Between Mecca and the South Sea
In a little shrine in West Java, two young men sit cross-legged, heads bowed in pious absorption over open copies of the Koran. An example of orthodox Islam? Not exactly. Behind one worshipper is a large oil painting of a young woman, her shoulders bare, wearing a green gown that shows off the curves of her body. She is set against a background of blue ocean waves. The other man sits beside a bed that is draped in green silk, with a multitiered ceremonial parasol and a green chandelier above it. The shrine sits on a little outcrop of volcanic rock, jutting into the surf of the Indian Ocean shoreline.
The province of West Java, modern successor to the ancient kingdom of Sunda, is known as one of the most devoutly Islamic regions of Indonesia. In recent years it has voted in a governor from a new Islamist party, the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, Prosperous Justice Party), which some say draws inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the like-minded Islamist party that has ruled Turkey since 2002. As the PKS gathered in electoral strength over the first decade of this century, many Indonesians worried that it had a hidden agenda, one it would reveal only on gaining power: to convert the country into a state ruled by Islamic law, instead of the multifaith model enshrined by Sukarno in his Pancasila compromise of 1945.
Yet here, close to a fishing and tourism town called Pelabuhan Ratu, an older and indigenous form of worship is still peeping through this wave of purist Islam. While reading the words of Muhammad, two devout young men are seeking to draw strength from Nyai Loro Kidul, a female deity or spirit said to reside in the ocean south of Java; her name is sometimes translated as “Queen (Ratu) of the South Sea.” She is a wrathful spirit, needing to be appeased with annual offerings. Her color is green, though a richer aqua green than that of Islamic banners, and one not to be worn by seafarers or bathers along this treacherous shore.
Sukarno had a modern tourist hotel built here, one of the four financed by Japan’s war reparations. Guests in one room soon started complaining of disturbed sleep, of visions in the night. Room 308 remains set aside for Nyai Loro Kidul. No one else can stay there, though visitors can enter to commune with the goddess. Over centuries, she has been the mythical consort of successive kings and sultans in the Javanese dynasties. The late Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX of Yogyakarta, highly educated in the Netherlands, wrote of how she appeared to him while he meditated. When he lay dying in 1988, royal servants in the kraton reported sightings of her bidding farewell the much loved and respected ruler, independence leader, and vice president.
Java could be mapped intensively according to concentrations of geomantic forces, which draw seekers of spiritual strength on ziarah (pilgrimage) on auspicious days in the Javanese calendar or on Muslim feast days. The place might be the graveyard of the Yogyakarta and Solo royal houses at Imogiri, built by Sultan Agung of Mataram in the 1640s. Or it might be the mythical haunt of gods in the great Hindu narratives, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These dramas might have been located originally in the landscape of India, but in Javanese tradition their characters—Rama and Sita, the warring Pandawa and Kurawa, plus local inserts like the clown-god Semar and his three doltish sidekicks—lived and fought in Java “before there were people.” It might be the Sendang Semanggi, a spring near Yogyakarta, or the Gua Sirandil, a sea cave near Cilicap, or the Gua Semar, a cave on the misty Dieng Plateau, inland from the Borobudur monument.
The mythical heroes and great historical characters are believed to leave some of their power at their dwelling places, graves, or sites of great achievement. With patient meditation and fasting, and by sprinkling flower petals and lighting incense, ordinary people can soak up some of this power. Some take it further, into a deep mysticism known as Kebatinan, in which meditation, self-denial, and ascetic practices, such as sitting under waterfalls, take the practitioner to a higher plane of consciousness. In the early part of his career, Suharto used to meditate in the Gua Semar, since he identified with this native wise fool of the wayang theater. In 2002 the police chief I Made Mangku Pastika, seeking a breakthrough in the Bali bombing case, went to a mountain to clarify his mind: the vital clue soon arrived to identify the vehicle used in the car bombing of a nightclub.
Pastika is a Hindu, like nearly all the 4 million Balinese. But most of those following such practices in Java will have “Muslim” on their identity cards and, if asked, would declare themselves as such. This ambivalence infuriates scholars and preachers of Islamic orthodoxy. In Islam, worship at the graves of saints or great men, even that of the Prophet Muhammad himself in Medina, has been contentious down the ages. The purists of the Sunni tradition see it as superstition: the dead leave nothing of their being, and graves are simply a reminder of mortality, but better an unmarked burial place in the desert anyway. The great split of Islam started soon after Muhammad’s death, with his descendants venerated as caliphs. In Java, installing a human intermediary between a formless Allah and the individual of the ummat (Islamic community) can signify more than superstition and folk impulse. It can point to the stubborn survival of the pre-Islamic faith, both the Hinduism of the premodern era and even earlier forms of animism.
