[Indonesia's Struggle: Jemaah Islamiyah and the Soul of Islam, by Greg Barton, University of New South Wales Press, August 2004, Sydney. ISBN: 0-86840-759-3. Price: A$16.95 (paperback), 118 pages.]
Gary LaMoshi – Despite more than 225 dead in three bomb attacks attributed to Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorists and thousands more killed in anti-Christian jihad in the Malukus and central Sulawesi since 1999, Indonesia continues to dismiss the influence of radical Islam. Conventional wisdom contends that extremists enjoy support from only a tiny minority in the world's largest predominantly Muslim nation. Yet Indonesia's mainstream political and religious leaders more frequently embrace these alleged fringe groups than condemn and isolate them, lending extremism respectability and acceptance as the body count rises.
Given that contradiction, examining Islam in Indonesia often raises more questions than it answers. Indonesia's Struggle: Jemaah Islamiyah and the Soul of Islam presents a clear-eyed analysis of Islam's involvement in Indonesian politics and terrorism, avoiding simple generalizations as Indonesia emerges from decades of authoritarian rule under former president Suharto that suppressed Islam as a potential threat to the New Order's political control.
Author Greg Barton of Australia's Deakin University, an expert on modern Islamic intellectual currents, explains in this concise volume major trends in Muslim thought in simple language that lay people can understand. The theology can be somewhat confusing: what many call fundamentalists are more rightly labeled modernists, their thinking growing out of Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, which funds Indonesian radicals and seeks to scour impurities from Islam and return to sixth-century practices. Liberals or traditionalists endorse a syncretic Islam that appends elements of Sufi mysticism and local, traditional influences.
Gun-intended consequences?
Throughout this book, Barton acknowledges links between terrorism and the Indonesian armed forces that most experts sweep under the rug. Jemaah Islamiyah was born as an unintended consequence of Indonesian military plots against Muslim radicals in the 1970s. JI attacks starting with the Christmas Eve 2000 bombings across the archipelago may, in turn, be unintended consequences of the military's sponsorship of anti-Christian jihad in the Malukus and central Sulawesi.
Supplementing his academic qualifications, Barton was a live-in biographer for former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, holding a ringside seat to observe the role of Islam in Indonesia's reform era. Wahid, a nearly blind, liberal Muslim cleric widely known as Gus Dur, became president in 1999 as a compromise candidate with Islamist support. (Barton defines Islamists as transforming Islam into a political ideology and emphasizing the differences between Muslims and others, whereas liberals support acceptance and tolerance.) Gus Dur was ousted in 2001 after Islamists realized that he didn't share their agenda, illustrating the split between Islamic and Islamist politics.
In Indonesia's Struggle Barton shows how religion stood at the center of Indonesian politics even before independence. The original draft of the 1945 constitution included the Jakarta Charter, obliging Muslims to follow Sharia, Islamic law. Nationalists removed that section to create a more secular state, inspiring Islamist political and even armed opposition that didn't end until the military takeover in 1965. In the first national elections in 1955, Islamic parties received nearly 40% of the votes. After more than three decades of repression, Islamic parties received similar percentages in the 1999 and 2004 national elections, with Islamists showing growing strength in the most recent balloting.
Islamist gains may owe to their former forbidden-fruit status; the two hottest categories in Indonesian mass culture are Islam and sex, both suppressed under Suharto (though still widely practiced). Barton cautions against ignoring radical Islamist roots of the fast growing Prosperous Justice Party, whose chairman is a speaker of the legislature. But Barton echoes other Western critics when he discounts the appeal of Islamists as political reformers when other choices carry New Order connections. More curiously, Barton fails to address why the political establishment fears Gus Dur enough to create a blatantly discriminatory excuse – a vision test requirement – to bar him from the 2004 presidential race without worrying about backlash from his supporters while fearing negative reaction if they condemn radical Islamists.
The enduring strength of Islamists is an uncomfortable fact for Indonesia's secular politicians and concerned Westerners to face. But liberals need to recognize that religion is a staple of Indonesian political life just as Indonesians need to understand that they're the ones who suffer from Islamist terrorism in their country. Barton argues convincingly that it's not public sympathy for radical Islamists that endangers Indonesia but political Islamists' denial of jihadi Islamist violence.
Two roads converged...
Political Islamists support the introduction of Sharia by democratic means, while jihadi Islamists advocate theocracy and are willing to use violence to get it. Barton observes that Indonesia's political and jihadi Islamists are converging, with politicians' embrace of jihadis moving violent extremists into the mainstream. He warns that the convergence could lead Indonesia to resemble Pakistan, where an Islamist minority has imposed its views on a secular majority. At the focal point of Indonesia's convergence, Barton finds the Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI) and its founder Abu Bakar Ba'asyir.
A fervent preacher with a flair for public relations, Ba'asyir currently is standing trial for a second time on charges that he's the leader of JI. Ba'asyir 's botched first trial, according to Barton, reversed the post-Bali bombing current of public support for a crackdown on jihadi Islamists, confirming Islamist propaganda that the "war on terror" is a war on Islam and demonstrating how Western support for anti-terrorism measures can be counterproductive.
Barton points out that, in the war for Indonesia's soul, the Islamists are better equipped and more aggressive than liberal Muslims. That's hardly surprising: zealots who see the world in black and white tend to be more fanatical than those who detect nuance and accept different views. Barton's straightforward book reveals where radical Islam stands in this nation with key strategic geopolitical and theological-political roles, placing Islamists closer to Indonesia's center than most choose to believe.
[Gary LaMoshi has worked as a broadcast producer and print writer and editor in the US and Asia. Longtime editor of investor rights advocate eRaider.com, he's also a contributor to Slate and Salon.com.]