Chinese Ways of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity and Religiosity in Indonesia by Hew Wai Weng (review)

Abstract

The title of Hew Wai Weng’s ethnographic study, Chinese Ways of Being Muslim, captures immediately a crucial feature of the Indonesian Chinese Muslim experience. Dispersed throughout the archipelago, Chinese Muslims have responded to localized and historical trends in highly variable ways, so that ways of being Muslim are both diverse and individual. Clearly not a cohesive group, their treatment as an analytical category makes good sense for this study. Even so, who belongs in this category is still open to interpretation. Choosing to highlight diversity, Hew includes in his project not only individuals who self-identify as practicing Chinese Muslims, but also Chinese married to non-Chinese Muslims who no longer consider themselves Chinese, as well as Chinese converts who have become Muslim for practical reasons but are not religious in practice. Even within this wider framework, and despite the increased visibility and activism of Muslim Chinese, their numbers remain relatively small, estimated at only .5 to 1 percent of the Chinese Indonesian population (somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand individuals).