THE INFLUENCE OF ANIMISM ON ISLAM

Regarding the thirty million Moslems of the Dutch East Indies, Wilkinson well says:
"The average Malay may be said to look upon God as upon a great king or governor—mighty, of course, and just, but too remote a power to trouble himself about a villager’s petty affairs; whereas the spirits of the district are comparable to the local police, who may be corrupt and prone to error, but who take a most absorbing personal interest in their radius of influence, and whose ill-will has to be avoided at all costs."

At first consideration, one would imagine that the stern monotheism of Islam—the very intolerance of Semitic belief in Allah—would prevent compromise with polytheism. The facts are, however, to the contrary.

"Belief in spirits of all sorts is neither peculiar to Acheh nor in conflict with the teaching of Islam," says Dr. Snouck Hurgronje. "Actual worship of these beings in the form of prayer might seriously imperil monotheism, but such worship is a rare exception in Acheh. The spirits most believed in are hostile to mankind and are combated by exorcism; the manner in which this is done in Acheh, as in Arabia and other Mohammedan countries, is at variance in many respects with the orthodox teaching. Where, however, the Achenese calls in the help of these spirits or of other methods of enchantment in order to cause ill-fortune to his fellow-man, he does so with the full knowledge that he is committing a sin."

The missionary, Gottfried Simon, goes even further when he says:
"The pioneer preaching of the Mohammedan idea of God finds a hearing all the more easily because it does not essentially rise above the level of animistic ideas; for the Mohammedan does not bring the heathen something absolutely new with his doctrine of God; his idea of God correlates itself to existing conceptions. Animism is really the cult of spirits and the souls of the departed."