Jihad archipelago

National Interest, The, Winter, 2004 by Greg Sheridan

IT'S ALWAYS perplexing in Washington, as in most Western capitals, that when one attends a seminar about Islam, it is generally focused on the Middle East, with perhaps an occasional nod to Pakistan and the Islamic bomb.

Indonesia, the most populous Islamic nation in the world, seldom rates a mention. There are 200 million Indonesian Muslims (out of a total Indonesian population of 230 million), more than can be found on the entire Arabian peninsula and many more than live in the next two most populous Muslim states, India and Pakistan. Yet Arab disdain for the peoples of the region (charging, for example, that they don't even speak Arabic, the language of the Prophet), a disdain generously reciprocated by Southeast Asians for the Arab world, has kept Southeast Asian Muslims on the margin of Muslim debate and out of Western consciousness. That low profile has been greatly to the benefit of the stability, and independent evolution of Islam in Southeast Asia. But this is set to change, both because of the increasing economic and strategic strength of Southeast Asia and the spread of Islamist terrorism.

There is today a life and death struggle under way in Indonesia and its Southeast Asian neighbors over who owns Islam, a contest that is almost as important as any political battle facing the international community. In many ways it is a conflict of globalization, though not in the usual sense. For in this battle the interests of the West lie overwhelmingly in the triumph of the local, the ethnocentrically particular and the traditional--against the interests promoted by global communications technology and the spread of internationalist ideas.

In Indonesia, as in much of Southeast Asia, the central struggle is between local Islam, which is characteristically tolerant, moderate, syncretic and pluralist, and globalist Islam emanating from the Middle East, which is paranoid, intolerant, extremist and viscerally hostile to the United States and the larger West. The most important manifestation of this clash of ideas are the activities of Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups in Southeast Asia, pre-eminent among them Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), responsible for the terrorist bombing in Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 civilians.

But the deeper difficulty lies in the interaction between terrorist groups and their sympathizers on the one hand and emerging mainstream political Islam on the other. These two strands of Islamic thought share a disturbing amount of common ideological ground. This means that extremists, despite the fact that the vast majority of Indonesians rejects their violent methods, can have a profound, perhaps decisive, influence on the development of Indonesian politics.

Similar struggles of different intensity are underway in the Muslim communities of Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei, and in the smaller scattered Muslim communities of the region. While there's no need to panic yet, Western policymakers must understand that there is a long, bitter fight ahead.

Surveying the Region

MALAYSIA IS generally the most Islamically conservative Southeast Asian society of any consequence. Only about a tenth the size of Indonesia, its recently retired long-term leader, Mahathir Mohamad, made a career of baiting and lambasting the West. But although much that Mahathir said was offensive, particularly his weird remarks about Jews controlling the world, he was at heart an opponent of Islamic extremism.

The key fault line in Malaysia is racial, but the racial and the religious overlap. The majority Malay population is Islamic, but Chinese and Indians, overwhelmingly not Islamic, together make up nearly 40 percent of the population. Mahathir's government pursued a policy of "affirmative action" for the Malays, the bumiputras ("sons of the soil"), who are not as wealthy as the Chinese. The minority races in Malaysia thus feel a permanent sense of grievance because government policies discriminate against them. However, at the same time as he railed against the West, Mahathir pursued sensible pro-growth policies very friendly to Western investment. As a result, the Malaysian economy has grown strongly now for two and a half decades. Chinese and Indians have felt that even in the face of official discrimination, there is room for them to get ahead. It has been a classic case of a larger pie making everyone a little fatter.

That is not to say political Islam has been quiet. Rehman Rashid, in his scintillating memoir, Malaysian Journey, recounts that the 1979 Iranian revolution had an electrifying effect on young Malays, convincing them that Islam had a political destiny. But as the squalid reality of Iran under the ayatollahs became clear, Malays turned against the Iranian model. The Chinese and Indian minorities, of course, were terrified of it.

Malaysian Islam took a different path and so did its dominant political party, the United Malays National Organization. Mahathir's rebarbative anti-Western rhetoric obscured the novelty and importance of the experiment he was undertaking in Malaysia. By linking traditional Islamic piety with East Asian economic dynamism, Islam became a friend of economic modernization, and vice versa. It may not have worked perfectly, but it was better than anything else then on offer in the Islamic world, with the possible exception of Turkey.