De-demonizing Southeast Asian
Islam By Michael Vatikiotis
SINGAPORE - At last the academic community
is standing up to the myths being perpetuated
about Islam and Muslim identity in Southeast Asia.
For years scholars and area specialists have lain
supine as the roller-coaster of the "war against
terror" has ridden roughshod over truth and
history concerning the region's nearly
300-million-strong Muslim community.
Kudos
to British political scientist John Sidel for his
brief and biting essay "The Islamic Threat in
Southeast Asia: A Reassessment" [1] that seeks to
redress the appalling
imbalance. In fewer than 60
pages, Sidel, a professor at the London School of
Economics, demolishes many of the shaky premises
that have shored up the so-called "second front"
in the US-led "war against terror" and helped
create a dangerous divide between Muslims and
non-Muslims in the region.
The backlash
has regrettably been slow in coming. Perhaps
that's because of the immense weight that US
foreign policy carries in Southeast Asia; perhaps
also because tales of fanatical bearded jihadis
plotting the downfall of secular regimes are just
too compelling for the Western media to report
straight.
It has become axiomatic in the
media and among so-called security specialists
that Southeast Asia is home to a resurgent Islamic
sentiment that breeds and protects dangerous
radicals bent on redrawing the region's map
through the establishment of a pan-Islamic
caliphate.
Sidel in essence argues the
reverse. Using a more refined and informed
analysis, he points to the declining fortunes of
once-ascendant Islamic forces in the last decade
of the 20th century. From the mid-1990s in
Indonesia and Malaysia, the intellectual
effervescence of Islamic thinkers such as Anwar
Ibrahim and the late Nurcholish Madjid offered a
promise of a modernist Islamic politics that
blended and synthesized modern technology and
democracy with the moral tenets of faith.
Their liberal ideas posed a threat to
oligarchic and undemocratic interests and were
smothered - partly through co-option as in the
case of Indonesia, and more starkly in Malaysia by
Anwar's arrest and incarceration. Anwar and his
intellectual peers epitomized the nadir of Islamic
revival in the region.
After 1998, the
financial crisis and the ensuing political
instability swept away rosy ideas of an Asian
renaissance based on enlightened religious ideas.
This emasculation, Sidel argues, left more
conservative and radical activists feeling that
Islam had been sidelined and besmirched, which
helps explain, he argues, why a tiny minority
turned to violence.
"The turn towards
terrorist violence by small numbers of Islamist
militants," Sidel writes, "must be understood as a
symptom of a reaction to the decline,
domestication and disentanglement from state power
of Islamist forces in the region."
Modern roles Finely argued as
his thesis is, Sidel is in too much of a hurry to
explain away the role of Islam in modern Muslim
society and policy.
For instance, he
neglects to explain fully why conservative Islamic
mores are so appealing to a society that sees
secular politicians stealing from the people and
modern forms of government powerless to defend
their interests. The important distinction here is
between Islam as a moral code for governing
everyday life and Islam as a war cry for a tiny
minority of misguided misfits.
It is one
thing to explain away the fanatics targeting
Westerners in Bali and Jakarta as weak and
marginal. It is quite another to play down the
trend toward religion in a society that has seen
Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism as well as
Islam make huge gains in the region over the past
two decades. As a result, there is no escaping the
fact that religion has entered the political fray.
The question is: How successfully can democracy,
which has made great strides in a country like
Indonesia, temper the conservative, fanatical
fringes?
Sidel argues convincingly that
Islam has become a marginal force in Indonesian
and Malaysian politics. Yet he misses the point
that in both countries, there is insufficient
ideological ballast to counter the forces of Islam
and therefore insufficient middle ground on which
to contest elections. People have the vote, but
democracy is still under construction in an
institutional sense - party platforms are poorly
developed and rhetoric and symbolism outweigh
substance.
So instead of fighting over
better education and garbage collection,
gubernatorial candidates in the recently held
Jakarta city elections battled over Islamic law
and pluralism. In Malaysia, the deputy prime
minister provocatively and erroneously described
Malaysia as an Islamic state so that the ruling
party could get out in front of the opposition
Islamic party ahead of elections expected by early
next year.
Sidel is right about the
domestication of Islamic politics. He is wrong
about disentanglement, and this is what still
concerns many non-Muslims. None of this detracts
from the core of Sidel's thesis, which is that the
violent militancy of the past few years is a
marginal anomaly rather than a symptom of growing
strength of radical sentiment in society at large.
The problem is that he applies this notion rather
too broadly to all forms of violence in the Muslim
community.
He supports the idea, for
instance, that the eruption of violence in Muslim
minority regions of Mindanao and southern Thailand
is a symptom of re-ordered elite relationships
that have upset the balance of interests that in
the past appeased local Muslim leaders and kept
violence at bay. This is simplistic and ignores
deep-rooted issues of ethnic identity and pent-up
historical grievances that have at best been
contained rather than accommodated over the
generations.
True enough, legions of
so-called terror experts and mainstream
journalists have failed to make a convincing case
that armed groups in either of these two
backwaters are about to link up, break out and sow
violent mayhem across the region. Nor is the
violence going to subside with the simple
restoration of justice and democracy, as Sidel
seems to suggest.
Ultimately, Sidel's
provocative essay is too short to cover adequately
all the valuable new analytical ground he is
opening up. The significance is that he has
created a path for other experts and specialists
to follow. If the "horrorists", as British writer
Martin Amis calls the more conservative proponents
of the Islamist threat, are allowed to dominate
the debate much longer, there is a real danger
that the distorted perceptions of Muslim Southeast
Asia could become dangerous realities.
Sidel seeks to paint a less alarming
picture and put Islam in a more objective social
and political context. He mostly succeeds in
defusing the Islamic time bomb, though in places
his argument moves too far in the other direction
by playing down the importance of assertive
Islamic social and political currents.
In
the face of so much uncritically received nonsense
from the other side of the argument, perhaps Sidel
can be excused for a modicum of hyperbole.
Note 1. "The Islamic
Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment" by John
T Sidel. East West Center, Washington, DC, and the
Singapore Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Michael Vatikiotis is Asia
regional director of the Center for Humanitarian
Dialogue based in Singapore and a former editor of
the Far Eastern Economic Review.
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