“Radical groups are weak here,” Gus Dur told me. “This is the last breath of radicalism before it will be liquidated,” he continued, partially lifting his eyelids for emphasis. “Formal Islam is not in demand, unlike in the Middle East. Only in the Middle East has the religion been politicized. With Hamas there is only shouting. The initiatives belong to the Jews, who are working in a systematic way to create a future.” He went on: “We are like Turkey, not like the Arabs, or Pakistan. In Pakistan, Islam works against nationalism. Here Islam is a confirmation of [secular] nationalism,” that, in turn, encompasses a Buddhist and Hindu past. “There is no longer a threat of disintegration. Though many islands, we are basically one nation. Islam is dynamic in Indonesia.” Despite the absoluteness of the Koran, “Islam is not yet finished, it is still in dialogue with itself and with other religions …” He continued thus in his peculiar rambling, progressive, preachy, and visionary manner.*
His remarks were not mere platitudes. It was striking how throughout my month-long visit to the country, people kept bringing up spontaneously the necessity of having good relations with Jews and other religious groups. Moreover, Indonesia captured, tried, and executed the terrorists who bombed the discotheque in Bali in 2002, killing more than two hundred people, even as it went on to stabilize its democratic system; nor was there a negative public reaction to the execution of the three terrorists. If the first term of President George W. Bush was about the war on terrorism and the second about spreading freedom and democracy, then Indonesia is the world’s best example of what Bush advocated, in the same sequence, although his administration often was too preoccupied to notice.
But the dense story of Indonesian Islam—as complicated as the designs of Javanese batik—does not end with the humanism of Gus Dur. Indeed, the Grand Mosque of Banda Aceh (the Mesjid Raya Baiturrahman) provides a hint of the many contradictions of Islam here. Its striking, six pitch black domes and delightfully ostentatious, sparkling white facade are redolent of both Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It reminded me of the palatial mosques of northern India, full of a happy, floral, and curvaceous blending of different geographical traditions. The severe, fortress-type masculinity of, in particular, mosques in Egypt and North Africa is entirely absent. The prayer hall was full of children playing loudly, mixing with the sounds of tropical birds. Women in jilbabs and flowing white mukennas were kneeling on the floor in prayer. There were as many women in the mosque as men. It was a real community gathering place. A photograph documented the floating debris that came up to the steps of the mosque following the tsunami. The grounds, complete with a reflecting pool, were rehabilitated with money from Saudi Arabia. The conservative and even radicalizing tendencies of the Middle East are wielding ever greater influence here, even as the peculiar character of the faith in Southeast Asia stubbornly persists.
Besides Saudi money and power, there is the dynamic influence of Middle East–based global television networks such as Al Jazeera, which, while highly professional and entertaining in their own right, bring Indonesians into the mainstream of both Arab and European center-left political thought and sensibilities. Al Jazeera helped crystallize Indonesians’ intense and lingering dislike of Bush and, in early 2009, of Israel’s air attack on Gaza. “In Indonesia, Israel lost the war of words over Gaza,” Aguswandi told me, because of the way it was portrayed on television. This is a new phenomenon, given that Indonesia has never felt itself humiliated by Israel in the way that contiguous countries like Egypt and Syria have.
Compare this with the mass disinterest shown here over the plight of the Muslim Rohingyas, brutally oppressed by the military regime in Burma, with tens of thousands of them living across the border in Bangladesh in some of the world’s most squalid refugee camps. In February 2009, when odious elements of the Thai military put boatloads of Rohingyan refugees out to sea with little food or water and Rohingyas came ashore in Aceh, there was little popular outcry here, even though one easily could make the case that the Muslim Rohingyas of Burma’s Arakan Province are tyrannized to a greater degree than are the Palestinians. To a significant extent, the contradiction is explained by the effect of Persian Gulf–based global media, which now penetrate the smallest villages; it will only grow in importance, thus helping to close the attitudinal gap with the Middle East.