Even late in the twentieth century in Indonesia, it seemed that this was a social reality that simply had to be accepted—perhaps reluctantly by strongly devout Muslims, but with relief by those who saw this syncretism as a sturdy foundation for a pluralist nation that encompassed many non-Muslim religions. If large segments of the population of Java, two-thirds of the Indonesian nation, could adhere to an accommodating mixture of tradition and theology, then Indonesia would be predisposed to religious tolerance.
The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s book The Religion of Java (1960) became for decades the dominant paradigm in the West with which to explain the “moderate Islamic” character of Indonesia. He saw the Javanese as falling into three aliran (streams). One was the santri (devout), comprised of those who were highly observant of the rituals and demands of the Muslim faith: prayer five times a day, the halal diet, observance of the fasting month of Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Around them was the mass of villagers whom Geertz categorized as abangan (roughly meaning “vernacular”), who might attend the mosque on Fridays and observe Ramadan but who might also make offerings to spirits, seek magical help from faith-healers, and take moral lessons from the Hindu epics. The third category comprised the Javanese aristocracy and gentry, the priyayi, who could be quite overtly Hindu in style—by using Sanskrit names, for example, and in some cases by pursuing highly developed forms of Kebatinan.
Historians suggest that this divergence resulted from the pathways by which Islam came to the archipelago and from the political structures of that time. The religion came along with the trade in textiles and precious commodities that ran through the sea routes along the southern edge of the Asian landmass, from China and Japan around to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Muslim communities were observed by Marco Polo in Sumatra at the end of the thirteenth century. The adoption of Islam by the ruler of the new trading city-state of Malacca in the fifteenth century helped it spread to the trading seaports around the Java Sea. It was a religion suited to the commercial classes, supporting the notion of parties dealing on a footing of equality and trust in the marketplace.
Then came a new example of the good Muslim in the shape of Sufi missionaries, who showed a pathway to transcendental religious experience not unlike that pursued in Hinduism. Indeed, many of the Sufis would have come from India or Central Asia, where mystical elements would have been absorbed into their practices, making them already attuned to the attitudes of the Javanese in the agricultural inland. The earliest of the legendary Wali Songo (nine saints) said to have brought Islam into inland Java in the fifteenth century, Maulana Malik Ibrahim from Samarkand, seems to have been such a missionary.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the kingdom of Mataram arose in central Java, the last to have independence before the tightening of Dutch rule. Its rulers adopted Islam and the title of “sultan.” But this was an expedient strategy to help them face the rising power of coastal states, so the conversion was a surface one. Rulers and the priyayi continued their existing practices of building power and legitimacy from their perceived closeness to great spirits and deities. By the time Islam penetrated through inland Java, many compromises had been made.
Yet conversion has been and remains an ongoing process. Dutch rule helped make Islam a self-identifier for the subjects of the Indies and helped rally support behind rebellions in Java, West Sumatra, and Aceh during the nineteenth century. The cooption of many elements of the priyayi class and the outer-island rajahs into the colonial administration tended to discredit the holders of traditional power and customary belief.
The greater interconnection of the world through the steamship and the telegraph brought Indonesia’s Muslims into closer contact with schools of thought arising in the Middle East. More were able to make the hajj to Mecca and learned of the Wahhabis, who were seeking to return Islam to its austere and simple origins. Some young people went to study in Cairo and became immersed in the reformist school, which not only sought to strip away the compromises with pre-Islamic beliefs but also looked at ways of combining Islam with the modern world.
In 1912, two significant movements began that showed a stirring within Indonesia’s ummat. The Sarekat Islam was an early nationalist organization, formed largely among santri elements in trading ports and market towns. The apolitical Muhammadiyah organization set out to reeducate Muslims through a network of schools and local branches in the spirit of the reformists of Cairo.
