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.