There is, too, the effect of commercial air travel, which allows 200,000 Indonesians to make the annual haj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, the largest contingent of the 1.7 million pilgrims from throughout the Muslim world. Moreover, Yemeni Airways flies to Indonesia four times a week, strengthening the historic Indian Ocean links between the Hadhramaut in Yemen and Java in Indonesia. Previous generations of tradesmen from the Hadhramaut and the Hejaz in Saudi Arabia brought liberal and heterodox Sufi influences to Indonesia. But today, buttressed by Wahabi money that, among other things, translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Indonesia’s official national language, Bahasa Indonesia, the influence from the Arabian Peninsula is, to an essential degree, hateful. This also is globalization, in which various strains of thought are homogenized by mass media, in turn influenced by determined interest groups, into a monochrome, ideological way of thinking.
As is the case with Hindu nationalists in India, those most drawn to radicalism in Indonesia are not the Islamic scholars, whose very knowledge of the religion makes them less susceptible to mass media, but the first generation of professionals, newly liberated from the village, who have wide access to books, news publications, and television, and are still somewhat credulous. In Indonesia, a Muslim radical is much more likely to be a young chemical engineer than an old cleric. An examination of the country’s Muslim organizations only adds to the aura of overwhelming complexity that is Indonesian Islam.
Indonesia may be the globe’s most populous Muslim society, but it is also home to sizable minorities of Chinese, Christians, and Hindus. Thus, it is functionally a secular state, and this has given rise to Muslim civic organizations that are the largest in the world, because Islamic states like those in the Middle East simply do not require them. “In this way,” explained Anies Baswedan, rector of Jakarta’s Universitas Paramadina, “the secular state accommodates a vibrant religious life, even as powerful Muslim groups give legitimacy to the secular authorities. Personal piety therefore thrives in a way that it never would in an Islamic state, where religion is by necessity politicized.”
The two most prominent organizations are Nahdlatul Ulema (Revivalist Clergy) and Muhammadiyah (Followers of Muhammad). Because of the very size of these groups, with memberships in the millions, their politics are often vague and hard to pin down. Nevertheless, broad themes are discernible.*
Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), of which Gus Dur was a longtime president, was formed in 1926 out of concern for austere and fundamentalist Wahabist influences that began to filter into Indonesia following the establishment of Ibn Saud’s kingdom of Saudi Arabia the same year. It is traditional and conservative, loyal to Sufi saints, and, therefore, somewhat counterintuitively, inclusive, syncretist, and supporting of civil society. This is because the deep emphasis on Muslim tradition protects it from contemporary Islamic ideology, which seeks to defend Islam from the influences of other religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Because of its anchor in generations of Islamic thought, NU’s is a confident belief system that does not feel threatened by other strains of thought and thus does not define itself through enemies. NU is comfortable with the contradictions of the modern world. Thus, it promotes the wearing of the jilbab for women, while it also evinces an understanding attitude toward gay rights. Yet NU’s record is not entirely clean. For example, NU was caught up in the frenzy of the last years of Sukarno’s rule, when, in the fall of 1965, its youth movement went on a killing spree against communists on Java.8
Muhammadiyah is the more modern of the two organizations, and therefore, again somewhat counterintuitively, the less open-minded, though it is important not to carry this point very far; this is more of a vague sensibility
than a clearly defined policy direction. Muhammadiyah emphasizes literalism, a return to the written words of the Koran and the Hadith that have been corrupted by the pagan and, therefore, reactionary elements of accumulated tradition in this part of the world. Muhammadiyah is conducive to radicalism, even as its very existence and organizational structure keeps many would-be radicals from taking the next step into terrorism.