Clifford Geertz described how Muhammadiyah’s followers took the santri in new directions. They emphasized the importance of individual effort, of engaging in secular activity, of keeping faith pure, and of observing proper behavior, and advocated the use of logic and pragmatism. The more traditional Javanese Muslims tended to be fatalistic, to weave religion into all aspects of life, to accept other beliefs and practices, to take a more literal approach to texts, and to value inward religious experience over outward activity. They tended to gravitate to the NU, formed in 1926 partly in reaction to the rise of Muhammadiyah.
The two organizations grew in strength through the twentieth century, until each could claim 30 to 40 million members, making them the largest Muslim bodies in the world. The NU was more inclined to jump into politics, contesting the elections in 1955 and 1971 under its own name (and later, in the reformasi era, through the PKB). The Muhammadiyah held back as an organization, though many of its members entered politics through the various Islamist parties. Labels are difficult: “orthodox” does not necessarily mean conservative; “progressive” or “modernist” can also look orthodox and revivalist.
As we have seen, Sukarno came from the priyayi stream on his father’s side, while his mother was a Hindu from Bali. Although he adopted the forms and practices of Islam, he was a careful balancer of the three forces of his precarious Nasakom coalition. At the very beginning of the Indonesian republic, he turned aside demands for a Negara Islam Indonesia (Islamic Indonesian State) by producing the Pancasila doctrine, and he later also resisted the fallback position of the Islamic party: the Jakarta Charter, which would have obliged all those who identified as Muslims to follow the requirements of the faith.
Suharto arrived in power by smashing the communist component of Nasakom and then turned his attention to taming the other two. The gradual eclipse of Sukarno between 1965 and 1970 was accompanied by machinations within the PNI to promote New Order sympathizers. On the religious front, Suharto started his long presidency as very much a product of his upbringing and experience. Like many of his fellow army officers, he was “small town Java” (to use Harold Crouch’s words), distinctly abangan in upbringing, and had been exposed to Kebatinan through an apprenticeship with a well-known dukun (faith-healer). His early postindependence experience in the field had come when he had quelled a rebellious Islamic militia in Java, and he’d then fought the Islamist rebellion in South Sulawesi.
In the early years of his national leadership, Suharto’s immersion in Javanese mystical practices was scarcely a secret, and he made much use of names from the wayang theater as political symbols. His political operatives under Ali Murtopo, who included priyayi and Catholic figures, tackled political Islam through several initiatives. A friendly figure, John Naro, was installed as head of the main Muslim political party, Parmusi, which from 1977 was dragooned with all the others into the blandly named PPP. At the same time, Murtopo’s Opsus group kept contact with surviving members of the Darul Islam and Negara Islam Indonesia insurgencies in West Java, always handy for black operations to discredit mainstream Muslim groups. The regime also fostered Kebatinan, to the point that, in the early 1970s, it seemed the practices would be recognized as an official religion. This, too, was not without its political dangers, however: the messianic Mbah Suro cult in East Java caused the army to crack down in 1967 out of a fear that remnants of the PKI might use mysticism as a cover to regroup; the elite-level Kebatinan circle, led by the minor bureaucrat Sawito Kartowibowo, in 1976 suggested that Suharto had lost the wahyu that made his rule legitimate.
However, Suharto was careful to appoint widely respected Muslim figures as his ministers of religious affairs, who were responsible for dispersing official support for mosques and schools and administering the hajj. As years of high economic growth began to lift living standards, it became apparent that greater relative prosperity was being accompanied by a general rise in piety and religious observance. (This is not a phenomenon unique to Indonesia: witness the rise of Christian evangelism in nineteenth-century Britain, for example.) Observing Islam enhanced the people’s feelings of respectability and provided them with a framework for living in a confusing modern world—this was especially true for people newly moved from villages to cities. In an environment where the young, in particular, were beset by temptation, Islam provided a moral compass and plenty of people and places to go to for guidance and help.
With pathways into political change blocked, the newly devout channeled their energies into dakwah, the proselytizing of the faith. Funds poured into the building of mosques and madrassas and pesantren (Islamic schools), with some of the money coming from the oil-rich Arabian countries. More Javanese women and girls started wearing versions of the jilbab (headscarf). Charter flights made it cheaper and easier to make the hajj. Hundreds of students went off each year to study in the Islamic centers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A few joined the mujahideen fighting the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Five times daily, in villages and urban neighborhoods alike, came the amplified call to prayer, often overlaid from several mosques. Like the calls of a watchman, this became a comforting soundtrack to daily life.
