"Then Muslim terrorists aren’t true Muslims?”
Hasyim scowled. His forehead furrowed around the dark prayer callous and he started to shout: “George Bush is the terrorist!” he said. “Not Muslims! There are no Muslim terrorists! George Bush ...”
But Rian said that in his opinion true Muslims could not be terrorists.
Then Hasyim began to rant -- really rant, in long passionate sentences which Abi and Syihab interrupted sometimes, just to translate -- about President John F. Kennedy, who (he said) tried to solve problems caused by America’s wayward youth in the 1960s by sending the social scum to Vietnam. Did I think that was a good idea? Kennedy, said Hasyim, had promised in a campaign speech to cleanse American society of its losers and criminals by sending them as cannon fodder to Vietnam.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“But have you heard this campaign promise?” Rian asked.
“Never.”
“Well,” he said triumphantly. “You should look it up.”
Of course Vietnam wasn’t even a campaign issue in 1960; but I let that go.
Soon the meeting broke up. It had been tense. Abi and Syihab were shaken, too. They’d never talked for so long to fundamentalists. The fierce defense of illogical positions, to Abi, was “scary,” but also a question of self-knowledge: He said Hasyim and Rian and the others would never look inward to question themselves or their religion. “Instead, they looked outside for enemies.”
Abi also said something interesting. In spite of the shabby office building, and the poor-looking clothes, fundamentalists in Yogyakarta tended to be middle-class students from technical universities. “Science and religion aren’t separated here, as in the west,” he explained. “But some people raised in secular homes have no exposure to Islam until they are at university.” They discover these ideas as technical students and convert with fervor. Rian at the MMI office had said his family in Sulawesi was aristocratic -- “but I no longer call myself an aristocrat; I am a Muslim” -- and Abi thought that was a good example. “Rian may have been raised in a secular home,” he said.
Can fighting poverty help stop terror?
The radicals I met in Indonesia contradict the vague idea in America that violent Islam is a function of oppression and poverty. Where dictators keep people destitute, goes the thinking, frustrated young men turn to extreme religion. That was one point of the Iraq war. Beyond the fizzled excuse about weapons of mass destruction, one of the main justifications for the invasion was that “a stable, peaceful, and democratic” Middle East would breed fewer terrorists, not only because terrorists relied on certain dictators for money but also because ordinary Muslims would have less reason to bomb London or New York if they could feed their families and vote for their leaders.
What complicates the situation in Indonesia is that democracy seems to have had the opposite effect. The collapse of Suharto's dictatorship enabled Baashir to freely set up MMI in Yogyakarta in 2000, and let Jemaah Islamiyah spread to the major cities and rebel flashpoints of Indonesia, starting with East Timor. Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) reports that "fundamentalists in Jakarta's universities are gearing up to assume power in the 2008 parliamentary elections" -- but that doesn't mean that what they have in mind is democracy.
When middle-class or even rich young men discover the poetry of the Koran, the austerities of sharia, along with the fiery rhetoric of rebellion against an imperial, decadent west, it is easy enough to end up with warriors for the law of God in any system. And democracy gives them freedom to move. To most Americans, this tolerance of subversion is the great virtue of a liberal society, but in Indonesia -- for example -- it fails to move Hasyim Abdullah's heart with gratitude.
This, of course, raises an important question for Iraq: If fostering democracy in other Muslim nations has enabled the return of extremism, how can Baghdad avoid a similar fate?
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