ABSTRACT
Oceania consists of tens of thousands of islands with total land area of 8.54 million square kilometers, over 90% of which is mainland Australia; spread over eighty million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. Australasia has the largest concentration of Muslims among four regions covering Oceania: Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Muslims entered the Islands in 1879 under the indenture system that was introduced by the British Empire. Accordingly, the British brought slave like labor force from the Indian sub-continent to exploit the British dependencies. Muslims started coming to Melanesia at the end of the nineteenth century and were brought by the British as indenture workers and by the French as prisoners. In 1907, the Muslim population consisted of eleven Malay policemen working with the German forces in Pohnpei. In 1907, the Muslim population consisted of ten Malays, or 0.02% of the total population.