As we saw in chapter 4, all this did not go unnoticed by Suharto, who steadily adopted more of an Islamic identity himself. Through the Muslim intellectuals’ association, the ICMI, he cultivated a range of young academics and professionals. The army, too, felt uncomfortable at the perception of it as the enforcer of Westernized ways, especially after armed clashes with Muslim communities in incidents at Tanjung Priok in 1984 and Lampung in 1989, and many of its senior officers took on a “green” identity as devout Muslims.
On Suharto’s resignation in 1998, the patron of the ICMI, B. J. Habibie, stepped up to the presidency and brought several of the group’s leading figures into his government as ministers or advisers. As we saw in chapter 4, it was a short-lived presidency, as was that of his successor, Abdurrahman Wahid. Neither the NU nor the Muhammadiyah camp gained enough traction through their respective political parties to capitalize on the religious identity of 87 percent of Indonesians. Wahid, as the head of the PKB, finessed a relatively minor 12.6 percent vote in the 1999 election result to emerge as a consensus president, based on his personality as much as or more than on his religious standing. The PAN, led by Amien Rais, the Yogyakarta political science professor and former Muhammadiyah head (and ICMI member), gained a disappointing 7.1 percent, less than the PPP’s 10.7 percent.
With the impeachment of Wahid, the presidency returned to the secular nationalist figures Megawati and Yudhoyono. In the following elections, in 2004, the main Islamic parties all slipped backward: the PKB to 10.6 percent, the PAN to 6.4 percent, and the PPP to 8.2 percent. Incumbency—with Wahid as president and Amien Rais as chairman of the MPR—had not helped at all (not that it had helped Megawati either—her PDI-P’s vote dropped drastically from 33.7 to 18.5 percent). Muslim leaders, once they entered the snake pit of Jakarta political power, turned out to be politicians just like all the others.
Yet the combined vote of all Muslim-identity parties held up at around 33 percent, just as the secular nationalist total stayed about the same, and Golkar, increasingly the party of business and the outer islands, held at about 21 percent. In the nationalist camp, the newcomer was Yudhoyono and his Partai Demokrat: he went on to defeat his old boss Megawati in the first direct presidential election held that year. In the Muslim camp, the new force was the PKS, which was formed out of an earlier group that had won only 1.7 percent of the vote in 1999: it gained 7.3 percent of the vote, and its leader, Nur Hidayat Wahid, became chairman of the MPR, replacing Amien Rais (who was to trail behind Yudhoyono and Megawati in the presidential election). Significantly, the new PKS and PD emerged as the first and second parties in Jakarta, the urban melting pot that pointed to future trends. In 2008 the PKS went on to displace Golkar from the governorship of West Java, the most populous province in Indonesia, which partly rings the national capital.
For the following five years, the PKS seemed to be the party that would ride the wave of Islamic piety into power. It explained itself as a party that had grown out of the dakwah (outreach) and tarbiyah (education) movements during the Suharto era, making its biggest impact among both local students and those returning from overseas. Several of its leaders had been to Egypt and become familiar with the (then underground) Muslim Brotherhood, but the party has long been ambivalent about whether this organization is its model. Taking “Bersih dan Perduli” (“Clean and Caring”) as their slogan, the party’s elected representatives made a point of ostentatiously refusing “envelopes” when money was being offered around.
By 2008 PKS claimed to have half a million cadres active in its branches, all chosen and trained to be walking examples of principled and pragmatic politics, ready to pitch in and help when natural disasters or other problems arrived. It made good use of the Internet and other modern technologies, yet preached a conservative social agenda. While espousing the equality of women at one level, its religious council was talking of the “natural division of labor,” in which women were suited to supporting and domestic roles; the council also enjoined women to follow demure ways of dressing and behaving.
Those suspicious of a hidden agenda noted the inclusion of several descendants of Darul Islam figures. Over 2006 and 2007, the central board of Muhammadiyah was concerned enough to issue a warning about PKS infiltration and moved to expel members who had dual loyalty. It saw a sharp division between itself and the rising party. Muhammadiyah accepted the Indonesian state as it was, governed by the multifaith Pancasila. The PKS, on the other hand, had as its goal the steady Islamization of the nation, so that an Islamic state would eventuate by universal consent. Around the same time, the NU became more vigilant against PKS cadres entering its pesantren and warned against the influence of “transnational” Islamic movements, such as Wahhabism, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation, a transnational movement working for a borderless Islamic caliphate), and Ikhwanul Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood, meaning the PKS). Women activists, meanwhile, claimed to have traced a movement in Yogyakarta to separate boys and girls at schools to a PKS initiative.
