The march toward a more moderate
Islam By 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."
