East of Arabia
More Muslims live east of Afghanistan than west of it. The countries with the four largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Yet the Middle East continues to retain its prominence in discussions about Islam.
A fascinating example of this is former WSJ-writer Tunku Varadarajan’s piece in The Daily Beast on this very subject. Can you spot the error? He writes:
“Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, as the president pointed out to his Jakarta audience—an audience that can scarcely have been unaware of the fact, and yet one that resides in a country constantly aware of its second-class status in the Arab-centric Muslim world. …. Islam is not of the Arab world alone….Which is why Obama’s salutations to Islam—which had grated so harshly in suffocating, Sunni Cairo— sounded so congenial in Indonesia, a country whose president, Sushilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is a Muslim who doesn’t even have a Muslim name.”
First, Mr. Varadarajan says that discussions of Islam are usually Arab-centric and should be broadened to include countries like Indonesia.
Then he does the exact opposite by claiming that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (spelt incorrectly) “doesn’t even have a Muslim name.” Yudhoyono’s name is perfectly Muslim, of course, in the sense that people with such names in Indonesia have, in the recent past, been Muslim. But of course, they are not Arab names.