For its part, the PKS denied having any strategy to infiltrate other organizations. As for its long-term goal, it was not interested in the Jakarta Charter of legally obliged Islamic behavior, but what it called the “Medina Charter,” which it said was based on Muhammad’s rule in the Arabian city, and under which all religious minorities had freedom of worship.
Yet the PKS was soon to hit a ceiling. In the 2009 election, its vote rose only slightly, to 7.8 percent, compared to the widely mooted goal of 20 percent, which would have put Nur Hidayat Wahid in a good position to contest the presidency. It did much better than the other Muslim parties. The PKB’s vote dropped to 5 percent amid squabbling over the succession to Wahid, who died at the end of that year; the PPP’s vote dropped to 6 percent, as did that of Amien Rais’s PAN, while some smaller Islamic parties dropped out of parliament altogether. Still, the PKS’s small share was a sign of lost momentum, despite its vastly increased national profile and flow of funding.
One reason was the old phenomenon of political contamination. As a minority group, the PKS politicians could not change anything, and not all the party’s cadres could maintain their “Clean and Caring” stance. With the party deciding to join Yudhoyono’s grand coalition for his second term, the contamination became more pronounced. The PKS gained three cabinet positions: Agriculture, Social Services, and Communication. In 2013, as we shall see, a massive scandal enveloped the party over manipulation of beef import quotas in the Ministry of Agriculture.
Another factor may have been a backlash among women voters. The PKS had been one of the strongest supporters of a new antipornography law, passed in 2008. In its application at the local level, it soon became an excuse for vigilantism against women seen as dressing immodestly or moving about on their own. A woman coming home in the early evening in one West Java town, for example, was stopped and searched: the lipstick in her handbag was seized upon as evidence of “prostitution.” Several of the top PKS leaders practiced polygamy; one middle-aged man took a teenage bride. The example of the wildly popular Muslim televangelist Abdullah Gymnastiar, known as Aa (“Big Brother”) Gym, showed the force of a female backlash: in 2006 he took a second, much younger wife, and his ratings plummeted.
But the more important factor in the stalling popularity of the Islamic parties was that everyone to some extent started playing “the Islamic card” in politics, not least Yudhoyono. Although he was educated in the United States, his openness to the West was balanced by the careful modesty he showed in his personal life, by his undertaking of the hajj, and by his adherence to foreign policies supporting the Palestinian cause and opposing the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. At home, he included Muslim parties in his ruling coalition even after the 2009 election gave him and his PD an unprecedentedly strong mandate. Members of Habibie’s Muslim intellectuals’ group moved into his and other secular parties. “We have taken the leadership from the radicals and the simplistic people in Islam who push a black and white solution,” says Adi Sasono, an ICMI member who was a minister in Habibie’s government and who now heads the Indonesian cooperative movement’s main body.
Beneath the government, there is now a creeping orthodoxy. From the start of his presidency, Yudhoyono gave enhanced space and semigovernment status to the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Indonesian Ulamas’ Council) and its fatwas, or rulings on matters of theology, and appointed a highly conservative figure from the PPP, Suryadharma Ali, as his minister of religious affairs. One result was passage of the antipornography law. Another was increasing pressure on the minority branches of Islam regarded as heretical by the orthodox Sunni.
The half million members of the Ahmadiyah sect, who recognize a prophet who came after Muhammad (to most Muslims, the last and greatest messenger of God), escaped an outright ban by Yudhoyono’s government. But an edict warned them against making their own interpretations of Islam or trying to spread their beliefs. Across several regions Ahmadiyah mosques were shut down by local authorities. In 2011 a 1,500-people-strong mob attacked an Ahmadiyah group in Cikeusik, Banten province, and killed three, while police stood by. The twelve rioters brought to trial received sentences of three to six months in jail, while an injured Ahmadi was charged with provoking the attack and given seven months.
Over 2011 and 2012, Sunni groups attacked and evicted communities of Shia on the big island of Madura, adjacent to East Java, and a court gave one of the local Shia clerics four years’ jail for heresy. In both cases the response of Yudhoyono’s religious affairs minister was to advise the minority to convert to mainstream Sunni practices or to agree to be declared non-Muslim. Yet both the religious affairs and home ministries have dug their heels in against any more registration of religions beyond the six allowed on official identity cards—Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—even though the constitutional court has ruled that the state may not limit the number of religions. Even supporters of Yudhoyono were mystified that the religious affairs minister was not replaced.
