Religious Conversion as Relational Transformation: Nas–Tadabbur–Ihsan Framework Among Two Indigenous Communities of Malaysia and Bangladesh

Abstract

This article aims to situate itself within religious anthropological scholarship through a comparative study of Indigenous religious transformation in Malaysia and Bangladesh. Methodologically, the study combines phenomenological interpretation with a decolonial perspective rooted in relational ontology, seeing humans as embedded in land, ancestry, kinship, and community. Drawing on ethnographic engagement and interpretive analysis, it examines the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia (conversion to Islam) and the Bangladeshi Santal (conversion to Christianity), showing that conversion rarely entails simple doctrinal change but unfolds as a negotiated transformation of moral life, kinship, and belonging within existing cultural worlds. Indigenous actors reinterpret new religious teachings through their own cosmological frameworks, creating hybrid moral landscapes where Indigenous relational knowledge coexists with new religious practices. To understand these dynamics, the article develops the Nas–Tadabbur–Ihsan (NTI) model, connecting relational ontology (Nas), reflective epistemology (Tadabbur), and ethical practice (Ihsan). While these concepts originate in Islamic ethical vocabulary, the article does not present NTI as a universal model; rather, it uses it as a heuristic-theoretical lens derived from that lexis to examine how religious conversion is experienced as a relational, reflective, and ethical transformation. This article contributes to the anthropology of religion by showing how an Islamically derived conceptual vocabulary can serve, with caution, as a comparative analytical lens without imposing a confessional reading on the Christian Indigenous experience. It advances conversion studies by reframing Indigenous conversion as relational transformation rather than linear movement in belief, affiliation, or assimilation. Thus, Indigenous conversion is better understood as an ongoing process of ethical negotiation and relational reconfiguration, not merely cultural rupture or assimilation.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Religions, 2026 · DOI ↗