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Hundreds of Styles Across a Diverse Region

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Hundreds of Styles Across a Diverse Region

Silat names not a single unified martial art but a large family of related fighting traditions native to maritime Southeast Asia, practised across the Malay peninsula, the Indonesian archipelago and the southern Philippines, with hundreds of distinct regional and lineage specific styles, silek, silat and related local names, differing considerably in technique, weapons emphasis and underlying philosophy, reflecting the enormous ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of the region silat comes from rather than descending from one common founding source. This diversity extends directly to silat's religious and spiritual framing, which varies as widely across the tradition as its physical technique does: many silat lineages, particularly across Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines, are explicitly Islamic in orientation, incorporating adab, Islamic codes of proper conduct and etiquette, into training discipline, framing the art's ultimate purpose in terms consistent with Islamic ethical teaching, and sometimes opening or closing training with Islamic prayer or invocation, while other lineages, particularly in regions and communities with different religious majorities or a more explicitly pre Islamic cultural inheritance, draw instead on older animist, Hindu Buddhist or otherwise locally rooted spiritual frameworks predating the region's Islamisation.

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