BOOK
REVIEW A
mainstream embrace for extremism Indonesia's Struggle:
Jemaah Islamiyah and the Soul of Islam by
Greg Barton
Reviewed by 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. (See Terrorism links in Indonesia point to
military, October 8.) 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.
(See Indonesia's transition: the good, the bad
and the ugly, October 20.) 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
(see Ba'asyir trial: wrong war, wrong
place, November 3). 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.
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 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.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
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. 
