Magic and Religion in North Africa

On the other hand, even greater deformations awaited it in countries like the Dutch East Indies, where peoples at all degrees of human development are observed, and where one sees the religion of Muhammad sometimes allied with the practices of savages, and sometimes strangely mixed with civaïsme Shaivism, the worship of Shiva and Buddhism. In our colonial empire, we have a fine example of an Islam entirely altered and reduced to purely primitive beliefs in those Tchames Chams who founded the ancient empire of Champa (present-day Annam) and who, pushed back by the Chinese, Cambodians, and Annamites, still subsist here and there in our Indo-China and in Siam. We could add other examples, citing on one side the Negroes among whom fetishism is often allied with Muslim practices, and on the other, the Persians, who have remained the classic example of a nationality that Islam could not mold into its rigid framework. Renan said they represented "the obstinate persistence of the Indo-European genius through one of the saddest adventures of Asiatic history"(1).

(1) Renan, Miscellanies of History and Travel, p. 145.