It is commonly held that European colonisation and the efforts to modernise Muslim lands challenged Islam and undermined local custom, and that Islamisation was generally opposed to European ideas and technologies and rejected local beliefs and practices. While colonial historiographies tend to focus on the influence of European actors, Muslim nationalist and postcolonial scholars emphasise Muslim and native agencies.

In the Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya, however, the ideas and actions associated with the concept of modernity were formed as an outcome of the interplay between Islamic reform and European colonialism. Islam and colonialism were not as confrontational as is often assumed. In this book, I offer a comparative and cross- cultural history of Islamic reform and European colonialism as both dependent and independent factors in shaping the multiple ways of becoming modern in the Netherlands East Indies (or Indonesia) and Malaya (today’s Malaysia) during the first half of the twentieth century.