The larger Christian minority also felt nervous under Yudhoyono. They, too, had been swept up in the wave of piety that accompanied fast economic growth and political turmoil. The decadal census shows their place in the Indonesian population remaining much the same, about 7 percent of Indonesians being Protestant and 3 percent Catholic, with the largest concentrations in North Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Manado, Maluku, and Papua.
Yet many Christian observers feel that the official figures somehow understate the reality, as indicated by a highly visible wave of church building across cities and rural areas. Many new believers flock to evangelical churches in the Java countryside. In the Temanggung regency, Central Java, where about forty churches have sprung up in recent years, angry Muslims ransacked a courthouse after a judge gave a Christian evangelizer a five-year jail term for distributing leaflets critical of Islam, instead of the death sentence they were demanding. The same fervor grips large sections of the ethnic Chinese minority, especially in Jakarta, where there are now “megachurches,” such as preacher Stephen Tong’s $27-million Reformed Millennium Centre, which holds up to 4,500 worshippers. The second-generation scion of the Lippo Group, James Riady, is one such born-again.
A backlash against this Christian expansion has taken several forms. One is the application of building consent rules that require the agreement of surrounding communities; these are not usually bothered with in the case of mosques. A notorious case is a large church project in the West Java city of Bogor that has stalled for years, despite a court ruling that it must go ahead. A smaller church for people of the Batak ethnic group in Bekasi was demolished by local authorities in early 2013.
All these minorities feel threatened by Muslim vigilantism, chiefly from the Front Pembela Islam, a preman-style organization of white-clad thugs who take it on themselves to put down Christian churches and Islamic minorities and to disrupt places of entertainment that they see as locations of prostitution and alcohol consumption. Founded in 1998 by military and police officers for use against student protests, the FPI has been tolerated long after another violent, military-sponsored Islamic group, Laskar Jihad, was shut down following the first Bali bombing in 2002.
In 2006 a US embassy cable said an official of the BIN, or State Intelligence Agency, had mentioned that the then national police chief, General Sutanto (who would later head the BIN), had been funding the FPI right up to the time it attacked the embassy that year. Sutanto had described it as a useful “attack dog” that could spare the security forces from accusations of human rights violations. Another cable reported that former Jakarta police chief Nugroho Djayusman admitted contact with the FPI, though he claimed it was to monitor its activities.
In mid-2008 a mass of FPI members attacked a multifaith crowd that had gathered at the foot of the National Monument in Jakarta to protest against the then imminent antipornography law. The police stood by as dozens of demonstrators were injured by the FPI. Following a public outcry, police reviewed video recordings and arrested several FPI members, including the group’s head, Habib Rizieq, who received an eighteen-month jail sentence some months later. The group continues its violent attacks across Java and, in 2013, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a large-scale motorcycle parade through Jakarta.
When pressed, government officials claim the FPI is now “out of control” and functioning as muscle for hire. Yet the wilting of Laskar Jihad, once the support of the security apparatus was removed, suggests that Yudhoyono’s government has not really tried to keep the FPI’s activities within the law. On the other hand, the army’s continually professed willingness to help out the police against terrorism and interreligious violence offers a cure that would be worse than the disease.
An example of what could be done came in February 2012, when masses of the local Dayak people in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, occupied their airport to prevent the disembarkation of four FPI leaders who had arrived to set up a provincial branch. The FPI delegation was kept on the aircraft and sent back to Java by security officials. When Yudhoyono went to New York to collect an award for religious tolerance from an American private foundation, media coverage had an almost derisive tone and highlighted protests by members of the demolished church in Bekasi and by Shia and Ahmadiyah representatives outside the presidential palace.
Below the surface, a much more sinister form of Islamist violence has stirred, and the government and the police deserve much more credit for their response to it. The jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s attracted a small number of volunteers from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. On their return in the 1990s, these people were drawn to the purist teachings of figures like Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, an ulema of Yemeni descent who founded the Al-Mukmin pesantren at the village of Ngruki near Solo, Central Java.
