Bruijn and van Dijk 1995, Gibbal 1994; on Tuareg,
Bouman 2003; on Tubu, Baroin 1984).
The agricultural and sedentary groups are con-
sidered by the nobles to have a status equal to that
of non-nobles. Among these are the Berti, the
Zaghawa, and the Wolof who are today Islamized,
but in whose culture other religious forms are rec-
ognizable, comparable to the situation of pastoral
semi-nomads. Others, like the Dogon, Kapsiki,
Hadjerai, and Nuba were in contact with Islam, but
in a negative way especially in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries when they were subject to
slave raids. Conversion of these groups to Islam
began in the twentieth century, most intensively
after the Second World War. Islamization often
goes together with migration to towns (van Santen
1993), or with repression during war (Davidson
1996, de Bruijn, van Dijk, and Djindil 2004,
Manger 1994). In one village and even within one
family a mixture of religious forms can be found.
For example, the Dogon in Mali have a marabout
mask in their ritual dances (Joly 1994) and the
Hadjerai in Chad both conserve their altars in the
mountains and go to the mosque. These groups are
all more or less patrilineally organized, which fits
their livelihoods well. In what way the conversion
to Islam influenced the kinship system is not very
clear. For the Kapsiki in Cameroon, for instance,
the turn to Islam goes together with a decreasing
importance of the maximal clan. For the Hadjerai
the introduction of Islam not so much influences
the descent system as affects the position of women
as their role as animistic priestess diminishes, a
process also described for the Jola in Senegal
(Linares 1992).
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Working Paper 195, Michigan State University 1989.Mirjam de BruijnEast Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia,
and the PacificIntroduction
This entry discusses kinship, descent, and inheri-
tance systems in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the
Australia-Pacific regions. Due to the multiplicity of
ethnic groups with varieties of local customs in
these regions, the entry focuses on certain ethnic
groups that exemplify how Islamic rule is in con-
flict with, or has adapted to or co-opted local pre-
Islamic laws. The argument is that the acculturation
of Islamic law and local customary laws has had
different effects on the women living in these
regions.southeast asia
Although as early as the seventh and eighth cen-
turies Arab Muslim traders traveled throughout the
islands of Southeast Asia, Islam started to affect the
region after the first settlement of a Muslim town,
established around the late thirteenth century, in
the Pasai region of North Sumatra (Reid 1993,
133). It is said that Islam’s popularity and its
acceptance by local people was due to the Islamic
propagators’ ability to syncretize Islamic ideas with
existing local beliefs and display tolerance toward
local pre-Islamic practice (Osman 1985, 44). The
dissemination of Islam into Southeast Asia has sig-
nificantly affected the structures of its social organ-
ization, especially in relation to its gender relations
and inheritance systems. The fact that Islamic prin-
ciples of descent and inheritance favor men has led
to conflict with more gender-equal customs in
many places in Southeast Asia. The entry here