Gary LaMoshi, Denpasar – Fallout from the October 1 Bali bombings put a damper on the local Hindu Galungan and Kuningan holidays celebrating the triumph of good over evil in heroic times.
Bali could use a hero at the moment as tourist arrivals and hotel occupancy plummeted following the blasts. And as Indonesia's estimated 190 million Muslims wrap up the holy month of Ramadan, the entire country could use some heroes in the religious sphere.
No group has claimed responsibility for the strikes against Saturday night diners in Kuta and Jimbaran Bay. No one has dared identify the neatly severed heads of the apparent suicide bombers. (Investigators now regret identifying the heads as those of suspected terrorists. "If we say the three men are victims and not suspects, I strongly believe that their families would be willing to come forward and help us," a police source told a local newsweekly.)
But the tactics and targeting suggest the work of Islamic fanatics who were also behind the October 2002 Bali bombings that left 202 dead. Regardless of who planted the October 1 bombs, there's no doubt that violent religious extremism is on the rise in Indonesia, and it presents a greater challenge to democracy and freedom than spectacular acts of terrorism. In July, thousands of vigilantes attacked a complex housing 700 members of the Ahmadiyah sect in Bogor, a hill town outside Jakarta where President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono makes his family home.
The attackers called themselves Indonesian Muslim Solidarity and cloaked themselves in an obscure 1980 Indonesian Ulema Council (known by its Indonesian acronym MUI) fatwa against the Muslim splinter group, which believes there have been prophets since Muhammad (specifically, Ahmadiyah's founder). Thugs beat residents and set fire to buildings. Police made no arrests because religious issues are fraught with politics, so police require political guidance to act.
Blaming the victim
The central government and mainstream Muslim leaders tut-tutted about the attacks but showed no stomach for taking on the mob or its instigators. The attorney general's office, without apparent shame, said it would look into banning Ahmadiyah as "disruptive to the public order", even though a leader in the district including the complex told reporters, "We're more afraid of those protestors." Authorities in Bogor, without apparent irony, decided the best way to protect Ahmadiyah was to shutter the complex and evict its inhabitants.
MUI opened a national convention, held once every five years, days after the attacks amid calls to rescind its fatwa against Ahmadiyah. Delegates to the convention were in a feisty mood, though. "We are proud to report there is not one single church in Cilegon [West Java] and this is how we intend to keep it," a delegate bragged. Another delegation reported with regret that despite a population that's 90% Muslim, a non-Muslim had won a local election. "We will make sure it won't happen next time," the delegates promised.
Not only did MUI's convention reiterate its fatwa against Ahmadiyah, it issued a new set of draconian edicts condemning pluralism, secularism and liberal Islam. The chairman of MUI's Fatwa Commission warned of liberal Islam, "All of their teachings are deviant... Their principles are dangerous and misleading because they believe in only [what] they think is right and use pure rationale as justification." One fatwa ordered Muslims to consider Islam as the only true religion and all other religions as wrong.
Fatwa fallout
This fatwa barrage brought swift condemnation from inter-faith and liberal Islamic circles. Just as predictably, it brought new attacks on Ahmadiyah followers, as well as threats of mob violence against the Liberal Islamic Network, a leading progressive group, and the closing of at least 23 churches by hardline groups. Prosecutors in Malang, a city in East Java, presented a case to prosecutors against Muhammad Yusman Roy for leading prayers in Indonesian rather than Arabic. The court documents cited MUI's fatwa against the practice as their justification, even though MUI rulings do not hold any legal status.
Yudhoyono's government, despite the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, has been cowardly against the zealots. The Ministry of Religious Affairs stuck its head in the sand by saying there were no church closings, only terminations of "illegal assemblies", based on the technicality that houses of worship can only be opened with official approval. Religious minorities generally find it impossible to obtain permits, so must worship in illegal assemblies. These mainly Christian minorities have urged the government to revise the requirement.
Weeks after the illegal assembly closings, Yudhoyono weighed in through a spokesman, not pledging to reopen the churches or revise the building requirements, but to reiterate the hollow freedom of religion guarantee and urge people to resolve their differences without violence. There's been no action to back up those words, reflecting the government's deeply rooted conflict over religion and its place in public policy.
Indonesia is the country with the world's largest Muslim population, but it is not a Muslim country. At independence, there was sentiment for declaring Islam the state religion. Secular-minded leaders prevailed. But because it was and is a hot-button issue, the state reserved a role for itself as regulator in religious matters. For example, state-sanctioned religious freedom extends only to five recognized faiths: Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic and Christian, a childishly ignorant term for Protestant.
The Pancasila state philosophy of Suharto's authoritarian New Order included belief in one god among its tenets, requiring some fancy footwork to bring Bali's polytheistic Hinduism into the tent. The former president's regime sought to suppress and control religion to keep it conveniently secondary to the state, but it also showed great skill in exploiting fanatics. Muslim zealots were integral in the bloodletting against alleged communists following the 1965 coup that brought Suharto to power and then were duped into reviving armed groups that gave the government a pretext for repression of hardliners. Indonesian Islam's reputation as moderate and tolerant may owe much to those being the qualities the New Order demanded from Muslims.
Forbidden fruit
The fall of Suharto gave rise to renewed fundamentalism among previously forbidden fruit: Top selling books since 1998 have involved either unrestrained religion or sex. When reformer Abdurrahman Wahid – a liberal Muslim cleric now at the forefront of campaigns to foster tolerance – became president, New Order holdovers stoked radical Islamic violence that emboldened fanatics, gave them a public platform and trained them in jihad useful for violence beyond what their mentors had in mind.
Radicals such as MUI can exploit their clerical status, the government's discomfort with confronting Muslim leaders and a raft of potentially repressive laws on the books, such as the statute against "disgracing a religion" that leaves the door open for radicals to demand legal action against alleged heretics such as Ahmadiyah or proselytizing Christians. It's not enough for these fanatics to be holier than thou; they want to coerce others into being as holy as they think they are, even when their zeal to enforce the fine print shreds the religion's basic principles.
Indonesia's politicians are reluctant to confront Islamic extremists, even though they claim these views represent only a tiny minority of the population. That aversion may stem from the state's ambiguous role in religious matters, personal belief or that fanatics represent a bigger slice of the population than anyone cares to admit. The issues are complex, and Indonesia's political classes are far-more skilled at calculating than governing.
The far-more simple issue, which lies at the root of virtually all of Indonesia's woes, is the rule of law. It's up to Yudhoyono to force religious leaders including MUI to declare loudly and publicly that people have a right to believe what they choose and no one has the right to take the law into their own hands, not even in the name of Islam.
The possible silver lining in this run of religious mayhem, or the most dangerous sign of all, is that this year local residents have begun resisting the white-robed, club-wielding Islamic thugs who attack businesses selling alcohol, legally but offensive to their fanatic sensibilities, during Ramadan. In Surakarta, Central Java, the Indonesian Democracy Party, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri's group, took up the gauntlet against the extremists. Maybe the opposition seeing some votes in it will prompt Yudhoyono's government to belatedly do the right thing.
[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.]