Marwaan Macan-Markar, Bangkok – The new leader of the world's most populous Muslim country, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has a serious challenge ahead, having stepped into the political limelight just as Southeast Asia's identity as a symbol of moderate Islam becomes increasingly bruised by the region's own Muslims.
The image of moderate Islam in the region has been harmed by developments linking elderly Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a shadowy group of Muslim radicals that intelligence officials accuse of unleashing terror in the region; bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines blamed on Muslim extremists, and unrest in southern Thailand, which the government accuses separatist Muslim rebels of inciting.
The revelations this week from a courtroom in Jakarta will be hard for Yudhoyono to ignore. A Malaysian Muslim witness, Mohammad Nasir Abbas, told the court that the 66-year-old Ba'asyir was the leader of JI, disclosing details that for the first time linked him with the extremist group. Both Ba'asyir and the JI have been accused of being linked to the 2002 bomb attacks on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, which killed 202 people, and the bombs that exploded last year in a major Jakarta hotel, where 12 people died.
Yudhoyono also will have difficulty avoiding the violence that has left more than 500 people dead this year in another corner of the region – southern Thailand's predominantly Muslim provinces. Here again, the government of Buddhist Thailand accuses separatist Muslim rebels of the bloodshed, including the beheading of Buddhist monks.
But as he revealed after his election victory in September, Yudhoyono is determined to stall this onward march of religious extremism. And his performance throughout 2005 inevitably will serve as a significant cue to the region, given Indonesia's political weight in Southeast Asia and in the Islamic world.
Fortunately for Yudhoyono, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has begun to lay the foundations to propagate a more liberal and accommodating Islamic culture by advancing the idea of Islam Hadari or moderate Islam.
"Islam Hadari is very crucial to this region," Norani Othman, a sociologist and cofounder of Sisters in Islam, a progressive women's group in Malaysia, told Inter Press Service. "It stands for an Islam that accepts differences, respects religious pluralism and that is open to modernism and democratic rights."
That the citizens of Southeast Asia's second-largest Muslim country have embraced this Islamic vision was underscored in March this year, when the moderate coalition that Abdullah heads soundly defeated the opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia, or PAS, which propagated an extreme conservative form of the faith.
For Noraini, the edge enjoyed by Abdullah's view in the continuing struggle for the soul of Islam in Malaysia is a welcome relief to women, following the pressure that emerged in the 1980s to limit the role of Muslim women in public capacities. "Back then, the religious authorities began to curtail the freedom enjoyed by women," she said. "We have to persuade them to do otherwise; for the religion to be in touch with the 21st century and not be stuck in the past."
The parliamentary and presidential elections that followed in Indonesia mirrored the trend set in Malaysia – that the candidates from the Islamic-based parties failed to dislodge politicians who stood for a blend of religious moderation and nationalism.
Even the staunchly religious candidates who won a seat during the April parliamentary elections, such as cleric Hidayat Nur Wahid of the Prosperous Justice Party, wear the badge of reformers. Shortly after he was endorsed as leader of the powerful legislative body, the People's Consultative Assembly, Hidayat dismissed speculation that he would push to impose Sharia, Islamic law.
But elsewhere too, voices of moderation have been on the march in an attempt to reclaim the ideological ground they have partially lost to extremists. The work this year by groups such as the Liberal Islam Network, the Center for Moderate Muslims and the Center for Islam and Pluralism in Indonesia convey this trend.
They are complemented by the might of two large religious organizations – Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which claims a membership of more than 30 million Indonesians, and Muhammadiya, which has 20 million members. Both groups have consistently echoed moderate views and stood up against extremism.
An international conference of Islamic scholars hosted by the NU in Jakarta this February conveyed this moderate view. The Jakarta declaration that was endorsed by the Islamic scholars advocated a faith "not associated with violence, terrorism, ignorance [and] intolerance," Nico Harjanto, a researcher at the Jakarta-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told IPS. The religious and secular leaders have recognized the problems coursing through the Muslim community, and they are working on many fronts – from law to politics – to "counter radical teachings", he said.
"For leaders in the region, it seems that combating [the] JI terrorist group [has] become the main priority, as the success of that campaign can have psychological effects to those who wish to join terrorist groups," the CSIS researcher added.
But as intelligence reports have revealed, Indonesia, where nearly 90% of its 238 million people are Muslim, and Malaysia, where 60% of its 25 million population also follow Islam, are not the only nations troubled by Islamic extremists. Muslims form a minority of 3.3 million people in Buddhist Thailand, 3.9 million in predominately Catholic Philippines and 500,000 in Chinese Singapore. And all these countries have raised the alarm about a JI presence.
Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States, intelligence officials have warned the region's governments about a plan by JI to create a pan-Islamic state that would include Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand and the Muslim kingdom of Brunei.
This vision of fighting for a transnational political entity contrasts sharply with the local, separatist violence that Southeast Asian governments had to deal with in past years. The conflict in southern Thailand, the southern Philippines and Indonesia's Aceh province are among them.
As Indonesia prepares for possible terror attacks during this Christmas and New Year's season, a recent report from the International Crisis Group (ICG) states that the toughest issue facing Yudhoyono's new government is internal security reform. Earlier this week, the Brussels-based ICG said Indonesia's 280,000-strong police force needed to be doubled if it were to protect the country from threats including terrorism and ethnic conflict.
"The use of terrorism as a method of struggle has changed the course of Islamic armed resistance against secular governments in the region," said Harjanto. "This of course scares many moderate Muslims."
Election results this year conveyed the consequence of such fear in the region's two leading Muslim countries. And at an inter-faith conference in the Indonesian province of Yogyakarta this month, Yudhoyono helped to reduce the fears further by delivering a call to arms to defend Southeast Asia's identity as a home to a moderate and accommodating form Islam.
"Terrorism is the enemy of all religions," he said. "Pluralism is a fact of life in Indonesia." (Inter Press Service)