. The search for a different approach provoked a series of questions. How do we understand the element of religion in the contemporary intrastate conflicts that have arisen in Southeast Asian societies? Indeed, why have these conflicts even taken on a confessional nature and found religious expression? How should we understand the veracity of their religious contents and claims? These questions are of signal importance because of their analytical novelty in the sense that no one else has asked these questions substantively of Southeast Asian intrastate conflicts, certainly not in the context of a comparative study contained in a single volume.

The book has set out the basic premise that religious identity and discourses have been important in the framing of political conflicts in Southeast Asia. Indeed, in all the cases investigated here, conflict actors have themselves often framed their actions in religious terms in one way or another.

Religion has always been an important theme in Southeast Asian history and culture. It has also been a crucial feature of the region's politics and specifically, as I hope to demonstrate in this book, in the conception of nationhood and the political contestations that have defined the history of the nation in Southeast Asia. Indeed, since the emergence of anti-colonial movements in the region, religion has animated and colored nationalism in Southeast Asia. Romantic nationalists from Myanmar (Burma) to Indonesia and the Philippines, in possession of great capacities for invention and myth-making, frequently capitalized on the “immutable” religious identity of “their people” in order to construct narratives that frame conceptions of nationhood beyond the imperative of material self-interest.

Such is the currency of these narratives, it harkens to Hugh Trevor-Roper's observation, made in his illuminating tome, The Invention of Scotland, that “for what people believe is true is a force, even if it is not true.” This conceptualization of nationhood using religious metaphors, vocabularies, and referents, I should add, was not merely confined to those anti-colonial movements that agitated successfully to liberate their nations from Western imperialism. Religion has been an equally robust, if at times overlooked, phenomenon on at least two further counts: first, as a feature in the process of post-independence nation and state building and consolidation and, second, in the articulation of resistance by groups within the territorial state but who do not share in its conception of nationhood. It is in the hope of untangling this dynamic thematic combination of religious identity, nationalism, and political contestation that Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia has been written.

The topic of religion and conflict has fascinated many a scholar of the region. The result has been the production of several excellent studies that explore the role of religion in political conflict from a wide array of perspectives ranging from economic inequality to minority identity, political legitimacy, and integration. Of particular note are Thomas McKenna's illuminating study of local politics in Cotabato, Edward Aspinall's study of how religious identity blended with nationalism in Aceh, Duncan McCargo's work on southern Thailand that focuses on the legitimacy-deficit of the Thai state in the Malay south, and John Sidel's masterly analysis of the kaleidoscopic violence perpetrated by religiously inspired groups in Indonesia. This book hopes to add to this literature in at least two ways.

Southeast Asia is doubtless one of the most dynamic economic regions in the world. It is, at the same time, also home to some of the most enduring post-colonial intrastate conflicts. A brief look at the headlines of major broadsheets over the last decade and a half is a good indicator of how this has cast a shadow over the region. In Myanmar (Burma), violence has broken out between Buddhists and Muslims even as the country creeps down the path of democratization. In Thailand and the Philippines, Muslim minority groups in their respective southern provinces are purportedly waging jihad or “holy war” against what we are told are majoritarian prejudices of predominantly Buddhist and Catholic states and societies, respectively. While Malaysia has thus far avoided the outbreak of violence, the country nevertheless has witnessed an alarming escalation of tension as a Muslim-dominated government has allowed the expression of acutely exclusivist majoritarian views on religion in the name of “defending” the Islamic faith to go unchecked, the deleterious effect of which has been the constriction of the religio-cultural space afforded to non-Muslims by the Constitution. In Indonesia, post-Suharto political transformation appeared in its early years to have given rise to sectarianism and religious intolerance, which in many cases have also boiled over to violence not only between Muslims and non-Muslims, but within Indonesia's kaleidoscopic Muslim community as well.

On close inspection, a common thematic thread appears to weave through many of these conflicts – the role of religion. Because of how religious language and symbolism are evoked in some form or other, many of the aforementioned conflicts have been the subject of a great deal of media and academic attention that have chosen intuitively to cast them as religious conflicts. Given the popularity and appeal of such views, particularly those emanating from media circles, both local and international, a proper understanding of the role of religion in these conflicts is necessary and urgent. It is for this purpose that this book is written.

The book poses the following questions: how and why did religion come to assume such a prominent role in intrastate conflicts in Southeast Asia, and how should we endeavor to understand this role?

Scholars of religion in Indonesia have consistently maintained that it is an exceedingly complex phenomenon not given to straightforward analysis or generalizations. The complexity of the topic is arguably captured in the concept of aliran (streams, referring to the different currents of Islam in Indonesia), which since its introduction to Indonesian studies by the anthropologist Cliffor Geertz has continued to provide a useful point of entry to the analysis of social and political trends in the country. Originating in Geertz's study of Indonesian Islam, scholars of Indonesia had traditionally set great store by the notion of aliran, which speaks to the existence of multiple, dynamic, oftentimes competing streams that define the variegated nature of Indonesian society and politics. Even though the veracity of the concept has in recent times been critiqued and challenged, the evolution of autonomous regional and local histories and identities over time has doubtless also contributed to this diffused heterogeneity.

Because Indonesian society has by and large managed to accommodate this diversity, it has acquired a reputation for pluralism and tolerance. The accuracy or aptness of this characterization, however, has been a matter of considerable debate. This debate notwithstanding, the main analytical assertion here is that issues of what constitutes the nation in terms of who should be included or excluded, and on what grounds, remain contested at the geographical as well as confessional margins, and the frequent occurrence of various forms of religious tension and conflicts serves as a prescient reminder of this. Bearing this in mind, it is with caution that this chapter wades into the debate by focusing on what it is that is “religious” about religious conflicts in Indonesia, and how to conceptualize it against broader themes that define the process of negotiation and renegotiation of nationhood.

The study of communal or sectarian violence in Indonesia has long been a rich analytical and empirical field. An extensive literature is now available that explores the complex and multifarious dynamics that account for violence in Aceh, Papua, Sulawesi, Maluku, North Maluku, and Kalimantan. A careful scrutiny of this scholarship reveals a multiplicity of analytical frameworks and explanatory variables that includes ethnic identity, opportunism on the part of elites at local and national levels, terrorism and ideological and theological extremism, political transition as a result of the collapse of President Suharto's New Order government, resource competition, and criminality.