The popularity of Muhammadiyah among young professionals indicates how the blending of Islam with other cultural and religious traditions here has its limits. For centuries, religious currents direct from the Arab world have continued to influence Indonesian Islam, refusing integration with the local environment. And so the advent of Al Jazeera and commercial airline links are, in the final analysis, an intensification of an old story, rather than the start of something new. To better explain this, a historical and philosophical discursion is in order:
The very encounter with Dutch colonialism only strengthened the Indonesians’ sense of Islamic identity, as they became, in Geertz’s words, “oppositional Muslims.”9 The cry of jihad played a large role in the Acehnese war against the Dutch, who crept up the coast of Sumatra in the 1850s and 1860s before encountering strong guerrilla resistance from the Muslims at Sumatra’s northern tip. The war, which began in 1873 and did not end until 1903 with the Sultan of Aceh’s surrender, saw not only a full-blown Muslim insurgency against the Dutch, but also the import of pan-Islamic ideas from the Middle East to encourage the mujahidin.
Yet it is also true that this very direct and radicalizing contact with Muslim Middle Eastern lands was encouraged precisely because, as a Dutch colony, Indonesia was denied frequent connections with Muslims of nearby British colonies in South and Southeast Asia, whose inhabitants lived under a rival European power. So it was that Muslims in Indonesia sometimes have been more influenced by the purer ideas of Arabia than from, say, the more syncretic Muslim quarters of India.
To be sure, as the age of steam improved transoceanic communications, waves of immigrants, especially from the Hadhramaut in eastern Yemen, descended upon Aceh and other parts of Indonesia, bringing with them not only Sufistic heterodoxy but also stern and orthodox ideas, forged by their relative proximity to Mecca.10
When speaking about the Islamic orthodoxy that began to descend in earnest upon Indonesia in the nineteenth century, we must be careful to say that such a purified Islam, compared, that is, to the Southeast Asian variety, was itself being influenced by new currents of thought within the Middle East. Most significant and exciting in that regard was the modernism of the late-nineteenth-century Egyptian scholar and reformer Muhammad Abduh.
Abduh is crucial to the Indonesian story. The late American Arabist Malcolm H. Kerr explains that Abduh’s “historical role was simply to fling open the doors and expose a musty tradition to fresh currents.”11 Abduh deplored the blind acceptance of traditional religious dogma, rife with superstition, that had accumulated over the centuries, and sought answers to Egypt’s modern predicament within the pristine faith of the early years of Islam. By giving reasons and explanations to what once was mere simple faith, Abduh did much to bring Islam into the debates of the twentieth century. His was a way of thinking rather than a specific program, said the scholar Yusni Saby. Thus, Abduh unwittingly inspired both secular moderation and fundamentalist radicalism, for both are elements of modernism.12 In particular, Abduh’s efforts to improve religious education, in order to adapt it to contemporary needs, helped to make Middle Eastern Islam a standardized global religion. This gave it the strength to combat the syncretism of Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist under-layers, as well as its substantial pockets of Christianity, and, just as significantly, its secular nationalism.13
Abduh is not only read widely in Indonesia, he constitutes the founding philosophic spirit of Muhammadiyah as well. Organizationally, Indonesia has done more to propagate Abduh’s thinking—with its associations to both radicalism and liberalism—than anyplace in the Middle East. Muhammadiyah has helped spawn movements that, like the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, are focused on both radicalism and social self-help networks.
So the battle goes on in Indonesia, or rather the process. The latest phase is a fundamentalist attempt to latch on to issues that few people care about and make them into parliamentary controversies, like pornography, suggestive street behavior between young men and women, and who gets to certify hallal food (food that conforms to Muslim dietary laws). In this sprawling archipelago, it seems, we are seeing both a so-called clash and a merger of civilizations. Islamic Southeast Asia is welcoming, sensuous, and culturally complex in ways that the desert-baked Middle East is not, even as it features periodic pogroms against ethnic Chinese Christians, and incidents like the 2002 Bali attacks and the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta the following year. As these violent acts indicate, there is another enemy besides syncretism that radical Islam faces in Indonesia: westernization itself, the modern world that Indonesia’s relative handful of fundamentalists have no choice but to react to. As the Israeli scholar of Indonesian Islam Giora Eliraz puts it: “Radical fundamentalists need worthy adversaries.”14
According to Geertz, who uses as his examples Indonesia and Morocco—the two geographical end points of the Islamic spectrum—the conversion of religion to radical ideology does not happen because people doubt God, but because they have come to doubt themselves, which, in turn, is something that goes back to their very fear of modernization.15 It is such doubt and the extreme response it engenders that cannot help influencing Indonesia’s fate.