Ba’asyir had fled to Malaysia for seventeen years during the New Order, after frequent arrests for advocating the adoption of Syari’ah law and ultimately for his involvement in a bombing at the Borobudur monument. By the time he returned to Indonesia in 1999, the country was awash with jihadist literature and teaching. The new Internet and video technologies brought texts into immediate, vivid life, promoting the school of thought known as Salafism (similar to Wahhabism and also originating from Saudi Arabia), which envisions a transnational caliphate of Muslims who follow a social and religious life modeled on the era of the Prophet.
When the first bombing of tourist targets in Bali in October 2002 shattered some of the general complacency about Indonesia’s “moderate” Islam, the manhunt for the plotters led Indonesian police and their foreign advisers to a circle of younger jihadists linked to Ba’asyir and the Ngruki pesantren. They operated under the name Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Congregation), the police believed, with Ba’asyir as their spiritual leader. For his part, Ba’asyir denied any connection with terrorism or that Jemaah Islamiyah even existed outside the constructions of the police and Western intelligence agencies.
Already suspecting Ba’asyir over church bombings in Java, the authorities looked for evidence that linked him with the Bali bombing. They obtained convictions for conspiracy and immigration offenses, but on his release after twenty-five months in jail, the Supreme Court overturned his conspiracy conviction. He returned to making ambivalent messages about martyrdom in the cause of jihad and in at least one sermon called foreign tourists “worms, snakes and maggots.” In 2011 a court sentenced him to fifteen years in jail for organizing a secret terrorism training camp.
Cells of Jemaah Islamiyah continued to mount roughly annual major bombings against targets linked to Western influence, including the Australian embassy and the Marriott Hotel. An allied group called Kompak (Komite Aksi Penanggulangan Akibat Krisis, Crisis Management/Prevention Committee) in Poso, Central Sulawesi, kept up terrorist attacks after a short-lived but fierce religious war between local Muslim and Christian communities was ended via the mediation of Jusuf Kalla while a minister in Megawati’s government. But after coordinated suicide bombings against two big hotels in 2009, a steady manhunt by the new Detachment 88 unit from the Indonesian police produced results, with some 400 adherents of Jemaah Islamiyah arrested and 250 convicted. The unrepentant perpetrators of the first Bali bombing had been executed by firing squad at the end of 2008. Scores of others were serving prison sentences. Still, authorities and the police resisted calls from foreign governments for the banning of Jemaah Islamiyah. Better to keep it on the surface, they argued, where they could track its activities.
The Detachment 88 police also took a soft approach to those Jemaah Islamiyah members under arrest. Aware that prisons could be schools that only hardened extreme ideologies, they attempted to “deradicalize” about 200 of the convicts, starting by trying to learn about their motives. This involved senior police eating meals with them, taking them out for limited excursions, and even encouraging marriages for some. “It’s a sign they are coming back from al-hijrah [a mental state of readiness to sacrifice one’s life] to the real world,” one Densus leader said in 2008. Detainees who seemed less committed were separated from hardline mentors. By overcoming suspicion of the thagut, or evil police, investigators aimed to turn detainees from what they called the “lesser jihad”—or a narrow focus on violent methods—to a “greater jihad” of nonviolent or spiritual struggle.
By 2013 the police had arrested about 900 people in their antiterrorism campaign and killed about ninety suspects during raids. Jemaah Islamiyah and its splinter group Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid were disrupted, broken into small cells, largely cut off from sources of funds and technologies, and their bomb-making experts removed. The surviving militant jihadists turned to drive-by assassinations of isolated police officers.
While the threat of terrorism has abated, it has not disappeared. About three-quarters of the terrorists in jail are due for release over the coming decade, many of them still comparatively young. Police think that perhaps 40 percent will have become even more motivated while in prison. In addition, between 150 and 200 Indonesian jihadists are thought to have joined the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which carved out a “caliphate” across the border of these two countries. Foreign counterpart agencies worry at the lack of a clear “proactive” strategy by Indonesian security agencies to identify and diffuse violent jihadism. The signs are there, they say, in literature, Internet postings, and sermons: what is needed is early intervention with a “counternarrative.” The obstacles to this have been the turf wars between the various police, military, and intelligence agencies; lack of capacity to track student movements to jihadist centers in the Middle East and South Asia; and a protective reaction by the ministries of religious affairs and education when, say, a radical pesantren is identified.
