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The Battle for Indonesia

The Battle for Indonesia

Author: Sadanand Dhume
Publication: Wall Street Journal
Date: August 11, 2003

The growth of Islamist terrorism in Indonesia should lead us to ask searching questions about the country's security. Yet these inquiries would be insufficient if they were not accompanied by a more fundamental question: Why is Indonesia, whose dominant brand of Islam is famously tolerant, churning out angry young men with mayhem on their minds?

Islam is a relative newcomer to this part of the world. It took root only in the 1400s, after the high-water marks of Islamic civilization -- Moorish Spain and pre-Mongol Baghdad -- had receded, and barely a century before the advent of European gunships in Southeast Asian waters. Moreover, the faith was transmitted to this archipelago -- a world away from Mecca -- largely by trade rather than by conquest, arriving by Indian dhow rather than by Arab charger.

Distance from Islam's Arab heartland, in time as well as space, imbued Indonesia's version of the religion with an eclecticism absent in converted lands closer to the first flush of Arab power. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has said: "In Indonesia, Islam did not construct a civilization, it appropriated one."

Preceded by nearly a millennium and a half of Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam evolved here as a mélange of core Islamic beliefs and older Hindu-Buddhist customs that bore little resemblance to the desert faith of Yemenis, Iraqis or Syrians. In "The Year of Living Dangerously," set in the mid-1960s, the dwarf photographer Billy Kwan explains this to his colleague, an Australian journalist fresh off the boat: "Spiritually, this place is still a colony -- not of Holland, of Hindustan. It's the old Hindu kingdoms that are most real here."

Today, a generation later, greenhorn reporters alight in a different land. From the '70s onward, Indonesian Islam began to be stripped of its native foliage by a combination of rapid urbanization, the enforcement of religious education by the anti-Communist regime of former strongman Suharto, and the efforts of Middle Eastern and homegrown purifiers of the faith.

By the mid-'80s, Arab names began to edge out their Sanskrit predecessors in kindergartens. (Note that Megawati, the president's name, is Sanskrit for "Lady of the Clouds." Indonesia is the only Muslim country in which a pre-Islamic nomenclature stubbornly survives, an indication, Wahhabi critics say, of the non-seriousness of traditional Indonesian Islam.) Head-scarves started to appear on college campuses, too, and in offices the greeting assalamu alaikum started becoming an alternative to the religiously neutral selamat pagi, or good morning.

In recent years, this Arabization of Indonesian Islam has gathered pace. In 1998, Suharto's 32-year-old government collapsed along with Indonesia's once-vaunted economy. In the chaos that followed, groups with names like Islamic Defenders' Front and Laskar Jihad took to the streets, trashing bars and discotheques in Jakarta and battling Christians in a bloody civil war in Eastern Indonesia. In 2000, Indonesia ushered in Christmas with bomb blasts in nine cities that left 19 dead.

At the same time, globalization has given Indonesians access to the language, ideas and rage of the Arab "street." Today's Muslim radical in Jakarta can download a tract calling for holy war against infidels just as easily as he can ogle the bikini-clad she-devils of Baywatch Hawaii on his television. Underlying all this is the cultural cringe of the convert, most acutely documented by V.S. Naipaul in his "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples." Indonesian Islamists who wax lyrical about Muslim Spain fall silent when it comes to the grandeur of Indonesia's own (pre-Islamic) Majapahit empire.

Of course, the old truism about moderate Indonesians is not entirely dead, as anyone who has experienced a night of bar-hopping in Jakarta can attest to. Last year's attacks on Bali have forced the government to get tough with violent Islamists. Laskar Jihad has disbanded. The leader of the bar-trashing Islamic Defenders' Front is in jail. Abu Bakar Baasyir, the alleged spiritual head of the al Qaeda-linked group Jemaah Islamiyah, is on trial for his role in the Christmas church bombings and an alleged plot to assassinate President Megawati.

Yet the larger processes that gave rise to such groups remain in place. In 1987, Amrozi -- the Bali bomber sentenced to death last week -- led a group of family members in an attempt to burn the tomb of their Javanese village's patron saint. Local legend had it that this saint had used his powers to bless the village with a well that never ran dry. He represented an older version of Islam, mystical, syncretic, touched by the magic of Java. The police may make more arrests and the judges may hand down more death sentences. But as long as Indonesian society churns out young men like Amrozi -- men mortified by their past, who see the tombs of their saints as eyesores and their own history as pre-history, as an infidel tabula rasa -- the world's most populous Muslim country's troubles with terrorism will not go away.

Mr. Dhume, a former Indonesia correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Asian Wall Street Journal, is writing a book on Indonesia.
 


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