When he first experienced the presence and supernatural demonstration of God it brought a change of heart that no argument had been able to generate. Apollo 11 made history when it landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. American astronauts Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins brought back the world’s first samples from another celestial surface. Illness occurs when one or more of these spirits leaves the body; this condition may be reversed by the soukhwan-more commonly called the baci-a ceremony that calls all thirty-two khwan back to bestow health, prosperity, and well-being on the affected participants. In Shiism the scholars are more organized and even have some of the qualities of a Catholic hierarchy. Of course, this has not prevented Muslim communities from dissolving into fractious sects or even falling into fratricidal warfare. Southeast Asians are heirs to a tradition of kinship and gender that accorded women a significantly higher social standing than even their sisters in premodern Europe. For most modern Muslims, however, any comparable discussion of “Indian Islam” or “Indonesian Islam” as opposed to “Arab Islam” is disquieting; indeed, for some Muslims such ethnic references are repugnant.

Today nearly four-fifths of the republic’s population is Roman Catholic, with small numbers of other religious groups (including Church of Ireland Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Muslims, and Jews). Islam’s central rituals and canons emphasize unity and commonality, as in the insistence on the finished truth of the Quran, on the five pillars or ritual activities incumbent on Muslims, and on the implementation of God’s law as incumbent on all Muslims. When speaking of Asian Islam, it is helpful to distinguish between two primary Asian civilizational streams: a Central and South Asian tradition, on one hand, and a Southeast Asian tradition, on the other. First, some commonalities. South and Southeast Asian Islam have long had in common the tradition of mysticism, or Sufism. First, you need to specify Location with latitude, and longitude as parameters. Muslims also visit the Bath of Mary in Jerusalem, where Muslim tradition recounts Mary once bathed, and this location was visited at times by women who were seeking a cure for barrenness. Part of its comedy can be found in the characters, who are depicted as traditional anime archetypes like overpowered beings, samurai who take themselves too seriously and heroes with complicated past. Because of this, someone who practices spirituality may continually change their beliefs throughout their life.

Astrology was a popular subject in monumental works of literature like Dante’s “Inferno,” Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” and Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” “Rome and Juliet, “Julius Caesar,” “Hamlet” and “King Lear.” “Comets, importing change of time and states,” Shakespeare writes in “Henry VI. Whatever the reason, if you approach any government department or school to change your name or your child’s name, you will be asked to make a gazette and submit it to the concerned authorities. In Sunni Islam, the Islam of most Asian Muslims (unless we include Iranians as Asians, as specialists of Islam sometimes do), the law has been discussed and developed since the eighth and ninth centuries through the conventions and authorities of four schools of law. On the contrary, the scholars of Islam in Asia all took the texts and methods of the schools of law developed in Iraq and Syria in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Accordingly, the influence of the schools of law on the popular practice of Islam became greater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as more and more Muslims came to understand their religion through schooling and religious books. In modern times, print culture and mass education have tended to make Muslims more textualist and legal-minded in the way they understand their faith. It is this influence that leads most modern Muslims to take exception to the idea of national versions of Islam and insist that there is just one Islam. In culture and practice, as opposed to in the normative ideal, the answer to the question as to whether there are Arab and Asian versions of Islam is a highly qualified “yes.” The strongest qualification concerns the religious law that developed in Asian and Arab Islam. Most variants are quite orthodox in their profession of the faith, not deviating too much from the letter of religious law. As much as Asian Muslims have always differed in their religious practice from their Middle Eastern brothers and sisters, they have differed almost as much among themselves.