The vagueness of Indonesian law about conspiracy to plan terrorist acts also discourages early intervention. Instead, police feel they must wait until the plotters are ready to strike, hence the high incidence of shootouts and deaths of suspects during arrests. In 2010 Yudhoyono set up the Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terrorisme (BNPT, National Counter-Terrorism Agency), headed by a retired police general with a retired Kopassus officer as his deputy. It organized meetings known as Klinik Pancasila to educate young Muslims about the national ideology and distributed a pamphlet titled Buku Cinta NKRI (Book of Devotion to the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia).
While the violent attack on Indonesia’s status quo appeared quiescent at the end of Yudhoyono’s presidency, the general picture was one of a nation undergoing an intensification of its conversion to Islam, which started centuries ago but was speeding up in the digital age. The explicitly Islamic parties might have been in decline, but all parties and leaders in a position to take power were taking on an increasingly Islamic character, sought out running mates among respected Muslim figures, and organized Islamic affiliates. The division between santri and abangan was blurring in Java. Alumni of Habibie’s association of Muslim intellectuals were now ministers and potential presidential candidates in ostensibly secular parties.
The issue of the nation’s “Arabization” became a running topic. Devout Muslims were fixated with the Middle East as the center of Islam. New media were transforming the culture of learning, as observers like the sociologist Yudi Latif noted. “The ulama had been the cultural broker or interpreter who adjusted the signal from the Middle East in a harmonious way [that was] within the capacity of local culture to absorb,” Latif says. “The new media have bypassed the local ulama. There is a transnational Islamic movement. The new-age Muslims tend to be cut off from the roots of Indonesian historical tradition and attach themselves to Middle Eastern epistemology.” To many worried minorities and more secular Muslims, it seemed that the goal of the “greater jihad,” a process of deepening faith that would eventually lead to a voluntary embrace of Islamic law and governance, was possibly underway among a large majority of Indonesians.
Yet the example of the PKS showed that a great moderation of the Islamist signal follows when an Islamic grouping shifts into the formal power structure from the outside. The move toward Syari’ah law by Indonesia’s empowered regional governments was also running out of steam in the later years of the century’s first decade, no more so than in Aceh, where it had been applied as a concession to mollify the GAM rebels during Wahid’s presidency. Like other senior GAM figures who had always seen their struggle as primarily a nationalist one, Shadia Mahaban is appalled at the religious zealotry this unfettered. Local newspapers continue to report groups of ulema burning stacks of jeans, which religious police seize from passing women and replace with skirts, or proselytizing on the sinfulness of women straddling motor scooters as drivers (rather than riding sidesaddle as pillion passengers), and generally urging women to retreat from public office.
Such purification campaigns bemuse those who know Acehnese history. The old sultanate had a string of female rulers. Houses were always passed to daughters, along with nearby rice paddies, so their husbands were virtual guests. Acehnese women—notably, the heroine Cut Nha Dhien—fought alongside their menfolk in wars, to the consternation of the more sensitive Dutch soldiers. Uniquely among women of the Malay archipelago, the Acehnese female dress included loose pantaloons, not the tight and hobbling sarongs worn elsewhere. As Mahaban declares, trousers and jeans were thus more authentically Acehnese than the loose skirts handed out by the ulema like prudish nineteenth-century Christian missionaries. Mohammed Nur Djuli says he was branded a “Westernised orientalist” when he wrote about this in the main local newspaper.
Mahaban sees the promotion of Syari’ah as part of a wider struggle for cultural dominance and power that has ramifications across Indonesia. “They are trying to tell the whole of Indonesia, ‘We’re doing this, we’re still powerful,’” she says. “I hate to say it, but it was Gus Dur’s fault. It was his biggest fault, allowing this to happen here, without thinking about Indonesia as a whole. If you look at it culturally, anthropologically, in Aceh it was never like that. This is something very new. It’s like a born-again Islam or something.”
Without the Aceh precedent, the enforcement of Syari’ah by local administrations in parts of West Java and Kalimantan might not have progressed. “It’s not working here, so what makes you think it will work in West Java?” Mahaban asks. “There’s no such thing like this in South-East Asia. It’s something very new. Some kind of identity you want to show, something that we lost during the Suharto era, the Dutch period: the only identity is by showing how religious you are.”
Perhaps this suggests that Indonesia’s long contest between custom and religion is as much a struggle with its feminine side as with anything else. It may be too early to write off the influence of the beautiful Queen of the South Sea, Nyai Loro Kidul.