Nevertheless, there are strong grounds for optimism. Although almost 85 percent of the country is Muslim, 85 percent of Indonesians reject the notion that the state should be formally based on Islam, preferring instead the pluralist- and democracy-affirming principles of Pancasila, the moderate nationalist ideology enshrined in the 1945 constitution, with its five principles of belief in God, nationalism, humanism, democracy, and social justice.
Indonesia’s very rugged and archipelagic geography, flung out over a seascape as wide as the continental United States—at a place where the Sinic and Indic worlds fuse—has led finally to a democracy that features an increasing dispersal of power following decades of dictatorship under Sukarno and later Suharto.16 Despite all the pageantry and stagy contrivances of Sukarno’s leftist theater state, which developed a useful myth for the new Indonesian nation, and the Dutch- and Japanese-style post-colonialism of Suharto’s right-wing military state, which fortified that myth with new institutions, geography has eventually overwhelmed both those attempts at extreme centralization. As it happens, it was reform-minded Islamic groups, with Muhammadiyah in the forefront, loyal to the progressive intentions of Muhammad Abduh, which, more than the secular nationalists, led the pro-democracy struggle against Suharto in the late 1990s. As an Iraqi intellectual once was reported saying, “When I travel to Syria and Iraq I feel that I see Islam’s past, but when I travel to Indonesia, I feel that I see its future.”17
Such religious vibrancy, so intellectually rich that, consequently, it has avoided the ideologizing of faith, could only have occurred within a multi-confessional state that has proved sturdier than many gave it credit for back in the tumultuous days of 1998, after Suharto’s downfall. Indonesia now boasts an independent media of eleven national television stations and a press that is the freest in Southeast Asia. Because more people were lifted out of poverty in the 1980s and 1990s here than in any other place in the world save for, perhaps, China, Indonesia is poised to be an economic giant of the twenty-first century. Indonesia is positioned to withstand the rigors of decentralization, and, despite its archipelagic nature, hold together because it is united by a common Malay language: Bahasa Indonesia, which, since it is a traders’ tongue not associated with a particular group or island, is embraced enthusiastically by all. And with decentralization comes the potential of applying religious laws differently in each place, according to local traditions, thus furthe
r defusing religion itself as a political issue.
Because of the somewhat unexpected success that religious progressives have had against radicals in the democratic environment of the past few years, Indonesian intellectuals are, grudgingly, starting to give Suharto some credit for establishing the basis of a strong modern state, with his promotion of an educated middle class, without which Indonesia could never have held together following his demise. The very students whose demonstrations led immediately to Suharto’s exit were the ones who, when they were younger, benefited from the primary and secondary education initiatives he started. I have even heard Suharto compared to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and to Park Chung-hee, who built the basis of South Korea’s industrial might in the 1960s and 1970s. Suharto (and Sukarno, too) helped provide Indonesia with a secular nationalism that has been crucial in the battle against religious extremism. Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups like Jemaah Islamiyah, with their strong Yemeni element, still lurk in the interstices between more moderate Islamic organizations, but they are perceived as weak, and that is partly because Suharto’s legacy is not altogether bad.
Whereas Islam arrived on these islands at Aceh, the continuing struggle over the religion’s place in modern life in post-Suharto Indonesia will be fought amid the urban slums and skyscrapers of cities like Jakarta. Greater Jakarta has twenty-three million people by some estimates. With skylines in all directions, it exudes the immensity of São Paulo, and in its lazy red-roofed kampongs (houses) and grubby storefronts the ratty edginess of Manila. Cars and motorbikes squirm through its streets in traffic jams as bad as Kolkata’s and worse than almost everyplace else in Asia. During the rainy season as much as a quarter of the city floods.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 31
