How Did Indonesia and Malaysia Become Majority-Muslim?
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- South East Asian Royalty adopted Islam due to being likely swayed by rich Muslim merchants + missionaries and then gradually became popular.
- South East Asian Peasant populations without strong Buddhist/Hindu religious influences adopted it to fill void of previous Animist religions or even just Animist traditions.
>Actual TL;DR: Rulers converted for economic, political, and personal reasons. Not much work has been done on popular conversion, but so far it seems that the government and Sufis both helped spread Islam on a popular level. The new religion was perceived as magic, provided solace in a changing world, and finally became just a part of life.
If you're working in Indonesia and your boss is Muslim and you're not, the fastest way to get ahead is to convert.
That plus other one-way traps reinforces Islam as a dominant religion.
Technically, the term "Hindu" as defined by the British just meant non-Muslim. In fact, it was the British who popularized the term Hindu in the first place since prior to British influence, there was no such religion, just a broad set of different religions such as Shivaism, Buddhism, Vishnuism and numerous others. In many places such as Assam, Buddha is revered by people who are labeled as Hindu.
This is hyperbole. While Im sure there are businesses where it's true (there are millions of them in Indonesia), it's not common at all, at least in my experience in Java/Sumatera. There are glass ceilings based on ethnicity in some companies, but it's rarely related to religion and more based on cultural cliques.
There might not be any quantitative records of religious beliefs. When our ancestors encountered people of a different religion, it was more about chopping heads off than about counting them.
It should be noted that the deta is from Iran, but presumably the same arguments apply for Southeast Asia.
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-69BqAL9ARKg/T1WBF0NwxeI/AAAAAAAAAB...
[2] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674732810
Certainly Reddit and the comment's length are not indicators of accuracy. They are indicators of an author with a lot of time and motivation, which could be good or bad.
I would not classify it as reliable, even if accurate and knowledgeable people post there.
That said, I think many people misunderstand the discourse that's happening there. It's not academic, but instead a touchpoint between academics(-ish) and laypeople. The kinds of questions being asked are decidedly not the sorts of questions discussed in literature. Flairs in turn have to give an educated answer that actually communicates with the asker. Citations don't really fit well into what's happening for either side. They're time consuming to produce and no one reads or even understands them, nor do they provide particularly relevant information. You can't usually cite a consensus, after all.
> It has very high standards for answers (as you can see several times a day when a the mods nuke an entire thread for not being good enough):
I'll point out that this practice indicates nothing about the quality; it depends on the mods and not on the quality. If the mods' taste happens to correlate with quality, only then would it result in higher quality comments. For example, mods in a forum that promotes conspiracy theories might also delete threads that don't match their definition of 'quality'.
I'm a little concerned that the parent comment might represent a Reddit theory of accuracy, quality and scholarship, but not the real thing.
As for individual posters, you can probably just message them and they'll be happy to provide their background. If not, I'm guessing you can message the mods and ask for some proof that they are who they say they are.