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The Bali bombers' real
crime
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG
KONG - Austrian-born Adolf Eichmann was an early member
of the Nazi Party. He became the man responsible within
Germany's Nazi government for the "Final Solution of the
Jewish Problem", the attempt to annihilate European
Jewry.
After World War II, Eichmann escaped from
US forces and made his way to Argentina, but in 1961
Israeli Mossad agents apprehended the fugitive and
brought him to Israel for trial. In 1962, he was tried,
convicted for his crimes against the Jewish people, and
hanged. Eichmann was the only individual ever to receive
the death penalty in Israel and be executed.
What made Eichmann famous - or rather infamous -
other than his crimes to exterminate the Jews was the
condition under which he carried out his "orders".
Eichmann, according to Hannah Arendt, who covered his
trial for The New Yorker, an effort that later resulted
in the book The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, was
guilty not of stupidity "but a curious, quite authentic
inability to think".
Arendt described this
quality as the "banality of evil" - actions carried out
in a routine and thoughtless manner, so much so that
grave moral consequences were totally ignored in pursuit
of bureaucratic and narrow ends.
While exact
parallels may not be drawn, broad similarities are
appearing in the current Bali bombing trial. The
cavalier, almost frivolous, attitude toward human lives
is rooted in the banal world view of the alleged Bali
perpetrators.
Not unlike Eichmann, Amrozi bin
Nurhasyim and Imam Samudra, both of whom are on trial in
Denpasar, Bali, have shown little remorse, let alone
emotions. The two men, together with 30 other suspects,
are accused of planning and carrying out the October 12
attacks that killed 202 people, mostly tourists.
Amrozi said he was not sorry for the Westerners
he is accused of killing. "How can I feel sorry? I am
very happy, because they attack Muslims and are
inhumane." His only regret was that he wished "there
were more American casualties". Seven Americans died in
the tragedy, along with 88 Australians, 38 Indonesians,
23 Britons, nine Swedes, six Germans, four Dutch
nationals, and others. In all, people from 21 countries
were killed.
As Samudra sat down to hear the
indictment, he looked over to his nine lawyers and
shouted "Takbir!" ("Proclaim", a religious
rallying cry). They responded with calls of "Allahu
akhbar" ("God is great"), followed by smiles and
cheers. During the trial, Samudra sat impassively,
occasionally stroking his goatee.
While Adolf
Eichmann's defense was that he merely followed orders,
that of the Bali bombers is that they responded to wrong
inflicted on the Muslim world, otherwise known as the
ummah.
Although the litany of wrongs is
extensive, ranging from the Kashmir conflict to the
Israeli-Palestinian quagmire, the Bali bombers were
driven not so much by their ideological and religious
bondage as by their inability to think even within the
context of their own religion.
Islam affirms,
for example, that the murder of a single person is akin
to the slaughter of all humanity. Yet the Bali bombers,
in their haste to indict, did not take this demand into
proper consideration. Islam also affirms that mankind
was created in different nations and groups so that all
can know one another. The Bali bombers ignored this
injunction as well.
Indeed, what makes them
practice Islam differently is not so much their
atomistic selection of the Koranic phrases as their
tendency to believe blindly in the evil and epicurean
nature of the Westerners - traits that are thought to be
embodied by depraved Americans. What explains the nature
of their religious violence, though?
Religious
violence, regardless of where it is found, has much to
do with the nature of the religious imagination, which
has always had the propensity to absolutize and to
project images of cosmic war. This imagination can
become very narrow and jaundiced when a person can
neither understand the spiritual subtext of the religion
nor the environment in which he lives.
Indeed,
religious violence has much to do with the social
tensions experienced by the perpetrators that cry out
for absolute solutions. Mark Juergensmeyer, author of
Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of
Religious Violence, spoke about the sense of
personal humiliation experienced by men who long to
restore an integrity that they perceive as lost in the
wake of virtually global social and political shifts.
Related to this is the valorization of the
warrior. Hence, religious violence often involves
ex-military personnel - a profile that befits Samudra,
who received part of his training in Afghanistan -
coupled with male bonding and an appeal to men "on the
margins" - a profile that matched Amrozi, a known
drifter.
What linked Samudra and Amrozi
together, however, was not their common understanding of
religion. Rather, they were fatally bonded by their
misguided belief and interpretation of sharia (Islamic
law), a rule they believe sanctioned them to perform
acts of horrific violence. Yet their misunderstanding of
sharia was not just literal, but parochial.
The
Arabic word shari'ah comes from the root
shar'a, which means "to open, to become clear". F
W Lane points out in his monumental Arabic-English
Lexicon that, according to the authors of the
authoritative Arabic lexicons, the Taj Al-'A rus,
the Tadheeb and the Misbah, the Arabs do
not apply the term shari-at to "any but (a
watering place) such as is permanent and apparent to the
eye, like the water of a river, not water from which one
draws with the well-rope".
A modern lexicon,
Lughat ul Qur'an, states that the term
shari'ah refers to a straight and clear path, and
also to a watering place where both humans and animals
come to drink water provided the source of water is a
flowing stream or river.
Thus it is more than a
little ironic that the term shari'ah, which has
the idea of fluidity and mobility as part of its very
structure, should have become the symbol of rigid and
unchanging laws to the Bali bombers.
It would be
a tragedy if other Muslims, or for that matter
non-Muslims, also believe that this sharia equates
religious dogma and violence, for this is clearly not
the case. If anything, the Bali bombers, not unlike
Eichmann, have proved one thing: An empty mind is
literally the devil's playground. In this context, all
were guilty of sins of thoughtlessness.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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